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ABFFE
Book Review:
Mencken: The American Iconoclast: The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of
Baltimore by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
Book Review by Audrey Eisman
Rodgers, Marion Elizabeth.
Mencken: The American Iconoclast: The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of
Baltimore (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 978-0195072389.
 H.G. Mencken was a brilliant journalist and editor who was outspoken in
his belief in a free press. Therefore we might say that he was an early
exponent of free expression, although what he said often offended many –
including several presidents of the United States.
Mencken was born in1880, and was raised, wrote and died in Baltimore.
His family was extremely proud and even more prejudiced, speaking
strongly against African Americans and Jews, and Mencken once said “I
inherited a bias against the rabble. I come of a family that thought
very well of itself for 300 years, and with some reason.”
However, when our country became involved in WWI, Mencken (a German
American) realized that discrimination was expanding to include his own
nationality – and so he became more sensitive to the role of the
discriminated. And with the advent of Prohibition, he added that to his
literary fire.
Mencken, who strongly opposed America’s participation in World War I and
II, was critical of the suppression of anti-war speech. “The common
notion that free speech prevails in this country makes me laugh” Mencken
wrote in his diary. “Twice in my lifetime I have been forced to shut
down altogether, first in 1916 and then in 1941….The American people, I
am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they
are ready and eager to put it down….War in this country, wipes out all
the rules of fair play.” Moreover, in his obituary for the Associated
Press, that he penned himself, he wrote “I have believed all my life in
free thought and free speech.”
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has written a remarkable biography of this
unique and certainly iconoclastic man.
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