The Press: The Uncommon Scold

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In Baltimore, soon after the general elections of 1948, Henry Louis Mencken suffered a severe stroke that damaged his power of speech and his ability to read and write. But it left his remarkable mind unimpaired and isolated. Two years later a massive coronary occlusion brought him once more to the verge of death. In the brick row house on Rollins Street where he had spent nearly all his life, Mencken sank, fighting, into the twilight of aphasia. It was a cruel fate for a man of Mencken's measure, and in his anguish he rebelled against it. This week death finally came to Mencken, at 75.

Act of God. His death will send a twinge of nostalgia to many a middle-aged American—a feeling which will be difficult to explain to his son or daughter. A generation ago, Mencken's passing would have caused wholesale sorrow in certain speakeasies and newspaper city rooms. College students would have cut classes for a day to mourn the loss of the stormiest figure on the U.S. conversational scene. And in many a parish house and political forum, his death would have been considered an act of God.

Mencken was an editor of surpassing skill, a journalist of scintillating brilliance, a rare humorist and a savage critic. For years he was the brightest star on the Baltimore Sunpapers. He was the forward lance in the march of American letters from John Fox Jr. (The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come) to Sinclair Lewis, helped kill off much of the trash in American writing. Many of the best U.S. writers of the century (Lewis, Dreiser, Cather, Pound. Fitzgerald) were discovered or trundled by Mencken in his happy days as co-editor (with George Jean Nathan) of the Smart Set (1914-23) and the old American Mercury (1924-33). He took out after U.S. criticism, which he said "smells of the pulpit, the chautauqua, the schoolroom."

For a generation of jazz-age iconoclasts, Mencken was a demigod who cut down false idols with a meatax. He fought the censors and prohibitors like an enraged impala, and destroyed shibboleths with a whimsical delight that has seldom been equaled. On his overheated typewriter he minted words and phrases that became part of the national currency: "booboisie," "bozart," "Comstockery," "Bible Belt." With roars of laughter, Mencken insulted at least half his countrymen as "morons" and "boobs" led by "medicine men." He enraged a lot of people, and capitalized on their anger by fielding their barbs into an anthology, Schimpflexikon.

He found grounds for scorn in virtually everything that crossed his irritable eye. He advocated death by artillery fire for Negroes and poor whites. A vociferous agnostic, he roared against the "whooping soul-savers." (One of his favorite letter endings: "I pray for you incessantly.") Religion, he maintained, was simply a "conditioned reflex."