The "Forgotten Man" of H. L. Mencken

hailed him as a libertarian have not seen the whole man. The truth is that he was both. His social and political thought is particularly fascinating because it embodies so many conflicting elements in the American heritage. He remained faithful throughout his lifetime to many aspects of the Darwinian revelation as interpreted by such thinkers as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner,' but he also derived ideas and values from the tradition of the Enlightenment, the idealized conception of the antebellum plantation society that was widespread in the New South, and the German-American way of life as he had known it in Baltimore. Since he took over concepts from these different sources without attempting to reconcile the assumptions on which they were based, the opinions he expressed in his social criticism are often strikingly inconsistent. Through an analysis of his interpretation of the Man, an image he borrowed from Sumner and adapted to his own purposes, this article will identify and examine some of the major contradictions in his views. In the first issue of the American Mercury, Mencken declared that the reader to whom he and George Jean Nathan wished to appeal was what ... Sumner called the Forgotten Man. . . the normal, educated, welldisposed, unfrenzied, enlightened citizen of the middle minority. 2 Sum

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