Memoirs of an Obscure Professor

5. Purlings and Platitudes: H. L. Mencken's Americana

5 Purlings and Platitudes: H. l. Mencken's Americana WHEN I heard H. L. Mencken speak one afternoon during my undergraduate days at Yale in the late 19305, I was a bit disappointed. He omitted a formallecrure for onc thing, and for another opened the meeting up to questions from the audience without even making any preliminary remarks. Still, I enjoyed his witty answers to questions and recall chortling over his statement that Gertrude Stein "hasn't got any ideas, and she can't express them." Mencken was only partly right about Stein, of course, but then he was only pardy right about a lot ofthings and downright wrong about many things too. Franklin Roosevelt was surely far abler than Mencken was ever willing to concede; and even William Jennings Bryan, whom Mencken despised, was unquestionably wiser than HLM in detecting the absurdities of social Darwinism. But Mencken was right on target when it came to a number of important issues, and his blasts at humbug, hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, and patrioteering seem to me as exhilarating to read today as they were in his lifetime. His championship of free speech and expression was important, too, and I was delighted when I learned recently that in 1936 he had teamed up with Texas Congressman Maury Maverick, a feisty New Deal Democrat, in framing a bill (which attracted little support) making it a felony for any 121 MemoIrs of an Obscure Profetsof 122 public official to violate the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights. The Chicago Tribune's Mike Royko probably comes closer to HLM than anyone else writing in America today in his ability to puncture the pretensions of the new crop of pests clamoring for attention - the oracularly wise, aggressively virtuous, and vehemently compassionatewithout neglecting the old pests, still with us, that Mencken loved to assault. Mencken's "Americana" first appeared in the Smart Set intermittently and then became a regular feature of American Mercury in the 1920S. In T920, the New Republic started a somewhat similar column called "The Bandwagon" which presented weekly reports on the silly statements and bizarre goings-on of the Great, the Near-Great, and the Not-SoGreat . And in T978, the Progressive came up with a monthly page entitled "No Comment," which, like "The Bandwagon ," took on the rich, the powerful, and the prestigious as its main target. Mencken, by contrast, took on the masses as well as the classes. But he was tickled by anything absurd. The New Yorker's fillers at the bottom of the page - the How's That Again Department, the Clouded Crystal Ball, the Remarks We Wish We Had Never Heard - are very much in the Mencken style, too, and were possibly inspired by Mencken's "Americana." Every Mencken reader has his favorite quotation, and mine is probably (it's hard to pickjust one) his description ofWarren Gamaliel Harding's prose. President Harding, wrote Mencken on March 7, 1921, right after the inauguration, "writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) ofpish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." Still, one can't help chinking, Harding at least wrote most Purtlngs and Platltuc::t.s ofhis own stuffand he was one of the last presidents to do so. And he made at least one word, normalcy (he mispronounced "normality") popular. But who would really want to go "back to normalcy," as the 1920 Harding campaign slogan urged, after reading Mencken? Efforts to do so in the 1980s, in fact, proved calamitous for the nation's economy. **** H. L. Mencken's heyday was the 1920S. His was "one of the loudest voices," it was said, "whose noise combined to make the Roaring Twenties roar. " In November 1920, we are told, he cast his vote for Warren Gamaliel Harding and then sat back to enjoy the fun. " No other such complete and dreadful nitwit," he was soon saying, "is to be found in the pages of American history." Mencken was...