H. L. Mencken Revisited (Twayne, 1998)
H.L. Mencken Revisited? Okay, The Sage of Baltimore does not have much to do with things Irish (although he did promote some of the new Irish writers in the early decades of the last century). However, I cut my academic teeth on Mencken. While still a larval doctoral candidate in the history graduate program of The Johns Hopkins University, I had the good fortune to be invited to spend a few hours in Mencken’s old house on Hollins Street on Baltimore’s Union Square. August Mencken, a dead ringer for his deceased brother, still lived there. “Do you drink?” he asked me as soon as I was seated. I allowed as to how I was known to imbibe on appropriate occasions. He then poured me a large tumbler full of Jack Daniel’s Green Label untainted by even a drop of water. We were not far into the evening when my feebler efforts at note taking ceased. However, I vividly recall the brother, having embarked upon a rather reactionary tirade, suddenly stopped. Glaring at me, and, referring to the current crop of politicians, left, right and center, he proclaimed. “But they’re all frauds, aren’t they?” It was as though the ghost of Henry Louis Mencken had passed through the room.
Mencken was the subject of my first book. Although I eventually set him aside for several decades, when I was asked in the late 1990s to produce a revised edition, I couldn’t resist the challenge. A good bit more material in the shape of letters, diaries and studies had become available, and I welcomed the opportunity to incorporate some of this information into what is still a relatively short, compact introduction to an important figure in early twentieth-century American literature and one of the great satirists of American politics and culture.
Mencken was basically a libertarian and would have heaped scorn on what passes for gospel in the so-called blue states today. Still, I can’t help wondering what the man who once referred to American politics as “a carnival of buncombe” would have to say in the Age of Trump. I suspect that he would still stand by his dictum that democracy was the theory of government which held that the people should get what they want—GOOD AND HARD!