Damning Words

The Life and Religious Times of H. L. Mencken

D. G. Hart

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781467445726
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Recounts a famously outspoken agnostic's surprising relationship with Christianity H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) was a reporter, literary critic, editor, author—and a famous American agnostic. From his role in the Scopes Trial to his advocacy of science and reason in public life, Mencken is generally regarded as one of the fiercest critics of Christianity in his day. In this biography D. G. Hart presents a provocative, iconoclastic perspective on Mencken's life. Even as Mencken vividly debunked American religious ideals, says Hart, it was Christianity that largely framed his ideas, career, and fame. Mencken's relationship to the Christian faith was at once antagonistic and symbiotic. Using plenty of Mencken's own words,  Damning Words  superbly portrays an influential figure in twentieth-century America and, at the same time, casts telling new light on his era.

CHAPTER ONE

Lamentable Heresies

H. L. Mencken was baptized in the fall of 1880, a few months after his birth on September 12, into the Protestant Episcopal Church. His baptized name was Henry Louis. The initials came later when, in his first business venture as a nine-year-old printer of business cards and a neighborhood newspaper, Mencken’s choice of movable type prevented spelling out his whole Christian name. With the r’s in his printing kit either broken or defective, he resorted to “H. L.”

Previous biographers have generally avoided attributing any significance to Mencken’s baptism. When mentioned, the Christian initiation rite is simply rendered a convention of nineteenth-century American culture in which Mencken’s parents obligingly participated. This interpretation makes sense since, along with his extended family, Mencken was never a churchgoer or claimed to be a Christian. But something in those baptismal waters hooked Mencken because the Christian religion would never be far from his observations of the world or how he understood himself in contrast to the rest of his fellow Americans. Even though Mencken would eventually be received into communion in the Lutheran church, his dissent from American pieties contributed to his emergence as one of the most astute observers of American Christianity whose mocking might have done more good for the body of Christ if his devout readers had not been so shocked by his irreverence. His experiences as a boy, which included large doses of Christian influence, helped him become a major critic of the American version of Christian civilization along with its inconsistencies and blemishes. His baptism was simply his initiation into a world with which he would have to reckon (even if many of his interpreters have not).

Questionable Characters

Later in life, Mencken wrote that his ancestors “for three hundred years back were all bad citizens.” He explained that they “weren’t moral—in the conventional sense” and were “always against what the rest were for.” As much as Mencken used this genealogy to explain his own iconoclastic temper, his baptism as an Episcopalian points to a different side of his family. The Christian rite by no means indicated a family of churchgoers or even Godfearers. But it did very much reveal Christian morality “in the conventional sense.”

The Menckens of the Old World hailed from the vicinity of Bremen and achieved no distinction until the first half of the seventeenth century. Then Eilard Menke (the original family name) became the archpresbyter at the cathedral of Marienwerder (now Kwidzyn). But Mencken’s family traced their lineage to one of Eilard’s cousins, Helmrich. A merchant in Oldenburg, Helmrich produced a son, Lueder, who refused to continue in the family business and went out on his own by completing in 1682 a PhD at Leipzig University. Lueder taught law at the university for most of his career—in addition to serving as rector. His brother, Johann, was also an academic, who stood at the front of a line of professors in the Mencken family who taught at Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Halle. The family member with whom Mencken most identified was Johann Burkard Mencke, another PhD, who completed his degree in 1694 and four years later, at the age of twenty-four, was elected a member of the Royal Society. A year later he became the editor of what many consider the first scholarly journal to be published in Germany (Acta Eruditorum). The reason for the American Mencken’s identification with Johann Burkard was not so much his scholarly accomplishments as his capacity for mocking such achievements. A 1715 work, The Charlatanry of the Learned, exposed satirically the pretensions of scholars and pedants. “It gave me a great shock,” Mencken reported to a friend. “All my stock in trade was there—loud assertions, heavy buffooneries, slashing attacks on the professors.”

This discovery, however, did not come until Mencken was in his thirties, and it gave him a way to chart the history of the West. The eighteenth century of Johann Burkard Mencke represented the high point of Mencken family cultural fortunes and of European civilization more generally. It was a time, according to Mencken, when life was “pleasanter and more spacious than ever before.” It “got rid of religion,” “lifted music to first place among the arts,” “took eating and drinking out of the stable and put them into the parlor,” and “invented the first really comfortable human habitations ever seen on earth.” It was also the time when Mencken’s forebears made their mark in Leipzig with a street named Menckestrasse and a memorial window in the city’s Thomaskirche.

But the Mencken clan declined and fell after ancestors moved to Wittenberg and endured the Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent French occupation of the city. Mencken’s great-grandfather, Johann Christian August (1797–1867), was the first family member for almost 150 years not to have attended university. He also lacked a profession and made his way by working on farms and eventually operating an inn. His son (Mencken’s grandfather), Burkardt Ludwig (1828–1891), apprenticed as a cigar maker in Saxony, the trade that sustained the family through the 1890s and that Henry Louis would be expected to inherit and maintain. The grandfather took his trade to the United States in 1848, after the democratic revolutions in Europe that made the democracy in North America look orderly had occurred. Burkardt Ludwig quickly established himself, and his business as a cigar maker and shopkeeper, in Baltimore. Despite the heavy influx of German immigrants to the United States during the 1840s, Mencken’s grandfather remained aloof from German American immigrant culture and institutions. An indication of such ethnic independence was his marriage to Harriet McLelland, a woman of English and Scottish stock. Burkardt’s independence was also responsible for the American line of Menckens being baptized not as Lutherans but as Episcopalians.

Mencken’s mother’s side of the family, the Abhaus, was much less accomplished than the Menckens. His mother’s line was also much more German. They came to America from Hesse, though they had originally been French Protestants who sought refuge in Germany during the troubles of church reform in France. In 1852 Mencken’s grandfather, Carl Heinrich Abhau, settled in Baltimore and tried to make a life as a cabinetmaker. Unlike the Menckens, who were aloof from the German community in Baltimore and only went to church (Episcopal) for the baptism of a baby, the Abhaus throughout the 1860s and 1870s entered fully into German American life, which included attending services at the Lutheran church. Mencken later expressed gratitude for the peasant stock of his Abhau ancestors. “If it were not for my peasant blood, the Mencken element would have made a professor out of me.”

Whatever the influence of distant ancestors, Mencken’s parents, August and Anna, met at festivities sponsored by Baltimore’s German Americans, and in 1879 were married. August had excelled in math during his brief education in a private school but left the halls of learning to work odd jobs in Pennsylvania before returning to Baltimore to establish his own (with his brother) cigar manufacturing firm (somewhat against the designs of his father). August’s marriage to Anna also escaped the designs of the Mencken paterfamilias—whom Henry later described as the “undisputed head of the American branch of the Menckenii” with “jurisdiction over all its thirty members.” Whenever Burkardt arrived in August’s home, “he deposited his hat on the floor beside his chair, mopped his dome meditatively, and let it be known that he was ready for the business of the day”—which included everything from “infant feeding and the choice of wallpaper at one extreme to marriage settlements and the intricacies of dogmatic theology at the other.” Although August’s choice of a bride had escaped the elder Mencken’s rule, Burkardt did require the son to be married in Baltimore’s Saint John the Baptist Episcopal Church.

Later in life, Mencken would reveal opinions about Germany during the United States’ intervention in European wars that would cost him professionally and personally, but those notions he hardly inherited from his father, who continued in Burkardt’s isolation from Baltimore’s German American community. Unlike the grandfather who celebrated the glories of Old World Mencken success even while looking down on German American commoners, the father disregarded even family accomplishments. A successful merchant of cigars, with shops in Baltimore and Washington, DC, August supported a Mencken brood that began with Henry’s birth on September 12, 1880. It was a conventional middle-class home in which the baby was “encapsulated in affection, and kept fat, saucy, and contented.” By the time he turned three, the family had moved from renting to home ownership. The location chosen on Baltimore’s west side was definitely “not a German neighborhood.”

The Mencken household was also a religion-free zone. August was, like his father, a skeptic and likely submitted his children for baptism to please a wife who regarded christening as a rite of passage in civilized society. But Burkardt, the grandfather, enjoyed a good argument about Christian theology and indirectly catechized his grandson in an awareness of church teachings that would extend throughout the boy’s life. Henry would later tell the story of accompanying his father and grandfather on business trips, one of which included a stop at Saint Mary’s Industrial School just outside Baltimore (where Babe Ruth, between 1902 and 1914, received a modest education). The Xaverian Brothers tried to teach “problem boys” a trade, including cigar making. The school acquired tobacco from Burkardt and August tried to market the cigars, but to no effect, since “the cheroots that the boys made were as hard as so many railroad spikes.” After conducting business, Burkardt’s custom was to sit down with the Xaverians and “debate theology.” “These discussions,” Mencken recalled,

seemed to last for hours, and while they were going on I had to sit in a gloomy hallway hung with gory religious paintings—saints being burned, broken on the wheel and disemboweled, the Flood drowning scores of cows, horses, camels and sheep, the Crucifixion against a background of hair-raising lightnings. . . . I was too young, of course, to follow the argument; moreover, it was often carried on in German. Nevertheless, I gathered that it neither resulted in agreement nor left any hard feelings. The Xaverians must have put in two or three years trying to rescue my grandfather from his lamentable heresies, but they made no more impression upon him than if they had addressed a clothing-store dummy, though it was plain that he respected and enjoyed their effort. On his part, he failed just as dismally to seduce them from their oaths of chastity, poverty and obedience. I met some of them years afterward, and found that they still remembered him with affection, though he had turned their pastoral teeth.

Such good-natured opposition to Christianity left a lasting impression on the grandson whose readers (whether Christian or infidel) took note of the antagonism but often missed (and still do) the respect that accompanied disbelief. Whether he inherited this trait directly from Burkardt is one of those nurture-nature questions that evade the expertise of average mortals. But Burkardt did manage to balance the chip on his shoulder about divine matters. He was both a Mason and a “Christian of the Protestant sub-species” who had “lost his confidence in Jahveh” before Henry’s birth. This “outright infidel” permitted his three daughters “to commune freely with the Protestant Episcopal Church” and also required that his sons subscribe, as he had, “toward the Baltimore crematorium.”

August may not have enjoyed debate as much as his father, Burkardt, but he too was responsible—in this case, directly—for schooling the young Henry in the basic pieties of American Protestantism. Sunday school was an invention of Anglo-American Protestantism that caught more spiritual fish than the churches. An institution first established during the run-up to the Second Great Awakening when Protestants in the United States fanned out across the countryside to perform good works and build a righteous society, Sunday school was designed to provide basic literacy for working-class children. Since these kids could not go to school during the week but had to work instead, and since most Americans rested each Sunday to observe the Sabbath, Sunday school became a device for extending the blessings of civilization to members of those families unable to attend common or private schools. It did not hurt that the curriculum used to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic was overtly religious and moral; this was simply another way to reinforce the ties between revealed religion and civilizational advance. In the 1870s when public schooling became more common and in some cases required, Sunday schools needed to find a different mission since local school districts had made their efforts redundant. At this point, the program of Sunday school shifted from secular subjects to explicitly religious ones, especially mastering the contents of Scripture.

The devotional character of Sunday school by the time of Mencken’s boyhood makes ironic his “infidel” father’s decision to send the Mencken boys to the local Methodist church for Sunday school. Even more remarkable is how much Henry apparently learned:

I can’t remember the time when I did not know that Moses wrote the Ten Commandments with a chisel and wore a long beard; that Noah built an ark like one we had in our Christmas garden, and filled it with animals which, to this day, I always think of as wooden, with a leg or two missing; that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar (I heard it as cellar) of table salt; that the Tower of Babel was twice as high as the Baltimore shot tower; that Abraham greatly pleased Jahveh by the strange device of offering to butcher and roast his own son, and that Leviticus was the father of Deuteronomy.

Mencken did not remember “any formal teaching” or any particular instructor, but he did gain the sort of biblical literacy that was typical for most Americans drawn into the reach of the Protestant churches and their related agencies.

What stood out in Mencken’s memory of Sunday school was the “heartiness of the singing.” His favorite song was “Are You Ready for the Judgment Day?”—“a gay and even rollicking tune with a saving hint of brimstone.”

We grouped it, in fact, with such dolce but unexhilarating things as “In the Sweet By-and-By” and “God Be With You Till We Meet Again”—pretty stuff, to be sure, but sadly lacking in bite and zowie. The runner up for “Are You Ready?” was “I Went Down the Rock to Hide My Face,” another hymn with a very lively swing to it, and after “the Rock” came “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” “Throw Out the Lifeline,” “At the Cross,” “Draw Me Nearer, Nearer, Nearer, Blessed Lord,” “What A Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Where Shall We Spend in Eternity?” . . . and “Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Revive Us Again.” . . . It was not until I transferred to another Sunday-school that I came to know such lugubrious horrors as “There Is A Fountain Filled with Blood.” The Methodists avoided everything of that kind. They surely did not neglect Hell in their preaching, but when they lifted up their voices in song they liked to pretend that they were booked to escape it.

The idea that the boy who grew up to be known as America’s chief infidel learned these classic songs of born-again Protestantism and even relished singing many of them is one of those jaw-dropping aspects of Americana. But such was the conventional nature of Protestantism in American society, that infidels and believers alike shared a common biblical vocabulary and repertoire of pious song.

Mencken himself was surprised that his father, being “what Christendom abhors as an infidel,” would send him to Sunday school and expose him to “Wesleyan divinity.” The reason was simple. August wanted a peaceful house for a Sunday afternoon nap:

This had been feasible so long as my brother and I were puling infants and could be packed off for naps ourselves, but as we increased in years and malicious animal magnetism and began to prefer leaping and howling up and down stairs, it became impossible for [August] to get any sleep.

Whether or not August knew the program of Sunday school, it was a marvelous tonic for his rambunctious boys. As Mencken observed, singing was the aspect of Sunday school that children most enjoyed; “there they are urged to whoop their loudest in praise of God,” he recalled, “and that license is an immense relief from the shushing they are always hearing at home.” Still, the father never worried that his sons would succumb to local Protestant pieties. “The risk,” August explained to Henry, “was much less than you think,” since the Methodists “had you less than two hours a week, and I had you all the rest of the time.” “I’d have been a hell of a theologian to let them nail you.”

The Making of a Bookworm

Terry Teachout makes the astute observation that Mencken the man revealed the limitations of an autodidact—someone who settles into intellectual ruts because he is self-taught. This feature of Mencken’s intellectual development was likely the result of what Mencken the boy experienced in his formal education. He began at a private school, Knapp’s Institute, an institution of predominantly German American demographics. When Mencken turned twelve, August sent him to the Baltimore Manual Training School (later Baltimore Polytechnic), a high school that trained students for manual labor. Since Mencken’s brothers, Charlie and August, both went to the Polytechnic and became engineers, August may have had similar hopes for his oldest son. Either way, Mencken’s formal education was hardly the sort of training someone would have chosen for a man who became one of the most prolific authors and influential editors in the world of American letters.

Mencken’s recollections of Knapp’s Institute, named for the headmaster, Friedrich Knapp, are likely the best source for what a private school in 1880s Baltimore was like. The student’s memories have more to do with the people than academics. The student body was mainly German American. It included a large enough group of Jewish American boys to offer classes in Hebrew. The multicultural academy also attracted Latin Americans, “chiefly Cubans and Demerarans,” whose handkerchiefs always smelled of perfume. Like the students, Mencken remembered the teachers less for their ethnic heritage than for their smells or political convictions. One instructor in particular left “a powerful aroma” that served “admirably as a disinfectant.” When this teacher advocated an eight-hour workday during class and Mencken relayed the radical idea to his father, the sweet smell of perfume could not inoculate the elder Mencken, a liberal in the classical model of free markets and small governments, from worrying that the school harbored political nihilism. Knapp himself was a Swabian who in 1850 had migrated to Baltimore, about the same time as Mencken’s grandfather, Burkardt. He wore “the classical uniform of a German schoolmaster—a long-tailed coat of black alpaca, a boiled shirt with somewhat fringey cuffs, and a white lawn necktie.” His coat and hands were covered with chalk dust, some of which must have accompanied Knapp’s regular doses of snuff. What impressed students more than Knapp’s attire was the rattan he carried to keep wayward stu...