Selected Prejudices. First Series. The Travellers" Library

by H.L. Mencken

In the 1920s, when he was at the peak of his form, H. L. Mencken would periodically collect his magazine work and publish his favorite pieces in a series of books entitled Prejudices. This collection represents the best of those books. The essays were selected and introduced by novelist James T. Farrell. Prejudices: A Selection first appeared nearly 40 years ago and is now being published by Johns Hopkins University Press, which is thankfully bringing much of Mencken's work back into print. Included are such gems as Mencken's attack on the South in "The Sahara of the Bozart"; his amazingly prescient appreciation of Ring Lardner; and more than two dozen other essays which show convincingly why Mencken was one of the most popular, most feared, and among fools, the most hated writers of his day.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics, Collections, Classics, Journalism

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Henry Louis "H.L." Mencken became one of the most influential and prolific journalists in America in the 1920s and '30s, writing about all the shams and con artists in the world. He attacked chiropractors and the Ku Klux Klan, politicians and other journalists. Most of all, he attacked Puritan morality. He called Puritanism, "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

At the height of his career, he edited and wrote for The American Mercury magazine and the Baltimore Sun newspaper, wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column for the Chicago Tribune, and published two or three books every year. His masterpiece was one of the few books he wrote about something he loved, a book called The American Language (1919), a history and collection of American vernacular speech. It included a translation of the Declaration of Independence into American English that began, "When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody."

When asked what he would like for an epitaph, Mencken wrote, "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."

(from American Public Media)

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't share all of H. L. Mencken's prejudices - how could I, over a century later and half a world away? But I loved his crisp way of executing his victims, relished his irony and enjoyed being taken by surprise and obliged to laugh out loud.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

....And, actually, I'm going to say that it verges on two stars.

I've heard a lot about HL Mencken, most of it approving and well-nigh worshipful, and I saw this copy laid out on a shelf by random chance the other day and figured now was a good time to delve into it. Some professor must have chucked it and left it to be given away or pulped and I was happy to have found it.

I just finished it on the bus today and I gotta say it's perfect bus/commute/passing the time reading. Punchy, funny, sparklingly clear, thunderous and self-assured while being mischeivous and exactingly pissed off.

It's interesting how his voice, so potent and bracing in his day, has really saturated the culture. I mean, how many cranky atheists with a self-deprecating grudge against everything, alternately furious and hilarious and happy to chortle, guffaw, howl, and snicker at the fools and mediocrities, "mountebanks", "chappaquas" (?), "buncomb" and flim-flam, "poltroonery", the list goes on (and it is mighty fun to come across these quirky, feisty words now so long in disrepair. I remember the opening to Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels" with its earnest advocacy for "the motley mountebanks" who spice up our life with their jibes and antic hop and how fun and strange and quasi-dated the whole thing was, save the fact that it is and was a brilliant, funny, sneakily powerful film) and on...think of the funny, witty, philosophically severe haters in our midst- virtually every standup worth his salt from Mort Sahl to Carlin to Lewis Black...

I have increasingly noticed how the vibe of our media climate, print radio tv it makes no difference, has sort of unconsciously (or maybe consciously, based on what little I've heard) taken the grouchy tone as tactic of self-defense- the hater is the last one to get called out for towing a party line. Apparantly I.A. Richards once said that you could define an era of history by measuring whether people were more afraid of being thought sentimental or stupid...One look at the cable channels or the alternative weekies or conservative radio will pretty much seal that deal, I should say.

Mencken is everywhere.

So I picked up this collection of Prejudices knowing I was in for a pretty good time. Mencken's got a front row seat at the freak show and he's gobbling popcorn and waving the black flag as often as he pleases. It makes for good reading. I laughed out loud several times in the course of a couple of days and that in itself is really a rarity for me. Always just used to strike me as a kind of schizoid thing, laughing at a book. Maybe it's because I'm a sentimentalist at heart and kind of prefer the Celtic twilight of sadness and despair poetic thing, I don't know, but I'm getting on in years and the newspaper is really becoming a lot funnier than it used to be, unintentionally. Mencken's the king of laughing at the newspaper, and bully for him.

His bon mots crackle with snake-oil and grit. I'd quote some- I was intending to, before I impulsively gave my copy to a friend of mine- but hell 20 minutes on Wikiquote will pretty much give you the whole story. You've got to love a guy who hates quackery in any form- Puritanism, William Jennings Bryan (he's fictionalized in "Inherit the Wind" as a newspaper sharpie who sells stuffed monkey dolls amid the fracas outside the Scopes trial- something which wouldn't surprise me at all if it were found to be true), Prohibitionists, Calvin Coolidge (!- but at the same time, let's face it, maybe a Mitt Romney of the 20's? Shmuck fucked us over big time, worth a shaken fist!), hick farmers, snooty college profs, chiropractors (!- seriously? I dunno, if you say so...) and any and all religious believer.

You can trust a man who is defined by his hates (and defines himself as such) in much the same way that you can trust a man who smokes and drinks all the time.

Humor is key, in this as in all things, and wit and vision and a knack for language. You care enough to put down what you think in a limpid, accessible, detailed way you probably know the limitations of your own grump. I do believe that unclear thinking leads to unclear writing, in direct proportions. I've had to gaze long and deep into that big dark truthful mirror enough times to call bullshit on myself, not to mention grading about 25 undergraduate papers on symbolism and metaphor.

If anything will make you long for the antiseptic light of clarity in prose, that'll do it. I can't quite imagine Mencken in the classroom- not really- though I would certainly consider assigning his essays as supplementary materials.

Mencken seems fairly enough to deserve placement in the disappointed idealist category. He diligently sticks up for good prose (Conrad getting a sensitive and deserving approbrium here, and I know he went out of his way to publish more splendid women writers than many editors of his time), good scotch, ribald debate, social libertarianism, and "living at his ease in Christendom"- a telling term if there ever was one.

He's enviable in his drollery, high dudgeon, and the glimpses of lyricism and a latent belief in the value of (old-world) culture for its own sake which is damn near refreshing, if not redemptive. He wants sharp fellas and good scotch, string quartets and adult conversation, tough-minded prose and politicos who say what they mean and mean what they say. Can't knock any of that.

And it's sort of on this liberarian issue that I start to go arm's length with the guy. I used to sort of be one, highschool intellectual style, and like all far-out ideologies it's got enough of the truth to make it adhesive, but not enough to make it pliable. HLM was certainly a libertarian avant le lettre , and it's easy to see why. I get it, I don't like paying taxes for a nanny state either, and democracy has a huge swath of stupidity and easy ridicule built into it. HLM's a Darwinist, too, and proudly and affirmitively so. No problem here, not really, embarrasing hippieish presuppositions of Your Humble Narrator aside, a little or a lot of secularism is always welcome, and a damn good thing.

But I just can't get down with the implicit- and not so implicit, as several essays attest- endorsement of a kind of Social Darwinism for its own sake. Mencken wants people to be witter and sharper and more attentive and sophisticated than they are, sure, and obviously one would have to be as big a rube as the clowns he paints to argue the point. But- and this is a big but here- SOMETIMES YOU"RE THE BUTT OF THE JOKE, TOO, PAL! I can't tell you how many times I've shown my ass in public, intellectual forum or no, and anybody who even seems to suggest they are in fact the strong and all the other knuckleheads are the weak is just full of it.

Social Darwinism, I'm convinced, is nothing more than a big ol' empowerment fantasy writ large whether done with aplomb and eloquence and a certain kind of honest self-criticsm (as with Mencken) or with boborygymous bombast, bursting with portent, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing but a pathetic and creepy and ultimately obnoxious pseudo-intellectualism full of sound and fury and signifying bupkus (Ayniegetchergun Rand) the end result is the same. Nobody- but nobody- is going to survive a world of all against all, no matter how many books you read or weights you lift or scotch you drink or wisecracks you snark out. It's futile; man was born to fail.

I suspect Libertarians like to draw a picture of the world in which they wish to live, provided they don't ever literally live there. Everybody wants to be Thor the wonder demon, and smash the peons with thunderbolts of scorn and derision, and everybody is pretty much ok with making a buck or two off a credulous sucker. But to really create a society, let alone a politics, off of this is misguided, masterbatory, short-sighted and stupid.

When you're down and out, it's to the bosom of the social contract you must turn whether you like it or not. The bootstraps are not in fact one's own but are instead a rope ladder whose ends are limitless and endlessly fasten and re-fasten everywhere. There's nowhere to escape from society, even if the dunderheads prevail they are still a stich in the social fabric and they can make a safety net if the dark day comes when you need it and brother, make no fanciful mistake about it, you will.

No matter how funny it is or what comfortable vantage point it offers for a quick-witted connessieur the presupposition is one of ruling classes, ubermensch out of a stoned sophmore's wet dream, and a kind of royalist heirarchy which even if defined in terms of good taste (ah! may it be so! A republic of letters with free health care, endless libraries, good music, and learned and witty company over a banquet of the immortals! Tra la! Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished!) is still just that- a monarchy. And if there's anything HLM, good American that he is, couldn't stand for a minute, it would be just that. Circular logic, vicious cycle.

Not to read too far into Mencken's weltanschaung (and the Teutonic word is entirely appropriate here- as a proud German- American Mencken is oft fond of the syllable-happy terms to signify culture and learning and Old-world graces, which is totally goof by me except when the point is made- as it has been- that HLM was rather more muted than he ought to have been about a certain political trend on the rise across the pond in the 30's and 40's, entirely enough in Mencken's heyday to beg for his Oylmpian scorn and skillfull mockery- to little avail???) but I'm trying to carry some of these clearly worded and enjoyable open-throated essays to some kind of logical political conclusion...and I can't help adding that I was pleased to see that even with his across the board loathing of the poltiics of his time he apparantly did vote for Roosevelt at least a couple of times, after turning his back in scorn, as he probably did most things. I can't imagine him with women, really. BTW, his assessment of Teddy Roosevelt was one of the most interesting, insightful, and well-wrought peices in the entire book.

Then again, it might just be me being overly suspicious or persnickety. I spend a lot of time peering into author photos on book covers because I believe there is much to be revealed in a face. Orwell said that the face you get after 40 (or was it 50? no matter) was the face you earned. Juxtapose this with what's IN the book, taking it all in all, and you can at least get a glimpse of what it might have been to break bread or at least converse with the man in question. I don't want to sound like a Mencken-esque phrenological nutso here but I doubt very much that its entirely foolish to discredit the study of a face for a trace of wisdom here and there...

And it could very well be that Mencken was punking us- or not quite punking us, but at least tugging at the earlobe to wake us up, a finger jab or two in the ribs to make sure we're sitting up, listening, actively engaged and ready to box with him. He strikes me as a man who hates to be bored above all else (in Farrell's excellent introduction he describes Mencken's falling to some kind of debilitating sickness and the sage of Baltimore lamenting above all else that his condition has left him unable to read or write- too stressful, bad for the nerves, doctor's orders) and will go down fighting in a fine donnybrook than go gentle into the good night. Bully for him, I say.

And maybe in the end that's all he wanted. Tweak some egos, rattle some cages, test some mettles, and feast on a sacred cow or two. He wanted a good fight, some worthy entertainment, and the company of those in the smart set who were willing to keep the jam session flowing. Love him, hate him, you can't ignore him and one gets the sense that this was a deliberate tactic on his part. Not outrage for outrage's sake, not even most of the time, but stirring sediment in as many brains as he could while he could.

I bet he probably died happy...looking again at the candid cover shot, one can envision a man who might well pick up the bar tab at the end of the night if you stuck with him and to your respective guns, waving your diplomatic entreaties off while he rummaged through his wallet for the cash, muttering vicious, brilliant curses as he glances towards the door. His eyes, his ancient glittering eyes, are gay.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 3/4 stars

[Ike Sharpless · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars not because I agree with Mencken's politics - generally, I don't, although the idea that "democracy is the idea that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard" sometimes sounds pretty accurate - but because he speaks his mind even, and especially, when most people would just shut up and let groupthink step in. Society needs contrarians, even libertarian ones.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

(walter cronkite + edward murrow + hunter thompson + jon stewart + stephen colbert + keith olbermann) x 500 = 1/10 the talent, erudition, wit, morality, and character of h.l. mencken. oh, if only american journalism had anyone remarkably comparable today.

[JD Waggy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll say this--there is no point, either in the title or the content, that Mencken is at all shy or misleading about what this is.
This is, quite literally, a selection of prejudices. I had no idea who Mencken was when I picked this up off of a Free Shelf in college, so I can't quite chime in on his impact in some of these other reviews. I imagine, though, that he would have loved to have been in this age of opinionated blogging--he would have had a ball with the entire Internet to hear his ideas. He's quite delighted to simply tear apart things he finds ridiculous: "The truth is that criticism, if it were thus confined to the proposing of alternative schemes, would quickly cease to have any force or utility at all, for in the overwhelming majority of instances no alternative scheme of any intelligibility is imaginable, and the whole object of the critical process is to demonstrate it." (84)
This collection of essays is Mencken's weighing in on all manner of things in the way that only a 1920s, highly-educated white dude in America could. He's pretentious, racist, profoundly and self-righteously atheist, and utterly lost in despair that he was born American rather than English. The thing I appreciated most about this was the insight into the 20s, that rare moment of hindsight about the awfulness of The War To End All Wars before the realization that the 30s and 40s are going to suck like crazy. I don't know all that much about this time period, so it was cool to see from the viewpoint of a guy living through it. It manifests in some hilarious ways, like his enduring hatred of Methodists (who were very big in the Prohibition movement; fun fact, Welch's Grape Juice was invented partly because Welch was a Methodist trying to figure out how to make communion wine non-alcoholic) because they're taking away his lovely liquor. He also really dislikes chiropractors. And Calvin Coolidge. He does, however, absolutely love Baltimore, which was an interesting thing to come across with the recent race rioting there.
Some of this is terribly dated and some of it just clunky and silly because, again, overly-educated white dude. But it's an interesting peek into the era and what was important then. And some of the things he says are very much still things to which we should pay attention. A mixed bag; glad I picked it up, but I'm not going to hang on to it.

Some notable quotes:

"In view of the popular or general character of most of the taboos which put a brake upon personal liberty in thought and action--that is to say, in view of their enforcement by people in the mass, and not by definite specialists in conduct--it is quite natural to find that they are of extra force in democratic societies, for it is the distinguishing mark of democratic societies that they exalt the powers of the majority almost infinitely, and tend to deny the minority any rights whatever." (p. 25)

"[T]he United States is essentially a commonwealth of third-rate men--that distinction is easy here because the general level of culture, of information, of taste and judgment, of ordinary competence is so low...Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards. The land was peopled, not by the hardy adventurers of legend, but simply by incompetents who could not get on at home...No American colonist, even in the worst days of the Indian wars, ever had to face such hardships as ground down the peasants of Central Europe during the Hundred Years War, nor even such hardships as oppressed the English lower classes during the century before the Reform Bill of 1832." (98)

"What makes New York so dreadful, I believe, is mainly the fact that the vast majority of its people have been forced to rid themselves of one of the oldest and most powerful of human instincts--the instinct to make a permanent home...The very richest man, in New York, is never quite sure that the house he lives in now will be his next year--that he will be able to resist the constant pressure of business expansion and rising land values." (207)

[Red Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

The great thing about reading Mencken's essays in 2018 is to understand how little has changed in our political landscape. By changing a few names and references Mencken's work could easily be offered as current political and social commentary on our unwieldy, but hopefully resilient, system.

Examining different views of morality and etiquette: "The Englishman, surprising his wife with a lover, sues the rogue for damages and has public opinion behind him, but for an American to do it would be for him to lose caste at once and forever. The plain and only duty of the American is to open upon the fellow with artillery, hitting him if the scene is south of the Potomac and missing him if it is above."

"What lies under the horror of such blabbing is the deepest and most widespread of human weaknesses, which is to say, intellectual cowardice, the craven appetite for mental ease and security, the fear of thinking things out."

On T. Roosevelt and his sweeping ideas, but failure to carry out adequate reforms: "So with his campaign for national preparedness. He displayed the disease magnificently, but the course of medication that he proposed was vague and unconvincing; it was not, indeed, without justification that the plain people mistook his advocacy of an adequate army for a mere secret yearning to prance upon a charger at the head of huge hordes."

Mencken compares the voter to the drinker - "Today he chooses his rulers as he buys bootleg whiskey, never knowing precisely what he is getting, only certain that it is not what it pretends to be." - and the potential downfall of our system - "The danger is that the hopeless voter, forever victimized by his false assumption about politicians, may in the end gather such ferocious indignation that he will abolish them teetotally and at one insane swoop, and so cause government by the people, for the people and with the people to perish from this earth."

[Stevefk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Been dipping into this book for 10 to 15 years, and finally finished it. Very hit and miss. His prose is often entertaining, but the essays themselves will depend upon where the reader's viewpoint stands to begin with in determining the level of appreciation he/she has for the content. I doubt Mencken changes any minds with his snarky personality. I loved his takedown of organized religion, and the selfishness of farmers, but his view that all politicians are equally horrible, no exceptions, is childish. In the end, I could not give this more than three stars.

[Regine]

Rumbustiously cantankerous.

[M Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contains some disrespect of Theism, but other than that, just plain fun.

[Gregg Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

PREJUDICES - THIRD SERIES

By H. L. MENCKEN

Published, October, 1922


I read this book about mid 1960s and was not that impressed with it. Oh, it made sense and was relevant but at 16 your mind is in other places. Now that I am more aged and my priority is not going out on Friday night, I can find new truths and insights. This book covered Mencken’s analysis of 5 random Americans and how the contributed to American literature and politics. One is Abraham Lincoln (the other 4 were Paul Elmer More, Madison Cawein, Frank Harris and
Havelock Ellis) and Mencken admires him but also lays it on the line about Lincoln. Was he the savior of America during the Civil War? Mencken would say otherwise.

Back in the first half of the 20th century, America became very pro-Confederate. So many of our military posts had (and still have) been named in honor of Confederate heroes (Fort AP Hill, Polk, and so many more). So many books and the Media showed the South in a positive light (Gone With The Wind, Gen R E Lee, and so many more). What was it that started America to promote the South in the first part of the 20th Century? Well one of many reasons can be traced to some of America’s greatest writers such as H. L. Mencken. In his book “Prejudices” he presents Lincoln’s Gettysburg address as a lie. He admired the Gettysburg Address as a great oratory but not as truth.

“But let us not forget that it is oratory, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination — “that government of the people, by the people, for the people,” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i. e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle an absolutely free people; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and vote of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that vote was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely any freedom at all. Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality of the Gettysburg address? If so, I plead my aesthetic joy in it in amelioration of the sacrilege.”

Today, we are taught, just the opposite and if you believe H.L. Menchen’s logic you will find yourself facing the hostile politically correct prejudice of today’s media.

[Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mencken's views on the police in several of his essays show he knew they were a threat to liberty, or at the very least, a rude awakening for people who think we have liberty. He notes that if they come to your house in error, you tell them so, and then flee their obviously mean intent, they will cheerfully beat you to the pulp in any state of this union.

His assessment of critics of each age as mostly unable to correctly appreciate the better artists of their age was true then, and now. His assessment of politicians as craven, followers of the conventional wisdom rather than leaders is even more sadly correct now than then.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a follower of Nietzsche, Mencken is a strange old bird. Nietzsche went after Jesus and Socrates. HLM fulminated against William Jennings Bryan and the chatauqua. However, there is some great stuff in here. An appreciation of music critic James Huneker that sent me to his work. An essay on Baltimore vs. New York that Chesterton could have written. He was certainly correct that Prohibition was a lunatic stab by the country against the city, and The Husbandman is one of the truest things written about the city-country divide in America.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually have a lovely old two-volume 1920s edition given to me by a friend. The literal mustiness of the pages makes the intermittently musty bits more palatable. Some of it's still sharp. He was a tack, that Mencken.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just great.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not much to say, it's Mencken. It's brilliant. Surprised no one's bothered referencing his essay "The Cult of Hope" in discussing Obama.

[Juliana Rausch · Rating 5 out of 5]

why didn't someone tell me i'm not smart enough to read mencken? i am filled with self-hatred since reading prejudices.

[Grim-Anal King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good writing; mostly apposite disdain; even the nonsense is good nonsense.

[Matt Cavedon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Endearingly Nietzschean, for an American; fantastic humor, rhetoric, and observations

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

If the word irreverent hadn't been invented it would have been coined for Mencken.

[William O'Brien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incredible vocabulary and cynical outlook