Media: He was the greatest American controversialist of the first half of the 20th century and arguably its most influential journalist of any era. The by-line by which he was known to a reading public was HL Mencken.
To other newspapermen he was Hank. In American conversation - and he was never out of it - he was simply Mencken. Such was his reputation that he was sometimes referred to as "America's George Bernard Shaw."
For almost six decades he campaigned across the landscape of American public life, attacking politicians and officials, excoriating venal journalists, publishers and editors and challenging prejudice and complacency in the national psyche. He questioned the consensus that brought the US into two world wars. He took on the evils of racism, fundamentalism and xenophobia. He denounced lynching, anti-Darwinism and prohibition. He wrote half a dozen best-selling books, of which the most acclaimed continues to be regarded as one of the key works on the evolution of American English.
Henry Louis Mencken was born in September 1880, the son of a moderately prosperous cigar importer in Baltimore, Maryland. The Menckens lived in refined affluence in an area favoured by the prosperous German merchants of the city. Commercially, it was boom-time for Baltimore. But underneath the prosperity, it was a divided community with a great underclass of poor, uneducated blacks.
His early start in journalism was at the Baltimore Herald. He was city editor on the Herald when the city (including the newspaper office) was destroyed in the great fire of February 1904. But for most of his newspaper career his by-line was synonymous with the Sun newspapers, notably the prestigious Baltimore Sun. In time he was to build his own successful journals, including American Mercury and The Smart Set.
His landmark book The American Language was first published in 1921. It was said that his The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche did more to spread understanding of the German philosopher than any other work ever published. His In Defense of Women had 11 printings by 1928. A New Dictionary of Quotations appeared in 1942.
Mencken is synonymous with the triumphant age of American newspapers, the era when print was king, before television and with radio still in its infancy. The great metropolitan newspapers were, in effect, the political opposition as well as being the principal forum of public debate. Their influence was tremendous and the men who dominated them were nationally-known figures.
Of all that formidable generation, HL Mencken is the journalist and editor whose work and reputation have best stood the test of time. His observations on government, on the law, on politics and indeed on what we now call "the media" have resonances that are as sharp and relevant today as they were in the 1930s and 1940s. He has never gone out of fashion. There are successive biographies, critical appraisals, anthologies and re-publications of his work. There are Mencken societies and there is a regular pilgrimage of devotees to his grave at Loudon Park Cemetery, Baltimore.
There are two particular values to this biography. It places Mencken in the political context of an uncertain America on the way up. It had not nearly achieved the position of dominance it holds today. Debate was vigorous and it was valued. But it also has contemporary relevance as a testament to the necessity of reasoned dissent at a time of crisis and self-doubt.
Mencken was proud of the family's roots in Germany (the Menckens were distantly related to Bismarck.) In the first World War he believed that Germany was the victim of a ruthless British-led propaganda machine. When he visited Germany in the 1930s he wrote approvingly of Hitler and the Nazi movement.
"It was the Germany of his ancestors, not Hitler's Berlin that he had gone to see," writes the author. "Rather than dwelling on the reality before his eyes, he retreated to a Germany that no longer existed."
But, as often happens with controversialists, his capacity to be gloriously wrong had the paradoxical effect of enhancing his reputation as an independent thinker. He was a fierce critic of Roosevelt. "If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely," he wrote in American Mercury in 1936, "he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House Yard come Wednesday."
He frequently railed against the US press. The editorial pages were "our grandest and gaudiest failure", he declared. "Printing the news is only half the job. The rest is interpreting it, showing what it signifies, getting some sense and coherence into it."
He was no less scathing of the journalists' union, the American Newspaper Guild. "No newspaperman of genuine skill and dignity has anything to do with the management of the Guild," he once wrote.
His observations on the relationship between war and freedom of expression might have been written for contemporary America as the imbroglio of Iraq deepens. In the first World War, he recalled, the hamburger became the "liberty sandwich". And sauerkraut became the "liberty cabbage". Sound familiar?
"On the day war is declared . . . all free discussion will cease. No newspaper will be able to dissent without grave risk of denunciation and ruin. Any argument against the war itself and any criticism of the persons appointed to carry it on will become aid and comfort to the enemy. The war . . . will become the touchstone and standard of morality."
Newspapermen who tried to resist would be threatened "both socially and physiologically", he wrote. "The dissenter is not only suspected by his neighbours, he also begins to suspect himself . . . thus the job of demagogy is completed . . . in the schools children are taught that the war is fought for freedom, the home and God."
One has the strong sense that with just a little reworking, much of what he wrote would be appropriate to the opinion pages of US newspapers today. Whether it would see the light of day is another question.
HL Mencken died in January 1956.
Mencken, The American Iconoclast - The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of Baltimore, By Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Oxford University Press, 672pp. £19.99
Conor Brady was editor of The Irish Times from 1986 to 2002
