"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

"We posture as apostles of fair play, as good sportsmen, as professional knights-errant - and throw beer bottles at the umpire when he refuses to cheat for our side...we save the blac-and-tan republics from their native [statesmen] - and flood them with "deserving" democrats of our own. We deafen the world with our whoops for liberty - ans submit to laws that destroy our most sacred rights...We play policeman and Sunday school superintendent to half of Christendom - and lynch a darky every two days in our own backyards."

If there are two quotes that summarize my next distinguished member of the rapidly extinct breed I fondly call the American Gadfly, these will suffice. Henry Louis Mencken (better known simply as H.L.M.) was a L'enfant terrible of the first half of the 20^th century and a child prodigy to boot. He talked his way into a newspaper job in Baltimore at the age of 19. No college, no School of Journalism, only an abiding sense of what he believed and a burning desire to write what he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, to be the truth. A true Horatio Alger story of the "Gilded Age."

In the manner of his time, he was expected (as the oldest son) to follow in his father’s footsteps and spend his years working in the family’s cigar factory. When his father died unexpectedly, he was freed of that Victorian responsibility and set off, with his mother’s blessing, to be a newspaper man. And what a newspaper man he became. He and Walter Lippman (a wholly different breed of cat, he) were the two most influential men in the most influential mass medium of the early 20^th century: newspapers and magazines.

Mencken came in like April, a lion in a pressroom filled with men old enough to be his father. His distinctive style and invariably contrarian views flew in the face of the growing sense of American preeminence and her deeply held national dreams of empire. He rejected those notions out of hand as partially evidenced by the second quote above. He saw America not as a shining beacon of perfection but as a deeply flawed nation whose insecurities and inferiority complex caused her to be more schoolyard bully than savior of mankind. He saw America, not as a mature world leader, but as a bumbling, awkward adolescent whose idea of high culture was a campground revival and whose blind devotion to democracy prevented her from producing any truly great men or, for that matter, anything of greatness. In his time, he was both the most hated and, for many, the most loved writer in the nation. True to his nature, he enjoyed his status as the former much more than he did the latter. But even those who hated him read his columns for the Baltimore Sun newspapers and never missed the opportunity to write him their poison pen letters. Mencken, ever the gadfly, gleefully collected and filled (and dutifully collected royalties on) entire books filled with their attacks.

He was a creature of his age. He was convinced of Darwinism or, more correctly, "Spencer-ism": men may be born equal, but that is where equality ends. Some men (and women) have superior skills and qualities that separate them from the great mass of average "booboisie" (Mencken’s word). Since there were superior men, democracy (by its nature of "one man, one vote") is anathema to the advancement of culture, mankind and civilization, itself. When demagogues can rise up from the masses and incense the "mob men" (again, Mencken’s) into action for whatever crusade they desire, democracy quickly degenerates into ochlocracy. And opposition to the steamroller of majority rule is fruitless and, often enough, downright dangerous. That was the evil Mencken saw in the American system of government but the greatest threat was in the blind allegiance and unquestioning obedience its citizens could follow in the name of patriotism. He writes:

"More, democracy gives it [the belief that the "lowly" shall inherit the earth] a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters—which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy." ["Last Words: A Short Essay on Democracy," 1926]

In that short paragraph is, perhaps, Mencken’s gripe with America. Democracy, like religion, is based on the principle that even the lowest common denominator of homo Americanus should and will rule the nation (or, in the instance of Christianity, "inherit the earth"). This, H.L. Mencken would not abide. He viewed the effects of this bastardization of the jus naturale as a travesty. Worse, he saw it as a blight on all mankind, the superior men as well as the common man. It was just, as Mencken would believe, that the common citizens didn’t know they were being used and abused; the superior men - always in the minority - knew it but were powerless to do anything about it.

To better illustrate this contrarian philosophy (acutely so in the light of contemporary America thought and its age of "political correctness"), let us examine a few of Mencken’s great Quixotic windmills and the wars he waged against them.

Example #1: In World War I, under the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, the government instituted a number of measures that, by today’s standards of oppression (e.g. The Patriot Act) seem absolutely draconian. There, of course, was the American Protective League which was a quasi-official organization of, when denuded of all the glitter of their "star-spangled patriotism," vigilantes. At their zenith, the 250,000 APL operatives (in 600 cities) carried federal badges and, working hand-in-glove with Wilson’s Attorney General (Thomas Gregory), they carried out illegal searches and arrests throughout the nation during the U.S. involvement in the War. Under the cloak of Wilson’s Sedition Act, the Postmaster General was authorized to ban publications, arbitrarily deemed to be "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or [that used] abusive language about the United States' form of government." When Palmer succeeded Gregory as Attorney General, he began the infamous "Palmer Raids" which allowed the government’s new Bureau of Investigation (BOI), the forerunner of the FBI, to raid and/or seize any publication deemed "disloyal" and, eventually, "immoral."

It was the suppression of freedom of speech that Mencken railed against. He felt, to his very marrow, that this was the only defense mankind had against the inexorable oppression of government. When he saw the machinations of Wilson - even in a time of war - his thoughts about the mob mentality of Americans was solidified. He saw that the trumpet of patriotism, when blown with sufficient air - and Wilson’s propaganda machine provided more than enough volume - can cause the average American to gladly offer up his most precious liberties to the altar of "my country, right or wrong"). It was this characteristic of democratic government that caused him to despise its hypocrisy. While proposing to "make the world safe for democracy," Wilson (and leaders like him) could bury the Constitution and impose their own despotism without complaint. If the government can set up a frightening enough specter of impending danger, Mencken observed, the typical American will allow almost anything and, usually, did just that. See the first Mencken quote above.

Example #2: Mencken noted that once the herd of America’s started heading in one direction, it was easy enough to distract them onto another path. When the U.S. finished with World War I (1918), the people were ripe for another cause célèbre. And, thanks to the growing influence of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) and left-over German antipathy, the rising tide of religious zealotry was able to bring about the passage of the 18^th Amendment and the banning of alcoholic beverages.

As Mencken viewed it, this was - pure and simple - the idiocy and fallacy of democracy at its worst. When a majority of citizens can be influenced by enough persuasive demagogues - no matter how illogical their argument - oppression and loss of liberty can reign. The rhetoric for prohibition of alcohol promised the elimination of alcoholism, decrease in crime and improved safety of the honor, chastity and dignity of womanhood. What actually happened? Alcohol consumption and deaths from its usage, quite possibly, rose (who could tell since it was all illegally produced and sold), crime rose with the "Roaring Twenties" and, women, well women discovered college, work outside the home and became "flappers."

[Mark Thornton, writing for The Cato Institute, notes that: "Although consumption of alcohol fell at the beginning of Prohibition, it subsequently increased. Alcohol became more dangerous to consume; crime increased and became "organized"; the court and prison systems were stretched to the breaking point; and corruption of public officials was rampant. No measurable gains were made in productivity or reduced absenteeism. Prohibition removed a significant source of tax revenue and greatly increased government spending. It led many drinkers to switch to opium, marijuana, patent medicines, cocaine, and other dangerous substances that they would have been unlikely to encounter in the absence of Prohibition." [Emphasis added]]

It was this sort of "Law of Unintended Effect" that caused Mencken to laugh his fool head off: "We live in a land of abounding quackeries and if we do not learn how to laugh, we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers with alarm." But, that was the public Mencken. In his soul, he was a fire of suppressed rage: "Between Wilson and his brigades of informers, spies, volunteer detectives, perjurers and complacent judges, and the Prohibitionists and their messianic delusion, the liberty of the citizen has pretty well vanished in America, In two or three years, if the thing goes on, every third American will be a spy upon his fellow citizens."

Example #3: The passage of Prohibition convinced Mencken that organized religion (he lumped them into one of his greatest bugaboos, "Puritanism" - which he defined as: "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy") was, when it ventured beyond the pulpit and into the American culture, a negative force. When unleashed on society at large, the Puritan mentality could (and did, in the eyes of Mencken) hinder literature, art, creativity and thought itself. In one of his essays, "Puritanism as a Literary Force," (1917) he wrote:

"The Puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution-- these things have put an almost unbearable burden up on the exchange of ideas in the United States."

It was as the "unholy warrior" that Mencken covered the Scopes trial with unbridled and adolescent glee. If you will recall, it was the first challenge to teaching the concept of evolution in public schools in the U.S. Defending John Scopes, the biology teacher accused of violating the Tennessee state law (the Butler Act) that it was a crime to teach evolution in any school that received state funds, was the most famous criminal attorney in the United States, Clarence Darrow. Joining the prosecution was one of Mencken’s most despised "Puritans," former Congressman. Secretary of State and 3-time candidate for President, Williams Jennings Bryan. The circus, with its designated Ringmaster (Mencken), came to little Dayton, Tennessee in July, 1925.

Mencken was one of 200 newspaper reporters who covered the trial and, at the time, was the most famous. His coverage made no attempt to be "fair and balanced" but, even today, that phrase carries little ballast. He mocked the town's inhabitants as "yokels" and "morons." He classically described Bryan this way:

"Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition - the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes." [In Memoriam: W.J.B., July 27, 1925 - published the day after Bryan died in Dayton, TN] No mincer of words was Mencken. According to most literary experts. Mencken’s scathing "In Memoriam" ranks as one of the great invectives in the English language. It shows, as few others of his thousands of articles and dozens of books, just how deeply the author felt about the dangers of demagoguery and hegemony in a democracy when left unchallenged. He honestly believed that when unqualified men (as he surely felt Bryan was) can rise to the level of influence and power that Bryan did, the security of our liberties were constantly in danger. His only resistence to these "clear and present dangers" was to expose the men practicing this sort of rabble-rousing and expose them to the sharpest edges of his pen. He was not shy in doing what he saw as his duty.

I realize that this discourse on H.L. Mencken leaves many questions unanswered, poses a number of new ones and is an entirely unsatisfying look at the man who was described by his contemporary, journalist Walter Lippman, as "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people." Mencken virtually redefined newspaper reporting and, even today, is one of the most quoted and most imitated writers of the past century. His writing style, alone, was so novel and widely read that it remained the "gold standard" for newspaper men for decades. "Often imitated, never duplicated" should be the epithet of H.L. Mencken.

One may ask, with all his criticism and scathing denunciations of American politics, was H.L. Mencken a "true American"? It is my impression that he was just that. He deeply loved his country but, wanted her to shed her antiquated religiosity and populist government and become what he knew his country could become. He was constantly frustrated by poorly qualified politicians rising to national office and, by playing to the electorate, failing to remain true to the Constitution as envisioned by the founders. He saw, firsthand, that the wars his countrymen were hoodwinked into fighting "to make democracy safe" were only excuses for government to grow larger, more intrusive and trample upon the basic liberties of its citizens. He saw it with Wilson in World War I and lived long enough to see the cycle repeated by Franklin Roosevelt during his "New Deal" followed up with World War II.

Yes, it could be argued that Mencken was, in some things, a racist and an anti-Semite. Certainly, some of public and much of his private writings show this. But, despite his personal beliefs, he aggressively fought for civil rights long before it was fashionable to do so. He wrote bitterly against the practice of lynching (still occurring, even in Maryland, in the early 1900s) and received countless death threats for his trouble. He supported the activities of the nascent NAACP and counseled and mentored black reporters and writers including George Schuyler and W.E.B. Du Bois. During the Holocaust, he repeatedly criticized Roosevelt for not doing more for Jewish immigration to the U.S. Whatever he held in his heart, he believed that liberty was for all and, through his writing, sought to make that fantasy a reality.

Mencken was a rare and, for me, a singular force in American commentary. He was far ahead of his time but, regrettably, he had no successors. His unrelenting and unsparing criticism of American hypocrisy, zealotry and charlatanism died with him. For, today, we have much to critique and examine that requires a critical, dispassionate eye. Unfortunately, we are segregated into the two camps of liberalism or conservatism and we have become, seemingly, incapable of analyzing any issue without the tunnel vision of partisan ideology. Not everything in our modern world is black or white and not every criticism is unpatriotic or anti-American. We have hypocrites, demagogues and downright scoundrels today but refuse to expose them and unabashedly write about them for fear that we might be labeled a "right-wing fanatic" or a "liberal wingnut." So, instead of voicing our opinion and facing the backlash, we couch our rhetoric in cozy, fur-lined political correctness. And misunderstanding, obfuscation and frank confusion prevails and nothing is solved. This was not the way of Mencken and the wonderful gadflies like him. Theirs was a time when a precious few said what they meant and meant what they said. I wish we had someone like him today.

But, sadly, that appears to be just my opinion.