I recall, upon moving to Baltimore in 1980, that H.L. Mencken was a man that would be occasionally quotes in the news paper on the opinion/editorial page and even on local TV news. Then came the release, in the late 1980s, of his private journals, in which he was critical of blacks and Jews in what was essentially merely reflections of his own inner mind. Henceforth H.L Mencken has been reviled in his native town, Baltimore’s very best man of letters consigned to oblivion for thinking that which he kept from the world. Based on my reading of Mencken, I think he would have preferred it that way, what, with America’s love affair with the hideous more and more apparent and ever more drearily on display in Baltimore, I assume his ghost is relieved.

In this brief introduction to Mencken’s work on Nietzsche, career academic Dennis Sweet puts his head on the chopping block by reminding the reader, that while treasured by middle-class white America, Mencken hated middle-class white America, that while remembered as a racist, Mencken did more to encourage and facilitate African America writers in the early 20th Century than any other human in history, though reviled as an Anti-Semite, he actually—as a second generation German American—facilitated the escape of some Jews from Nazi Germany, that, while a raging misogynist, he was an advocate of women in literature and, as an editor, got some ladies published.

Sweet ranks Mencken highly as a historian of Philosophy and duly notes his strengths as a writer, reminding us the he was a very young man, still in his twenties, when he wrote a book that has been described as “doing Nietzsche better than Nietzsche.”

Mister Sweet on Mencken:

“…Mencken was the enemy of any sort of ‘group-think.’ He was always the champion of individualism and individual accomplishments; he disdained those who found their identities and their purposes in groups and group ideals…With regard to the average American, the group Mencken referred to as the ‘booboisie,’ or the ‘boobus americanus,’ he observed that, ‘no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Middle Class.'"

I normally ignore introductory essays of classic authors. But in this case, I am glad that a longer wait than normal for my appointment compelled me to read Dennis Sweet’s introduction to one of the few decent people to ever rise from the mire of this “once great medieval city” on the Chesapeake.