Editing H. L. Mencken (section)

===Race and elitism===
In addition to his identification of races with castes, Mencken had views about the superior individual within communities. He believed that every community produced a few people of clear superiority. He considered groupings on a par with hierarchies, which led to a kind of natural [[elitism]] and natural [[aristocracy]]. "Superior" individuals, in Mencken's view, were those wrongly oppressed and disdained by their own communities but nevertheless distinguished by their will and personal achievement, not by race or birth.

{{external media | width = 210px | float = right | headerimage= | video1 = [https://www.c-span.org/video/?10797-1/diary-hl-mencken ''Booknotes'' interview with Charles Fecher on ''The Diary of H.L. Mencken'', January 28, 1990], [[C-SPAN]]}}

In 1989, per his instructions, Alfred A. Knopf published Mencken's "secret diary" as ''The Diary of H.&nbsp;L. Mencken''. According to an Associated Press story, Mencken's views shocked even the "sympathetic scholar who edited it", [[Charles Fecher]] of Baltimore.<ref name="latimes1989" /> A club in Baltimore, the [[Maryland Club]], had one Jewish member. When that member died, Mencken said, "There is no other Jew in Baltimore who seems suitable." The diary also quoted him as saying of blacks, in September 1943, that "it is impossible to talk anything resembling discretion or judgment to a colored woman. They are all essentially child-like, and even hard experience does not teach them anything".

Mencken opposed [[Lynching in the United States|lynching]]. In 1935, he testified before Congress in support of the [[Costigan–Wagner Bill]]. While he had previously written negatively about lynchings during the 1910s and 1920s, the lynchings of [[Lynching of Matthew Williams|Matthew Williams]] and [[Lynching of George Armwood|George Armwood]] caused him to write in support of the bill and give political advice to [[Walter White (NAACP)|Walter White]] on how to maximize the likelihood of the bill's passing.<ref name="olson8">{{Cite journal |last=Olson |first=Walter |date=2019 |title=2019 Mencken Society Lecture: Mencken, the NAACP, and the Anti-Lynching Campaign |journal=Menckeniana |issue=224 |pages=8–11 |issn=0025-9233 |jstor=26841917}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Scruggs |first=Charles |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/book/67865 |title=The Sage in Harlem: H. L. Mencken and the Black Writers of the 1920s |date=2019 |publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press |isbn=978-1-4214-3029-4 |location=Baltimore |page=31 |doi=10.2307/2926173 |jstor=2926173 |id={{Project MUSE|67865|type=book}} |s2cid=162199305}}</ref> The two lynchings in his home state made the issue directly relevant to him. His arguments against lynching were influenced by his interpretation of civilization, as he believed that a civilized society would not tolerate it.<ref name="olson8" />

One of his biographers observed that:

{{cquote|... he was receptive to black writers, without question more helpful than any other editor of his time. Both [[W.E.B. Du Bois]] and the poet [[Countee Cullen]] appeared in the ''Mercury’s'' pages during its first year, and in later issues poets [[James Weldon Johnson]] and [[Langston Hughes]] and future NAACP head [[Walter F. White]] were represented. Indeed, the black journalist [[George Schuyler]], who contributed nine essays to the ''Mercury,'' was to appear more frequently in the magazine in the final six years of Mencken’s editorship than any other writer, white or black.
| source = Fred Hobson<ref>Mencken: A Life (1994), Chapter 10, ''“The Nearest Thing to Voltaire”'' (p. 247)</ref>|||
}}{{external media| float = right| width = 210px | video1 = [https://www.c-span.org/video/?159342-1/the-skeptic-life-h-l-mencken Presentation by Terry Teachout on ''The Skeptic'', November 11, 2002], [[C-SPAN]]}}

In a review of ''The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken'', by [[Terry Teachout]], journalist [[Christopher Hitchens]] described Mencken as a [[German nationalism|German nationalist]], "an antihumanist as much as an atheist", who was "prone to the hyperbole and [[sensationalism]] he distrusted in others". Hitchens also criticized Mencken for writing a scathing critique of [[Franklin Delano Roosevelt]] but nothing equally negative of [[Adolf Hitler]].<ref>{{Cite news |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |author-link=Christopher Hitchens |date=November 17, 2002 |title=A Smart Set of One |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/books/a-smart-set-of-one.html |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190707194805/https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/books/a-smart-set-of-one.html |archive-date=July 7, 2019}}</ref>

[[Larry S. Gibson]] argued that Mencken's views on race changed significantly between his early and later writings, attributing some of the changes in Mencken's views to his personal experiences of being treated as an outsider due to his German heritage during World War I. Gibson speculated that much of Mencken's language was intended to lure in readers by suggesting a shared negative view of other races, and then writing about their positive aspects. Describing Mencken as elitist rather than racist, he says Mencken ultimately believed that humans consisted of a small group of those of superior intelligence and a mass of inferior people, regardless of race.{{r|gibson}}

Mencken scholar Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has argued that, despite the racial slurs and ethnic slang in the diaries, Mencken rebelled against "the Aryan imbecilities of Hitler" and stated: "To me personally, race prejudice is one of the most preposterous of all the imbecilities of mankind. There are so few people on earth worth knowing that I hate to think of any man I like as a German or a Frenchman, a gentile or a Jew, Negro or a white man."<ref>{{cite web | url=https://reason.com/2018/09/12/the-alt-right-loves-hl-mencken-the-feeli/ | title=The Alt-Right Loves H.L. Mencken. The Feeling Would Not Have Been Mutual | date=September 12, 2018 | access-date=October 7, 2023 | archive-date=October 28, 2023 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231028035549/https://reason.com/2018/09/12/the-alt-right-loves-hl-mencken-the-feeli/ | url-status=live }}</ref>

====Anglo-Saxons====
Mencken countered the arguments for Anglo-Saxon superiority prevalent in his time in a 1923 essay entitled "The Anglo-Saxon", which argued that if there was such a thing as a pure "Anglo-Saxon" race, it was defined by its inferiority and cowardice: "The normal American of the 'pure-blooded' majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen."<ref>{{Cite news |last=Mencken |first=HL |date=July 1923 |title=The Anglo-Saxon |work=[[Baltimore Evening Sun]]}}</ref>

====Jews====
[[Chaz Bufe]], an admirer of Mencken, wrote that Mencken's various anti-Semitic statements should be understood in the context that Mencken made bombastic and over-the-top denunciations of almost any national, religious, and ethnic group. One of his autobiographers noted:

{{cquote|Thus, rhetorically at least, he lived life more dramatically than most other mortals, attempted more, risked more, said more, and said it more colorfully on a wider range of subjects than perhaps any other writer of his generation. The result, depending on what he came out with at any given time, was that he appeared to be both the best friend and the worst enemy of Jews, blacks, and numerous other segments of the population.
The truth is that a hundred statements could be chosen to “prove” Mencken anti-Semitic and a hundred to “prove” he was not.
| source = Fred Hobson<ref>Mencken: A Life (1994), Chapter 17, Germany (p. 412) </ref>|||
}}

That said, Bufe still wrote that some of Mencken's statements were "odious", such as his claim in his 1918 introduction to Nietzsche's [[The Antichrist (book)|''The Anti-Christ'']] that "The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many [[pogrom]]s as now go on in the world".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich |url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322-h/19322-h.htm |title=The Anti-Christ |date=1999 |publisher=See Sharp Press |isbn=1-884365-20-5 |location=Tucson, Arizona |author-link=Friedrich Nietzsche |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210621153355/https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322-h/19322-h.htm |archive-date=June 21, 2021 |url-status=live}} Note: URL goes to Gutenberg version of just Mencken's text, but does not include Chaz Bufe's introduction or slight changes.</ref> Mencken was also an Axis sympathizer who berated the Allied war effort as late as 1944.<ref>{{Cite web |last=By |date=1989-12-17 |title=MENCKEN’S DIARY REVEALS ANTI-SEMITISM, BIGOTRY |url=https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1989/12/17/menckens-diary-reveals-anti-semitism-bigotry/ |access-date=2025-02-25 |website=Sun Sentinel |language=en-US}}</ref>