Of Mencken and Micropolitics

The rise and fall of nations and cultures is too abstract for most people. But fiction, especially that informed by journalism, can shows how the sweeping patterns of history play out the micro level. Individual stories can be just as informative as any grand history of the clash of civilizations.

H.L. Mencken, who died 57 years ago this week, was the greatest newspaperman of his age, or perhaps of any age. He shaped the thought of a generation with The American Mercury (now available online thanks to Ron Unz). He changed the way Americans viewed the way they speak with his book The American Language . Most critically, as the author of the first English-language book on Friedrich Nietzsche, a champion of free speech and of a kind of idiosyncratic aristocratic radicalism, Mencken has been an important influence on the libertarian American Old Right and the emerging North American New Right.

A new collection of Mencken’s early fiction, The Passing of a Profit and Other Forgotten Stories, provides a vital perspective on his vanished world.

Motifs run through these seventeen tales that were developed further in Mencken's public writings and private diaries. Among the most important: the confrontation between the civilized Western man and the savage. Like his contemporary H.P. Lovecraft, Mencken identified what he called the “civilized minority” with Northern Europeans. But it's not a perfect association—Mencken's contempt for the socially conservative and rural “Real Americans” of the Sarah Palin mold is well known.

And this collection can hardly be called racist. For example, “The Cook's Victory” is a hilarious recounting of a black cook winning a pardon from a poaching ship captain who wants to execute him for “mutiny.” His victory comes from the captain's need for his help as the police approach, slowly gaining more and more concessions, finally winning his freedom just as the captain makes good his escape. In “The Crime of McSwane,” a white soldier fighting in a colonial war loses his rifle and goes mad at the reduction in status, encouraging his comrades to die so he can reclaim his position. Other stories show Northern Europeans coming out on top of Southern Europeans or non-white “natives,” but often as a result of swindling or fraud—hardly an edifying picture of the “civilizing” power of Western Man.

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