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Chapter 1    
 
THE FATHERS
 
What a small space in time a family usually marks off! The American Washingtons, scarcely heard of in the world before the 1760’s, vanished before the end of their first century.… Jefferson’s progeny are heard of no more, and neither are those of Lincoln, Sherman and Roosevelt I.… The Menckenii, on their humbler level, have lasted a bit longer, but their end is in sight.… Sic transit!
—H. L. Mencken, “Autobiographical Notes, 1941–
 
This is the story of a family as well as the story of an individual. H. L. Mencken himself always framed his life in such a way, rarely escaping the knowledge that he was part of, indeed the end of, a continuum. Nearly as important, the story of the Menckens in America, by turns proud and undistinguished, exceptional and representative, casts light on a family that, despite the prominence of one of its members, never quite took hold in America. “People of my blood … have been in the country for more than a century,” Mencken wrote in his sixties, “but I still feel and think of myself as a stranger.” “I have lived in the United States all my life without becoming, in any deep sense, an American.” “I often regret,” he wrote a distant German cousin in 1932, “that my grandfather did not stay in Saxony.”
 
These were only occasional musings. At other times, as we shall see, H. L. Mencken felt himself very much an American. But his sentiments show the degree of his alienation from twentieth-century America (at the same time as he was deeply immersed in it), as well as his ties to a Germany, often as much mythic as historical, to which he sometimes returned in his imagination. Particularly in his later years, he reflected often upon place and destiny, change and loss—perhaps the fate of a man who seized fame in his thirties, gained international celebrity in his forties, and was largely dismissed in his fifties. The story of the Menckens in America is a story of exactly one hundred years; at the time of Henry Mencken’s cruel stroke in 1948, the family had been in the United States exactly that long. Other branches of Mencken’s family had arrived somewhat earlier, but his father’s family, as we shall see, was the branch that mattered most, and his grandfather Mencken had landed in Baltimore a century to the month before this most famous Mencken was silenced forever and the Mencken family as force and influence in American society ceased to exist.
 
That was the kind of historical coincidence, the kind of symmetry, that H. L. Mencken, if he had possessed the wit to appreciate it fully after 1948, would have relished. He had earlier pondered such coincidences and ironies in abundance, as well as detected a certain drama in the story of the Mencken family. In his late fifties and his sixties, he turned time and again to the past, collecting boxes of materials about the Menckens, planning to write a history of the family and its long line of gelehrten. In a land in which nearly all of those who claimed distinguished Old World origins were frauds, Mencken believed he was the real thing. Thus it was chiefly the European phase of the family on which he planned to focus. He would say little in autobiographical notes, diaries, and letters about his other forebears, the Abhaus, the Gegners, and the McLellands. Certainly the materials for the Menckens were more abundant than for the others, but that was only part of it. The Menckens were also the only branch of distinction. Besides, H. L. Mencken believed in patriarchy: it was the world of the fathers that mattered most.
 
Finally, he saw a certain poignancy in the rise and decline of the Menckens, for, taking the long view, it was during the decline of the family that he himself had been born. He was thus one of that notable company of American writers born in the nineteenth century—Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville among them—who were products of families whose proudest days lay in the past. If Mencken did not at first set out precisely to revive the family name, at least, once he had revived it, he took no small measure of pride in his accomplishment. The pride lay not only in his measuring up to the earlier Menckens but also (since his own success was achieved before his keen interest in family set in) in their having measured up to him. He was astonished that they resembled him so greatly.
 
We must look, then, at Mencken’s antecedents in some detail, always keeping in mind that it is not only the past but also Mencken’s view of it that is important here. What he wrote about his ancestors tells us as much about his views on politics, history, class, education, religion—and self—as anything he ever wrote on the America of his own time. We learn above all that H. L. Mencken was just as fully a determinist (though a vastly different sort) as Cotton Mather or any other of the Puritans he so despised and ridiculed. Biological determinism—heredity—explained nearly all:
 
How did I get my slant on life? Heredity. My ancestors for three hundred years back were all bad citizens. They weren’t moral—in the conventional sense. They always were against what the rest were for.… I inherited their traits, and I am what I am today … just because … I am a mechanism, the product of heredity.… It was set for me which way I’d jump as I met my environment.… I was prejudiced when I came into the world.
 
Henry Mencken was not, like his beloved Huck Finn, “brung up to wickedness.” He was born to it.
 
Just what sort of “bad citizens” the early Menckens were became evident shortly after they emerged from obscurity about the end of the sixteenth century. The earliest members of the family (then spelled Mencke) had lived without distinction for at least two or three centuries in and around Oldenburg, some thirty miles west of Bremen in what is now northwest Germany. But no member of the family came to true prominence until Eilard Mencke (1614–1657) moved to Prussia, “took to the Protestant pulpit”—as H. L. Mencken later wrote—and became archpresbyter of the cathedral at Marienwerder (now Kwidzyń). It was another of those historical ironies, the later Mencken must have noted, that the first prominent figure to bear his name had been a man of the cloth. Eilard also looms large in family legend as a benefactor of subsequent Menckes and Menckens. The owner of property in Oldenburg, in 1657 he established a university scholarship that would aid numerous members of the family and tempt others, including possible American claimants, as late as H. L. Mencken’s time.
 
It was not to the direct line of Eilard Mencke, however, but to that of his cousin Helmrich that H. L. Mencken belonged. And it was principally in that line, and that of Helmrich’s brother, Johann, that the “bad citizens” lay. Helmrich Mencke was a merchant in Oldenburg, but his son Lüder (1658–1726)—in the first act of a family drama that would be played out again two centuries later—left the family enterprise for the world of books and ideas. Lüder traveled to Leipzig, took his Ph.D. in 1682, and taught law for forty-four years at the University of Leipzig, becoming rector of the university and judge of the Saxon high court as well as the author of a number of books. His son Gottfried Ludwig (1683–1744) also became a professor of law, at Wittenberg. Gottfried’s son and grandson—in the line of descent of the Baltimore Menckens—taught and practiced law as well.
 
The earliest notable ancestors, then, of that most famous twentieth-century adversary of preachers and pedagogues were themselves preachers and pedagogues—and lawyers—although H. L. Mencken might have added that the paths to prominence in other fields were severely limited in those days. If the preachers in the family died out quickly, the pedagogues remained for nearly two centuries, although more so in a line of collateral descent than in H. L. Mencken’s own line. Helmrich’s brother, Johann, was the progenitor of an even more notable branch, one with which, in its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century days, H. L. Mencken identified even more closely than he did with his own. For it was Johann’s son, Otto (1644–1707), even before Lüder Mencke, who (H. L. Mencken later wrote) “broke away from the family business” and “took to the higher learning.” It was he, rather than Lüder Mencke, who began the dynasty of Mencken professors at Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Halle.
 
The most notable figure in this dynasty, “the best of all the Menckens,” was Otto’s son, Johann Burkhard Mencke (1674–1732), a figure about whom Henry Louis Mencken was to write at length and with whom he was to identify most closely. Johann Burkhard, the prodigy of the family, took his A.B. at Leipzig at age eighteen and his Ph.D. when he was barely twenty. He traveled to England and was elected a member of the Royal Society when he was but twenty-four, after which he returned to Leipzig as a full professor of history at age twenty-five and assumed the editorship of the Acta Eruditorum, the first learned journal in Germany, which his father had helped to found in 1682.
 
Thus proceeded the early career of Johann Burkhard Mencke—as chronicled by his spiritual, if collateral, descendant two and a half centuries later. We have no reason to question the accuracy of that account, nor the excitement reported by that descendant when he discovered that Johann Burkhard, like himself, had always thought on a grand scale. Johann Burkhard had conceived in his early twenties “an enormous work upon all the ancient historical manuscripts then known in all languages” and had produced a great number of books, including in his later years a magnum opus in three volumes, totaling 6,381 pages. But it was not these volumes that excited Henry Louis Mencken so much as a single volume that Johann Burkhard Mencke had published in 1715, a satire, De Charlataneria Eruditorum (The Charlatanry of the Learned), which was aimed at scholars and pedants. In reading that satire, H. L. Mencken later wrote, he was delighted “to find that a man of my name … had devoted himself so heartily to an enterprise that had engaged me … the tracking down of quacks of all sorts,” quacks who were “still flourishing mightily” in twentieth-century America. When he first encountered the volume, Mencken wrote a friend, “It gave me a great shock. All my stock in trade was there—loud assertions, heavy buffooneries, slashing attacks on the professors. It really was uncanny.”