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[This book came out in the early nineties, an excellent collection, uncompleted, of Mencken’s descriptions of the various writers, publishers and businessmen and others he knew in first few decades of the 1900s.]

I had become convinced early in my newspaper days, and even before, that the distinguishing mark of th enormal Americano was his essentially moral view of the world, his tendency to color all values with concepts of rightness and wrongness, his inability to throw off the Puritan obsession with sin. There had been, of course, a revolution against Puritanism in New England, and it had gone so far on certain levels that the Boston area had been distinctly ahead of the country in general, intellectually speaking, for two generations, but even in the Boston area there were still plenty of surviving evidences of the old madness. Elsewhere, save on the Pacific Coast and in what I came to describe as “a few walled towns,” it was raging almost without challenge, and especially in the  South and the agricultural parts of the Middle West.

Both of the latter regions, in the first years of the new century, seemed to be virtually lost to civilization. In the South the Civil War had either killed off or driven out all save a small minority of the old gentry, and there remained only a rabble of poor whites preyed upon by a new class of barbaric exploiters, and in the Middle West the descendants of the pioneers were offering massive proof that the stock from which they had sprung, whatever its fitness to withstand heat, cold, thirst, hunger, insect bites and physical fatigue, had not left them any heritage of sense. The time was one of almost unimaginable intellectual backwardness — a low point in the always dipping curve in the pervading gloom — the Johns Hopkins University, what remained of Charles A. Dana’s New York Sun, the Bookman edited by Harry Thurston Peck, William Graham Sumner, James Huneker, George Ade and his fables in slang, the Stone & Kimball publishing venture in Chicago, the music of Reginald De Koven, the occasional flashings of the Adams family, et sic de similibus — but they were only points, elsewhere the murk was a solid black.

It was the heyday of some of the most banal eminentissimos that even the United States, up to that time, had ever known — William Jennings Bryan, T. DeWitt Talmage, Orison Swett Marden, Hamilton Wright Mabie, Lydia Pinkham, James Munyon, William Dean Howells, Edward Bok, David Belasco, and so on and so on. The spectacle they provided was a gaudy one, and I surely enjoyed it as much as most, but meanwhile my hand itched for a club to belabor them to the glory of God. I had, I believe, no more public spirit than a policeman or an archbishop, but I was full of lust to function, and before I was twenty-five it was already plain that my functioning would take the form of a sharp and more or less truculent dissent from the mores of my country. By the time I set to work on my Shaw book I was already becoming known, in the narrow circle I then inhabited, as one to whom the American spectacle, American ideas and ideals, the great body of Americans themselves, were predominantly more amusing than inspiring, and less admirable than obscene.

I doubt seriously that my German blood had anything to do with this reaction, at least on the conscious level. I had, before my first trip abroad in 1908, when I was already nearly thirty years old, little contact or sympathy with Germans, and my acquaintance with German literature, and even with German history, was of the meagerest. I recall well how, in preparation for my Nietzsche book, I had to bone up on German philosophy, and how dull I found most of it, not to say repulsive. My reading had been almost wholly in English literature, even at the expense of American, and I was so soaked in it that the high point of my first trip abroad was not my visit to Leipzig, the old home of my family, but that to London, where I was genuinely thrilled when George Fawcett took me down the Strand to the Temple and showed me the haunts of Thackeray and the grave of Oliver Goldsmith.

My Grandfather Mencken, as I have recorded in Happy Days, held himself aloof from the other Germans of Baltimore, and my father had an active distaste for them. My mother, who was pure German, spoke the language more or less, but it was not often heard in our house, and I had only the sketchiest knowledge of it when I entered F. Knapp’s Institute in 1886. The teaching there was done by the old-fashioned method of endless repetition, and though it made me familiar, if only by osmosis, with the sounds of th elanguage, it certainly did not give me anything properly describable as a command of even its elementary grammar. Whatever real acquaintance with it I acquired later on was picked up from German servant-girls.

My grandfather, if he had lived, would have interested me in the Mencken family, if not in the German Kultur, but he died before I was twelve, and my father showed no concern about such things. It was not, indeed, until after his death in 1899 that I so much as examined the family documents and souvenirs that were kept in the bottom compartment of his old walnut secretary, and not until after World War I that I made any serious effort to find out who the early Menckens were and what they had done. The point of view that was to color all my writings probably came, in its essence, from my father, for he was a natural skeptic, and hence had a low opinion of the prevailing American scheme of things, but I don’t recall ever hearing him connect it specifically with the Puritan demonology. Thus I got nothing save a sort of framework from him: all the rest had to come out of my reading, and, once I had taken to journalism, from my observation of the American scene at first hand.

I believe today that the most powerful influence ever exerted on my thinking was that of Thomas Henry Huxley, who taught me to distrust moral certainty, and, in particular, to be very suspicious of those who had it. But I also got a lot from Thackeray and from many another English writer, and perhaps even more from Mark Twain. It was Mark, and not any racial or family interest, that turned my curiosity toward Germany and the Germans. When I first visited Germany, in 1908, A Tramp Abroad was my guide-book, though I did not carry it with me, and on my subsequent visits, ending in 1938, I covered nearly the whole of the route it lays down.

But in the years before 1912 I certainly did not think of myself as a German, though I was already conscious of my differentiation from the common run of Americans. If I ever pondered that differentiation at all, I probably thought of it, in the egoistic way of youth, as no more than an evidence of my superiority as an individual. This superiority, in the narrow world that I then inhabited, was certainly not imaginary: I actually got on much better than anyone else I was close to, and if good luck had something to do with it, then hard industry and an undeniable competence also had something to do with it. As for the common run of Americanos, I disdained them, not as members of a different species, but as inferior members of my own species.

Two things, I believe, served as the immediate catalysts of my dawning race consciousness. The first was my intimate contact with Percival Pollard in 1911, at the time he was writing his Masks and Minstrels of New Germany. He was a thorough-going Germanophile, and in our long talks he greatly widened my information about German ideas and doings and my understanding of the German character. When I reviewed his book in the Smart Set for August, 1911, my enthusiasm for the authro was a great deal more visible than my sympathy for his theme, but all the same the foundation was laid, and when I. A. R. Wylie’s The Germans followed in 1912 my review in March of that year resolved itself into a general defense of the Germans against the libels of the English propagandists and the ready credulity of American dupes. I discovered, reading it, that th edominant German ideas were also my ideas, and when they were attacked (as it seemed to me, ignorantly and viciously) by Price Collier in his Germany and the Germans in 1913, I fell upon both book and author with a good deal of heat (September, 1913). As I have said, Pollard laid the foundation for all this, but at least a part of it went back to my early enthusiasm for Mark Twain, and both influences were strongly reinforced by my second visit to Germany, in 1910.

But it remained for the shock of World War I to carry me all the way. Even in its preliminary rumblings I saw the beginnings of an inevitable struggle to the death between the German Weltanschauung and the Anglo-Saxon Weltanschauung, and it was quickly apparent which side I was to take myself. I, too, like th leaders of Germany, had grave doubts about democracy. I, too, felt an instinctive antipathy to the whole Puritan scheme of things, with its gross and nauseating hypocrisies, its idiotic theologies, its moral obsessions, its pervasive Philistinism. It suddenly dawned on me, somewhat to my surprise, that the whole body of doctrine that I had been preaching was fundamentally anti-Anglo-Saxon, and that if I had any spiritual home, it must be in the land of my ancestors.

When World War I actually started I began forthwith to whoop for the Kaiser, and I kept up that whooping so long as there was any free speech left in the United States. That period, unhappily, was not prolonged. By the spring of 1915 it was obvious that Wilson would take his American lieges into the war soon or late, and by th autumn it began to be evident that an honest discussion of the issues would presently be impossible. I thus quit my job on the Baltimore Evening Sun and made plans to go abroad, to see something of the German Army in action before it would be too late.

Unhappily, it was impossible for me to break away from my new and increasing magazine duties until the end of 1916, and when I returned in March, 1917, free speech was completely suspended, and for two years I was pretty well hobbled. As I have recorded, I refused absolutely to acquiesce even formally in the current American balderdash about the causes, purposes and ultimate aims of the war, and I even managed, from time to time, to sneak sneers at them into my book reviews and other writings, but in the main I had to mark time. This marking time, of course, was extremely disagreeable, and I was by no means disposed to take my disabilities lying down. Back in the first months of the war I had begun to think of a book that would set forth my objections to the whole Puritan Kultur in a large and positive way, and before I went abroad at the end of 1916 I put most of it together. When I returned in March, 1917, all that remained was to make it printable in war time.

This was A Book of Prefaces.