H. L. Mencken: the Greatest American Critic of the Great War:

The Great War was in some respects the most important event of Henry Mencken's early career. Of German ancestry and a distant relative of the late Otto von Bismarck, he enthusiastically opposed the war.  And—at least until 1917—openly rooted for the Kaiser's victory and a British defeat.  When America joined the hostilities he assumed the role of spokesman for the reaction against the worst elements of the war; it provided new ammunition for his endless battle against the abuses of the democratic system and the genus of men which Mencken had labeled Boobus Americanus.

Such efforts were not universally popular. The editor of Baltimore's Evening Sun was an Anglophile and a Wilson supporter, and Mencken's column became increasingly obnoxious to him, especially when Mencken led the opposition to Woodrow Wilson's renomination and re-election in 1916. Having tried unsuccessfully to turn Mencken's attention to other matters, his editors sent him to Germany as a war correspondent in 1917, announcing "Mencken is not neutral. He is pro-German."

When Mencken returned to Baltimore in 1917, the United States declared war, and Mencken found himself the target of the super patriots. Mencken was placed under surveillance by the Department of Justice. His mail was opened. Despite this opposition he remained true to himself throughout the war's remainder, although he ceased advocating a German victory. Underlying his attitudes about the war was Mencken's skepticism—he did not believe in equality between anyone and he did not believe in democracy at all. In 1920 he defined democracy as “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” In the decade that followed World War I, H.L. Mencken became the single most influential commentator on the American scene.  Here are some of his pronouncements about the war, both during and looking back.

Henry Louis Mencken, After the War

1914 – Pro-Germanism

"Arrogance is a quality that is noticeable in all successful and efficient people. . . The German attuitude towards the world is simple. He tells the world to go to the devil. This German arrogance, is an affront to Anglo Saxon pride. . . Is the Teuton afoot for new conquests, a new tearing down, a new building up, a new  transvaluation of all values? ... [L]et us not be alarmed by his possible triumph. What did Rome ever produce to match the Fifth Symphony?”  

Baltimore Sun, 28 Sep 1914

Early British Propaganda

"When [the American] recalls the amazing feats of the English war propagandists between 1914 and 1917—and their even more amazing confessions of method since--he is apt to ask himself quite gravely if he belongs to a free nation or to a crown colony.The thing was done openly, shamelessly, contemptuously, cynically, and yet it was a gigantic success. "

Prejudices: Third Series, 1922 

"In brief, the doctrine was clearly laid down, not once but a thousand times, that it was an offense against the United States for any German, however calmly, however reasonably, to speak up for Germany. It was perfectly allowable for a horde of English special pleaders—e.g., H. G. Wells, Harold Begbie, Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett, the Chestertons, Thomas Hardy, Winston Churchill—to fill the papers with the most atrocious attacks upon the Germans, but it was ipso facto an unfriendly and even criminal act for a German or a German sympathizer to bring forward anything in rebuttal.” 

Baltimore Evening Sun, 16 February 1915

The Lusitania

"RMS Lusitania was a ship carrying munitions of war; the whole world was given fair warning that she would be sunk at sight; the Americans who sailed upon her knew that they were taking their lives in their own hands; the English Navy failed to offer her the slightest protection; her captain steered her deliberately into waters in which two other large British ships had been sunk the day before.” 

Baltimore Evening Sun, 10 May 1915

The Execution of Edith Cavell

"The pro-English newspapers. . . wring tears from the boobs, and Dr. Wilson is dutifully protesting to Germany. But what if the Germans, in their answer, should refer ironically to the case of Mrs. Surratt? Or to the 20,000 Boer women and children done to death in English concentration camps in South Africa? ... The United States, with its hypocritical gabbling about “humanity,” stands before the world as the international Pecksniff and Chadband.”

Baltimore Evening Sun 23 Oct 1915

[Eleven days after the execution of Nurse Cavell, on Ocrober 23, his last "Free Lance" column appeared in the Sun. Mencken stated that it was his own decision to go on to other things, but others believed the column had been taken away from him.]

Battling the Hated Professoriat

“I accumulated,” wrote Mencken, “in those great days, for the instruction and horror of posterity, a very large collection of academic arguments, expositions and pronunciamentos; it fills a trunk, and got me heavily into debt to three clipping-bureaus. Its contents range from solemn hymns of hate in the learned (and even the theological) reviews and such official donkeyisms as the formal ratification of the so-called Sisson documents [famous forgeries] down to childish harangues to student-bodies, public demands that the study of the enemy language and literature be prohibited by law, violent denunciations of  all enemy science as negligible and fraudulent, vitriolic attacks upon enemy magnificos, and elaborate proofs that the American Revolution was the result of a foul plot hatched in the Wilhelmstrasse of the time, to the wanton injury of two loving bands of brothers.”

Prejudices: Second Series, 1921 

"The agitators against Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Wagner, Richard Strauss, [and] all the rest of the cacophonous Huns ... And the pathologists who denounced Johannes Müller as a fraud, Karl Ludwig as an imbecile, and Ehrlich as a thief? And the patriotic chemists who discovered arsenic in dill pickles, ground glass in  pumpernickel, bichloride tablets in Bismarck herring, pathogenic organisms in aniline dyes? ... And the Columbia, Yale and Princeton professors? ... [and] university presidents, such as Nicholas Murray Butler [1862-1947, president of Columbia University].”

Prejudices: Third Series, 1922

 

On America's Wartime Excesses

“There must be at least 100,000 detectives in the United States."

Letter, July 1918

"The posse of 'two thousand American Historians' assembled by Mr. Creel [in his Committee for Public Information] to instruct the plain people in the new theory of American history, whereby the Revolution was represented as a lamentable row in an otherwise happy family, deliberately instigated by German intrigue."

The American Credo, 1921

Looking Back at America's World War

"The history of the American share in the World War is simply a record of conflicting fears, more than once amounting to frenzies. The mob, at the start of the uproar, showed a classical reaction: it was eager only to keep out of danger. The most popular song, in the United States, in 1915, was “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.” In 1916, on his fraudulent promise to preserve that boy from harm, Wilson was reëlected. There then followed some difficult manœuvres—but perhaps not so difficult, after all, to skilful demagogues. The problem was to substitute a new and worse fear for the one that prevailed—a new fear so powerful that it would reconcile the mob to the thought of entering the war. The business was undertaken resolutely on the morning after election day. Thereafter, for three months, every official agency lent a hand. No ship went down to a submarine’s torpedo anywhere on the seven seas that the State Department did not report that American citizens—nay, American infants in their mothers’ arms—were aboard. Diplomatic  note followed diplomatic note, each new one surpassing all its predecessors in moral indignation. The Department of Justice ascribed all fires, floods and industrial accidents to German agents. The newspapers were filled with dreadful surmises, many of them officially inspired, about the probable effects upon the United States of the prospective German victory. It was obvious to everyone, even to the mob, that a victorious Germany would unquestionably demand an accounting for the United States’ gross violations of neutrality. Thus a choice of fears was set up. The first was a fear of a Germany heavily beset, but making alarming progress against her foes. The second was a fear of a Germany delivered from them, and thirsting for revenge on a false and venal friend. The second fear soon engulfed the first. By the time February came the mob was reconciled to entering the war—reconciled, but surely not eager.

"There remained the problem of converting reluctant acquiescence into enthusiasm. It was solved, as always, by manufacturing new fears. The history of the process remains to be written by competent hands: it will be a contribution to the literature of mob psychology of the highest importance. But the main outlines are familiar enough. The whole power of the government was concentrated upon throwing the plain people into a panic. All sense was heaved overboard, and there ensued a chase of bugaboos on a truly epic scale. Nothing like it had ever been seen in the world before, for no democratic state as populous as the United States had ever gone to war before. I pass over the details, and pause only to recall the fact that the American people, by the end of 1917, were in such terror that they lived in what was substantially a state of siege, though the foe was 3000 miles away and obviously unable to do them any damage. It was only the draft, I believe, that gave them sufficient courage to attempt actual hostilities. That ingenious device, by relieving the overwhelming majority of them of any obligation to take up arms, made them bold. Before it was adopted they were heavily in favour of contributing only munitions and money to the cause of democracy, with perhaps a few divisions of Regulars added for the moral effect. But once it became apparent that a given individual, John  Doe, would not have to serve, he, John Doe, developed an altruistic eagerness for a frontal attack in force. For every Richard Roe in the conscript camps there were a dozen John Does thus safely at home, with wages high and the show growing enjoyable. So an heroic mood came upon the people, and their fear was concealed by a truculent front. But not from students of mob psychology."

Notes on Democracy, 1926

Mencken's  Credo

“I am an extreme libertarian, and believe in absolute free speech, especially for anarchists, Socialists and other such fools…. I am against jailing men for their opinions, or, for that matter, for anything else"

Letter, summer 1920

Sources: "Some Notes on Mencken in the First World War".  Menckeniana, Summer 1976 and Fall 2016; Letters of H.L. Mencken; Mencken's "Free Lance" Columns in the Baltimore Evening Sun and his "Prejudices" Series of Essays.