H.L. Mencken Against the Journalists

Can we please stop calling journalists brilliant? It's a cultural grade inflation that has become epidemic and needs to stop.

Rachel Maddow, a hectoring ideologue, goes on David Letterman and is called "the smartest person in the world." Maureen Dowd pens some imbecilic singsongy column, and Howard Kurtz expressed disappointment that someone of her "intelligence" would do such a thing. To Chris Matthews, anyone who diagnoses the craziness of the conservatives is "just a brilliant, brilliant person." At this rate Ed Shultz will win the Nobel Prize for literature next year.

One of my prized possession is the Library of America's two-volume collection of H.L. Mencken's Prejudices. Prejudices were a series of essay collections that Mencken, one of the greatest journalists of the 20th century, published between 1919 and 1927. Here are some of the topics Mencken covered: The American Magazine; The Genealogy of Etiquette; Art and Sex; Edgar Allen Poe; FDR; Broadway; Opera; the Nature of Love; Marx; The Life of Man; Education; The Nature of Liberty. And that's just the first volume. I cannot name one journalist or pundit today who could hold forth on all of those topics with any kind of perspicacity.

One of the best essays in the Mencken collection is "Journalism in America." In 1924, as Mencken notes, journalism was becoming more and more popular and more and more professional. It wasn't considered a hobby for the aimless and artistic, and advertisers, cowed by growing circulations, were increasingly reluctant to try and dictate coverage. It was a fat time for newspapers. Thus, the journalist began to think of himself not as an artist or intellectual (i.e., Mark Twain) but as a professional man.

Mencken sums up the transition and the journalist's new view of himself: "Once [the journalist] thought of himself, whenever he thought at all, as what Beethoven called a free artist - a gay adventurer careening down charming highways of the world, the gutter ahead of him but ecstasy in his heart. Now he thinks of himself as a fellow of weight and responsibility, a beginning publicist and public man, sworn to the service of the born and the unborn, heavy with duties to the Republic and his profession."

This was before the age of blogging, which has made the problem worse. We now have journalists who are not artists and know very little, yet who pass themselves off as intellectuals. Tom Brokaw has achieved an elder statesman status, yet he is not wise, and his books are not very literate. Dan Rather can barely write. Most conservative bloggers can write about nothing but politics, and many do that badly. This has to do both with illiteracy and ageism; many right-wing sites hire pretty blonde girls who are 20 years old and and have no idea what Watergate was, much less who Mencken was.

Mencken, born in 1880, was in his forties when he started writing Prejudices. His work influenced an entire generation of artists, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said "Mencken has done more for the national letters than any man alive." (These days it's the young who are dictating news and opinion to the old.)

When I was growing up in Washington I had the great fortune to have met, on several occasions, a man named Luis Marden. At this point I'm supposed to explain who Luis Marden was and what he did, but that is not easy. Marden was an explorer, pioneer photographer, writer, navigator, artist, explorer and intellectual. He worked at National Geographic for most of his life, which spanned most of the 20th century.

Marden was friends with my father, who was an editor at the magazine. On the occasions when Marden was at our house, we thought of him not as a scientist or explorer or writer or photographer, but as a man with whom we could speak with about any topic, from baseball to dolphins to revolutions. Can you say the same thing about Ana Marie Cox?

Of course not. And yet, Cox still appears on television regularly, honored as an expert of some kind about something when all she is is a childish ideologue and a hack.

So let's just put an end to it. Call them analysts. Call them pundits. But to coo over people like Frank Rich and Monica Crowley as brilliant intellectuals is to denude the term of meaning.