The Intellectual Bully of Baltimore

I've been walked through H. L. Mencken's life before, each time convinced the claim has been overworked. Yet each time more is brought forth about the man—how he lived, worked, and related to people; successive biographers, critics, idolaters bore in closer in ten or more works since 1925, much to the reader's interest and the subject's disparagement. William Manchester (Disturber of the Peace) wrote an affectionate tribute. Carl Bode (Mencken) was correct, objectively academic. Terry Teachout (The Skeptic, now available in paperback) may have seized the essence of the man: it was all in the writing. Mencken proved that extraordinary style, when animated by a specific skeptical disposition, could trump substance, even want of it.

I have just emerged from Marion Elizabeth Rodgers's long book, jammed with more facts about the man than stones on a shingle beach, but the mystery, to me at least, remains: I don't know for certain why H. L. Mencken was so famous, though I am ready to admit he was, still is. A single fact related by Vincent Fitzpatrick, the scholar and Mencken biographer who keeps the Mencken Room on the third floor in the Enoch Pratt Central Library in downtown Baltimore, persuaded me. According to the sharp-eyed minions of the clipping service Dr. Fitzpatrick employs, Mencken remains the most frequently quoted American author, even today. (Well, it's either he or Mark Twain.) Every year Fitzpatrick fills hundreds of pages of a scrapbook with articles about Mencken or with quotations from his work. In fact, a few years back, while living in Mexico, I sent Fitzpatrick a copy of Mencken's posthumous advice to those who might want to honor his spirit, urging them to "forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl." That's what I call staying power. That's what I call global reach.

Marion Rodgers worked hard on this book; she seems to have tracked down and talked to every living person who had some kind of connection with Mencken. She read millions of words in libraries and private collections, his dossier in the fbi. Her book, says the blurb on its cover, is "the full portrait of one of America's most colorful and influential men." Why do I think Oscar Wilde? Why do I think The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Yet I am grateful to her. Anyone with even the faintest interest in the "Sage of Baltimore," the "Glare of the Sunpapers," or, her preferred epithet, the "Bad Boy of Baltimore," should be as well. Owing to all that industry she's gotten to things few people knew about before, and she treats more thoroughly incidents only touched upon by other biographers—such as her account of Mencken's brief tenure as editor of the editorial page of the Evening Sun.

I never met the man; he died nine years before I landed at the Sunpapers. (This is the way Baltimoreans referred to the two papers published here; they still do, though only the morning paper remains.) My only connection, tenuous indeed, is that I worked for six years on the editorial page whose staff Mencken terrorized during the three months he served as its editor. I have met three, and briefly knew two, of the victims of that horrific tenure: Robin Harriss and Gerald Johnson, a noted Maryland historian whose bust is positioned in the Pratt's soaring Central Hall. Mencken was put in charge by the publisher, Paul Patterson, and told to rattle the Ivory Tower. This he did—and in the process revealed himself as a raging ideologue and vicious propagandist. He thought the staff a pack of second-raters, harried them, rejected their ideas, rewrote their copy, nudged aside those whose opinions, especially on FDR and the New Deal, collided with his. He ordered two of...