Hot Dogs

H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)
From American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes

Interesting Links

“H. L. Mencken: Culinary Chronicler of Baltimore” (Minxeats)

“H. L. Mencken as a Boy? Oh, Boy!” (Danny Heitman, Humanities)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Nature of Liberty,” H. L. Mencken
• “The Declaration of Independence,” Abigail Adams
• “Immigrant Picnic,” Gregory Djanikian
• “Eating American” Sheila Hibben

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American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes
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Women eating hot dogs at White City amusement park, Chicago, Illinois, during the 1920s. Unknown photographer. Chicago History Museum.

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“The national taste for bad food seems all the more remarkable when one recalls that the United States, more than any other country of the modern world, has been enriched by immigrant cuisines,” wrote H. L. Mencken a century ago in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. His article, under the title “Victualry as a Fine Art,” despaired of the state of American food:

Every fresh wave of newcomers has brought in new dishes, and many of them have been of the highest merit. But very few of them have been adopted by the natives, and the few have been mainly inferior. From the Italians, for example, we have got only spaghetti; it is now so American that it is to be had in cans. But spaghetti is to the Italian cuisine simply what eggs are to the Spanish: a raw material. We eat it as only those Italians eat it who are on the verge of ceasing to eat at all. Of the multitudinous ways in which it can be cooked and garnished we have learned but one, and that one is undoubtedly the worst.

“What ails our victualry, principally,” Mencken concluded, “is the depressing standardization that ails everything else American.”

Which brings us, perhaps inevitably, to the hot dog, which Mencken called “the reductio ad absurdum of American eating . . . a cartridge filled with the sweepings of the abattoirs.” He seemed to have a love-hate relationship with the frankfurter, although his more charitable feelings about them were usually tucked away from view. While he condemned the uniformity and blandness of this wholly (if not wholesome) American fare, Mencken delightedly served hot dogs on a silver platter to his goddaughter when she visited. And, likely as not, a mere mention of hot dogs would recall to him the happiness of youth:

Some time ago I read in the New York papers about the death of an Irishman* who had been esteemed and honored in life as the inventor of the hot-dog. . . . They said that he had made his epochal invention in the year 1900 or thereabout, and that it had been first marketed as consumers’ goods at the Polo Grounds.

All this made me smile in a sly way, for I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore ’way back in 1886, and they were then very far from new-fangled. They differed from the hot-dogs of today in one detail only, and that one was hardly of statistical significance. They contained precisely the same rubbery, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard. Their single point of difference lay in the fact that their covers were honest German Wecke made of wheat-flour baked to crispness, and not the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster-of-Paris, flecks of bath-sponge, and atmospheric air all compact.

The name hot-dog, of course, was then still buried in the womb of time: we called them Weckers, being ignorant that the true plural of Weck was Wecke, or in one of the exceptional situations so common in German grammar, Wecken. They were on sale at the Baltimore baseball-grounds in the primeval days before even [Orioles infielder] Muggsy McGraw had come to town, and they were also sold at all picnics. In particular, I recall wolfing them at the annual picnic of F. Knapp’s Institute [a private school]. One year I got down six in a row, and suffered a considerable bellyache thereafter, which five bottles of sarsaparilla did not cure. (From Mencken’s memoir Happy Days, 1939.)

On November 1, 1929, the Friday after the Great Crash, the stock market remained closed to allow traders to “clean up” their records after the previous week’s chaos. The market reopened on Monday and continued its decline, and Wall Street announced that the exchange would close again the next day. Late that afternoon, past the screaming headlines of the front page, Mencken’s weekly column appeared as usual in the Baltimore Evening Sun. With his trademark arrogance and wit, he offered advice on how Americans might elevate hot dogs “to the level of an art form.” Often quoted and reprinted in the years since, it might well be the only lasting contribution of the Great Crash, and we reprint it here as our Story of the Week selection.

* The “Irishman” mentioned above by Mencken is concessionaire Harry Mozley Stevens, from Derby, England, who had been credited by some sources as being the originator of “hot dogs,” so called. Stevens supposedly first sold them at a Giants game at the New York Polo Grounds on a cold day in April, either in 1900 or 1901 and the following day cartoonist Tad Dorgan referred to the new offering as “hot dogs” in a now-lost illustration, and the name stuck. In the 1937 edition of The American Language, Mencken added, “The name was suggested, of course, by the folk-belief that wienies were made of dog-meat.” The attribution of the coinage to Stevens and Dorgan has since been discredited by numerous appearances of the term in print during the 1890s—and by the simple fact that in 1900–01, Dorgan was still living in San Francisco.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the text of Mencken’s article below.

Hot Dogs

The hot dog, as the phrase runs, seems to have come to stay. Even the gastroenterologists have given up damning it, as they have given up damning synthetic gin. I am informed by reliable spies that at their convention in Atlantic City last May they consumed huge quantities of both, and with no apparent damages to their pylorus. In such matters popular instinct is often ahead of scientific knowledge, as the history of liver eating shows so beautifully. It may be that, on some near tomorrow, the hot dog will turn out to be a prophylactic against some malady that now slays its thousands. That this will be the case with respect to gin I am willing to prophesy formally. Meanwhile, hot dog stands multiply, and millions of young Americans grow up who will cherish the same veneration for them that we, their elders, were taught to give to the saloon.

My own tastes in eating run in another direction, and so it is very rarely that I consume a hot dog. But I believe that I’d fall in line if the artists who confect and vend it only showed a bit more professional daring. What I mean may be best explained by referring to the parallel case of the sandwich. When I was a boy there were only three kinds of sandwiches in common use—the ham, the chicken and the Swiss cheese. Others, to be sure, existed, but it was only as oddities. Even the club sandwich was a rarity, and in most eating-houses it was unobtainable. The great majority of people stuck to the ham and the Swiss cheese, with the chicken for feast days and the anniversaries of historic battles. Then came the invasion of the delicatessen business by Jews, and a complete reform of the sandwich. The Jewish mind was too restless and enterprisng to be content with the old repertoire. It reached out for the novel, the dramatic, the unprecedented, as it does in all the arts. First it combined the ham sandwich and the cheese sandwich—and converted America to the combination instanter. Then it added lettuce, and after that, mayonnaise—both borrowed from the club sandwich. Then it boldly struck out into the highest fields of fancy, and presently the lowly sandwich had been completely transformed and exalted. It became, as the announcements said, “a meal in itself.” It took on complicated and astonishing forms. It drew on the whole market for materials. And it leaped in price from a nickel to a dime, to a quarter, to fifty cents, even to a dollar. I have seen sandwiches, indeed, marked as much as a dollar and a half.

The rise in price, far from hurting business, helped it vastly. The delicatessen business, once monopolized by gloomy Germans who barely made livings at it, became, in the hands of the Jewish reformers, one of the great American industries, and began to throw off millionaires. Today it is on a sound and high-toned basis, with a national association, a high-pressure executive secretary, a trade journal, and a staff of lobbyists in Washington. There are sandwich shops in New York which offer the nobility and gentry a choice of no less than 100 different sandwiches, all of them alluring and some of them downright masterpieces. And even on the lowly level of the drug-store sandwich counter the sandwich has taken on a new variety and a new dignity. No one eats plain ham and cole-slaw to set it off. At its best it is hidden between turkey, Camembert and sprigs of endive, with anchovies and Russian dressing to dress it.

What I have to suggest is that the hot dog entrepreneurs borrow a leaf from the book of the sandwich men. Let them throw off the chains of the frankfurter, for a generation or more their only stay, and go seeking novelty in the vast and brilliant domain of the German sausage. They will be astonished and enchanted, I believe, by what they find there, and their clients will be astonished and enchanted even more. For there are more different sausages in Germany than there are breakfast foods in America, and if there is a bad one among them then I have never heard of it. They run in size from little fellows so small and pale and fragile that is seems a crime to eat them to vast and formidable pieces that look like shells for heavy artillery. And they run in flavor from the most delicate to the most raucous, and in texture from that of feathers caught in a cobweb to that of linoleum, and in shape from straight cylinders to lovely kinks and curlycues. In place of the single hot dog of today there should be a variety as great as that which has come to prevail among sandwiches. There should be dogs for all appetites, all tastes, all occasions. They should come in rolls of every imaginable kind and accompanied by every sort of relish from Worcestershire sauce to chutney. The common frankfurter, with its tough roll and its smear of mustard, should be abandoned as crude and hopeless, as the old-time ham sandwich has been abandoned. The hot dog should be elevated to the level of an art form.

I call upon the Jews to work this revolution, and promise them confidently even greater success than they have found in the field of the sandwich. It is a safe and glorious business, lying wide open to anyone who chooses to venture into it. It offers immense opportunities to men of genuine imagination—opportunities not only for making money but also for Service in its best Rotarian sense. For he who improves the eating of a great people is quite as worthy of honor as he who improves their roads, their piety, their sex life or their safety. He does something that benefits every one, and the fruits of his benefaction live on long after he has passed from this life.

I believe that a chain of hot dog stands offering the novelties I suggest would pay dividends in Baltimore from the first day, and that it would soon extend from end to end of the United States. The butchers and bakers would quickly arise to the chance it offered, and in six months the American repertoire of sausages would overtake and leap ahead of the German, and more new rolls would be invented than you may now find in France. In such matters American ingenuity may be trusted completely. It is infinitely resourceful, venturesome and audacious. I myself am acquainted with sausage-makers in this town who, if the demand arose, would produce sausage of hexagonal or octagonal section, sausages with springs or music boxes in them, sausages flavored with malt and hops, sausages dyed any color in the spectrum, sausages loaded with insulin, ergosterol, anti-tetanus vaccine or green chartreuse.

Nor is there any reason to believe that the bakers would lag behind. For years their ancient art has been degenerating in America, and today the bread that they ordinarily offer is almost uneatable. But when the reformers of the sandwich went to them for aid they responded instantly with both wheat and rye breads of the highest merit. Such breads, to be sure, are not used in the manufacture of drug-store sandwiches, but they are to be found in every delicatessen store and in all of the more respectable sandwich shops.

The same bakeries that produce them could produce an immense variety of first-rate rolls, once a demand for them was heard. I believe in my scheme so thoroughly that I throw it overboard freely, eager only to make life in the United States more endurable. Soli Deo gloria! What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table. I have wandered about for weeks without encountering a single decent meal. With precious few exceptions, the hotels of America all cook alike—and what they offer is hard to distinguish from what is offered on railway dining-cars.

Originally published in the November 4, 1929, issue of The Evening Sun [Baltimore]; collected in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, 1944.

The Hills of Zion

H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)
From H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series

Interesting Links

Transcript: Day 7 of Scopes Trial: “Read Your Bible” banner removed from courthouse; Darrow's examination of Bryan (Famous Trials)

“The testy ties between Clarence Darrow, H. L. Mencken, and Edgar Lee Masters” (John A. Farrell, Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Portrait of an Immortal Soul,” H. L. Mencken
• “The Fifth Planet,” Loren Eiseley
• “Natural History, the Forgotten Science,” Aldo Leopold
• “A Perfect Moment,” Maud Wood Park

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Thomas Theodore Martin, dean of the School of Evangelism at Union University, sets up a book table in support of William Jennings Bryan in Dayton, Tennessee, for the opening of the Scopes trial. “There was the eloquent Dr. T. T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss., come to town with a truck-load of torches and hymn-books to put Darwin in his place,” writes Mencken in “The Hills of Zion.” Bettmann Archive / Getty Photos.

In late May 1925, the magazine editor and newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken wrote to his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, then living in Paris:

Dear Fitz:
When are you coming back to the Republic? You are missing a superb show. In a few weeks I am going down to Tennessee to see a school-teacher tried for teaching Evolution. Match that in your decayed principalities if you can! William Jennings Bryan is to prosecute, and Clarence Darrow and Dudley Field Malone are for the defense.

Earlier in the year, Tennessee had passed the Butler Act, prohibiting the teaching of human evolution in public schools. When the American Civil Liberties Union announced that it would defend any teacher charged with violating the law, a group of community leaders in Dayton, Tennessee, saw a chance to drum up publicity for their town. They found a volunteer, John Scopes, a physics and math instructor who taught biology briefly when a teacher had taken ill. He could not remember whether he’d taught the forbidden topic, but he had certainly used the state-sanctioned textbook containing a chapter on evolution. In early May, a warrant was issued for his “arrest,” he was immediately “released,” and the accused went to play tennis. A former state senator living in the town exclaimed to the Chattanooga News, “Something has happened that’s going to put Dayton on the map!”

Despite denunciations of the stunt by most Tennessee newspapers, the Associated Press obliged the town by sending out a wire story on the arrest and impending trial. By the time a grand jury indicted Scopes in late May, three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, a foe of evolutionary theory who had gathered adherents in the fight against its acceptance by the public, agreed to prosecute the case. (“It is better to trust in the Rock of Ages than know the age of the rocks; it is better for one to know that he is close to the Heavenly Father than to know how far the stars in the heavens are apart,” Bryan wrote in 1922 in The Menace of Darwinism—lines he repeated in speeches and lectures around the country.) Bryan regarded the upcoming trial as an ideal test case and told the local prosecutor he would even pay Scopes’s fine if the teacher couldn’t afford it. In response to the news of Bryan’s involvement, Clarence Darrow and four other prominent lawyers, including an ACLU representative, joined the defense team. A local civic association set up a Scopes Trial Entertainment Committee, which printed up brochures and, since the town had only three small hotels, established a directory of private rooms available for journalists.

In Baltimore, Mencken worked as a nationally syndicated columnist for The Evening Sun and as the founding coeditor of an extraordinarily successful new magazine, The American Mercury. At first, he seemed inclined to side with the state. “No principle is at stake at Dayton,” he wrote in an article for The Nation published before the trial, “save the principle that school teachers, like plumbers, should stick to the job that is set before them, and not go roving around the house, breaking windows, raiding the cellar, and demoralizing children.” The ten days he spent in Dayton, however, convinced him that more was at stake than the curriculum, and he painted Bryan’s involvement in the case as fueled by naked ambition. “He can never be the peasants’ President, but there is still a chance to be the peasants’ Pope.”

When Mencken arrived in Dayton in July, he admitted he was surprised: “What I found was a country town of charm and even beauty.” The town was packed with more than two hundred reporters, and the invasion of eccentric characters (and at least two chimpanzees) thrilled him. “It was a carnival from start to finish,” recalled Scopes, already a bit player in his own drama. “Every Bible-shouting, psalm-singing pulpit hero in the state poured out of the hills and brought his soapbox with him, and they came from outside the state too.” In a letter to biologist Raymond Pearl, Mencken hyped the quality and abundance of bootleg whiskey available in Tennessee cities, bragged of having survived the poisonous corn liquor in Dayton, and admitted that the circus atmosphere “is genuinely fabulous. I have stored up enough material to last me 20 years.” His humorous yet caustic dispatches from the town delighted a national readership—and horrified the town’s residents, who realized Dayton was now “on the map” for all the wrong reasons.

The turning point in Mencken’s attitude toward the charade was likely the moment when, on the hunt for his next story, he encountered Chattanooga News reporter Nellie Kenyon and asked, “What does one do for entertainment?” Kenyon mentioned that there was a “Holy Roller meeting” nearby and, that evening, she took him to it—an event described in his next Evening Sun column, later revised as “The Hills of Zion,” perhaps his best-known and most-anthologized essay. “To Mencken, the revival he had just witnessed represented all of the falsehoods William Jennings Bryan and the lawyers for the prosecution represented,” Marion Elizabeth Rodgers wrote in a recent biography. “Yet at the same time he was so fascinated by the Holy Rollers that he visited their camp again and again, sitting on the ground, his hands on his knees, spellbound.”

As for the trial, Mencken realized all along that the fix was in—that it was “no more possible in this Christian valley to get a jury unprejudiced against Scopes than would be possible in Wall Street to get a jury unprejudiced against a Bolshevik.” A week into the trial, the presiding judge, John Tate Raulston, who walked into the courtroom pointedly carrying a Bible each day, announced that scientific testimony would not be presented to the jury. Rather than a battle between evolution and fundamentalism, the trial would merely determine whether Scopes was guilty of teaching material that was prohibited by the state. Mencken, whose coeditor, George Jean Nathan, had resigned that month, began to worry about his magazine duties and decided to leave town. It was a decision he soon regretted, since he missed the climactic scene when, deprived of witnesses, Darrow surprised the court by calling Bryan to the stand as an expert on the Bible, which resulted in a testy two-hour interrogation that put the great orator at a disadvantage. The subsequent reports of Bryan’s performance, as well as the exaggerated portrayals and caricatures of the event in biography, fiction, and film, permanently stained the public memory of Bryan’s storied career.

Scopes was convicted, of course, but the decision was overturned on appeal because Raulston himself had assessed the fine when state law required that the jury must determine the amount. The ruling quashed the ACLU’s hope for an appeal that would challenge the Butler Act itself. “In a way it was Mencken’s show,” John Scopes wrote in the mid-1960s. “In the public mind today, a mention of the Dayton trial more likely evokes Mencken than it does me.”

Five days after the trial ended, Bryan died in Dayton after attending a church service, and Mencken wrote the first version of “In Memoriam, W. J. B.,” a blistering obituary that became, in its various forms, one of his more infamous works. “It is too early, it seems to me, to send the firemen home,” Mencken warned; “the fire is still burning on many a far-flung hill, and it may begin to roar again at any moment. The evil that men do lives after them. Bryan, in his malice, started something that it will not be easy to stop.”

Postscript: Toward the end of the essay, Mencken mentions Thomas Theodore Martin, whose “headquarters” during the Scopes trial is pictured in the photograph above. As Mencken later recalled in Heathen Days, “On our first day in Dayton we had gone about scraping acquaintance with the country evangelists who were swarming into town, and among them we were especially delighted by an old man named T. T. Martin, hailing from Blue Mountain, Miss. . . . He made a gallant effort to save the abandoned souls of [fellow Sun journalist Henry M. Hyde] and me, and would take a hack at us every time he met us on the streets, which was ten or twenty times a day. Indeed, he continued these efforts by mail long after the Scopes trial was over.” Mencken later regretted not saving any of Martin’s letters, and he wrote in his unpublished notes for the book, “After his death, in 1940 or thereabout, his daughter wrote to me that he had died in full hope of saving me soon or late. He was typical of the old-time Southern evangelists of the better sort. . . . Even on the subjects of Darwinism and Prohibition he was relatively moderate.”

Notes: Coca-Cola was variously spelled as cocoa-cola, coco-cola, and coca-cola—even, at first, by the company’s founder, Asa Griggs Candler. Mencken uses the two latter spellings interchangeably, and we have kept them as is. In an account now regarded as apocryphal, Caliph Omar (Umar Ibn al-Khattab) is said to have burned the Library of Alexandria in 640 on the grounds that if its contents agreed with the Koran they were superfluous and if they contradicted it they were heretical. Henry Havelock Ellis was an English scientist who studied the psychology and sociology of sex. His books included The New Spirit (1890) and the seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928). Albert Moll was a German psychiatrist, a pioneer in the study of sexuality, and the author of The Sexual Life of the Child (1908). Andy Gump was the lead character of The Gumps, a comic strip created by Sidney Smith in 1917.

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It was hot weather when they tried the infidel Scopes at Dayton, but I went down there very willingly, for I had good reports of the sub-Potomac bootleggers, and moreover I was eager to see something of evangelical Christianity as a going concern. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Benediction

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
From F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels & Stories 1920–1922

Interesting Links

“F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jesuit story” (Anthony Lusvardi, SJ, Whosever Desires)

“Why a Maryland Cemetery Initially Rejected F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Corpse” (Suzanne Raga, Mental Floss)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “Portrait of an Immortal Soul,” H. L. Mencken
• “The Train,” Flannery O'Connor

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F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels & Stories 1920–1922
This Side of Paradise | Flappers and Philosophers | The Beautiful and Damned | Tales of the Jazz Age | 1,082 pages
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Web store price: $28.00

“It was a pietà, a life-size statue of the Blessed Virgin set within a semicircle of rocks.” Photograph of the statue of Mary in a rock formation alongside a path through the woods near Woodstock College, Maryland, c. 1930, by John Brosnan, S.J. Courtesy Georgetown University / Woodstock Theological Library Collections. Traditionally, a pietà is a depiction of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Jesus, but the statue placed in this grotto and described by Fitzgerald in “Benediction” is of Mary alone.

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When he was a fifteen-year-old high school student, F. Scott Fitzgerald spent spring break with his cousin Cecilia (“Ceci”) Taylor, in Norfolk, Virginia. He was near the end of his first year at the Newman School, a Catholic boarding school in Hackensack, New Jersey, where he had been sent in September 1911 because of his poor academic performance back home in St. Paul, Minnesota. Ceci, sixteen years his senior and a widow with four children, was Scott’s favorite among his relatives, and he would immortalize her as the widow Clara (“She made her goodness such an asset”) in This Side of Paradise.

During the break Fitzgerald accompanied his cousin on a trip to Woodstock College, near Baltimore, to visit her brother Tom Delihant, a Jesuit scholastic finishing up the nearly two decades of study and contemplation required before his ordination as a priest. Delihant made quite an impression on the teenager; they kept in touch for years and Fitzgerald’s admiration was unabated even as the young author renounced his on-again, off-again faith in his journal on his birthday in 1917: “A year of enormous importance. Work, and Zelda. Last year as a Catholic.” Not long before making this journal entry Scott wrote to Ceci about Tom, “He’s the old-fashioned Jesuit—the kind they got continually when the best men in the priesthood were all Jesuits.” Seven years later Fitzgerald wrote an essay on his boyhood for Woman’s Home Companion and cited the men he admired during his youth: in addition to football star Ted Coy, he listed “Richard Harding Davis in default of someone better, a certain obscure Jesuit priest, and, occasionally, Theodore Roosevelt.”

The visit to Woodstock College inspired two of Fitzgerald’s short stories. In 1915, while a Princeton student, Fitzgerald wrote “The Ordeal,” about a Jesuit seminarian in Maryland who is spiritually tested moments before taking his vows: “He felt himself alone pitted against an infinity of temptation.” Four years later, he completely reworked and expanded the story as “Benediction.” In this later version, the clash between spiritual faith and earthly enticement is transferred to a new main character, Lois, who is visiting her brother at seminary outside of Baltimore.

The story was snapped up by the influential literary magazine The Smart Set, edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Mencken loved the story, although Fitzgerald didn’t think much of the magazine (“I think their stuff is rather punk as a rule and never send them anything until some better magazine has passed it up”). A few months later, when Mencken reviewed Fitzgerald’s story collection Flappers and Philosophers, he declared “Benediction” the best story in the book and claimed that its initial publication “brought down the maledictions of the Jesuits and came near getting the magazine barred from the Knights of Columbus camp-libraries.”

Mencken is almost certainly embellishing readers’ reactions, since there is little evidence that the story inspired any such backlash, but he adds, “Re-reading it, I can see no reason why any intelligent Catholic should object to it in the slightest. . . . I commend it to the rev. clergy; they will enjoy it.” Indeed, a few years ago the story was heartily recommended by Anthony Lusvardi, S.J., one of five Jesuits writing for the blog Whosoever Desires:

The story is a gem, written in the witty, dancing prose of the youthful Fitzgerald, and touching on many of his typical themes—the giddiness of coming of age, the wistful sadness of romance, even a hint at class sensitivities. . . .

Lois’ encounter with God, with Catholicism deeply lived by Kieth and his companions, has changed her. It may not, Fitzgerald leads us to believe, have resulted in a conversion such as we read about in hagiographies, an about-face from a life of sin to a life of grace. But it has resulted in a life that is deeper, that contains previously ignored levels of meaning and profundity, a life perhaps more difficult, but also more real.

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Notes: In the opening scene of the story, the telegraph company clerk and a customer wrangle over whether a message contains fifty words, allowing it to qualify for a special rate. As the March 1910 issue of The Commercial Telegraphers' Journal explains, “The ten word limit on telegrams has for years been the basis of much fun among the jokesmiths who concocted many stories based on the inability of people to be brief. This industry is now threatened with extinction. The ‘night letter’ will now give everybody an opportunity to give vent to their verbosity to the extent of 50 words for the price of the much-abused ten word message.” A special rate was soon extended to daytime hours by both the Postal Telegraph Company and Western Union, as System magazine reported in 1920: “A 50-word night letter by either company costs $1.20. A day letter of 50 words between [San Francisco and Cleveland] costs $1.80, while if you have 51 words—and it happens that way quite often—your day letter will cost you just $2.16, thus making a cost of 36 cents for the extra word.”

On page 392, one of the seminarians is teased for his fascination with the maxixe, a Brazilian dance resembling the two-step which became popular in the United States in 1914.

*   *   *

The Baltimore Station was hot and crowded, so Lois was forced to stand by the telegraph desk for interminable, sticky seconds while a clerk with big front teeth counted and recounted a large lady’s day message, to determine whether it contained the innocuous forty-nine words or the fatal fifty-one. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Diary of a Retreat

H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)
From World War I and America: Told by the Americans Who Lived It

Interesting Links

Mencken and Germany; “Dissent Was Not Unpatriotic” (P. B. Cora, WW1 Centennial Network)

Video: H. L. Mencken” (Frederick Rasmussen, CSPAN)

Previous Story of the Week selections by H. L. Mencken
• “The Nature of Liberty”
• “Portrait of an Immortal Soul”

Buy the book
World War I and America: Told By the Americans Who Lived It
127 selections by nearly ninety soldiers, airmen, nurses, diplomats, statesmen, political activists, journalists, and others • 987 pages

“Sinking of a hostile armed troop carrier by German submarine in the Mediterranean sea,” 1917. Painting by German artist Willy Stöwer (1864–1931), reproduced on a postcard printed during the war. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

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In December 1916, with the war in Europe intensifying, Mencken went to Germany as a correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. His first dispatch was answered with complaints from some readers accusing him of German sympathies. The editors of the Sun took the unusual step of prominently announcing, “MENCKEN IS NOT NEUTRAL. . . . He has told you so in his first Free Lance column time and again. But this will not prevent him from giving you the real report of actual conditions in wartime Germany.” The paper went on to suggest that “he will be allowed greater latitude by the censor” and that his “great admiration for everything German will help him get the ‘inside story.’”

On January 27 Mencken left Berlin to visit the German-Russian front along the Dvina River in the northeast Lithuanian province of Vilna. Mencken biographer Marion Elizabeth Rodgers summarizes his reports: “There could be no doubt among Sun readers that ‘Herr Mencken’ not only was impressed by the German army but had also enjoyed himself.” He returned to Berlin on January 31 but was unable to revisit the front after the Kaiser announced a campaign of “unrestricted” submarine attacks against British shipping—an act that threatened the already strained relationship between the United States and Germany. On February 4 Mencken and his fellow reporters received word that, in fact, the United States had severed diplomatic relations with Germany, and they immediately realized their days in the country were numbered.

The German-American dispute over submarine warfare had been simmering for over two years. In February 1915 the United States warned Germany that sinking American ships, or ships carrying American passengers, would be considered “an indefensible violation of neutral rights.” In subsequent months American patience was seriously tested in a series of attacks on passenger ships, including, most famously, the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, which killed 1,198 people (including 128 Americans). In August, hoping to placate the U.S. government, the Germans suspended its unrestricted U-boat campaign, but the following March the French passenger ship Sussex was torpedoed, injuring several Americans. Wilson warned Germany that the U.S. would break diplomatic relations if attacks on passenger ships continued, and the Germans again pledged to abide by the established rules of naval warfare. At the end of 1916, however, Henning von Holtzendorff, the chief of the German naval staff, sent to General Paul von Hindenburg a secret memorandum, in which he projected that an unrestricted U-boat campaign would force Britain to sue for peace after five months. The allure of the quick victory promised in the memo—miscalculated as it proved to be—was too tempting.

On February 1, 1917, the day after his return to Berlin, Mencken wrote a detailed journal entry that became “Berlin at Time of Break,” the first of a series of articles published by the Sun the next month under the rubric “The Diary of a Retreat,” a chronicle of his flight from Europe. This initial installment has been included in the latest Library of America volume World War I and America: Told by the Americans Who Lived It, edited by Pulitzer Prize–winning author A. Scott Berg, and—on the centennial of the crisis, which led two months later to the American entry into the war—we present it below as our Story of the Week selection.

Notes: Mencken sprinkles a few references in his story that would have been familiar to most of his newspaper readers who had been following the war. On the first page he mentions Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to the United States from 1908 to 1917. On the following page: Gamaschen are leggings, and Die Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger was a daily German newspaper. On page 284: The term Feldgrau refers to German soldiers (from “field gray,” the color of the German uniform), and the rumor mentioned by Mencken, that General Erich von Falkenhayn’s forces were on the Danish frontier, turned out to be false. North German Lloyd was a German shipping company. The last sections of the article include interviews with Conrad Roediger, who worked for the German foreign ministry, and Fritz Thiel, the chief of the German information service. The final paragraph refers to James Watson Gerard, the American ambassador to Germany.

*   *   *

Across the front page of the Tageblatt this morning ran the long-awaited, hat-in-the-ring-throwing, much-pother-throughout-the-world-up-stirring headline: Verkündung des uneingeschränkten U-Boot-Krieges!—Proclamation of the Unrestrained U-Boat War! . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Portrait of an Immortal Soul

H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)
From H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series

Interesting Links
“H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan: A Legendary Ten-Year Literary Partnership” (Reader’s Almanac)

“A Genius for Contempt”: a review of Mencken’s Prejudices (Russell Baker, The New York Review of Books)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Nature of Liberty,” H. L. Mencken
• “Baiting the Umpire,” George Jean Nathan

Buy the books
H. L. Mencken: Prejudices
2-book boxed set • 1,222 pages
List price: $75.00
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“One Civilized Reader Is Worth a Thousand Boneheads”: the October 1914 cover of The Smart Set—the second issue edited by George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken. Image courtesy of the Flickr account of Johns Hopkins Rare Books, Manuscripts, & Archives.

In August 1914 H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan became the editors of the magazine The Smart Set, which had been founded at the turn of the century and was experiencing a slump in readership and advertising. The first issue under their management, published in September, retained the subtitle “A Magazine of Cleverness,” but the October issue added on its front cover, “One Civilized Reader Is Worth a Thousand Boneheads” and the November number promised readers “a moderately intelligent and awfully good time.” Subsequent issues continued the whimsical nature of its editorial trappings.

During the next decade, a typical issue of The Smart Set contained up to two dozen short stories, a dozen poems, and one play, along with a scattering of articles and reviews. Mencken and Nathan became famous for discovering, fostering, and reviewing new writers, including the likes of James Branch Cabell, Willa Cather, Edgar Lee Masters, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Eugene O’Neill (whose first published play appeared in its pages). The May 1915 issue introduced American readers to James Joyce with two stories from Dubliners. Several years later much of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early fiction, including his first story in a national periodical, was featured by The Smart Set. The magazine also presented now-forgotten authors who were well known in their day, such as the bestselling Arkansas native Thyra Samter Winslow and the pulp-fiction writer Vincent Starrett.

Of course, not all the acolytes and apprentices promoted in the pages of the magazine enjoyed the success of their more famous counterparts. In “The Portrait of an Immortal Soul” Mencken employs his trademark wit to describe his frustration when one of his discoveries completely bombed. Profiting from Mencken’s firm editorial guidance, R. A. Lindsey (writing as Robert Steele) published One Man, a fictionalized memoir of the life of crime that led the author to prison. Mencken plugged Steele’s debut in The Smart Set, but the book's appearance made barely a ripple and it “straightaway died the death.”

Many years later Mencken added a note updating the story:

After the book herein discussed came out I heard nothing more from the author until 1935, when he wrote to me from Wisconsin and then from Chicago. It appeared that he had married, had nine children, and was out of work, and that the whole family was trying to live on a dole of $17.28 a week. He said that he had written another book . . . , but I never heard any more about it.

* * *

Notes: On page 135, Mensch-an-sich means “the man himself.” On the same page, Mencken mentions two of Robert Steele’s literary antecedents. Giovanni Jacopo Casanova de Seingalt (1725–1798; better known simply as Casanova) surely needs no introduction. Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) is the Italian Renaissance artist most remembered for writing a colorful and racy autobiography.

Update: A number of readers have asked if One Man is available today. A facsimile edition is available as a print-on-demand title through Amazon, or you can download it online at the Internet Archive.

* * *

One day in Spring, six or eight years ago, I received a letter from a man somewhere beyond the Wabash announcing that he had lately completed a very powerful novel and hinting that my critical judgment upon it would give him great comfort. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Nature of Liberty

H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)
From H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series

Interesting Links

H. L. Mencken and Sara Haardt: “America’s foremost bachelor” ties the knot (Reader’s Almanac)

The Great Bathtub Hoax (Reader’s Almanac)

How tripping over a box of love letters turned Marion Elizabeth Rodgers into Mencken’s biographer (Reader’s Almanac)

Interview with Marion Elizabeth Rodgers about Mencken (PDF)

Buy the books
H. L. Mencken: Prejudices
2-book boxed set • 1,222 pages
List price: $75.00
Web store price: $60.00

During a recent interview conducted by The Library of America, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers reminds us just how popular a figure H. L. Mencken had become during the years following World War I:

It is difficult for modern readers to realize what an electrifying effect Mencken had. For the generation coming of age during the 1920s, Mencken cleared the air of Victorian stuffiness and cobwebs. . . . [His writings] made him, according to The New York Times, the most influential private citizen in the United States. Sherwood Anderson wrote that everywhere he went he was asked, “What do you think of Mencken?”

. . . Hundreds of newspapers printed his latest quotes and described the way he parted his hair, his fondness for cigars. In New York, a doctor used extracts of Prejudices to test his patients’ vision. Beauties of the Ziegfeld Follies held copies of Prejudices while hanging out at the Algonquin Hotel. . . . F. Scott Fitzgerald inserted Mencken’s name in the proofs of This Side of Paradise. His dalliances with blondes inspired Anita Loos to write Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Journalists, motivated by his outspoken stands on controversial issues, imitated his vernacular style.

His popularity gave Mencken a freedom to write on subjects nobody else would cover. His writings during and after World War I supported woman suffrage, promoted African American authors, and championed the contributions of immigrants to American society. He inveighed against censorship, corruption, police brutality, the Ku Klux Klan, and (above all) Prohibition. In fact, as Rodgers points out in her biography, Mencken wrote at least forty-two newspaper columns about the ban on alcohol.

Most of Mencken’s opinions were underscored by a devotion to the protection and advancement of civil liberties. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in the essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” “we didn’t remember anything about the Bill of Rights until Mencken began plugging it.” In a piece published in The Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1926, Mencken wrote:

Liberty, if it means anything at all, means that body of rights which the citizen reserves to himself, even as against the government. . . . Thus a conflict is set up between the rights of the citizen and the power and security of the government. In so far as the citizen prevails the government is weak, and in so far as the government prevails the citizen is not a citizen at all, but a subject.

Obviously no government, of its own motion, will increase its own weakness, for that would mean to acquiesce in its own destruction. . . . So governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down.

In the following satire, Mencken adopts an entirely different approach to the same topic, employing his trademark sarcasm to lampoon those (like himself) who defend the Bill of Rights and to assail those who would dispense with those rights “to safeguard public order and the public security.”

Notes: Mooney is a reference to Thomas Mooney, a labor leader convicted of murder in 1916 and pardoned in 1939. Also see Wikipedia for information on the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.

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Every time an officer of the constabulary, in the execution of his just and awful powers under American law, produces a compound fracture of the occiput of some citizen in his custody, with hemorrhage, shock, coma and death, there comes a feeble, falsetto protest from specialists in human liberty. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.