Skeptic [Paperback]

Part of the demonizing of Mencken these days might be attributed to the fact that American society is still intolerant of a critical attitude to religion. Mencken was indeed critical of Judaism. However, as readers of "Treatise on Gods" know, Mencken was also critical of Christianity and Islam. A rationalist to the core, Mencken had little time for people who believed in the supernatural. He detested the religious impulse in Christians, Jews and Muslims alike.

As for those who claim that Mencken is racially prejudice against the Jews, they will have to explain away the fact that, as Teachout shows, Mencken had many close Jewish friends and that he used harsh language toward everyone (the English, the Irish, African-Americans, Italians), not just against the Jews.

As so often with the genteel, the critics of Mencken have focused almost entirely on his manner of writing than rather than the substance of his writing. He argued quite forcefully for a humane foreign policy. Unlike the timid Walter Lippman, Mencken urged the US government to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. For a man who is so often characterized as nasty, he was surprisingly pacific in some of his politics: he was against participation in both world wars.

Much has been made about Teachout's use of Mencken's unpublished writings for this biography and many reviewers have implied that these writings reveal his dark side. Actually, these unpublished writings appear to reveal some new facts, not new prejudices. If Mencken said nasty things in the diaries, a look at his published writings will show that he was nasty there as well. By the way, he could also be nice sometimes too. Again it's just that Mencken's style is far more biting than anything allowed in today's journalism, which is apparently stocked with aspiring political consultants and public relations people.

The best account of the events of Mencken's life is still his Days books (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days). The collection of his newspaper columns, The Impossible Mencken, is better reading than this biography and a good record of Mencken's opinions on the issues of the day.

He left school after his father's death (1899) to become a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald, later serving as drama critic, city editor, and then managing editor of the Baltimore Evening Herald. Soon after the Herald folded in 1906, he joined the Baltimore Sun and continued with the Sun as editor, columnist, or contributor for most of his career. He published studies of George Bernard Shaw (1905) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), both of whom he admired. From 1914 to 1923, with George Jean Nathan he co-edited a satirical magazine, The Smart Set; in 1924 he and Nathan co-founded the American Mercury, a cultural magazine for "a civilized minority," which he co-edited for nine years. Mencken has been generally viewed (if viewed at all) as a crusty curmudgeon, never fully appreciated for the quality of his contributions to academic scholarship as well as to journalism during the first third of the 20th century.

To Teachout's great credit, he resurrects rather than revises an abundance of relevant biographical, social, and cultural material which he examines with both precision and circumspection. My guess (only a guess) is that those who read this biography will view Mencken through the filters of their own values. Some will find him "delightful" and "colorful"; others will be offended by his (to put it mildly) political incorrectness; still others will conclude (as Teachout seems to) that Mencken was the archetypical skeptic of almost everyone and everything...except his own opinions. For better or worse, "he was to the first part of the twentieth century what Mark Twain was to the last part of the nineteenth." Until reading this biography, I tended to view Mencken as a reasonably well-educated variation of Archie Bunker. Edmund Wilson once suggested that Mencken's public persona was a "comic mask" which concealed an "all-too-human face." In this context, Teachout has succeeded brilliantly in revealing that face.