H. L. Mencken: Inspiration for Individualists

The libertarian properly rejects the tradition-for-tradition’s-sake doctrine. This does not mean, however, that libertarians have no tradition or heritage. They actually have a very rich one. A careful look through American history will reveal men who have earned the admiration of rational defenders of freedom. Many of these men were newspapermen. Among them are Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, Frank Chodorov and Henry Louis Mencken. Mencken is the subject of this article.

Mencken, born in 1880, was a writer in the broadest sense of the concept. He wrote on virtually everything. Early in his career he was a newspaper reporter. But before his life ended in 1956, Mencken was a columnist, a literary critic, a translator and interpreter of Nietzsche, a social commentator, and an historian of the “American Language”. He also helped to found and edit two magazines: The Smart Set, a literary journal, and The American Mercury.

Mencken’s politics were explicitly libertarian. His position, however, was sometimes contradictory. On the one hand, he endorsed “states’ rights” in the case of Tennessee’s “monkey law”, although he thought it was silly. But on the other hand, he advocated freedom of association among consenting individuals when he opposed a Baltimore law that prohibited blacks and whites playing together on public courts. “A free citizen in a free state,” he said, “has an inalienable right to play with whomever he will, so long as he doesn’t disturb the general peace. If another citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a bother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.” (1)

In 1948, this was not a popular stand to take. But Mencken was not interested in saying what was popular, just what was true. The one characteristic of Mencken that is recognized by both his admirers and enemies is his absolute candor.

Throughout Mencken’s work it is evident that he admired the self-reliant, hardworking, individualist. His objection to statist programs, such as the New Deal, was that it rewarded the man who did not care to be responsible for his own life and it punished the man who does. “If (a man) can’t afford (something) he should avoid it, as self-respecting people always avoid what they cannot afford. The doctrine that the taxpayer should foot the bill which make a bogus prince of pelf of him is New Dealism at its worst,” he once wrote.

By this reasoning, Mencken was an opponent of government activity in almost all spheres. He even once said that the government should not have charge of the sidewalks because it allowed moochers who live off society to keep out of the mud.

Not only did Mencken not say popular things, he openly attacked the most popular ideas. In 1920, he satirically analysed the advocates of Puritanism and democracy: “Puritanism is represented as a lofty sort of obedience ot God’s law. Democracy is depicted as brotherhood. All such notions are in error. There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness – to bring him down to the miserable level of ‘good’ men, i.e., of stupid, cowardly, unhappy men. And there is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.” (3)

Mencken’s analysis of the souls of the democrat and Pruitan are remarkably similar to that of Ayn Rand. His objection to any form of political authority was based on the fact that such authority interfered with man’s pursuit of his well-being. He was keenly aware that a man who has not made himself fit for happiness (i.e., has not lived rationally) will hate those who are fit for it. This hatred often gets translated into a code of ethics (altruism) and a political theory (unlimited majority rule, totalitarianism). Mencken had no qualms about telling this to people, even in the midst of the New Deal.

Mencken did not just reserve his pen for political writings. He was a student of philosophy and expressed admiration for Aristotle. Mencken was fascinated by Nietzsche, in the way Rand was when she was young. Nietzsche’s disdain for the Christain ethics of humility was shared by Mencken. Mencken, however, explicitly rejected Nietzsche’s mysticism. His respect for reason was made clear in passages such as, “To argue that the gaps in knowledge which still confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity. When a man so indulges himself it is only to confess that, to that extent at least, he is not a scientist, but a theologian, for he attempts to reconcile science and religion by the sorry advice of admitting that the latter is superior to the former, and is thus entitled to all territories that remain unoccupied.” (4)

Reason presupposes free will, and Mencken knew it. In his Treatise on Right and Wrong, Mencken took up the subject of free will with an impressive degree of sophistication and in a manner familiar to readers of Rand and Branden.

That the mind is substantially free, at least in its normal state, must be assumed as a kind of metaphysical necessity, for if we argue that it is not free then we argue that our opinion to that effect is not a reasoned opinion at all, but simply an inevitable product of forces over which we have no control, and which we can scarcely comprehend. (5)

This is essentially the argument used by Nathaniel Branden in his refutation of psychological determinism. It is interesting to note that Mencken was suspicious of any theory that was labeled “metaphysical”. One really can’t blame him when one recalls that what went under the name of metaphysics was usually mysticism, explicit or implicit. Yet, Mencken did not mind referring to free will as a “metaphysical necessity”. This leads one to think that he would have approved of metaphysics as Objectivism conceives of it.

As said above, Mencken was a rational critic of mysticism and all religion. His Treatise on the Gods was his classic blast against Christianity, and it was his favourite work. He begins the book by saying, “Religion was invented by man and there is absolutely nothing in it to justify the belief that its inventors had the aid of higher powers, whether on this earth or elsewhere.” (6)

The treatise is a comprehensive study of the evolution of religion and its state as of 1936. His approach is serious, but he couldn’t resist calling the beliefs of the faithful Christian “shocking nonsense”, and then setting to prove it.

In a section dealing with the notion of a teleological scheme to the universe, Mencken made his sense-of-life apparent.

The truly civilized man, it seems to me, has already got away from the old puerile demand for a “meaning to life”. It needs no esoteric significance to be interesting to him.

His satisfactions come, not out of a childish confidence that some vague and gaseous god, hidden away in some impossible sky, made him for some lofty purpose and will preserve him to fulfill it, but out of a delight in the operations of the universe about him and his own mind. It delights him to exercise that mind, regardless of the way it takes him. … (7)

Obviously Mencken saw it as an insult to a man of self-esteem to hold that he is merely a puppet in some ghost’s puppet-theatre. Reminding one of a certain rational philosopher-novelist, Mencken saw man as a potential giant, and was indignant at any suggestion that all man can ever be a dwarf.

Consistent with this view, Mencken believed that government was a foe of man the giant. “The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. . . . (because) one of (government’s) primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.” (8) I don’t know if Mencken ever read Anthem.

In 1919 Mencken summed up his views on the State. “The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual along.” (9)

Mencken translated his political theory into economic theory. He was an advocate of laissez-faire, essentially. And he was a relentless critic of the planned economy. As an associate of Henry Hazlitt, he once called Hazlitt “one of the few economists in human history who could really write.” And to the glorifiers of the Middle Ages who denied the wonder of the Industrial Revolution, he said that the reason for the great material progress of the Industrial Revolution was “the accumulation of capital . . . (which) permitted labour to be organized economically on a large scale, and thus greatly enhanced productiveness. It provided the machinery that gradually diminished human drudgery, and liberated the spirit of the worker, who had formerly been almost indistinguishable from a mule.”

It must be stressed that there is some material that is objectionable in Mencken’s work. As mentioned above, there are occasional inconsistencies in his political writings. And once in a while he would speak of the market being good “despite its defects.” His occasional strains of philosophical skepticism, his suspicion of the value of metaphysics, and his confusion over terms such as “altruism” and “benevolence” necessitate critical reading of his work.

However, in all his writings it is obvious that Mencken did get great delight from the operation of his mind, not only in the way he handled the subject, but also in the way he handled the “American Language”. Whenever he wrote, he had two concerns: the truth and the best way to say it. His enthusiasm glows in his work.

To my knowledge, Mencken never constructed a detailed code of ethics. But he had contempt for the humble because he thought they had reason to be humble, and he despised the meek. He had no time for the envious man who is always worrying about others, but never about himself.

Mencken, the rationalist and individualist, said, “Of all human qualities, the one I admire most is competence.” In this, Mencekn and his work stand as a great source of inspiration to all rational individualists.

Footnotes

(1) The Vintage Mencken, gathered by Alistar Cook, Vintage Books, p. 28.

(2) Ibid. p. 230.

(3) Ibid. p. 76.

(4) Treatise on the Gods by H. L. Mencken; Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1959; p. 261.

(5) Treatise on Right and Wrong by H. L. Mencken; Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1959; p. 82.

(6) Treatise on the Gods, p. vi.

(7) Ibid., p. 291.

(8) A Mencken Crestomathy*, edited by H. L. Mencken; Alfred Knopf, N. Y., 1955; p. 145.

(9) Ibid., p. 146.

(10) Minority Report by H. L. Mencken; Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1956; p. 174.

*A new edition of this book is available from SIL Services, 400 Bonifant Road, Silver Spring, MD 20904, for $8.00. The Vintage Mencken will soon be availble from SIL.

Shel Richman is a reporter for the Coatesville Record. He is an Objectivist and an admirer of Ayn Rand.