'The Noble Phrase-Maker of the Schoolbooks'

Sometimes we read H.L. Mencken for his crankiness and the unapologetic glee he takes in eviscerating some fool feckless enough to make himself conspicuous. So long as we agree with his judgment, we root for Mencken’s demolition jobs. Here he is in 1921 on “Dr. Harding” – that is, Warren Gamaliel Harding, our twenty-ninth president:

 

“Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English I have even encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”

 

One is pleased by the still-useful, one-size-fits-all applicability of Mencken’s presidential verdict. With a handful of exceptions, little has changed in a century. Eight years later, Mencken reviewed a book about an earlier president, Meet General Grant by W. E. Woodward, and much of his assault on the hero of Appomattox feels cheap and rooted in wrongheaded myths and folklore:

 

“He was not, in point of fact, a man of any great competence, even as a soldier. All the major strategy of the war, including the final advance on Richmond, was planned by other men, notably Sherman. He was a ham as a tactician, and habitually wasted his men.”

 

Grant was no backwoods, drunken lout. He was not a gifted politician, as his presidency (1869-77) proved, but he was among the most adept of our generals and writers. Mencken’s attack on Grant sounds petty and personal, on occasion almost hysterical. He utterly misreads Grant’s achievements as a writer:

 

“The military automaton of the Memoirs and the noble phrase-maker of the schoolbooks disappears, and there emerges a living and breathing man, simple-minded, more than a little bewildered, and infinitely pathetic.”

 

Grant’s Personal Memoirs is one of the pinnacles of American literature, a model of prose clarity. In Chapter LXVIII, near the conclusion, Grant writes a memorably prophetic passage. On April 14, Lincoln invites Grant and his wife to accompany them to the theater that evening. Grant replies that they would like to do so but he is occupied with work and anxious to see his children. He learns of Lincoln’s assassination in Philadelphia and hears (falsely) that William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, had also been murdered:

 

“It would be impossible for me to describe the feeling that overcame me at the news of these assassinations, more especially the assassination of the President. I knew his goodness of heart, his generosity, his yielding disposition, his desire to have everybody happy, and above all his desire to see all the people of the United States enter again upon the full privileges of citizenship with equality among all.”

 

Grant reacts as a man and a citizen, not an avenging soldier. He thinks of the impact the murder may have on the country and its future:

 

“I knew also the feeling that Mr. [Andrew] Johnson had expressed in speeches and conversation against the Southern people, and I feared that his course towards them would be such as to repel, and make them unwilling citizens; and if they became such they would remain so for a long while. I felt that reconstruction had been set back, no telling how far.”

 

And yet, Mencken blames “the worst horrors of Reconstruction” on Grant.