Spring 1989

Ambivalent Victorian: H. L. Mencken

by T. J. Jackson Lears

LECTIONS Victorian: During the 1920s, H. L. Mencken was the voice of the educated and sophisticated throughout America. His criticism of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, his characterization of Main Street Americans as the "booboisie" and of Puritans as people haunted by the "fear that someone, somewhere may be happym-all this made Mencken a hero to a generation that included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Walter Lipp- mann. But during the 1930s, when he directed his anti-establishment f...

Victorian:

During the 1920s, H. L. Mencken was the voice of the educated and sophisticated throughout America. His criticism of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, his characterization of Main Street Americans as the "booboisie" and of Puritans as people haunted by the "fear that someone, somewhere may be happym-all this made Mencken a hero to a generation that included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Walter Lipp- mann. But during the 1930s, when he directed his anti-establishment ferocity at Franklin D. Roosevelt, social welfare, and the New Deal ("a milk cow with 25 million teats"), Mencken found himself rejected as a literary anachronism. Yet a half-century later a "Mencken revival" indi- cates that many Americans, starting early in the Reagan years, have found a new sympathy with the man. Here, T. J. Jackson Lears explores the contradictions that made Mencken (1880-1956) first the most influ- ential, then, for a time, the most forgotten critic in America.

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