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Mencken: The American Iconoclast

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

4.14 · Rating details · 166 ratings · 28 reviews

A towering figure on the American cultural landscape, H.L. Mencken stands out as one of our most influential stylists and fearless iconoclasts--the twentieth century's greatest newspaper journalist, a famous wit, and a constant figure of controversy.
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has written the definitive biography of Mencken, the most illuminating book ever published about t A towering figure on the American cultural landscape, H.L. Mencken stands out as one of our most influential stylists and fearless iconoclasts--the twentieth century's greatest newspaper journalist, a famous wit, and a constant figure of controversy.
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has written the definitive biography of Mencken, the most illuminating book ever published about this giant of American letters. Rodgers captures both the public and the private man, covering the many love affairs that made him known as The German Valentino and his
happy marriage at the age of 50 to Sara Haardt, who, despite a fatal illness, refused to become a victim and earned his deepest love. The book discusses his friendships, especially his complicated but stimulating partnership with the famed theater critic George Jean Nathan. Rodgers vividly recreates
Mencken's era: the glittering tapestry of turn-of-the-century America, the roaring twenties, depressed thirties, and the home front during World War II. But the heart of the book is Mencken. When few dared to shatter complacencies, Mencken fought for civil liberties and free speech. We see the
prominent role he played in the Scopes Monkey Trial, his long crusade against Prohibition, his fierce battles against press censorship, and his constant exposure of pious frauds and empty uplift. The champion of our tongue in The American Language, Mencken also played a pivotal role in defining the
shape of American letters through The Smart Set and The American Mercury, magazines that introduced such writers as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Langston Hughes. The paradoxes of Mencken's life are explored, as new gaps are filled regarding his notorious views of minorities and his
conflict, as a German American, during two world wars. And throughout, Rodgers captures the irrepressible spirit and irreverent wit for which Mencken was famed.
Drawing on research in more than sixty archives including private collections in the United States and in Germany, previously unseen, on exclusive interviews with Mencken's friends, and on his love letters and FBI files, here is the full portrait of one of America's most colorful and
influential men. ...more

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Hardcover, 672 pages

Published November 1st 2005 by Oxford University Press, USA (first published January 1st 2005)

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May 02, 2011 George rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: ipad, h-l-mencken, non-fiction

WONDERFULLY ICONOCLASTIC.

“He pummeled censorship, Prohibition, and hypocritical Puritanism with equal ardor. The defense of individual freedom always brought out the best of his powers, and the suppression of civil liberties became one of his dominant targets, bringing it more fully into the mainstream of public discourse.”—page 227/673

Standard disclaimer: In my personal pantheon of heroes, Henry Louis Mencken has long been idealized, lionized, and even damn near canonized, as one of the all-tim ...more

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Apr 14, 2010 Matthew W rated it it was amazing

How ironic that the most extensive biography covering the controversial life of the author of "In Defense of Women" was written by a beautiful woman. Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has no doubt written the most intimate(using mainly primary sources) work on the life of Baltimore's greatest sage H.L. Mencken. I am sure Mencken would have been flattered to have read Rodger's wonderful book. ...more

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Feb 26, 2020 Eric_W rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history-historiography, biography-memoir

One quote that really struck me, both an example of Mencken's perspicacity but also his blindness. Hearing William Jennings Bryan at the Democratic National Convention in 1904, he wrote:

As Bryan began to speak, Mencken observed how a hush fell over the crowd, and how he was cheered and jeered in turn by the excited hall. “He knew that the swift way to get things done in this country was not to argue for an idea, but to arouse a hatred,” Mencken wrote later, “and that is exactly what he set out t One quote that really struck me, both an example of Mencken's perspicacity but also his blindness. Hearing William Jennings Bryan at the Democratic National Convention in 1904, he wrote:

As Bryan began to speak, Mencken observed how a hush fell over the crowd, and how he was cheered and jeered in turn by the excited hall. “He knew that the swift way to get things done in this country was not to argue for an idea, but to arouse a hatred,” Mencken wrote later, “and that is exactly what he set out to do, dramatically and ruthlessly…. He knew, too, the subtle power of religious reminiscences and suggestions—its power to enchant and to arouse ancient and deep-lying passions, its power to sentimentalize even as dull a thing as a problem in political economy. In a word, he knew how to make the crowd run amuck…. The people were not brought in to decide a problem, but merely to slaughter a villain." With some heat, Mencken noted, "Such a mountebank as the Hon. William Jennings Bryan, with his astounding repertoire of bogus remedies, would be almost unimaginable in Germany."

Germanophile that he was, he failed to recognize what was to happen in Germany some thirty years later. His myopia in that regard, and refusal to admit to the appalling depredations against the Jews, was to lose him many friends during the years leading up to WW II. This myopia is only partly ameliorated by his defense of the black community, an unpopular stance. He was dismayed by the lynching of a man and incurred the enmity of the "eastern shore" residents for his editorials that cost the Sun a lot of advertising revenue. As late as the thirties, while in Germany, Mencken failed to appreciate the dangers faced by Jews in Germany as he considered Hitler a harmless buffoon. His naïveté was extreme and remarked upon by his friends who could see that Germany by this time was a schizophrenic mess of economic success and terror.

Mencken's support for unpopular causes was legendary. The suppression of free expression under Wilson during WWI was appalling. Anything and everything German or even suspected of being sympathetic to anything German was subject to arrest. One debt of gratitude we owe Mencken was his resistance to suppression of free thought which was rampant Palmer raids.
Mencken was heavily involved in the strategy for taking on Bryan during the Scopes trial. It was his idea to put Bryan on the stand, according to Rogers, although I was unable to confirm that anywhere else. Indeed, Mencken left to return to Baltimore before the famous climax of the trial. (On a side note, if you have not seen Inherit the Wind starring Spencer Tracey and Frederic March, go do that right now. The 1960 version, not the 1988 film with Kirk Douglas and Jason Robards. That one is junk.)

On the nomination of Warren Harding: The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

He thought Prohibition was abominable. While some viewed agitation against alcohol and tobacco a simple nuisance, Mencken believed such attitudes actually endangered individual liberty. “The Free Lance” bristled with indignation at the pretensions of a moral mania that was chipping away at man’s basic freedoms; his right to smoke a cigar, for example. A moralist could challenge him to a debate on smoking, he declared, even denounce him as a sinner, “but when, not content with this, he proceeds to snatch my cigar out of my mouth, or to belabor me with a club from behind, or to have a law passed condemning me to 30 days in jail, then he goes beyond my rights, and I am fully justified in calling him names, in pulling his whiskers and blacking his eyes. And whether I am justified or not, I am going to do it.”

Mencken could be quite Randian, years before she articulated the individualism he subscribed to: "He scorned the mob man or the believer, what he later called the “booboisie,” versus the first-rate man of the civilized minority—in other words, the iconoclast, whose mission it was to “attack error wherever he saw it and to proclaim truth wherever he found it. It is only by such iconoclasm and proselytizing that humanity can be helped.” Unfortunately, some of that thinking resulted in a favorable view of social Darwinism.

While I generally enjoyed the book, I found the numerous sections on his multiple girlfriends --it took him years to settle on Sara -- to be a bit tedious. I was not aware that he had done so much for the literary community, especially black writers, almost by himself bringing black writers to the attention of the country. His studies of the American language were epic and justifiably famous. ...more

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Sep 09, 2012 deLille rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical, world-war-1, world-war-2, political, philosophy, biography, favorites, top-ten-favorites

My husband is laughing because my copy of this book has oodles of different colored sticky tabs sticking out from the different pages, each one marking something that Mencken said that I wanted to highlight. (Yes, I know, it's time to get a Kindle and electronically highlight all those passages, but I can't help myself. I just love books. Each one has its own personality... its feel, its heft, its typeset, the texture and smell of its pages... all of this is lost on a Kindle.)

I absolutely loved ...more

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Oct 25, 2011 Andrew rated it really liked it

A biography of Mencken that updates ones by William Manchester and Charles A. Fecher. It underscores the popularity of the iconoclast in the beginning of the 20th Century for his stands on censorship, Prohibition, evangelicals -- and particularly his American literary criticism. Later he would become rabidly anti-government (or anti-New Deal) and gradually become disengaged from popular culture because of his dislike of movies, radio and television.

In a sense Henry L. Mencken was a Victorian pro ...more

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Nov 16, 2019 Liedzeit rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: biography

Mencken was once asked whether he wanted to be known as the sage of Baltimore or the man who hated everything. To which he replied that he did not care a damn (as long as one did not call him an old dodo). But he added that is was a little inaccurate to say he hated everything. "I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency."

This is a very good biography but I am not sure it was a good idea to read it. I did read his diaries so I knew something about the man. But I h Mencken was once asked whether he wanted to be known as the sage of Baltimore or the man who hated everything. To which he replied that he did not care a damn (as long as one did not call him an old dodo). But he added that is was a little inaccurate to say he hated everything. "I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency."

This is a very good biography but I am not sure it was a good idea to read it. I did read his diaries so I knew something about the man. But I have not read anything else, except for some quotations and the famous short piece that just lists all the Gods that have died (this alone would have made HLM a giant.)

So I feel I really should have read a couple of his books, before going deeply into his biography.

Anyway. Mencken was a journalist. Quite literally he started as a reporter the moment his father died and he was saved from a life as a manufacturer of cigars. He did not waste his time going to some university. And the first thing that amazes you is how did he get his education? Where did he get the knowledge (and chutzpah) to start his book-writing career with a work on Nietzsche?

And how do these guys find the time to get involved with so many women. Mencken at some time had three woman friends all hoping to marry him, while he spends Christmas alone writing letters to all them, telling them how much he missed them. One of the woman was an actress who was famous at the time who later married a friend of Mencken, James Cain. Was this the always twice ringing Postman Cain I wondered? Yes, I just checked. Funny, that Rodgers quotes from the unpublished(!) memoirs of Cain. (How is it possible that memoirs of such a man remain unpublished?)

Mencken was proud of his German ancestry. I liked this, but it is, to say the least, disturbing, to see that a brilliant man like him going to Germany in 1938 for example, could be totally unwilling to believe that anything really wrong was going on in Germany. People do believe what they want to believe. Of course, he was accused of being an antisemite. And not without some evidence. "The jews could be put down as the most unpleasant race ever heard of." - "They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom." This is from his Treatise on the Gods a book he regarded as his best. It seems there is not an excuse. But Mencken believed in free speech if he believed in anything. And he said: "I don’t apologize. I am entitled to my prejudices." And he also said: "I am sick and tired of this nationalism, anyhow. That goes for racialism. There is no pure race, the anthropologists tell us. So why not mix? Why not get our blood intermingled? Something interesting might result." (356)

And he fought in his editorials to let in Jewish refugees when the official policy was to be outraged about their treatment but to keep them out of the country at the same time. (And Mencken did delete the passage in a later edition.)

As for the quotations, of course, when Mr. Trump became President, people remembered being told by Mencken: "As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron." (223) - It helps to remember though, that Mencken despised FDR, a man we were told at school approached George Washington in saintliness. ...more

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Feb 01, 2016 Pat Rolston rated it it was amazing

I wanted to learn more about Mencken the man and his personal history before further reading of his essays, Prejudices: The Complete Series. Marion Rogers is a new author for me and I am thrilled to have found her book biography documenting HR Mencken. This is one of the best written biographies I have had the pleasure to read and HR Mencken turns out for me to be one of the best subjects. His worldview has been validated by history while those areas from which he diverged are less profound than ...more

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Mar 06, 2015 Victoria Miller rated it it was amazing

Until I read this book, I knew little about H.L. Mencken, other than being familiar with the name. After reading this book, I feel like he is a personal friend. Additionally, I was amazed at how much I learned of American history that you don't learn from the American history books. Henry Mencken was a very complex and unique individual, who had no qualms about saying what was on his mind, no matter how many people railed against him and shook their fists (and probably many threw things). He was ...more

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Jan 14, 2013 scott silverman rated it it was amazing

Hits all the right notes. Take Twain, add acid-- enjoy Mencken.

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Jul 21, 2009 Jeff rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction, biography, literary-nonfiction

I haven't given a book five stars since creating my Goodreads account, so now is as good a time as any.

Mencken, like me, was a big fan of the word "mountebank".
...more

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May 22, 2018 Val Rich rated it it was amazing

I loved this book! It is actually the first book I've "read" in audio and I am now a convert. At 19 discs and 24 hours of length, it took me a long time to complete. My commute/car time is short, but this amazing book made me look forward to driving. Henry Louis Mencken fully embodied the term iconoclast. He was intelligent, snappy, contradicted himself often . he was funny, generous, grumpy, and loud. With him, I explored nearly 75 years of American history. As a journalist, Henry covered Presi ...more

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Mar 05, 2019 Jeffrey Falk rated it liked it

This is another fascinating but ultimately disappointing Mencken biography. Rodgers does not disparage any of Mencken's unpopular views, and gives a full, objective account of his views on race (and the Jews), challenging typical views of his purported racism and anti-Semitism. She continually refers to Mencken's "contradictions", most of which are merely paradoxes, without addressing his deepest contradiction. And while the book is fairly thorough and detailed, Ayn Rand is never mentioned. This ...more

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Aug 16, 2021 Dan rated it really liked it

Decided to read this instead of Terry Teachout's bio because Teachout apparently spends a lot of time analyzing Mencken's works, which are readily available, fun to read and easily analyzed by you and me. Rodgers concentrates on the day-to-day life and has dredged up some apparently new material that is summed up by the chapter title "The German Valentino." The book seems comprehensive and it's a constant pleasure, even at nearly 600 pages.. ...more

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May 14, 2021 Tom Musbach rated it it was ok

I read this in a piecemeal fashion over a few years. Subtitled “The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of Baltimore,” it’s essentially a biography of H.L. Mencken, a very influential journalist, critic, and “celebrity” in the early 20th century. A German bon vivant, he had some controversial views--particularly his lenient treatment toward Hitler--that leave a bad taste. But it was also really interesting to read about his experience covering the Scopes “monkey” trials. (6)

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Jul 13, 2018 Michael Baranowski rated it really liked it

An engaging biography of a man I practically idolized as a young, fire-breathing conservative (a million years ago). Now, as a middle aged centrist liberal I find a lot more about Mencken that's hard to love, but I still appreciate his wit, honesty, and fierce devotion to a free press. ...more

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Jan 02, 2020 Tom Veenendaal rated it it was amazing

The most comprehensive biography of H.L. Mencken. It made me realize how much nuance was (by necessity) left out in shorter volumes. Restores faith in literary biography, with its balanced discussions of issues and attention to important details (but not unimportant ones!).

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Mar 20, 2016 Joy H. marked it as skimmed-partially

Shelves: biography, non-fiction, history

Added 3/20/16. (first published January 1st 2005)
I know I'll never be able to finish reading this tome but I'm going to try to savor as much of it as I can. I've borrowed it from our public library. Too bad they don't have it as an audio book.

4/22/16 - I skimmed parts of this book. Pretty dense reading. While some of it interested me, much of it dealt with areas in which I had no interest. Of course, Mencken was a very witty man and it's fun reading some of his comments. I got the impression he ...more

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Mar 05, 2017 LAS Books rated it really liked it

Comprehensive biography. Mencken is a lout.

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Nov 19, 2008 Voices Of rated it really liked it

I just finished reading this book and if you want to learn about one of the most influential journalists of the early 20th century this is a great place to start. Mencken was a consistent defender of freedom of speech and particularly the freedom (and responsibility) of the press to question the actions of those in power. He was constantly a gadfly to the media inciting them to be skeptical of the motives of our leaders. Quite an interesting man. This book was written well enough that it did...m ...more

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Oct 05, 2008 Josh rated it really liked it

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Mar 30, 2012 Robert Maier rated it really liked it

The tale of Mencken's life is fascinating and illuminating. The writing is a little disjointed and the time periods are frequently interwoven, and you get off track. It's a book written by a thorough researcher, who never quite grasped how to juggle simultaneous events into a smooth narrative arc. She makes a valiant try, but maybe the editors were too much in a hurry to get it out, and just abandoned the attempts for chronological clarity for the sake of expediency. In his own books, Mencken ma ...more

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Apr 09, 2008 Pnorman811 rated it liked it

Shelves: biography

I've been reading this slowly for months. It is a good introduction to the man. He has so much to offer in his views of the U.S in the early last century and of people in general. I will probably be exploring books written BY him and about him in the future. ...more

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Jul 03, 2008 W.T. rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography, history-biography, non-fiction

THE BAD-BOY OF BALTIMORE!!! Hunter Thompson had a great admiration for this man as he fought against censorship long before it was hip. My admiration for Thompson got me reading into the people that he admired...Thanks to The Good Doctor.

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Mar 10, 2008 David rated it it was amazing

The best bio I've ever read..... ...more

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Jun 09, 2012 Thombeau rated it really liked it

Shelves: biography

Extremely readable, fact-filled bio on the influential and controversial writer and pundit H.L. Mencken. Seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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