In case you wanted to know more about the man who so affected Richard Wright, here's a little on Mencken. Read the whole thing to find out what Mencken really thought about race. (The definitions for the words in bold are at the end as well):
Henry Louis Mencken was an American writer—essayist, literary critic, and journalist—a golden newspaperman in the Golden Age of newspapers. He began his journalistic career with Baltimore’s Herald, and after that paper went out of business, became an editor at the Baltimore Sun. As a columnist for the Sun, he made a name for himself with his provocative commentary, never afraid to say the shocking, inappropriate thing. From 1914-23 he coedited, with George Jean Nathan, The Smart Set, and moved on to edit with Nathan the American Mercury, where Mencken went from literary criticism to more social and political commentary. Mencken was an example of the satiric spirit of the age, shared by authors like Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Sinclair Lewis. Committed to going against the traditional view, showing a healthy critical skepticism, Mencken’s most famous journalistic enterprise was his coverage of the Scopes “monkey” trial in 1925, a trial in which the state of Tennessee accused a teacher John Scopes for violating the Butler Act that made it illegal to teach evolution in public schools. Mencken made fun of the prosecution and the jury that convicted John Scopes in the type of “boobus Americanus.” The Scopes trial was one of the first and most famous debates between Christian fundamentalism and the theory of evolution, a debate that goes on to this day. A fervent nonbeliever, Mencken had no patience for the Fundamentalist antics of prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, and when it was ruled that scientific testimony on evolution could not be admitted as evidence, he gave up reporting on the trial.
Mencken published many books and collected his columns and pieces in the six-volume Prejudices. Ultimately, Mencken was a man of contradictions, in many ways radical and in many ways a staunch conservative. Often on the unpopular side of (inter)national issues, he opposed American involvement in World War I and opposed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. His increasing turn to political writing, because of his unpopular political views, led to his decline in fashion. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes’s friend Harvey Stone says of him, “He’s written about all the things he knows, and now he’s on all the things he doesn’t know.” In keeping with the man of contradictions, he was throughout the 1920s-30s, perhaps, popularly unpopular (or vice versa—you figure it out). After all, no sooner does Jake attest to the power of Mencken’s influence than he declares, “I guess he’s all right…I just can’t read him,” to which Harvey responds, “Oh, nobody reads him now...” Actually, that wasn’t really true.
Mencken died on January 29, 1956. He was dramatized in the character of E.K. Hornbeck in the 1955 play on the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind. He remains one of America’s greatest critics and iconoclasts. Without getting your likes or dislikes from him wholesale, I encourage you to check him out some more. He’s a great guy to think with, to argue for and against.
On the against note, if you were thinking that Mencken angered the South by challenging racist views, though he was an outspoken critic of lynchings, he did not escape the taint of racism. He wrote to Robert Rives La Monte:
But for a more neutral flavor of Mencken, here's a short piece entitled "The Skeptic."
I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.
No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt – a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve. This doubt, it must be obvious, is always more than justified, for no man is worthy of unlimited reliance – his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation. The trouble with the world is not that men are too suspicious in this direction, but that they tend to be too confiding – that they still trust themselves too far to other men, even after bitter experience. Women, I believe, are measurably less sentimental, in this as in other things. No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pickpocket’s confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.
Mencken says that "[t]he trouble with the world is not that men are too suspicious...but that they tend to be too confiding." Do you agree or disagree with this statement?
Recommended Reading:
The Vintage Mencken, Ed. Alistair Cooke. New York: Vintage, 1990.
A Mencken Chrestomathy. New York: Vintage, 1982.
Hobson, Fred. Mencken: A Life. New York: Random House, 1994.
Men Versus the Man, a Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910. (available online here)
Vocabulary:
iconoclast: a person who attacks sacred or cherished beliefs, notions, traditions
satiric: critiquing through the use of humor, mocking, or exaggeration, especially in a political context
inconceivable: unthinkable
stock:type or group of people that are related by lineage
insuperable: unable to overcome
inert: inactive, unmoving
reliance: trust
treason: betrayal
wary: careful, suspicious
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