The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, by Terry Teachout. HarperCollins, 2002, 410 pages.

---

A Politically Correct View of H.L. Mencken

by R.W. Bradford

H.L. Mencken once said that he had it on the authority of a prominent publisher that books about Abraham Lincoln always make money, no matter how bad they are. The publication of Terry Teachout's "The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken" brings the number of biographies and memoirs about Mencken to 21, which means that a book about Mencken has been published, on average, once every 3.67 years since Mencken celebrated his 45th birthday in 1925. The longest gap between publications was eleven years, but some decades have seen as many as four. I wonder: have biographies of Mencken become "sure things"?

Mencken was arguably the most prominent and influential American libertarian of the 20th century. Part of the reason why Mencken's life is so frequently chronicled is simply that it was a very interesting life: he was both America's leading literary critic and its leading political pundit, and he chronicled nearly half a century of American life. But the more important part, I think, is that Mencken wrote with a style that is simultaneously outrageous and delightful. Since biographies of writers invariably include substantial quotations from their subjects, biographies of Mencken are almost certain to be read with pleasure.

Another reason why the flow of Mencken biographies has lasted so long after his death is that Mencken arranged his affairs so that important biographical information would be made available to scholars at various intervals, some as long as 35 years after his death.

Nothing new has come out since 1991, however, and Teachout's biography is the second to be able to exploit all of Mencken's papers and memoirs. It is unquestionably superior to the first such biography, Fred Hobson's "Mencken: A Life." In many ways it is the best of all the biographies despite an egregious and mysterious flaw.

I'll discuss the flaw a little later in this essay. Right now, I want to admit that I wasn't looking forward to reading "The Skeptic" with great anticipation. For one thing, while I've read a good deal of Teachout's magazine writing and have found it quite serviceable, I've never been particularly enthusiastic about it. For another, having read virtually everything written by Mencken that is reasonably available, including all his books and all his writing for The American Mercury, as well as eight or ten of the biographies and all six of the memoirs of his life, I wasn't convinced that I'd learn very much from Teachout that I didn't already know.

What's impressive about "The Skeptic" is that Teachout does a very good job of explaining Mencken's life and career in the context of the times in which he lived. Teachout even manages not to be outraged or addled by Mencken's hostility to Franklin D. Roosevelt and America's involvement in World War II, subjects that routinely outrage and addle other writers. For me, the best thing is that Teachout does a fine job of putting Mencken's literary criticism in context, thereby rendering it intelligible to people who lack professional training in the subject. The major weakness of my own understanding of Mencken is my limited familiarity with American literature between 1900 and 1940. I never have been able to appreciate his literary criticism fully. Oh, I'd read some Howells, Lewis, Conrad, Shaw, and a little Dreiser, but none of Gene Stratton Porter or Harold Bell Wright. Teachout's discussion of Mencken's criticism, and of many of the novelists that Mencken criticized, may not be comprehensive or scholarly, but it provides enough information to give me a feel for the reasons why Mencken regarded these authors in the way he did.

There remains one very serious problem. Time and time again, Teachout calls Mencken an anti-Semite. According to the index, Teachout mentions "Jews" or "anti-Semitism" on a total of 44 pages. That's the same number of pages that mention the Baltimore Sun, where Mencken worked for nearly a half-century. George Jean Nathan, with whom Mencken co-edited both The Smart Set and The American Mercury, is mentioned on but 47 pages.

From reading "The Skeptic," one might almost think that Mencken was more concerned with Jews than with his closest literary partner or the newspaper for which he worked (and on whose board of directors he served). Indeed, one might think that Mencken had practically made a career of thinking about Jews.

The notion that Mencken was an anti-Semite gained notoriety in 1990, with the publication of his diary. That book included a couple of brief passages that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic. The editor declared Mencken an anti-Semite, and the publisher made rather a big deal of it, presumably in hopes of increasing the book's sales at the expense of the author's reputation.

Against the notion that Mencken was anti-Semitic stood the evidence of his entire life: most of his closest friends were Jews, he expressed sympathy for Jewish settlement in Palestine, he advocated that the United States accept German Jewish refugees from Hitler's pogrom. There was also the testimony of the people who knew him. To me, the case that Mencken was an anti-Semite remained very thin, but I do not think the issue was resolved.

Now comes Teachout and, in his case for Mencken's anti-Semitism I detect something missing: an argument. Although he repeatedly calls Mencken an anti-Semite, he never actually argues that he is. In lieu of an argument, he offers us the testimony of others to the same effect and quotes several passages from Mencken that contain pungent opinions about Jews, many of them not favorable, and a lot about the history of the charge that Mencken was anti-Semitic. He tells us, "It is not his anti-Semitism for which he will be remembered — but that he was an anti-Semite cannot now reasonably be denied." He tells us that Joseph Epstein believes that "It is, alas, impossible any longer to let Mencken off the hook on the charge of anti-Semitism." And somehow, I am pretty certain, Teachout expects us to be convinced by this thin gruel of expert testimony and unconvincing evidence.

This is strange. Normally, when an author makes a controversial charge, he offers some crucial defense of it. If you want to argue that someone is an anti-Semite, you explain what you mean by "anti-Semite" then you show evidence that the person meets your definition. Teachout does none of this.

The closest he comes is the two specimens of argument from authority already mentioned — unless one considers the passages from Mencken that Teachout considers such powerful prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism that they needn't even be so characterized. I have gone through the book and examined every passage from Mencken that Teachout quotes and everything Teachout wrote that conceivably could be construed to support his charge. Here is a list of such sentiments as might be considered hostile to Jews. Teachout's writing, including his quotations from Mencken, are in italics. My comments are in Roman type.

• Long after they [Mencken and his long-time friend and colleague George Jean Nathan] parted company, he [Mencken] would make his own pen portrait of his dapper ex-friend, this one etched with a rusty nail: "A slight fellow, of less than average height, he is intensely self-conscious about his physique, and is at great pains to avoid being seen with women who are not smaller than he is. If they are known by sight to all the Jews and whores who hang about the theatres and nightclubs, so much the better, for though he has denied, in recent years, that he is a Jew himself, a typically Jewish inferiority complex is in him, and it gives him great satisfaction to have some eminent (or even only notorious) fair one under his arm." (p. 88)

Mencken indicates that he believes there exists such a thing as a "typically Jewish inferiority complex." Is this anti-Semitic? I don't see that it's any more anti-Semitic to say this than it is anti-American to say that a person has "a typically American credulity," or anti-German to say that he has "a typically Teutonic tendency toward authoritarianism."

• "I had little if any prejudice against Jews myself," he wrote in My Life as Author and Editor, "and in fact spent a great deal of my leisure in their company, but they were rare in the publishing business and rather resented by the Goyim, and there was little indication that they would ever be successful. . . . [I]t also seemed to me, in the early days of our acquaintance, that [Knopf] showed a certain amount of the obnoxious tactlessness of his race." But as Mencken got to know Knopf better, he changed his mind about the young publisher. (137)

At the worst, this demonstrates that, in the early part of the 20th century, Mencken believed Jews to be obnoxiously tactless, but that this belief was insufficient to keep him from making close friends of them. Knopf became one of Mencken's close Jewish friends. Is this proof of anti-Semitism?

• Mencken wrote: "The Jews of Detroit, outraged by the anti-Semitic nonsense printed by Henry Ford in his Dearborn Independent, have had an ordinance passed barring that curious journal from the news-stands. . . . I am certainly not anti-Semitic and never read Ford's paper, but I carry away from the Detroit episode a suspicion that he must have mingled some truth with his libels, else the yells would have been less raucous. No sane man objects to palpable lies about him; what he objects to is damaging facts. Perhaps if I read Ford I'd dismiss his case as without merit, and so, maybe, would every other fair man — but the Jews, with singular fatuity, now seem to be doing their best to make it impossible for me and other men to read and gag at him." (165)

In sum, Mencken believed that when people tried to suppress opinions through censorship, they might be trying to hide something. Is this evidence of anti-Semitism?

• Praising the Bible for its "lush and lovely poetry," he remarks that it is "astounding" that the Jews should have been responsible for "nearly all of it" since they could be "very plausibly" described as "the most unpleasant race ever heard of." Nor did he let it go at that. In a passage full of faint echoes of Nietzsche, he went on to explain: "As commonly encountered, they lack many of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects and their charity is mainly only a form of display. Yet these same Jews, from time immemorial, have been the chief dreamers of the human race, and beyond all comparison its greatest poets. . . . All this, of course, may prove either one of two things: that the Jews, in their heyday, were actually superior to all the great peoples who disdained them, or that poetry is only a minor art. My private inclination is to embrace the latter hypothesis, but I do not pause to argue the point." (247–8)

Here Mencken expresses a variety of generalizations about Jews, some favorable ("the chief dreamers of the human race, and beyond all comparison its greatest poets") and some unfavorable ("vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste"). These are certainly odd and idiosyncratic generalizations, but are they evidence of anti-Semitism?

• [Mencken wrote that] "The disadvantage of the Jew is that, to simple men, he always seems a kind of foreigner. . . . Thus he is an easy mark for demagogues when the common people are uneasy, and it is useful to find a goat." (270)

This is plainly an opinion about non-Jews, and a very unflattering opinion. Is this evidence of anti-Semitism?

• [Mencken wrote that] "On the one hand, it [the Jewish settlement in Palestine] is being planted intelligently and shows every sign of developing in a healthy manner. But on the other hand there are the Arabs — and across the Jordan is a vast reservoir of them, all hungry, all full of enlightened self-interest. Let some catastrophe in world politics take the British cops away, and the Jews who now fatten on so many lovely farms will have to fight desperately for their property and their lives." (271)

Here, surely, Mencken expresses sympathy with Jews.

• In letters to his Jewish friends, he [Mencken] explained that "the uproar being made by the Jews in this country is doing them far more harm than good," inflaming anti-Semites in Germany and America alike. "A very definite anti-Semitic movement is gathering force behind the door, and whenever a convenient opportunity offers it will bust out," he told Benjamin De Casseres, one of the Mercury's Jewish contributors. "At that time you may trust me to mount the battlements and holler for the Chosen." (277)

Here he plainly expresses support for Jews against anti-Semites.

• [Regarding the anti-Semitic activities in Germany, in 1938:] "It is to be hoped," he wrote, "that the poor Jews now being robbed and mauled in Germany will not take too seriously the plans of various foreign politicos to rescue them. Those plans, in all cases, smell pungently of national politics, and in not a few cases they are obviously fraudulent." Dis-missing as "next door to murder" the English plan to resettle German Jews in Tanganyika and British Guiana, he pointed out with gleeful precision that the White House was doing no better, since FDR had stated that he had "no intention of proposing a relaxation of the immigration laws" that prevented most Jews from emigrating to the United States. "Such gross and disgusting peck-sniffery," Mencken said, "is precisely what one might expect from the right hon. Gentleman, and I only hope the American Jews who have swallowed so much of his other buncombe will not be fetched by it." The only way to help Jewish refugees, he added, was "to find places for them in a country in which they can really live. Why shouldn't the United States take in a couple of hundred thousand of them, or even all of them?"

This little-known Sun column was exhumed in the eighties when the posthumous publication of Mencken's diaries led to renewed accusations that he was an anti-Semite. "Help for the Jews" was offered as proof to the contrary, though those who quoted from it almost always neglected to mention the last two paragraphs:

"I am here speaking, of course, of German Jews, and of German Jews only. . . . The question of the Eastern Jews remains, and it should be faced candidly. Many German Jews dislike them, and were trying to get them out of Germany before the present universal disasters came down. There is a faction of them that tends to be troublesome wherever they settle, and there is apparently ground for the general belief that in this country they incline toward the more infantile kinds of radicalism.

Fortunately, they are not numerous in German Jewry. The really large accumulations of them are in Poland and Rumania. It would be obviously impossible, even if it were prudent, for the United States to take them all in. But there is still plenty of room for them, and in a land where there is no prejudice against them, and their opportunities are immensely better than in Tanganyika or Guiana, or even Palestine. That land is Russia."

Having made so outrageously cynical a suggestion, Mencken affected to be dismayed when the Sun received "floods of letters of protest and abuse" from Jews who declined to go along with his solution to the problem of Eastern Jewry. He then decided that since nothing he wrote short of "the most preposterous flattery" would satisfy the Jews, he would write no more about them, "no matter how poignant their sufferings." (287–8)

It may be "cynical" to suggest that the U.S. admit only German Jews, and that Eastern European Jews might better find a home in Russia, but is it anti-Semitic? Only if one denies that German Jews are Jews. After all, to be "anti-Semitic" presumably means to be against all Jews because they are Jews. The fact that Mencken opposes admitting millions of Jews to the U. S. while supporting the expedited admission of hundreds of thousands of Jews tends to support the idea that he disliked Eastern European Jews, but it undermines any suggestion of anti-Semitism. Contrast Roosevelt's refusal to expedite the admission of any Jews.

• [Mencken wrote:] "The sharp, unyielding separateness of the Jews, based on their assertive racial egoism, marks them off as strangers everywhere. . . . The chief whooping for what is called racial tolerance comes from the Jews, who are the most intolerant people on earth. In the United States, as in all countries that they inhabit, they interpret tolerance to mean only an active support of their own special interests. . . . I hate to have to ask a man what he is — Jew or Christian, German or Englishman, European or Asiatic. There are so few persons in the world who are really worth knowing that it is wasteful and absurd to sort them into categories. But the average Jew leaves one no alternative. He is Jewish before he is a man, and presses the fact home with relentless lack of tact. This habit, I suspect, is one of the chief causes of Jewish unpopularity, even among those who are not rationally to be called anti-Semitic."

Mencken may have felt that he was "not rationally to be called anti-Semitic," but few who are fully acquainted with all the available evidence are likely to agree with him, though by the looser standards of his own time and place he might well have been acquitted of the charge. He was, after all, no Nazi — but he was willing to leave the Nazis to their own malevolent devices rather than see the United States go to war with Germany. He loathed Adolf Hitler — but no more than he loathed FDR. He thought America should open its doors to Jewish refugees — but only if they were his kind of Jews. He sympathized with their distress — but thought they had brought it on themselves. Perhaps most telling is the language he used to criticize Jewish friends such as Philip Goodman, who decided that they could no longer keep silent about the plight of the Jews under Hitler: Their crime, he said, was to have "turned Jewish on me." (289–90)

What a curious melange this is. First, Teachout quotes Mencken expressing a severe hostility to racial prejudice, but adding that the fact that so many Jews insist on being thought of first as Jews rather than as individuals makes it harder for some people to remember this. Is this evidence of anti-Semitism?

Then Teachout assures us that "few who are fully acquainted with all the available evidence" think that Mencken was not anti-Semitic. This, of course, is simply an argument from authority — a request that we accept on faith the conclusions of people who have seen "all the evidence," including evidence that is uncheckable, since it is available only to those permitted to see all Mencken's papers, including the portions of his diary and his two journalistic memoirs that his heirs, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, have chosen not to make public. It seems Teachout expects us to accept the existence and character of evidence that he does not permit us to see.

Finally, Teachout identifies as convincing evidence of Mencken's anti-Semitism "the language he used to criticize Jewish friends," whose "crime," Mencken said, was to have "turned Jewish on me." But Mencken wasn't accusing his friends of a "crime." The actual passage from Mencken's memoirs is this: "Goodman and I became friends almost immediately, and remained so until the shattering impact of Hitler made him turn Jewish on me."^* The emphasis on Hitler, and the background of Mencken's long-standing isolationism, help to clarify his meaning. Mencken's reaction is similar to that of his contemporary Rose Wilder Lane, who broke with Isaac Don Levine, a close Jewish friend, when the impact of World War II caused him to forsake the isolationism they had shared. The relationship could not survive the understandable difference in views. This is not anti-Semitism. In the same way, Mencken is saying that, understandably, Hitler's deeds "made" his friend discover that his Jewish identity was more important to him than his relationship with Mencken.

• He [Mencken] broke his silence . . . , taking . . . advantage of the occasion to sum up what he saw as the consequences of World War II: . . . "the Jews have been euchred out of . . . Palestine . . ." (308)

Here Mencken jumps to the wrong conclusion — Britain ultimately did support Jewish settlement of Palestine and even the expulsion of non-Jews from that territory. But is this evidence of anti-Semitism? Or of sympathy with Palestinian Jews? Pretty obviously the latter.

• In 1955, shortly before his death, and seven years after a third stroke had virtually destroyed his ability to speak, write, or read, his secretary discovered among his papers the manuscript for a book, consisting of a collection of miscellaneous notes of varying lengths, which was eventually published as "Minority Report." Mencken somehow managed to decide which of the notes to publish. Teachout offers no explanation of how a man who could hardly speak and could not read at all was able to take on such a task. Among the notes that Mencken cut was one that read: "The Germans, taken together, practice hardness and have a considerable talent for it, but individually they are mainly sentimentalists. Something of the same sort is true of most other nations, including the Jews. It reveals itself in the fact that every one, as the saying goes, has a pet Jew. The explanation here is that the average educated Jew tends to be an endurable enough fellow, despite his obvious failings, whereas Jewry as an organized body is almost unqualifiedly unpleasant."

Mencken begins with an opinion about "most nations," including the Jews — an opinion that is hard to view as hostile or even very unflattering. Then he finds the average educated Jew "to be endurable." This sounds hostile, though when one considers how many people Mencken found to be endurable, it might better be considered a compliment. Then he expresses an unfavorable opinion about the "organized body" of Jewry, an evaluation he made of just about every "organized body" he ever encountered. In the context of his normal literary conduct, is there anything here that is anti-Semitic?

Of Americans, Mencken wrote: "No other known man, indeed, is so violently the blowhard, save it be his English kinsman. In this fact lies the first cause of the ridiculous figure he commonly cuts in the eyes of other people: he brags and blusters so incessantly that, if he actually had the combined virtues of Socrates, the Cid, and the Twelve Apostles, he would still go beyond the facts, and so appear a mere Bombastes Furioso. . . . Braggadocio, in the 100% American — 'we won the war,' 'it is our duty to lead the world,' and so on — is probably no more than a protective mechanism erected to conceal an inescapable sense of inferiority." This is less flattering, I think, that what Teachout finds "anti-Semitic" in what he said of Jews. Should Mencken be denounced as an "anti-American"?

He described his fellow German-Americans in Baltimore as "ignoramuses of the petty trading class." Surely this is a harsher characterization than what Teachout finds offensively anti-Semitic. Should we conclude that Mencken was an anti-German bigot?

• Teachout quotes a "private conversation" that Charles Angoff claims he had with Mencken some 23 years earlier, in which Mencken expresses a sentiment that " . . . Hitler is a jackass. But he isn't altogether crazy in what he says about the Jews . . . " (337). Teachout also reports that Mencken's friends believed the recollection, and Angoff's entire book, to be, well, inauthentic. He quotes Alfred Knopf as saying, "The laws of libel forbid my saying what I think of [Angoff's book], but you can get the idea from Churchill's references to Mussolini in his wartime speeches." Teachout dismisses this, saying that he thinks that " . . . even after allowing for malice and exaggeration, much of Angoff's book is plausible enough . . . " Teachout's view to the contrary, Angoff's claimed verbatim memory of a 23-year-old conversation is hearsay evidence of the crudest sort; I can't see why we should give it more than passing consideration.

• Charles Fetcher, who edited Mencken's diary for publication, thought Mencken was an anti-Semite (339). Having read Fetcher's conclusion, though not the evidence in the case, a considerable number of writers who were unfamiliar with Mencken also decided he was an anti-Semite. A great many other people, including those who knew Mencken well, disagreed. Joseph Epstein, the distinguished essayist, was among those who dismissed the charge. Five years later, he changed his mind, though Teachout does not tell us why (339 –40).

* * *

That's it: the entire case that Mencken was an anti-Semite. It remains, to put it mildly, far from obvious. What is obvious is that Mencken said some pungent and unflattering things about Jews, as he did about all races and cultures, including his own. Where, now, does the argument stand?

In the wake of World War II, and Adolf Hitler's attempt to kill all European Jews, anti-Semitism has become an especially serious charge, a charge that should not, I think, be made lightly. I am tempted to speculate about why Teachout makes it without providing any real argument. If there is more definite evidence among Mencken's private papers and the unpublished portions of his diary and memoirs, why won't Teachout tell us what that evidence is? Why be content with such weak evidence as he has advanced?

I can concoct several hypotheses. Teachout wanted his book to be controversial in order to increase its sales, so he included this conclusion despite the lack of any convincing evidence. Or Teachout's editors thought the evidence was not very interesting, and cut it from the book. Or Teachout, for some reason unknown to his readers, wanted to keep the evidence secret.

These are only a few of the possible explanations. They may be unlikely. But we have no way to know.

The question of whether Mencken was anti-Semitic depends, of course, on what one means by "anti-Semitic. " If we mean by "anti-Semite" one who holds unfavorable opinions about Jews, then Mencken certainly was anti-Semitic. But by that definition, anyone who ever has an unfavorable opinion about any group of people can be regarded as anti- that group. Is everyone who thinks that Italians tend to be bad drivers or the English to be poor chefs to be tarred with the same brush? I doubt that a single person of any community or cultural group does not harbor at least a few unfavorable opinions of his peers. Should we describe Billy Graham as "anti-Christian" because he has observed that many Christians are hypocrites? Or George Steinbrenner as "anti-Yankee" because he once characterized the players on the team he owns as "lazy"?

Today, to be sure, when intelligent people use the term "anti-Semite" they do not mean to cast so wide a net. In the aftermath of Hitler, we think of someone as an anti-Semite if he harbors a genuine hatred of Jews merely because they are Jews, and if he wants to do them grave harm (usually because he harbors some preposterous conspiratorial fantasy about them). This accounts for the incendiary character of the term, which is invariably used as an epithet of a particularly vile nature.

Mencken bore no hatred for Jews merely because they were Jews, and he sought to do them no harm. He opposed efforts to discriminate against them. He advocated making an exception to U.S. law to admit hundreds of thousands of persecuted Jews to the United States. He had numerous long friendships with Jews. Teachout himself provides powerful testimony of Mencken's absence of anti-Semitism.

There are a couple of other annoying problems in "The Skeptic." For some reason, the book's preface, prologue, and first two chapters lack chapter headings at the top of the page, while its final eight chapters, source notes, bibliography, epilogue, and index do not. The source notes are strangely elliptical, identifying material only by chapter, thus making it a chore to track down the source of any particular quotation. The sources of some quotations are never identified at all. Given these flaws, which appear to be evidence of sloppiness at some stage of the editorial process, it is almost surprising that the book's bibliography is good and its index comprehensive.

So, where does this book stand among Mencken's biographies? It depends on what you're looking for. If you want a feel for Mencken as a writer and thinker, the best biography remains William Manchester's "Disturber of the Peace" (1950), which is also the most fun to read of any Mencken biography. If you want an account of Mencken's life, Carl Bode's "Mencken" (1969) is your best bet. If you want an account of Mencken's life and career with a good accounting of their historic context, but unfortunately weighted down with frequent and unsupported assertions of Mencken's anti-Semitism, Teachout's book is a fine choice.

---

1	Teachout's source note misidentifies the source of this quotation and fails to inform the reader that it is part of a much longer sentence about how his friendship with Goldman began in 1918.

BACK

© Copyright 2010, Liberty Foundation

Send editorial comments to letters@libertyunbound.com.
All letters to the editor are assumed to be for publication unless otherwise indicated.

Send web site comments to webmaster@libertyunbound.com.