Reading this collection of H. L. Mencken’s newspaper articles, most of them from the Twenties and Thirties, one begins to reflect on the persistence of human folly. Indeed, Mencken’s merry attack on the pieties and lunacies of his day inspires an oddly comforting thought: maybe things in America have not so much declined as remained depressingly the same.
Only the forms that public stupidity takes have changed: in Mencken’s time literature, for example, was judged in terms of its fealty to middle-class morality; now it is evaluated according to its political utility. But the sanctimoniousness, the righteous pressure to conform, the total lack of interest in art as such—these are with us still. We recognize the notion that “there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish,” just as surely as we recognize the “undiluted drivel—nine thousand words of bad English without an idea in it”—of a political speech from 1924.
It is, in part, this shock of recognition that makes even the three-dozen articles here about long-forgotten political conventions eminently readable. It is also, of course, their author’s famously pungent style. But perhaps Mencken’s most impressive quality is sheer sanity: a mind unclouded by sentiment, received wisdom, or the craven desire to please. Indeed, as long as there are no chiropractors, college professors, or Prohibitionists involved, he seems to judge each case entirely on its merits. Thus, he protests not only the