Freedom of Speech and H.L. Mencken

The Right to be Wrong

Kathleen Spaltro

(c) Copyright (2017).  All Rights Reserved.

Gore Vidal, like his friend-enemy Christopher Hitchens, was a poet of contempt. So was their great predecessor, the newspaper columnist and magazine editor H.L. Mencken. Declaring "I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud,” Mencken championed freedom and exposed fraud with gusto and happy venom. The waterfall of Mencken's amazingly gorgeous, unbelievably vivid prose cascades over the sputtering reader. Because he attacked everybody and everything, I wonder how Mencken escaped being strung from a streetlamp.

Despite actual threats against his life, Mencken persisted in scorning what he named the Boobus americancus (yes, you and me). He declined to assent to the prevailing belief in democracy, terming it  "the worship of Jackals by Jackasses." If the governed are of poor quality, those who seek to govern are even worse: "A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground." Mencken advocated not being taken in by either prevailing orthodoxies or aspiring reformers: "The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable."

Did Mencken's lifelong, bone-deep cynicism about his fellow citizens and their rulers cause him to despair? Far from despairing, Mencken feasted on what he saw as their inherent absurdity: "here, more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows."

The Uses of Cynicism

Certainly, Mencken's deep cynicism controlled his perceptions and judgments. He believed in freedom but not in people, in reason but not in "a geyser of pishposh." Judging the inaugural address delivered by President Warren G. Harding, Mencken crowed, "he writes the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." Contemptuous of Harding, Mencken wrote not much more kindly of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. An admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, I nevertheless read with great interest and amusement Mencken's evisceration of TR in an "autopsy." He slightly preferred TR to Wilson, whom he deemed a charlatan and a cad. He preferred FDR to no one.

Why do I read these heresies? While I very often disagree with Mencken's assessments and assumptions, the bracing astringency of his prose forces me to think, to defend what I believe with better reasons, or even to change my mind. The resident cynic of the United States, our self-appointed and unofficial Scourgeon General,  Mencken served as our national scold. Although reading him feels like falling into a briar patch, he provides a useful antidote to our prevalent mental, moral, intellectual, and ideological flabbiness. After emerging from the sauna of his prose, his reader is then whipped with birches. Reading Mencken is good for the health of our brains.

Insulting? Certainly. Entertaining? Immensely. Useful? I believe so, especially given our proclivities toward passionate agreements with those who already agree with us and uncivil exchanges with those who dare to disagree. Although he asserted that few of us are capable of thinking, Mencken upheld freedom of thought and speech. I myself have felt sadly disturbed by how many Americans do not seem to appreciate the principle of freedom of speech.

Free to Disagree

I find it perplexing that so many people apparently restrict freedom of speech to those with whom they already agree. Respecting freedom of speech has absolutely nothing to do with agreeing with others' views. People have the right to be wrong. (Speech that evolves into overt actions, such as violence, is a different matter.) Too many of us, both left and right, fail to see that others have the right to voice their opinions, however "incorrect" these opinions may seem to us. Freedom of speech is an uncomfortable liberty. But it means nothing to be for freedom of speech or belief unless you defend the freedom of people whose beliefs and speech you deplore.

Protest by all means. Argue, certainly. But preventing a person with whom you disagree from speaking crosses a line. Inevitably, others will cross that line by keeping you from speaking your mind. Nothing protects your own freedom of speech unless that protection also extends to those with whom you disagree.

Moreover, there is no need for freedom of speech at all unless people disagree. The very basis for insisting on people's freedom to speak their minds consists of the reality of pervasive human disagreement. If people agreed, freedom of speech would be unnecessary.

first appeared in The Woodstock Independent