Professor H L Mencken

The Free Lance, May-August 1914 Professor H L Mencken

H. L. Mencken returned from a six-week trip to Europe in late May 1914, immediately resuming his "Free Lance" column for the Baltimore Evening Sun. He continued his attacks on the customary array of follies and injustices that had animated his column for the past three years. Sunday laws in Baltimore (one of which prohibited the playing of baseball on that day) evoked his ire, as did the persistently high rate of death from typhoid in Baltimore as compared with other American cities. Mencken ruminates on the possibility of a national Prohibition amendment in the United States, which he regarded as a severe curtailment of civil liberties and one more instance of the Puritanism afflicting American society and politics. Patent medicines and other instances of medical quackery were always sure to provoke Mencken's satirical pen. With the outbreak of World War I in early August, Mencken undertook a controversial defense of Germany's actions (an understandable stance from this scion of German immigrants) that ultimately led to the termination of his column in a year's time.