"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage,
concludes that it will also make better soup."

-H.L. Mencken

"Eucational" toys in your grandparent’s day might have consisted of the Erector Set, microscope, or ant farm. There was also the “toy press.” The small printing outfit had a self-inking letterpress press, fonts of type, composing stick, and some ink and paper. Many a journalist and printer started careers on the providential gift of a toy press.

H.L. Mencken described in his autobiography the contents of his small printing kit and added, “These details, which I recover from the receipted bill in my father’s file, are of no conceivable interest to anyone else on earth, but to me they are of a degree of concern bordering upon the supercolossal, for that press determined the whole course of my future life.”

Mencken printed mostly small cards. Among them were a proud father’s business cards. The publishing bug bit and the young boy with the toy press was to become the most prominent and controversial journalist of the first half of the twentieth century. No one since Webster had a better command of the American language. And no one caused more controversy.

Henry Louis Mencken was born in 1880 and started his adult newspaper career in 1899. He became known for his wit and later for his caustic view of life. He was a libertarian and was far from politically correct before either term became commonly used. Mencken had a low view of social reformers. Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal was his frequent target. His consistent attacks were aimed at what one biographer has called “the insatiable American appetite for nonsense and gaudy sham.” He called it “booboisie.”

Mencken also had his prejudices. Organized religion, American Southerners, and most ethnic minorities, were also trampled in his writing. He took issue more with the groups’ actions rather than simply disliking them. He attacked and belittled so much and made so many enemies that perhaps it is understandable why he was also a foe of press censorship.

Mencken ridiculed much, but he also made great contributions. In 1919, he published a large book of examples of American expressions and idioms called “The American Language.” He wrote and published thirty other books and his literary reviews boosted interest in American literature. His style was a progressive break with the past and old ways of thinking.

In spite of his celebrated contributions of journalism, an off-the-cuff hoax unintentionally underscored his scorn for the public’s ability to fall for a scam or a quack. In 1917, he wrote an article for the New Your Evening Mail entitled “A Neglected Anniversary.” It was presented as a historical article about the first American bathtub, which was allegedly installed in the White House by President Millard Fillmore. He told a tall tale of how it had faced medical, legal, and public opposition.

The column was a work of satire. Mencken made the entire story up! He said, “This article was a tissue of somewhat heavy absurdities, all of them deliberate and most of them obvious.” He excused himself by saying; “My motive was simply to have some harmless fun in war days. It never occurred to me that it would be taken seriously.”

But it was! This article was quoted and footnoted as the authentic evidence of American lavatory history. Mencken said “Soon I began to encounter my preposterous ‘facts’ in the writing of other men . . . Quacks collared them for use as evidence of the stupidity of medical men. Medical men cited them as proof of the progress of public hygiene. They got into learned journals and the transactions of learned societies. They were alluded to on the floor of Congress. The editorial writers of the land, borrowing them in toto and without mentioning my begetting of them, began to labor them in their dull indignant way. They crossed the dreadful wastes of the North Atlantic and were discussed horribly by English up-lifters and German professors. Finally they go into the standard works of reference and began to be taught to the young.”

Curtis D. MacDougall gave a chronology of the bathtub hoax in his book Hoaxes. The article was first published in 1917. By 1926 Mencken had already confessed the hoax. The Boston Herald published the confession and then reported the article as fact a month later. Mencken continued to say it was a prank. Serious publications begin to quote the article as fact. One headline read “Bathtub Once Forbidden by Law in America.” Others quoted Mencken’s made up myth that the clergy “preached that such luxury meant nothing less than degeneracy.” It was reported that Boston had a law against taking a bath without medical advice. President Truman discussed the bathtub’s “history” on tours of the White House. Hundreds of versions of the story still circulate, all of which are oblivious to the tongue-in-cheek of the original author.

Mencken’s style was caustic and humorous. Some didn’t appreciate his wit during the Great Depression, and what he called sham was another’s religion or politics. Even though he made serious contributions to American language and literature, he might be best remembered for his made-up history of the American bathtub. H.L. Mencken died in 1956.


Mencken’s Creed

• I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind – that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
  
  
• I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
  
  
• I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty . . .
  
  
• I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
  
  
• I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech . . .
  
  
• I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
  
  
• I believe in the reality of progress.
  
  
• I - But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie, I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant.