It should be noted that work for the Evening Sun was far from Mencken’s only literary activity at the time. He had already published two monographs, George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905) and The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), and in 1908 had become a monthly book reviewer for the Smart Set, a position he would retain until the end of 1923. Writing as many as twenty-five 1,200-word newspaper columns a month, on top of a 3,000-word book review column (necessitating the reading of fifteen to twenty books each month), points to Mencken’s prodigious energy as he threw himself headlong into journalism on both a local and a national level.
At this juncture, Mencken as a journalist would have been called a “paragrapher”—that is, his column consisted of discrete paragraphs on a wide range of subjects, separated by a horizontal rule; the rule was present even when Mencken chose to discuss a single subject over several paragraphs or an entire column. (In some anomalous instances, Mencken would be forced to terminate a discussion in midsentence, sometimes even in the middle of a word, and resume it the next day. On some occasions he would promise to resume a discussion but then neglect to do so.) Whether Mencken was influenced by his great nineteenth-century predecessor, Ambrose Bierce—who in his fifty-year newspaper career, first for the San Francisco News Letter (1867–72) and later, more famously, for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner (1887–1906), consistently adhered to this “paragrapher” format—is not clear; but the entire run of the Free Lance retains this structure, and Mencken clearly felt comfortable with it. (His subsequent weekly editorials for the Evening Sun, beginning in 1920, finally abandon the “paragrapher” format, although they are customarily, and somewhat mechanically, divided into four numbered sections.)
While a fair proportion of the Free Lance column was devoted to sparring with local political, social, and religious figures—most notably the hapless J. Harry Preston, mayor of Baltimore for the entire period of the column’s existence, whom Mencken referred to as a “very vain and sensitive fellow”4—it becomes abundantly clear that these debates were merely the springboards for broader discussions of the significant issues of the period. Grasty had once told Mencken that he must not feud with clergymen, for this would undermine the Evening Sun’s chosen self-image as a family paper; but Mencken easily got around the restriction by persuading Grasty to allow him, in simple fairness, to respond to attacks by the clergy and others on himself. Mencken facilitated this task through his role as editor of the letters to the editors section, variously called “Editorials from the People” or “The Forum.” In this way Mencken gleefully printed searing (but usually inept) attacks on himself in the letters column and rebutted those attacks, almost before they were out of their writers’ hands, in The Free Lance.
No one could fairly conclude, however, that The Free Lance was merely a haven of abuse and billingsgate. A systematic reading of the columns allows us to ascertain a nearly complete view of Mencken’s political, religious, social, and cultural philosophy as it had evolved up to this point—and that philosophy underwent relatively few alterations in the course of his subsequent career. In the space of this introduction it is possible only to supply the barest outlines of that philosophy, but the columns themselves supply a wealth of detail and nuance.
The central pillars of Mencken’s worldview are freedom of thought and action and a sincere devotion to the truth as he saw it. Sundry combinations of these two principles may well account for all the anfractuosities—complex and at times seemingly contradictory—of his views on politics, society, religion, art, and general culture. In today’s parlance Mencken would be considered a libertarian, and he explicitly referred to himself as such; but unlike so many present-day libertarians, who frequently restrict the notion of freedom to the sphere of economics, Mencken maintained that freedom of thought and speech were central and essential. In a book review column of 1922 he wrote: “I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth. Take away this right, and none other is worth a hoot; nor, indeed, can any other long exist.”5 The ideal of personal freedom outlined in a Free Lance column of 1913—in which the citizen is “bound to do nothing that will endanger [his neighbors’] lives or imperil their property. He is bound to respect their liberties so long as the exercise of those liberties does not invade his own”—is closely in accord with the principles that John Stuart Mill established in On Liberty (1859). Mencken followed Mill in advocating the most minimal government involvement in those aspects of social life (particularly the legislation of morality) that have no direct relation to the protection of the citizen from external foes or internal threats.
Mencken, however, drew a curious corollary to his principle of freedom, especially as it related to the America of his own day: “it follows necessarily that I can be only an indifferent citizen of a democratic state, for democracy is grounded upon the instinct of inferior men to herd themselves in large masses, and its principal manifestation is their bitter opposition to all free thought.”6 That Mencken would so forthrightly expound his hostility to the very principle of democracy—a view so far outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse, then as now, as to be all but unspeakable—is, at a minimum, a testament to his desire to “utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth.”
Mencken’s objections to democracy—as with so many other facets of his overall philosophy—derive from his absorption of Nietzsche, although it could well be asserted that he would not have responded so ardently to this feature of Nietzsche’s thought if he were not already inclined toward it. It appears that Mencken took quite seriously Nietzsche’s ideal of the superman, insofar as it was practicable to do so in the United States of the early twentieth century. In his treatise on Nietzsche he described the concept as follows:
To put it simply, the superman’s thesis will be this: that he has been put into the world without his consent, that he must live in the world, that he owes nothing to the other people there, and that he knows nothing whatever of existence beyond the grave. Therefore, it will be his effort to attain the highest possible measure of satisfaction for the only unmistakable and genuinely healthy instinct within him: the yearning to live—to attain power—to meet and overcome the influences which would weaken or destroy him.7
Abstract as this sounds, it gets to the heart of the Menckenian notion that the properly civilized person is under no obligation to restrict his own freedom of action—and, perhaps even more important, his freedom of thought—in the face of the moral dispproval of his “inferiors.” There is no sense either in Nietzsche or in Mencken that the superman will be a political or military dictator: it is not that he wishes to fetter other people’s thoughts or actions; it is simply that he does not wish his own thoughts or actions to be fettered by others.
Mencken’s opposition to democracy has far-reaching ramifications well beyond the sphere of politics and morality. “It is a capital mistake,” he wrote in a Free Lance column of 1914, “to assume that the common people are stupid but honest.” The common people are, instead, both stupid and dishonest. Democracy was based on envy; it is “a device for giving to the relatively inefficient and unsuccessful (and hence, bitterly envious) majority, by the artificial and dishonest device of the ballot, that preponderance of power and influence which belongs rightfully to the minority [i.e., the supermen] by reason of its superior efficiency, honesty and intelligence.” It is thus no surprise that Mencken fought unrelentingly (and, it must be admitted, largely