My Plan Is to Let People Do Whatever They Please: New at Reason

Oh, that H.L. Mencken were alive today!

You don’t hear that wistful resurrectionary sentiment voiced much anymore. A modern newspaper columnist writing in Mencken’s gleeful style, with its joyful savagery, its jocose sesquipedalianism, its sheer delight in the American language, would be met with astonished horror on the order of Henry James watching a Sam Kinison video or Robby Mook meeting a man who owns a pickup truck. (I should warn you that one cannot write about Mencken without aping him, however clumsily.)

The longtime Baltimore Evening Sun columnist, American Mercury editor, and rumbustiously splenetic critic, who graced this orb from 1880 to 1956, would not be published in any major newspaper today. The reasons he foresaw over a century ago, when he decried the “cheap bullying and cheaper moralizing” whose purpose was the extirpation, the annihilation, of anything resembling a robust exchange of ideas. Two beliefs puffed up the righteous censor, according to Mencken: first, “that any man who dissents from the prevailing platitudes is a hireling of the devil,” and second, “that he should be silenced and destroyed forthwith. Down with free speech; up with the uplift!”

Plus ça change and all that, writes Bill Kauffman in his review of A Saturnalia of Bunk: Selections from the Free Lance, 1911–1915, a collection of H.L. Mencken writings.

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