B Y 1923 H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan were . tired of their connection with the Smart Set and hopeful of something better. For some fifteen years they had written critical articles for that magazine, and during the last half of that term they had been in editorial charge. They had won a wide reputation and an enthusiastic following, especially among the young and skeptical; and Mencken, through his forthright and biting essays collected in a series entitled
1 Titles: The American Mercury. (The New American Mercury, Dec. 1950- Feb. 1951 only.)
First issue: Jan. 1924. Current.
Periodicity: Monthly, 1924-62. 3 vols. yearly, 1924-40 (1-51) ;'2 vols. yearly, 1941-61 (52-93) ; 1 vol. yearly, 1962-current. Monthly, 1962 except for Summer (May, June, July) and Sept.-Oct.; quarterly, 1963-current (Fall, 1965, omitted).
Publishers: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1924-35 (Samuel Knopf, business manager, 1924-32, Lawrence Edmund Spivak, 1933-35); L. E. Spivak, 1935-36; Paul Palmer, 1936-39; L. E. Spivak, 1939-50 (Joseph W. Ferman, bus. man., 1940-50) ; Clendenin J. Ryan, 1950-51; J. Russell Maguire, 1952-60 (Robert C. Hodgson, bus. man., 1953-56; Leslie J. Yarbrough, 1956-60); all New York. Defenders of the Christian Faith, Inc. (Gwynne W. Davidson, chairman; M. L. Flowers, bus. man.), 1960-62; Oklahoma City. The Legion for the Survival of Freedom, Inc. (E. Wiltsie Platzer, chairman, 1963-66; Bruce Holman, chairman, 1966-current), 1963-66. The Legion name is missing from Fall and Winter, 1966, but Holman is still listed as “Chairman of the Board.” (Edwin A. Walker states in the Sept. 1965 issue that he was publisher Dec. 1964—Sept. 1965.) McAllen, Texas, 1963-65; Houston, Texas, 1966; Torrance, Calif., 1966-current.
Editors: Henry Louis Mencken and George Jean Nathan, 1924-25; H. L. Mencken, 1925-33; Henry Hazlitt, 1934; Charles Angoff, 1934-35; Paul Palmer, 1935-39; Eugene Lyons, 1939-44; L. E. Spivak, 1944-50; William Bradford Huie, 1950-53; John A. Clements, 1953-55; J. R. Maguire, 1955-57; William La Varre, 1957-58; Maurine Halliburton, 1958-60; Gerald S. Pope, 1960-62; Marcia C. J. Matthews, 1963; Jason Matthews, 1963-64; Edwin A. Walker (man. ed.), Dec. 1964-65; La Vonne Doden Furr, 1966-current.
Index -.Readers’ Guide to 1961.
References: Anon., “The Importance of Charles Angoff,” Little Review, v. 4, August 1917, pp. 37-48; M. K. Singleton, H. L. Mencken and the American Mercury Adventure (Durham, N.C., 1962) ; Johnny L. Kloefkorn, “A Critical Study of the Work of H. L. Mencken As Literary Editor and Critic of The American Mercury,” Emporia State Research Studies, v. 7, no. 4 (Kansas State Teachers College, 1959) ; Stephen E. Fitzgerald, “The Mencken Myth,” Saturday Review, Dec. 17, 1960, pp. 13-15, 71; Lawrence E. Spivak and Charles Angoff, eds., The American Mercury Reader (Philadelphia, 1944).
3
Prejudices, had become a prophet of modern apostasy. They were ready for a more impressive and dignified forum than that afforded by a magazine with the cheap name and rather sleazy tradition of the Smart Set.
Thus, when Alfred A. Knopf offered to set up a monthly review, giving them a one-third working interest in it as editors, they were quick to accept. Such titles as “The Blue Review,” “The Twentieth Century,” and “The Portfolio” were suggested; that of The American Mercury was adopted when Knopf and Nathan outvoted Mencken. 2
The first number was dated January 1924 and came out early in the preceding month. It made an impressive appearance as a whacking big octavo with 128 double-column Garamond-set pages bound in green covers. Elmer Adler was the designer. It was clearly planned for the more thoughtful reader of a free- thinking sort who had fifty cents to spend on a magazine in these inflationary years. For such a reader the contents of the new review were both intellectually exciting and to the last page entertaining.
And so it caught on. The original print order was for ten thousand copies; and two reprints were called for, bringing the total to 15,500. By the time the second number was in press, Vol. I, No. 1 was selling to collectors for ten dollars. 3 By the end of its first year, the Mercury was printing 55,000 copies, which was pretty good for a magazine whose projectors had counted on a circulation of 20,000. 4 Of this total, more than two-thirds were newsstand sales. Average net paid circulation went on climbing until it reached, in the magazine’s second year, about 75,000. 5
That first ten-dollar number is worth examining, since it set the pace that the magazine followed rather consistently for
2 William Manchester, Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H.L. Mencken (New York, 1951), pp. 148-49. The author is indebted to this work for many facts pertaining to the Mencken editorship of the Mercury, which Mr. Manchester derived from personal communication with his subject.
3 New Republic, v. 37, Feb. 6, 1924, p. 274.
4 Mencken, in American Mercury, v. 30, Dec. 1933, p. 387.
5 See circulation figures month by month, Mercury, v. 6, Dec. 1925, pp. xlii- xliv; also N.W. Ayer & Son's Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals (Philadelphia, 1925-current). Circulation figures given later in this chapter are based chiefly on Ayer.
more than five years. It opens with a “debunking” article by Isaac R. Pennypacker on “The Lincoln Legend,” which emphasizes the prominence of the family from which he sprang on the one hand, and his shortcomings as a military leader on the other. A later article in the number, by Harry Elmer Barnes, “The Drool Method in History,” attacks the historians for their capitulation to school boards and legislatures that forbid any disrespect to established idols and mores. A good little chapter on Stephen Crane by Carl Van Doren, a collection of personal letters to various friends from the late James Huneker, and a literary colloquium between George Moore and Samuel C. Chew (more notable for its novel form and its badinage than for any new ideas) constitute the literary criticism of this initial number. “Santayana at Cambridge,” by the daughter of Hugo Miinsterberg, is more a character sketch than a philosophical dissertation; and Woodbridge Riley’s “The New Thought” is a rather muddled, satirical account of that school and its connection with Christian Science, which is called “Eddyism.” “Aesthete: Model 1924,” by Ernest Boyd, is a satire on editors of the “little magazines.” The two political articles are a satirical sketch of Hiram Johnson by John W. Owens and a factual analysis of “The Communist Hoax” in the United States by James Oneal. Two pieces dealing with military matters are anonymous—one a sober and statistical review of actual disarmament since the adoption of the Anglo-Japanese-American Treaty of 1922; and the other a short essay, “On a Second- Rate War,” in which “the struggle of 1914-1918” is discussed in a summary studded with words like “jumble,” “childish,” “unpreparedness,” and “strategic error.”
The only poems in the number are an undistinguished group by Theodore Dreiser. There are three short stories—Ruth Suckow’s fine genre piece from Iowa entitled “Four Generations,” Leonard Cline’s funny and fanciful satire on “cops” called “Sweeny’s Grail,” and John McClure’s sketch of Cairo street-life, “The Weaver’s Tale.”
Of departments there are six scattered through the book. The first is a four-page “Editorial.” “The Editors,” writes Mencken, “are committed to nothing save this: to keep to common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possi-
6le, to give a civilized entertainment.”'He provides a little advance list of his betes noires in this passage:
The ideal realm imagined by an A. Mitchell Palmer, a King Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan or a Grand Inquisitor of the Anti- Saloon League, with all human curiosity and enterprise brought down to a simple passion for the goose-step, is as idiotically utopian as the ideal of an Alcott, a Marx, or a Bryan. ... It will be an agreeable duty to track down some of the worst nonsense prevailing and to do execution upon it—not indignantly, of course, but nevertheless with a sufficient play of malice to give the business a Christian and philanthropic air . 6
Ah, that is the authentic Mencken! Turn on twenty pages and you come to the second department—one which became, as the months passed, perhaps the most popular feature of the magazine—“Americana.” Herein are gathered bits of this “worst nonsense,” geographically classified. This first batch begins as so many later ones did, with Alabama, wherein it is noted that Birmingham’s Commissioner of Safety W. C. Bloe had ordered the city’s “exclusive clubs” to cease and desist allowing the playing of Sunday golf, billiards, and dominoes; and it ends with the state of Washington, in which Bellingham’s Garden Street Methodist Church had come up with a report, printed in a national publishers’ journal, that “$100 worth of advertising had brought in more than $1,700 in silver plate collections.”
The department called “Clinical Notes” is edited in this number by Mencken and Nathan jointly; later Nathan carried it on alone. Here are short expressions of “prejudices,” opinions, comment on social and artistic matters, mostly heterodox, sometimes calculated to shock, occasionally sophomoric, often commonsense without conventional camouflage. “The more the theologian seeks to prove the acumen and omnipotence of God by His works, the more he is dashed by evidences of divine incompetence and irresolution.” Mencken is displeased by “such dreadful botches as the tonsils, the gall-bladder, the uterus, and the prostate gland.” 7
“The Arts and Sciences” is one of the best of the magazine’s
6 American Mercury, v. 1, Jan. 1924, pp. 27-28.
7 Ibid,., v. 1, Jan. 1924, pp. 75-76.-
departments. In this first number, it dips into “Architecture” with a short piece by C. Grant La Farge about the new city skylines, into “Medicine” with a sensible little article about glands and rejuvenation by L. M. Hussey, and into “Philology” with an admirable essay by George Philip Krapp about acceptability of language usages. Later nearly all categories of human knowledge were tapped in the short pieces in this department—the various sciences, law, theology, economics, pedagogy, the fine arts, poetry, radio, and so on. The other two departments are Nathan’s “The Theater,” with his always incisive and informed commentary on current plays and the affairs and personalities of the playhouse; and “The Library,” with reviews of new books by Mencken and others. In this initial issue, the “others” were James Branch Cabell, Ernest Boyd, and Isaac Goldberg; later Mencken did them all himself, and there was also a “Check List of New Books” including brief notices. Most of these departments were carried over from the old Smart Set, where they had made much of the success of that magazine—“Americana,” Mencken’s reviews and Nathan’s theatrical criticism, and the “Clinical Notes.” These last fortunately lost, in the transition, their former heading “Repetition Generale.”
Readers of this first number of the American Mercury found that all of its articles were short, most of them running from four to seven pages. They also noted that the review was preoccupied with American topics; if they did not, they were reminded in the “Editorial”: “In general The American Mercury will live up to the adjective in its name. It will lay chief stress at all times upon American ideas, American problems, and American personalities because it assumes that nine-tenths of its readers will be Americans and that they will be more interested in their own country than in any other.” 8
Further, readers must have been impressed with the prominence of satire in the magazine—a satire that often ran into iconoclasm and “debunking,” as the term went in those days. Said the New Republic, a severe critic from the first: “ Tcono- clastic’ is a word which one fears will be frequently applied to our Mercury. A better word will have to be invented to describe
8 Ibid., v. 1, Jan. 1924, p. 30.
8 AMERICAN MERCURY
someone who loves to hear the crash of empty bottles quite as much as that of ikons, who often can’t tell the difference between them, and who always uses the same crowbar on both. The resulting noise is so loud as almost to sound like a philosophical system, and many people have been fooled accordingly.” 9
This leaves unanswered the question as to whether the New Republic considered Hiram Johnson, for example, an ikon or an empty bottle; but indisputable ikons in the Mercury’s range were Lincoln and Whitman. The Lincoln article, noted above, presented views which have since had wide acceptance; the one on Whitman, by Ernest Boyd, expressed opinions even then out of date and destined with passing years to seem more and more unperceptive. Boyd saw Whitman as “the first of the literary exhibitionists whose cacophonous incongruities and general echolalia are the distinguishing marks of what is regarded as poetry in aesthetic circles today. . . . With the lapse of time, his false position has reached the last degree of unreality.” 10 According to Assistant Editor Angoff, this article was “the subject of heated controversy in the office,” and “Mencken himself eventually admitted that the author was overstating his case.” 11 A number of other pieces in early numbers of the Mercury, it must be added, treated Whitman and his work more tenderly.
But, ikons or empty bottles, there is no doubt that Mencken had great fun smashing what he considered to be “frauds,” and most of his readers enjoyed the game no less. In the magazine’s fifth anniversary number, he wrote a paragraph that is worth quoting for its catalogue of the objects of Mercurial attack:
In this benign work [of exposing fraudsj it has covered a considerable range, and tried to proceed with a reasonable impartiality. The chiropractors and the Socialists, the Holy Rollers and the homeopaths, the pacifists and the spiritualists have all taken their turns upon its operating table. It has exhibited, mainly in their own words, the dreams and imbecilities of the prophets of high-powered salesmanship, vocational guidance, osteopathy, comstockery, and pedagogy. It has brought to notice, in the chaste, dispassionate
9 New Republic, v. 37, Feb. 6, 1924, p. 274.
10 American Mercury, v. 6, Dec. 1925, pp. 451, 458.
11 New Republic, v. 131, Sept. 13, 1954, p. 19.
manner of the clinic, the hallucinations of Rotary, the Gideons, the D. A. R., the American Legion, the League of American Penwomen, the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals, and a multitude of other such klans and sodalities, many of them highly influential and all of them amusing . 12
But in the same editorial, Mencken points out that his review has done much more than expose “frauds”: “It has given a great deal more space to something quite different, namely, to introducing one kind of American to another.” And he mentions such articles as those of the lumberjack James Stevens, later famous for his “Paul Bunyan” stories; the convict Ernest Booth, whose series about bank-robbing and such were cut short by prison authorities; and the musician Daniel Gregory Mason, who, in his stories of the Chautauqua, poked fun at the yokels whose favor he had once courted on the platform. There were also Jim Tully, who wrote of “hobo” life; George Mil- burn, with his Oklahoma sketches; Mary Austin, who told Indian tales, and so on.
Other favorite topics in Mencken’s Mercury were the American newspaper, often treated with understanding, sometimes with severity; advertising and press-agentry, usually assailed; folk literature, superstitions, and anthropology; the American Negro, his progress and his problems; philology, with emphasis on American usages; American history, particularly unswept corners and picturesque personalities and events; and literary figures such as Poe, Whitman, and Melville.
George S. Schuyler was a leading writer on the racial problem, and his article “A Negro Looks Ahead” created a sensation not only in the South but throughout the country. It concluded: “The Aframerican, shrewd, calculating, diplomatic, patient and a master of Nordic psychology, steadily saps the foundation of white supremacy. Time, he knows, is with him. . . . By 2000 a.d. a full-blooded American Negro may be rare enough to get a job in a museum, and a century from now our American social leaders may be as tanned naturally as they are now striving to become artificially.” 13
All regions came in for occasional lashings in the pages of the Mercury —the Midwest’s “Bible Belt,” puritanical New Eng-
12 American Mercury, v. IS, Dec. 1928, pp. 407-8.
13 Ibid., v. 19, Feb. 1930, p. 220.
land, the culturally arid West—but the South perhaps caught it hardest. Wrote W. J. Cash in “The Mind of the South”: “There is a new South, to be sure. It is a chicken-pox of factories on the Watch-Us-Grow maps; it is a kaleidoscopic chromo of stacks and chimneys on the club-car window as the train rolls southward from Washington to New Orleans. But I question that it is much more. For the mind of that heroic region, I opine, is still basically and essentially the mind of the Old South.” 14
Political articles of a serious nature were rare in the Mercury. Most of those about contemporary political figures and most of Mencken’s editorials in this field were designed to puncture the balloons of popular reputations. The most famous of such pieces was the mercilessly contumelious editorial about Bryan, published in the October 1925 number, shortly after that statesman’s death. It is still amusing reading, the real, distilled Mencken. There was really not much politics in it; it was a postscript to what Mencken had written (chiefly for the Baltimore Sun ) about the Scopes trial. One astute critic of Mencken’s total work has written: “. . . It was significant that one of the cruelest things he ever wrote, his essay on Bryan, was probably the most brilliant.” 15
Though contemporary literature was often treated in the Mercury’s articles, it was in Mencken’s own book reviews that the heart of the magazine’s comment on the writing of the day appeared. These reviews were, indeed, one of the most interesting features of the Mercury. In them Mencken expressed, in striking and exuberant style, his devotion to basic actualities and his contempt of gentility and sentimentality, his stout support of writers who defied conventionality and popular inhibitions, and his scorn for the idols of mass culture. Carefully discriminated and qualified book reviews are often dull; Mencken’s never were, partly at least because he usually condemned or praised, and no nonsense about it. Let us take two examples more or less at random. In the second number of the Mercury, a review of The Great Game of Politics, by Frank R. Kent, a colleague of the reviewer on the Baltimore Sun, began:
14 Ibid., v. 18, Oct. 1929, p. 185. '
15 Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York, 1942), pp. 203-4
Astonishingly enough, this is the first book ever written in America which describes realistically and in detail the way in which the mountebanks and scoundrels who govern 110,000,000 free and brave people obtain and hold their power. 16
And a year or more later appeared the following succinct review of Ernest Hemingway’s second book, In Our Time:
The sort of brave, bold stuff that all atheistic young newspaper reporters write. Jesus Christ in lower case. A hanging, a carnal love, and disembowellings. Here it is, set forth solemnly on Rives handmade paper, in an edition limited to 170 copies, and with the imprimatur of Ezra Pound. 17
Like a good journalist, Mencken did give his readers much information about the new books; but many read his reviews more for the Mencken in them than for anything else. They were always readable, sometimes amusing. Mencken was “at least half Puck,” observed a later critic, and added, “He loved to hear the rumble of his own hyperboles.” 18
“Menckenism” became a common word to describe a compound of prejudices, hyberbole, and a kind of free-wheeling diction just this side of rant. Certain words were overused: imbecile, mountebank, oaf, nincompoop, rascal, wowser, swine, pusillanimous, perfidious, fraudulent. To this “Menckenese” must be added two invented terms which have gained a considerable acceptance in the language: booboisie and Homo Boobus, the latter corrected by the more learned Boyd, we are told, to Homo BoobiensP Contributors had to submit their copy to editing which, if it did not include “a proper salting of Menckenese,” at least brought it into harmony with the tone of the magazine. 20
“Mencken was always eager to print authors for the first time,” according to his assistant editor, “and to that end he
16 American Mercury, v. 1, Feb. 1924, p. 248.
17 Ibid., v. 5, Aug. 1925, p. xxxviii. This appeared in the “Check List,” a department of brief notices, but I have the word of Mr. Angoff, then assistant editor, that Mencken wrote it (Angoff to Mott, June 13, 1959).
18 Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous With Destiny (New York, 1952), p. 316.
19 H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 4th ed. (New York, 1936), p. 560, n. 1.
20 Manchester, Disturber of the Peace, pp. 153-54. For comment on this assimilative process in contributions to the Mercury, see Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America (New York, 1941), p. 494.
carried on a huge correspondence with young men and women in all parts of the country.” 21 This was a practice he had brought from the Smart Set; in the two magazines, he introduced to a larger public many writers virtually unknown before. Such a list would include Ruth Suckow, James Stevens, Jim Tully, and many others.
But the Mercury’s table of contents was loaded with plenty of names well known to the reading public. In addition to those mentioned in other places in this chapter, we may list here a few representative frequent contributors: Gerald W. Johnson, Chester T. Crowell, Robert L. Duffus, Fred Lewis Pattee, Henry F. Pringle, C. Hartley Grattan, Louis Adamic, Duncan Aikman, Marquis W. Childs, Margaret Mead, Nelson Antrim Crawford (“A Man of Learning,” August 1925), Benjamin deCasseres, Lewis Mumford, Louis Untermeyer, and William E. Dodd.
The Mercury printed many short stories of considerable distinction. Some of them had regional settings, like those of Ruth Suckow, Winifred Sanford, James Stevens, George Sterling, Idwal Jones, and William Faulkner. It is said that Mencken did not like Faulkner, and accepted “That Evening Sun Go Down” (March 1931) under protest. 22 Sinclair Lewis provided both non-fiction and fiction (“The Man Who Knew Coolidge,” January 1928) from his busy typewriter.
Mencken looked upon his own early book of verse as a youthful indiscretion, and had little respect for contemporary poetry. 23 In his Mercury salutatory, he promised “some verse (but not much).” 24 This meant, apparently, a poem or two in each number. Some of them were very good, indeed. Favorites were the Midwesterners Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg; the Negroes Countee Cullen and James Weldon Johnson (“Go Down, Death!” April 1927); and the
21 Charles Angoff in the New Republic, v. 131, Sept. 13, 1954, p. 21.
22 Charles Angoff, H.L. Mencken: A Portrait From Memory (New York, 1956), pp. 107-8.
23 Angoff, Mencken, p. 83 and chap. vii. Angoff says Mencken in later life
bought up any stray copies of his Ventures Into Verse when he found them, and destroyed them. No wonder: see quotations from the volume in Cargill, Intellectual America, p. 484. v
24 American Mercury, v. 1, Jan. 1924, p. 30.
AMERICAN MERCURY 13
Westerner George Sterling; as well as Joseph Auslander, Grace Stone Coates, and Gwendolen Haste.
The Mercury also published some works in dramatic form, notably Eugene O’Neill’s “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” (February 1924), and several short pieces in dialogue by James M. Cain. Incidentally, Mencken was “violently” opposed to publishing the O’Neill play, but Nathan is said to have “threatened to resign” if it was rejected. 23
The most dramatic episode of the magazine’s early history was the result of the publication in the issue for April 1926 of a sketch by Herbert Asbury entitled “Hatrack.” This was one of a series presenting the author’s recollections of the religious life of a small town, later published as Up From Methodism; and since evangelists sometimes preached realistically against sexual misdemeanors, Asbury found an opportunity here to bring in a little character sketch of a village prostitute. It was all in the best tone of stag-party hilarity. That it exaggerated and gibed a phase of the religious and social life of the small town, and that it offended tastes more refined than those of Asbury and Mencken there can be no doubt; but surely there were few readers of the Mercury who considered it obscene or corrupting to morals. Harlotry doubtless has its humorous phases, and “Hatrack” followed a not unfamiliar literary tradition.
That was not the attitude of Boston’s Watch and Ward Society. It seems clear that Mencken courted some overt action by this unofficial organization; his biographer says that he had anticipated it. 26 He had baited the society in September of the preceding year by publishing an article entitled “Keeping the Puritans Pure,” by A. L. S. Wood of the Springfield Union, in which Jason Frank Chase, then secretary of the society, was ridiculed. So when the “Hatrack” number appeared, Chase notified the dealers’ trade agency in Boston that it was “objectionable”; and the dealers, accustomed to unquestioned yielding to the threat of prosecution implied in a Chase edict, stopped the sale of the April Mercury. Thereupon Mencken and Knopf
25 Statement made to Lawrence E. Spivak by Angoff, and reported in a letter (Feb 10, 1959) to Mott.
26 Manchester, Disturber of the Peace, p. 187. The fullest accounts of the “Hatrack” episode are in chap vii of this book and in Arthur Garfield Hays, Let Freedom Ring, revised ed. (New York, 1937), pp. 157-85.
enlisted Arthur Garfield Hays, famous attorney of the American Civil Liberties Union, in behalf of the Mercury; and Hays suggested that Mencken make a clean-cut case of it by himself selling a copy of the banned periodical to Chief Watcher and Warder Chase within the pure precincts of Boston. Mencken agreed, Chase agreed. Wrote Hays in his recollections: “On April 5, 1926, a milling, enthusiastic, and hilarious mob of thousands gathered at the corner of Park and Tremont streets in Boston, the crowd running over onto the Boston Common. Word had leaked out that at two o’clock in the afternoon the April number of The American Mercury was to be sold. There was a huge demand for the magazine at almost any price. People were wildly waving one, five, and ten dollar bills.” 27
But only one copy was sold, and that to Chase by Mencken at fifty cents. The clowning Mencken tested the coin with his teeth. Immediately after the transaction Mencken was arrested and taken to the police station, where he furnished bail. The next morning there was a judicial hearing on the charge of selling “obscene, indecent, and impure literature . . . manifestly tending to corrupt the morals of youth.” Somewhat to the surprise of the defendant, 28 the charge was dismissed. “I cannot imagine,” said the judge, “anyone reading the article and finding himself or herself attracted toward vice.” 29
There were sequels to this hearing. The April Mercury was suppressed in many cities and towns throughout the country. A Cambridge dealer who had sold it to Harvard “youths” was actually fined a hundred dollars, which the Mercury paid. A week later an injunction was obtained to prevent further interference with the sale of the moot number of the magazine. But most embarrassing was the action of the United States Post Office Department in refusing to accept the April Mercury for mailing. Eventually Hays had to get a federal injunction to force acceptance; and then the case was carried to the Circuit Court of Appeals, which decided that the question was “academic,” the April number being by that time far out of date. 30
27 Hays, Let Freedom Ring, p. 160.
28 Manchester, Disturber of the Peace, p. 196.
29 Hays, Let Freedom Ring, p. 169.
30 The American Mercury v. Kiely, Postmaster, et al., 19 Fed. (2d) 295 (1927).
The case cost the Mercury some ten thousand dollars, which nearly exhausted its reserve. 3 ' 1 Newspapers generally disapproved the ribaldry of “Hatrack” and were inclined to sympathize with the censors. A leading editorial in the New York Herald Tribune began: “The incurable vulgarity of Mr. H. L. Mencken is mixed with a considerable amount of business acumen. In his latest escapade he has been alert to capitalize to the utmost the egregious bad taste of an article to which the Boston authorities took exception. The case is flagrant enough to urge a stocktaking of current standards of decency in print.” The writer goes on to admit that “Hatrack” was “neither obscene nor suggestive,” though vulgar and indecent; and after this exercise in semantics, he adds that Mencken “is scarcely worth his space in a good jail.” 32
According to Angoff, Mencken later regretted having printed “Hatrack.” 33 Commercially, as the Herald Tribune suggested, it was probably good business. The Mercury’s average net circulation for 1926 rose to about seventy thousand, and the next year it added some five thousand more. The years 1926-1928 brought the magazine’s greatest prosperity. 34 Issues occasionally ran to 140 pages, of which 11 might be advertising. Book “ads” led; but clothing, foods, cosmetics, cigarettes, travel aids, and investment opportunities took much space. An amusing feature of the advertising section in these years was the series of full pages taken by manufacturers (such as the Lambert Pharmacal Company, distributors of Listerine) to criticize the Mercury itself and satirize its famous editor.
In July 1925, Nathan retired from his co-editorship to the position of contributing editor in charge of the departments “Clinical Notes” and “The Theater.” He felt that the magazine
31 Manchester, Disturber of the Peace, p. 207.
32 New York Herald Tribune, April 7, 1926, p. 22, col. 1.
33 Angoff, Mencken, p. 52.
34 Lawrence E. Spivak, later business manager of the magazine, writes (Jan. 30, 1959): “According to my figures, the Mercury reached its highest volume of business—close to $415,000—in 1927, but it reached its highest profit of $16,000 on a volume of $373,000 in 1926. The profit in 1927 was only $6,000; in 1928 it was $8,500; and in 1929 the magazine lost about $15,000. It continued to lose money through 1939, with the exception of 1933, when it made $900 largely because of vigorous cuts in expenditures.” Letter quoted with permission of the author.