H. L. Mencken

In July 1925 a Baltimore newspaperman of forty-four went to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, to report on the trial of a schoolteacher, John Scopes, charged with teaching evolution. The prosecution's star was William Jennings Bryan, three times a candidate for president. On the fifth day Bryan rose to defend the law against the scientists the defence wanted to call. "The parents have a right to say," he argued, "that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes, skeptical, infidels, or agnostics, or atheists." Then he named the man he thought evolution led to: "It is this doctrine that gives us Nietzsche, the only great author who tried to carry this to its logical conclusion."¹²³⁴⁵

The reporter was H. L. Mencken, and Nietzsche was the subject of his first book. Mencken had spent fifteen years scoffing at American piety in print. Yet he had never lost a faith, because he had never really had one. This chapter follows him from a Baltimore Sunday school to the courtroom at Dayton and on to the book in which, at fifty, he tried to understand what he had spent twenty years mocking.

Hollins Street

He was born in Baltimore on 12 September 1880, the eldest son of August Mencken, a cigar manufacturer, and grew up from the age of three in the house his father bought at 1524 Hollins Street.⁶⁷ Religion barely touched the family. His grandfather was an agnostic who stayed friends with clergymen over beer; his father was "a pronounced agnostic" who went to church only "under mild compulsion" and regarded the clergy with contempt.⁸⁹ For two generations the family had been "indifferent to religion," and for the women churchgoing was "a form of irregular social visiting."¹⁰

Still, the boy was baptised and sent to Sunday school, first a Methodist one and then a Lutheran one, his biographer Isaac Goldberg wrote, "not so much for religious edification as to provide the family with a few hours' respite from his presence." He loved the hymns and remembered them all his life.¹¹ On Palm Sunday 1895, in his first long trousers, he was confirmed; his father came, and was relieved when Henry soon dropped Sunday school "together with his short trousers."¹² Mencken himself put it this way: he was "educated in its mysteries in youth — though not, to be sure, taught to accept them."¹³¹⁴ Goldberg's judgment, written with Mencken's help, was that he "never knew the religious crisis."¹⁵

His own accounts of how he came to unbelief do not quite agree. In 1924 he wrote of the enlightened man that he "was not born with a congenital inaptitude" for religion: "He has simply outgrown it, as he has outgrown poetry, Socialism and love." In 1930 he spoke of his own "lifelong (and apparently congenital) conviction that the case of religion is not proved."¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸

Nietzsche and the Free Lance

Two weeks after his father died in January 1899, he walked into the Baltimore Morning Herald and asked for a job, and by February he was a reporter.¹⁹ He joined the Baltimore Sun in 1906.²⁰ In 1908 he published The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, an exposition of a system that, he wrote, "leads to a rejection of Christianity and democracy." It was Nietzsche's view, not yet his own confession, but he made no secret of his sympathy: "It is high time for the race of Darwin and Huxley to know Nietzsche better."²¹²²²³ That year he became literary critic of the Smart Set.²⁴

His earliest plain statement about himself came in a published exchange of letters with a socialist, Robert Rives La Monte, in 1910. "I am not a religious man," he wrote, "but I cannot think upon my own good fortune in life without a feeling that my thanks should go forth, somewhere and to someone."²⁵²⁶ The god of the churches was, he said, "merely an omnipotent and omniscient man."²⁷

Around 1910 (accounts differ on the year) he began a signed column in the Baltimore Evening Sun called "The Free Lance."²⁰ He gave it up in 1915 and summed it up in a private letter: "General aim: to combat, chiefly by ridicule, American piety, stupidity, tin-pot morality, cheap chauvinism in all their forms." The result: "Resolutions passed against me by all religious and uplifting organizations save Catholic and Jewish."²⁸²⁹³⁰

Prejudices

In the 1920s, in his collected essays called Prejudices, the ridicule became famous. He held a memorial service for the dead gods: "Where is the grave-yard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds?" They had once been mighty, and "to doubt them was to die, usually at the stake."³¹³²³³ He defined faith as "an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. Or, psychoanalytically, as a wish neurose."³⁴ Science, he wrote in 1924, showed that God, if He existed, was "neither good nor bad, but simply indifferent — an infinite Force carrying on the operation of unintelligible processes without the slightest regard ... for the comfort, safety and happiness of man."³⁵³⁶ And: "Christendom may be defined briefly as that part of the world in which, if any man stands up in public and solemnly swears that he is a Christian, all his auditors will laugh."³⁷

Privately he was blunter. In a letter his biographer printed in 1925, he wrote: "Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth. In brief, it is a fraud." In the same letter he added: "I respect a Catholic Sister of Charity much as I respect a Bach or a Michelangelo."³⁸³⁹⁴⁰ He was, Goldberg said, an agnostic, "not an anti-Christ" but "an anti-Christian."⁴¹ A critic, Professor Pattee, noticed that in all of Mencken he had found "no innuendo directed at Christ himself."⁴²

Dayton

The Sun sent him to Dayton in July 1925, and his friend Ernest Boyd wrote within months that he went "to report the antics of an ex-Secretary of State who went to Dayton, Tennessee, and announced that Darwinism would be abolished in this country, like liquor, by a constitutional Amendment."⁴³ Mencken's own dispatches from Dayton are not quoted here, because no reliable scan of them was found; the courtroom speaks through its own record.

Bryan argued that the Bible itself was on trial. "The Bible is the Word of God; the Bible is the only expression of man's hope of salvation."²⁴⁴ When he said Nietzsche "became an atheist following that doctrine," the defence counsel, Clarence Darrow, was on his feet at once: "there is not a word of truth in it. Nietzsche never taught that."³ An Alabama paper joked that week about "Mencken, the mercurial editor who is corresponding in these parts."⁴³

Treatise on the Gods

In 1925 Goldberg reported that Mencken was planning "a short treatise on Christianity."⁴⁵ It became Treatise on the Gods, published in 1930, with a preface dated Baltimore, 1 March 1930.⁴⁶ The tone had changed. His own position, he wrote, "may be described roughly as one of amiable skepticism. I am quite devoid of the religious impulse, and have no belief in any of the current theologies. But neither have I any active antipathy to them, save, of course, in so far as they ordain the harassing of persons who do not believe in them."⁴⁷⁴⁸⁴⁹ Studying religion had not shaken his conviction "that the case of religion is not proved, but it has at least made me see that dismissing the thing itself as a mere aberration is a proceeding that is far more lofty than sensible."⁵⁰¹⁸

Religion's "single function," he argued, "is to give man access to the powers which seem to control his destiny, and its single purpose is to induce those powers to be friendly to him."⁵¹⁵² "What brought it into the world was man's eternal wonder and his eternal hope." He still thought it "a poor device to that end," but added, almost gently, "that belief is only a belief."⁵³⁵⁴⁵⁵ The book's last pages made the claim he had come to: the civilized man, if he had not proved that religion was untrue, "has certainly proved that it is not necessary. Men may live decently without it and they may die courageously without it. But not, of course, all men."⁵⁶⁵⁷ What such a man had gained was "not a soul ... it is a way of thinking, a way of looking at the universe, a way of facing the impenetrable dark that must engulf him in the end."⁵⁸

He ended the chapter with a story from his reporting days: a condemned wife-murderer, a devout Baptist, reciting the Twenty-third Psalm on the gallows. "As an American I naturally spend most of my time laughing," he wrote, "but that time I did not laugh."⁵⁹⁶⁰

What he left

Mencken's unbelief had no conversion in it, in either direction. Raised in a house where religion was a social habit and the clergy a joke, confirmed in his first long trousers, he took up Nietzsche in his twenties and spent his thirties and forties mocking American piety in print, with Dayton as the great set piece. At fifty he sat down to study the thing he had mocked, and came out an "amiable" sceptic who thought religion unproved and unnecessary but would no longer call it an aberration. The defence lawyer at Dayton, Clarence Darrow, has his own chapter in this book.