TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

H.L. Mencken as a blogger—or nonblogger: Take your pick (and enjoy the free e-book)

By David Rothman

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), for our reader overseas, was often regarded as America’s nearest equivalent to George Bernard Shaw—at least as a knocker of the establishment and pious hypocrites.

He was a newspaperman, literary critic, magazine editor, you name it, and in Mencken: The American Iconoclast, biographer Marion Elizabeth Rogers captures him brilliantly in clear and vivid prose. The well-chosen photos, whether of Mencken at his typewriter or of the Scopes Monkey Trial, just add to my enjoyment of the book.

You can download the Oxford University Press book for free from Wowio; just remember—use Mobipocket Desktop’s translator from Adobe, rather than viewing it immediately in PDF, or the Mobi converter won’t work. Mobi does a great job with this book, photos and all, and ideally in the future Wowio will be able to point readers to Mobi, Adobe Digital Editions (IDPF format mode), dotReader or another alternative to PDF, a better format for printing out books than reading them. If you must use PDF for displaying the Mencken book, then consider reading it in Digital Editions (just reviewed).

A blogger in spirit—and there’s even a slight e-book connection

So here’s the question of the day. Would Mencken, oft called The Sage of Baltimore, have made a good blogger, were he alive now? I say yes. He thrived on controversy, was a civil libertarian to the max, and was reported to the U.S. Justice Department for less-than-worshipful words about George Washington. Along the way, he even had a very, very indirect connection to what became the e-book scene many years later. David Moynihan named his Blackmask site (same one embroiled in copyright disputes) after a detective magazine that Mencken cofounded.

Well in touch with the great literary talents and trends of his time, Mencken helped discover F. Scott Fitzgerald, and even ran essays from hobos and bricklayers (among other contributors) in another magazine of his, The Smart Set. Although he lived a conservative life, he was the ultimate anti-credentialist and rabble-rouser, at least within the intelligentsia. Oh, how we could use him today to take on George Bush and the like on Iraq and evolution.

Mencken was even an Arab-American of the World War I years—given his German roots and the D.C.-driven prejudices that led to sauerkraut being called Liberty Cabbage. Simply put, he had reasons, good and bad, to be POed at the establishment, and in the true spirit of the blogosphere, he never backed off.

Not everyone would agree with me on Mencken and the blogger question. Marion Rodgers herself writes in the Oxford University Press blog:

“I question whether Mencken would have been a blogger. Yes, like Gore Vidal, he would have embraced the fierce and refreshing independence of bloggers. He would have congratulated those few that get a scoop ahead of the mainstream press, now in such decay. Mencken celebrated the independent, family newspapers, like his old paper, the Baltimore Sun; he would have felt bitter that so many are now owned by conglomerates. Nonetheless, Mencken always considered himself a newspaperman. Very few bloggers could be called journalists.”

As much as I admire her book, I’d disagree with her a little. Some blogs are no more than PR efforts or exercises in kneejerk activism, but a growing number of others strive to offer the same mix of usefulness and fairness that a good newspaper does (even if the operative word here is “fairness” rather than “objectivity”).

The best blogs can approach the best newspaper columns in quality—in fact, surpass them on occasion. Just look at Josh Marshall’s efforts on stories such as the CIA leak scandal, where he scooped the MSM. My hunch is that Mencken would have used blogging to promote his books and magazines and maybe even as an end in itself. Perhaps the Sun Papers, for which he worked in Baltimore, would have run a Mencken blog, with the Sage enjoying the outrage that he stirred up on the comments pages. Talk about near-instant gratification!

Journalism authority: He’d have admired bloggers

On my side about Mencken—or at least about a friendly attitude toward bloggers, whether or not he actually would have been one—is journalism authority Donald Ritchie. “Yes,” he replies to her in the Oxford Press blog, “as king of the print generation H.L. Mencken would surely have shuddered over the ephemeral nature of cyberspace, but I can’t help thinking that he would have admired the bloggers’ linguistic creativity and their penchant for poking holes in the establishment’s pretensions.”

Of course, if some librarians and hangers-on have their way, the better aspects of cyberspace won’t be so ephemeral. But back to Mencken. If, for your blogging, you’re looking for inspiration beyond the latest RSS feeds, then I’d urge you to download the Mencken biography or buy or borrow the p-book.

Housekeeping: The IDPF-standards post will be along shortly.