Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work: A Memoir.

• Author: Fischer, Raymond L.

edited by Fred Hobson, Vincent Fitzpatrick, and Bradford Jacobs/The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp. 37B, $34.95

Reviewed by RAYMOND L. FISCHER Associate Mass Media Editor, USA Today, and Professor of Communication, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks

Henry Louis Mencken wrote 30 books and contributed to 20 others; with George Jean Nathan, he edited the monthly Smart Set from 1914 to 1923; and, in 1924, he helped establish the American Mercury, which he managed until 1933. John Owens, the Baltimore Sunpapers editor-in-chief, called Mencken "the most brilliant man engaged in journalism in America." Although he wrote for the New York Evening Mail, Chicago Tribune, and New York American, his work for the Baltimore Sunpapers and especially the Evening Sun gave him his greatest renown.

Mencken insisted that the Sunpapers must provide lively and increasing opposition to the incumbent political party. He never wrote in praise of a sitting president, maintaining that the business of a journalist was to stand in permanent opposition. Mencken considered all public officials to be frauds and not to be taken seriously, labeling them "snake charmers," "boozers," and fools.

Conditioned by his family and his German-American Baltimore childhood, Mencken was pro-German during both World War I and 11. During a 1922 trip to Austria and Germany, his friends convinced him that the communist revolution in Bavaria was being carried out "mainly by Jews" with great savagery. Mencken wrote that "every intelligent man looks for a catastrophy, and if it comes there will be a colossal massacre of Jews." In giving the "German view" after a 1938 trip, he commented that the Jews were "digging their own graves." All of this does little to clarify the most enigmatic issue during his lifetime his supposed anti-Semitism.

Mencken's views on race also create an enigma. Although he stereotyped blacks and used degrading names and...