A Saturnalia of Bunk. H. L. Mencken

      INTRODUCTION

      LATE IN LIFE, H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) estimated that he had published ten to fifteen million words as a journalist, essayist, reviewer, critic, and general man of letters. With such an immense body of work, it is not surprising that much of it—especially the newspaper work, which by its nature tends toward the local and the ephemeral—remains uncollected. It remains a fact, however, that a great many of the books Mencken compiled in his lifetime—notably his six-volume series of Prejudices (1919–27), which established him as America’s leading literary and cultural critic of the 1920s—were stitched together from newspaper or magazine articles. It is a bit more puzzling that neither Mencken himself, in his late compilation of a lifetime’s writing, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949), nor any subsequent editor has seen fit to preserve one especially notable treasure trove of journalism between the covers of a book: with few exceptions,¹ his 1,228 contributions to his column The Free Lance of 1911–15, comprising a million and a half words, remain embalmed in the pages of the Baltimore Evening Sun where they first appeared.

      Perhaps the very immensity of this mass of writing has proved intimidating; certainly, most present-day newspaper columnists would suffer apoplexy at the thought of writing a 1,200-word column six days a week for four and a half years. Perhaps, also, scholars have assumed either that this column represented apprentice work that could not stand up to the scintillating journalism Mencken produced in the decades following or that it was exclusively concerned with local affairs and personalities of minimal relevance to contemporary issues. A judicious reading of the best of the Free Lance columns puts the lie to both these assumptions.

      By 1911 Mencken could hardly have been considered a cub reporter. Having graduated from high school (the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute) in 1896, he went to work in his father’s cigar factory, with the expectation of taking over the business when his father retired; but the work proved most uncongenial, and only days after his father’s unexpected death in January 1899 he secured a job at the Baltimore Herald, one of the lesser papers in his hometown. His advancement on this humble paper was swift: by September 1901 he had become drama critic; a month later he was editor of the Sunday Herald; in 1903 he became city editor of the Morning Herald; in 1905 he was appointed managing editor of the Herald. Mencken came to dislike the executive or administrative aspects of the newspaper business: writing, whether repertorial or editorial, was his chief passion. When the Herald folded in June 1906, he was immediately hired by Charles H. Grasty to be news editor of the Baltimore Evening News; but although he did write some unsigned editorials and some installments of a Mere Opinion column, he again felt ill at ease in an administrative capacity and leaped at the chance to write for Baltimore’s oldest and most established paper, the Sun, when the opportunity presented itself in late July.

      For the time being, Mencken was unconcerned about his unceremonious departure from the Evening News; for the next four years he put most of his efforts into the Sun, writing unsigned editorials, drama reviews, and other work. But in 1910, Grasty (who had sold the Evening News to the wealthy magazine and newspaper magnate Frank A. Munsey in 1908), wishing to return to the Baltimore newspaper arena, gained control of the Sun after a struggle with Walter, Arunah, and Charles Abell, the feuding descendants of the paper’s founder. Mencken expected to be fired for having snubbed Grasty by resigning from the Evening News, but Grasty, knowing a valuable property when he saw it, forgave him and kept him on.

      Mencken quickly became involved in the Sun’s plans to establish an evening paper. As he wrote in his posthumously published memoir, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Grasty “was notoriously (and correctly) convinced that destiny was on the side of evening papers, and in that doctrine nearly all the other more reflective newspaper men of the time agreed with him.”² At a time before television or even radio had gained the devotion of the general public, it was assumed that hardworking citizens would wish to absorb the day’s news on returning home from the office or factory. Moreover, an evening (or, more properly, late afternoon) paper could actually report on noteworthy events of that day: in later years, Mencken’s celebrated reports of the Democratic and Republican national conventions would be telegraphed to the Evening Sun offices by early afternoon for immediate publication, providing the closest thing to live coverage then technologically possible in the print medium.

      Mencken appeared in the