who pursues his brother with clubs and artillery.”
Purely literary matters rarely come up in the Free Lance columns: that was the preserve of his Smart Set review column, which, in the course of fifteen years, all but established a canon of contemporary American literature, with Theodore Dreiser at the pinnacle and other such worthies as Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, James Branch Cabell, and F. Scott Fitzgerald not far behind.11 But on occasion Mencken did write on general issues relating to language, literature, and art. Several columns anticipate his vigorous advocacy of an “American language” starkly different from standard (British) English—something he extensively codified decades later in The American Language (1936) and its successors. One column reprinted here (11 December 1914) anticipates his famous “Sahara of the Bozart” article (in Prejudices: Second Series), condemning the cultural deficiencies of the South. On occasion he wrote brief reviews of some new books, and he also took occasion to skewer the many hopeless poetasters of his day, usually by the simple expedient of quoting the choicest of their lame verses with a minimum of comment.
Where Mencken did speak out was in his repeated warning against censorship of the theater or of literature. Here again the lust of an intolerant majority to take away the pleasures of the civilized minority was the central issue, and it was encapsulated in the figure of the redoubtable Anthony Comstock, who in his half century of lobbying against “obscene” books caused the suppression of thousands of books and magazines and, worse, the self-censorship of many authors and magazine editors who feared prosecution and the destruction of their reputations. As the 1920s advanced, the burgeoning Modernist literature of the period found in Mencken a valuable ally against puritanical attempts to suppress it, and by 1930 Mencken could take justifiable pride in believing that Comstock’s notorious legacy had come to naught.
It should not be assumed that The Free Lance is entirely devoted to dour reflections on the weighty issues of the day; indeed, even when discussing substantial topics Mencken is careful to leaven them with pungent wit and satire. He remarked, “My Free Lance job was the pleasantest that I had ever had on a newspaper . . . and I enjoyed it immensely,”12 and there is no reason to think that his readers were any less entertained. Some of his most engaging columns treat what he called quackery—astrology, Christian Science, the New Thought (a fuzzy mix of mysticism and self-help), patent medicines, antivivisection, antivaccination, and the like. But once again, Mencken’s fundamental principles come into play: these quackeries enjoy such widespread popularity because they appeal to the limited understandings of the common people, who—especially in the realm of medicine, where such tremendous strides had been made that the field was now hopelessly beyond the comprehension of the layman—are always quick to seek a simple answer to a complex problem. Quackery, indeed, is the inevitable product of democracy: “the ultimate adjudication of medical controversies, as of all other controversies, lies with the ignorant and unintelligent mob, and . . . this mob is animated by that chronic distrust of learning which always marks the lower orders of men.”
Medicine was a particularly sensitive issue with Mencken, who had a touch of hypochondria. He counted among his friends several of the leading figures in the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and he repeatedly defended them against frauds and charlatans—such as those who had organized the National League for Medical Freedom that sought to question their authority and to advance the claims of such dubious professions as homeopathy, osteopathy, and chiropractic. In the case of antivivisection, Mencken had no sadistic desire to carve up defenseless animals but recognized that animal testing was a crucial and indispensable aid in the treatment of human diseases; he also exposed the antivivisectionists in numerous instances of bad faith and bad science. The issue of public health was also a great concern to Mencken: throughout his Free Lance column he would print the standings of what he termed the National Typhoid League—a grisly parody of baseball standings in which the leading cities of the nation were ranked by the number of annual typhoid deaths; Baltimore was, lamentably and shamefully, near the top of the list for years.
Where Mencken parted company with nearly all his Evening Sun readers, even those who were sympathetic to his belaboring of clerics, his lampooning of astrologers, his broadsides against public officials, and his nose thumbing of vice crusaders, was in his screeds in the first year of the Great War. Mencken claimed, perhaps a bit disingenuously, that his advocacy of the German side of the war had little or nothing to do with his own German American heritage: “I was born in Baltimore of Baltimore-born parents; I have no relatives, near or remote, in Germany, nor even any friends (save one Englishman!); very few of my personal associates in this town are native Germans,” and so on. One suspects that Mencken was protesting too much. Although, as his biographer Fred Hobson has pointed out, Mencken wrote several editorials in 1910–11 critical of Germany,13 there is more to his fervent defense of Germany and his unrelenting, at times abusive, denunciation of England and the Allies than mere contrarianism or a desire for fair play.
Perhaps central to Mencken’s stance in the war was the fact that both English and American propagandists almost immediately blamed the outbreak of war on Germany’s absorption of militaristic ideas from the baneful Nietzsche. Mencken, for whom Nietzsche always remained an intellectual mentor, was not about to stand by and see his idol abused. Far from denying such a Nietzschean influence on modern-day Germany, he embraced it: Kaiser Wilhelm was, as his detractors claimed, no democrat, and it was good that he was not; England, in turn, had fallen into decay precisely because it had allowed the democratic principle to run amok and raise such demagogues as Churchill and Lloyd George to power. The bold, courageous Englishmen who had established a worldwide colonial empire had given way to sniveling cowards who drafted other nations to do their fighting for them. And as for Americans, who were theoretically neutral in the early stages of the conflict, their half century of peace since the Civil War had engendered both a military and a moral softness that made them ill-equipped to take a place on the world’s stage.
A detailed analysis of the causes of the war—and even a brief analysis of Mencken’s views on the causes of the war—is not possible in this space. Let it suffice to say that Mencken’s assertions that Germany’s rapid augmentation of its military might in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was purely defensive are both largely false and to some degree disingenuous. There is no reason to believe that, even given Germany’s increasing economic rivalry with Britain and its threat to match Britain’s superiority as a naval power, a confrontation between the two nations, let alone a world war, was inevitable. Mencken’s claim that “Germany was doomed to battle for her very life” is mere bluster and after-the-fact exculpation.
Mencken’s fanatical support for Germany led him into increasingly untenable positions as the war progressed. He wrote a plangent lament for France, but when he turned his attention to Belgium he shocked readers by declaring flatly that its fate was merely “academic and sentimental”—that, as a weak country, it was destined to be overrun by the strong. When Germany’s campaign of submarine warfare began, Mencken was once again an ardent advocate. He argued that commercial or passenger liners that failed to pull up when hailed by a U-boat were themselves to blame if they were subsequently sunk when pursued—an argument that conveniently ignored those numerous instances when vessels had been sunk without any advance warning. Mencken’s most notorious column was published the day after the sinking of the British liner Lusitania on 7 May 1915; among its 1,200 dead were 128 Americans. But as with other such incidents, the Lusitania had, in Mencken’s view, brought about its own destruction by being an armed vessel. Americans’ outrage over the incident—exacerbated by Germany’s unexpectedly belligerent response to President Wilson’s demand for an explanation and apology—came close to plunging the United States into war. Such an eventuality was Mencken’s (and Germany’s) worst fear, for he knew that Germany could not stand up to the united forces of England, France, Russia, and the United States. Americans’ isolationism quickly reasserted itself, however, and Wilson won his reelection campaign in 1916 chiefly on promising to keep the United States out of the war.
But that was more than a year in the future; for the time being Mencken had to face the
