H.L. Mencken: The Sage of Baltimore Who Was Also a Bigot

Henry Louis Mencken was born in this house on Hollins Street in eighteen eighty and lived here, with a brief period away during his marriage, until his death in nineteen fifty-six. He rarely needed to leave. From this address he produced thirty years of journalism that made him the most read and most argued-over American cultural critic of the first half of the twentieth century.

He invented the term "Bible Belt." He covered the nineteen twenty-five Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee with a ferocity that shaped how educated Americans understood the creationism debate for a generation. He wrote "The American Language," a study of how English transformed in the United States, that remains a reference work more than a century after its first publication. He founded the American Mercury magazine, which for a decade in the nineteen twenties was the place American intellectuals went to find out what they were supposed to think about everything.

He was also, in private, an antisemite and a white supremacist. The evidence is in his own diaries. Mencken had arranged that his personal diaries be held at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, sealed for twenty-five years after his death. When they were opened and published in nineteen eighty-nine, they contained passages of undisguised bigotry that contradicted the cosmopolitan critic his public work had seemed to represent. His defenders noted that the views were held privately; his critics noted that holding them privately did not make them less real.

The house on Hollins Street preserves both Menckens intact, the one who shaped American intellectual life for half a century and the one whose private diaries said things that the public Mencken would never have published under his name. That is, by his own standard of unflinching honesty about human nature, the only honest way to keep it.