The Life and Riotous Times of H.L. Mencken

William Manchester

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780795335648
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

"Written with verve, intellectual sophistication, and a prickly wit worthy of its eminent subject.... A first-class piece of literate entertainment" ( The New Yorker ). Before he went on to become a celebrated biographer and historian, renowned for such works as A World Lit Only by Fire, American Caesar, and The Last Lion, William Manchester worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun in the 1940s—and it was there that he met fellow journalist H.L. Mencken. This book tells the story of conservative, anarchist H.L. Mencken's life in compelling, intimate detail—and offers a uniquely personal look at the influential cultural critic and satirist who cofounded the magazines the American Mercury and the Smart Set and became a legend for his sharp and highly quotable wit.

CHAPTER I

PRECEDE

This much seems certain: in the late fall of 1848, a lonely, proud Saxon youth named Burkhardt Ludwig Mencken landed in Baltimore with five hundred Thalers and a spanking new certificate bearing notice he had served apprenticeship to a cigar dealer. Burkhardt was just twenty. Behind him he had left a small estate, a host of family traditions, and a love of German institutions which was to affect his descendants for the next two generations.

Just why Burkhardt came to America is less certain. His eldest grandson later maintained he had come to view first hand the amusing spectacle of democracy. It may be so. The Menckens have an uncanny habit of handing down social attitudes. But a far more likely reason is suggested by the year of immigration, familiar to the haziest schoolboy as one of political and economic struggle in Europe. Earlier in the year Burkhardt had completed five years of indenture in Oschatz, Saxony, and nineteenth-century indenture, under the best of conditions, was a dreary business. Like many another discontented European, Burkhardt may have chosen 1848 as the year to shift allegiance in hope of a better life.

In Baltimore, a growing German colony offered hospitable welcome, or at least a background against which newcomers might cast their lives until they learned the language. Here Burkhardt settled, unpacked his bag, and, pocketing his roll, hunted a job. This he found easy; a flash of his proficiency certificate and he was soon seated at a tobacco bench, rolling cigars. Saving his pennies and keeping a shrewd eye open for opportunities, he struggled through his first year in a strange country. Then he quit his job and set up a general store, selling tobacco, groceries, and odds and ends to the hausfraus. The store prospered and, after a time, was itself sold to buy a wholesale tobacco firm. By the early 1850s, Burkhardt had come into an estate where he could afford the proper quality collars to set off his somewhat stiff neck.

Despite the heavily German character of his new home, Burkhardt Mencken remained an individual apart. He was no mixer, he did not make friends easily, and toward the average immigrant, romping in the ecstasies of a classless state, he was openly disdainful. For his fellow businessmen, happy in their beery prosperity, he did not give an aristocratic damn—an attitude which they must have found exasperating. For the proletariat—the laborers who had lately exchanged a Saxon hoe for a Baltimore wrench—he had little but contempt. He was, as has been noted, lonely and proud, and his loneliness was largely due to his pride. This was not unreasonable. Europe, in 1848, was sending over its peasants, its tramps, its malcontents. Except, perhaps, in an incidental way, Burkhardt was not one of these. Discontented he may have been, though scarcely with political turmoil, in which he took but passing interest. Tramp he was not. And he was certainly no peasant.

In later years, as head of a prosperous family, Burkhardt would take his grandchildren on his knee and tell them of the glories of generations of Menckens before. It is a tribute to the inspired manner with which an otherwise austere man must have told the tale that those children listened eagerly and, in time, themselves learned to love the traditions as he had. And if, in those later years, he used the term glorious, he did not exaggerate. The name Mencken, which meant tobacco in the Baltimore of the 1880s, had meant quite something else in the Saxony of a century before. Long before the Ph.D. degree succumbed to Gresham’s Law it had been handed down from Mencken to Mencken with astonishing regularity—almost, indeed, as a sort of intellectual legacy. Lawyers, doctors, and philosophers, the Menckens had strode through the halls of the University of Leipzig with assurance and gusto, with a tread so solid its echoes are not forgotten there to this day.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century, one Otto Mencken had broken with a mercantile tradition and studied at Leipzig. In 1690, or thereabouts, he founded the Acta Eruditorium, the first learned review in German history, and its editorship passed, in turn, to his son and grandson. At Leipzig, in 1715, Johann Mencken, the first of these, published a deadly satire, De Charla-teneria Eruditorium, breaking pedantic heads and bringing the wrath of the college politicians down on his ears. The tradition continued, with no appreciable break. Burkhardt’s grandfather, son of a law professor at the University of Wittenberg, was himself a noted attorney and served with distinction in the wars against Napoleon. With splendor but two generations back, it is small wonder Burkhardt Mencken, in his tailed coat and high, old-fashioned collars, should scorn the mob and become, in an age of characters, a striking figure on the streets of nineteenth-century Baltimore.

Three years after his immigration, Burkhardt married. The sketchy transcript of Harriet McLelland which has come down to us is stark in its pathos. Born in Jamaica of Scotch-Irish parents, she was wed at sixteen, bore her husband five children, of whom the last, Louis, died, and died herself in 1862 of tuberculosis. More than that we do not know. Her death can hardly have left Burkhardt, saddled with four children and still struggling the inevitable struggle of the immigrant, more amiable. Shortly thereafter he married again. Caroline Gerhardt, herself a widow, bore him one child and served admirably as stepmother and housewife.

Burkhardt was made for the role of patriarch. With all the pomp and authority of a Hapsburg, he presided over family councils, making every family decision and pouncing on young rebels within the household at first murmur. Perhaps he found in his family an outlet for the suppressed sociability of his early years in America—or perhaps he was just remembering the Leipzig Menckens. At any rate, he was something of a domestic tyrant, with just enough kindliness and justice thrown in to make that tyranny bearable. As a second generation appeared, he became a doting grandfather, but there is no record of a softening in his role as father. Indeed, as head of the American Menckens he insisted on choosing names for the new children, supervising their education, and even pinch-hitting for their barbers when it pleased him. To his daughters-in-law he may have seemed heavy-handed, but they never argued with him.

In but one respect did this first American Mencken split with his ancestors. Theologians all, they had, to a man, been loyal to the church. Not so Burkhardt. His agnosticism did not prevent the baptism of his sons nor, although his authority carried on through the next generation, his grandsons. His religion, or lack of it, was not especially militant, but it does appear to have been articulate. Though he often visited the Catholic brothers at St. Mary’s Industrial School, bringing tobacco to those who would teach their charges the trade, he seldom left the building without roundly denouncing the God of their fathers. The brothers were a stubborn lot, and they never gave up trying to convince him. But he never came around.

Burkhardt’s first-born son, August, had come into the world amid the fumes of cigar smoke on June 16, 1854. He never quite escaped them. From his first staggering steps, he was fetched by the stogie’s glow, and by the time he was fifteen, he was squarely planted at his father’s bench, rolling round, firm, eminently puffable cigars. His childhood ambitions, like those of any other boy, wandered at times. A predilection for mathematics at Walker’s, a private school, had momentarily fired his imagination: he wanted to be an engineer. But though he fancied himself something of a mathematical wizard all his life, his engineering dreams never progressed beyond the imagination. It may have been just as well; the record of his mechanical accomplishments which has survived is anything but impressive.

Two years at the bench, some time on the road as a drummer, and a smattering of managerial experience gave August ideas of independence. His brother Henry, three years his junior, had like ideas; accordingly, in 1875, the year of August’s majority, they struck out for themselves with thirty-five dollars between them. The firm of “Aug. Mencken and Bro.,” cigar makers, prospered from its inception; with August in charge of the new factory at 368 West Baltimore Street and Henry supervising sales management, they pushed its credit rating to one hundred thousand dollars in ten years. Then, according to the custom of the time, they relaxed for the rest of their lives. Baltimore, in the late nineteenth century, was still a comfortable, leisurely town. The mornings sufficed for the execution of business and the inspection of products. In the afternoons August, after a comfortable nap at home, would return downtown to work furiously on an obscure arithmetic system he had invented known as “averages” or, if the season were right, to attend the nearest baseball game.

Like his father, August was a pronounced agnostic, a hardheaded business man, and a conservative to the point of reaction. Unlike Burkhardt, he was never lonely. Spared the painful transplanting which had been his father’s lot, he was expansive and genial, a loyal Shriner who loved to cavort in the outrageous costumery of that order. A practical joker, a strikebreaker, and an opportunist not above equipping his cigar boxes with the family coat of arms, he was in many ways the prototype of the late nineteenth-century merchant. Heavily respectable—he asked no more of a man than that he pay his debts; tolerant of corruption—so long as that corruption be harmonious with his enlightened self-interest; he was, by standards then current, scrupulously honest and was, by any standards, an excellent provider.

In appearance he was a handsome, tall, well-built man who dressed nattily and sported a fashionable brush mustache. A lover of good beer and good music—he himself played the violin wretchedly—and an absolute fanatic about baseball, August loved to hobnob with the other young German-Americans in West Baltimore. It was, indeed, at a West Baltimore picnic in the late 1870s that he met his future wife.

Anna Margaret Abhau, a slight, blonde, blue-eyed, wistful beauty, was born in Baltimore of Carl Heinrich Abhau and Eva Gegner in 1858. Abhau, like Burkhardt, was an immigrant of the class of 1848; his home had been in Hesse-Cassel. Anna’s mother was one of a host of Bavarian Gegners who had settled in Baltimore in disgust after the first German railroads had ruined a profitable coach business.

Whether it was Anna’s fancy or her pity which was attracted by August at that picnic we do not know. In later years, she told her children he had struck her as a sort of comic character and she had laughed at him for some time afterwards. “I assume,” her eldest son commented tartly, “that he attempted to entertain her with clowning, for which he had no talent.” Whatever the initial cause of attraction, August must have succeeded in keeping Anna amused; in November, 1879, they married and repaired to a rented house on the south side of Lexington Street, west of Fremont Avenue. Today the neighborhood, which still stands, is in the heart of Baltimore’s Negro slums, where sewage spews lazily in back yards and razors flash and men live miserably and die brutally; but seventy years ago it was quiet, clean, and attractive, and August had no cause to apologize to his bride for their new home.

Ten months later, on Sunday, September 12, 1880, there was a great pother in the Mencken home, and presently August emerged in pursuit of one Dr. C. L. Buddenbohm, needed to attend Anna, in labor with her first-born. The doctor left an auspicious celebration of Defender’s Day, a local holiday—auspicious because, years later, the child now yearning to be born would boast to out-of-town friends that the parading bands were in his honor—and hurried to Lexington Street. Burkhardt, alerted in his North Caroline Street home, charged furiously over the cobblestone streets in his buggy, coattails flying, to officiate and make the decisions he was certain were expected of him. Decision, however, was in the hands of Dr. Buddenbohm that Sunday; to Mr. and Mrs. August Mencken he delivered an infant son for the fee of ten dollars; August subsequently was billed and remitted. In his sovereign state, the new grandfather consulted the roster of family names and issued his pronouncement.

In a subsequent ceremony, Henry Louis Mencken was so baptized.

***

On an October morning three years later, her neighbors perceived that Anna Mencken was in a terrible state. It was moving day in Baltimore; the Mencken brothers had bought adjoining houses nearby, and Anna was going about the normally simple task of depositing stacks of family belongings on the sidewalk. In this she was pursued and harassed by a chubby infant who persisted in toddling after her and getting in the way. “Harry!” she cried again and again, “Go somewhere else!” But Harry, having concluded that the business at hand was very much his business, had decided that where he was was where he wanted to be, and accordingly declined to budge. Eventually August arrived and, after complaining bitterly of his wife’s inability to throw away anything, from an incipient file of Godey’s Lady’s Book to her gingham apron and slat bonnet, was assigned to the supervision of his eldest son. Toward the middle of the afternoon, the excitement abated, the rococo Victorian furniture was piled on a wagon, and the Menckens—August, Anna, Harry, and little Charlie, twenty months his junior—climbed into the family buggy and trotted over to their new house at 1524 Hollins Street.

Like most eastern cities of the time, Baltimore was expanding in a checkerboard pattern, the streets lined with two- and three-story houses with common side walls. Young Harry’s new home was one of these, three stories high, of red brick, with a white stone stoop in front and a long, narrow, walled yard in back. Across the street, in the autumn of 1883, the leaves were turning in quiet, gracious Union Square, a block-long park which had at one time been guarded by a high iron railing, now removed to permit free access on all sides. In the center stood a quiet fish pond, flanked by a squarekeeper’s house and a large cast-iron Greek temple. The neighborhood was still dotted with vacant lots, and a few blocks to the west began Steuart’s Hill, a rolling, open area which ended in the stockyards of Calverton. Hollins Street itself was nearly free of traffic, for transportation was still largely limited to the buggy, and travelers preferred the smooth paved space between horsecar rails to the harsh cobblestones of side streets. The neighborhood had been chosen for this, for its rapid approach to the business district, and for its proximity to Burkhardt, a few blocks away.

In this neighborhood, young Harry enjoyed a childhood normal almost beyond normality; it is not unlikely that the suspicion with which he was later to view change and the ridicule he was to heap on stories of personalities distorted in early years stemmed from the vigor and health of his own early life. As an infant, he was precocious; he talked at an early age, at fourteen months he was walking, and at three years he painfully traced, with his mother’s help, his first signature. Now at Hollins Street, hard by the summer house in the back yard, he industriously fashioned miniature railroads in the dirt while his mother, nearby, planted petunias and dahlias, strawberries and vegetables, and fondly watched the progress of the ferns on the north side, the morning glories in the rear, and the sprouting cherry, plum, and pear trees in between. After the births of August, Jr., and Gertrude, when the other children were in bed, Anna would read to her son by the red and waning light of the winter sun, and as he grew older, he began to play in the street before the house, watching, with the pathetic yearning of small boys to be older, the passing of the proud Hollins Street gang.

At five, he began to attend a Methodist Sunday School at the suggestion of one of August’s friends; at six he was ready for formal schooling itself. Friedrich Knapp’s Institute was situated opposite the City Hall, beside the famous Voshell House, in the heart of downtown Baltimore. Knapp was a strict disciplinarian of Burkhardt’s generation, well thought of by the leaders of Baltimore’s German colony. Under the headmaster were a half dozen teachers, mostly his relatives, who ran their charges through the gauntlet of primary subjects, with the emphasis on German, and concentrated on keeping them in line. At the end of each year came a recital on the European plan, with preening parents present and, afterwards, a picnic in Darley Park for all.

Two days before his sixth birthday, Harry and his cousin Pauline were taken aside by Uncle Henry, briefed on the route of the Baltimore Street horsecar, and told when and where to get off. The fall semester began next morning at Knapp’s, and Pauline, in a clean little frock and taut pigtails, and Harry, in knee-length short pants and button shoes, gravely set out to find horsecar and school. The first day they made it. The second day they didn’t. Somehow they managed to take a wrong turn at Holliday Street and wind up among the noise and tumult of the Pratt Street waterfront. Terrified, the children were dissolving in tears when a Negro dockhand came to the rescue and delivered them into the anxious hands of Professor Knapp.

Harry proved a good student. His German was poor, but he led in English and drawing, and though he yanked his share of pigtails and was paddled often enough, his deportment, in the report cards carefully examined by August, was described as excellent. His chief blind spot was rote memory, which may have explained his painful progress in German; because of it he was reduced, in the annual recitations, to the solving of mathematics problems at the blackboard—to the secret delight of August, who sat in the back of the room and worked it all out with his inscrutable “averages.”

Two years after his entrance at Knapp’s, Harry became a recruit in the Hollins Street gang, fiercely loyal to Fire Engine House No. 14 and a sturdy combatant in the wars with other gangs, loyal to other engine companies. The official duties of the gang consisted of following No. 14 wherever its duties took it and of throwing up election-night bonfires for the enlightenment of the neighborhood. Harry became all but indispensable to this last function. In man-to-man street fighting he was wanting in weight—though not, to be sure, in spirit. But when it came to pilfering ash barrels, garbage boxes, and other incendiaries for the election-night festivities, he was the best sprinter in the gang and could easily outrun any grocery man within five miles. While not engaged in serious business, the gang retired to Steuart’s Hill to scheme, hung around livery stables to watch the shoeing of horses, or sat at the feet of old Negro men and women who spun fantastic yarns of life in the South before the war.

Charlie followed his brother into the gang, but however much the boys might join in the formal and informal activities of the neighborhood’s younger set, their chief diversion came from within the family. August saw to that. With that fine sense of integrity he had inherited from Burkhardt, he planned and directed endless adventures for the entire household. He was particularly concerned with his sons. Harry he took on his weekly business excursions to Washington, there to perch on a brass rail and sip sarsaparilla while his father chatted with sporting figures, and when the boy became interested in photography, he helped him set up a developing room on the third floor. For all the children he bought a Shetland pony, housing it in a small stable in the back of the yard. To escape the unbelievable summer heat of Baltimore, he and his brother rented a large double house near Ellicott City, a quaint, somewhat vertical town lying west and north of the city. There, while their father commuted on an ancient arm of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the boys roamed the countryside along Sucker Branch, a small stream running through the property, during the summers of 1888 and 1889. Two years later, August bought a summer home on Belvedere Avenue, a wooded section half a mile from Baltimore’s Roland Park.

Certain differences naturally cropped up between father and son. August had become part owner of a baseball club, and in the hope that Harry would take to the game, he bought a set of uniforms for the boys in the neighborhood of his summer home. But try as he might, Harry merely passed as a weak sandlot shortstop, and eventually he gave up the game as a bad thing. And, more propitiously, he began to balk at Sunday School. At eight, he had been switched from the Methodists to the Lutherans. At first the raucous singing had entertained him, but before long he was squirming and asking for freedom. August would have none of it. He liked his Sunday-morning naps.

These, of course, were not serious. The seeds for a real dispute between father and son were sprouting, however, and though neither August nor Harry could have been expected to have recognized them, various signs and portents were at hand. Briefly, the question was Harry’s career. It seems absurd to speak of the approaching career of a boy still in short pants, and if the matter had been broached, doubtless they would have thought it absurd too. If either reflected on it they assumed, quite naturally, that the eldest son would follow his father into the tobacco business. Unlike most little boys, Harry wasted no time dreaming of soldierin...