The American Mercury: A Baltimore Magazine With a Mission
The American Mercury itself had a curious life, and a long death. It was initiated in 1924, after Mencken left his previous journal, Smart Set. The Smart Set was literary in focus, while The American Mercury was more concerned with American culture as such, outside the domain of universities and belles-lettres. In his biography of Mencken, The Skeptic, writer and Wall Street Journal Theater Critic Terry Teachout includes a few quotes from the prospectus for the new journal, which are attributed to both Mencken and his co-editor George Nathan:
“The Editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep the common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment…They will not cry up and offer for sale any sovereign balm, whether political, economic or aesthetic, for all the sorrows of the world.”
“In the field of the fine arts The American Mercury will pursue the course that the Editors have followed for fifteen years past in another place…to welcome sound and honest work, whatever its form or lack of form, and to carry on steady artillery practice against every variety of artistic pedant.”
“There are more political theories on tap in the Republic than anywhere else on earth, and more doctrines in aesthetics, and more reivions, and more other schemes for regimenting, harrowing, and saving human beings…To explore this great complex of inspirations, to isolate their proposals, to follow the ponderous revolutions of the mass mind — in brief, to attempt a realistic presentation of the whole gaudy, georgeous American scene — this will be the principle enterprise of THE AMERICAN MERCURY.”
By 1933, H.L. Mencken left The American Mercury, and with him, the character of the magazine changed. By World War II it became a voice for conservatism, and by its final demise in 1981, the magazine had moved even further rightward, with little but the name itself to link it to the heady, iconoclastic journal that became a nexus for discussing the “American scene.”
The American Mercury is often looked back at as a cultural high point of the late twenties. Here, from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death it’s referenced as a “last gasp” for American culture:
“In fact, the early decades of the twentieth century were marked by a great outpouring of brilliant language and literature. In the pages of the magazines like the American Mercury and The New Yorker…prose thrilled with a vibracy and intensity that delighted ear and eye. But this was exposition’s nightingale song, most brilliant and sweet as the singer nears the moment of death. It told, for the Age of Exposition, not of new beginnings, but of an end. A new note had been sounded…theirs was a language that denied interconnectedness, proceeded without context, argued the irrelevance of history, explained nothing, and offered fascination in place of complexity and coherence.”
We don’t necessarily share Postman’s views, or, for that matter, Mencken’s, about everything. And there are probably some still around in Baltimore who knew The American Mercury in the form that its bastardized offspring took in the 60′s and 70′s. But we feel that what started the The American Mercury — a need for people to write, truthfully and independently, about the world around them — is a reason for starting a reading series.
And if anyone has anything they’d like to add about the history of The American Mercury, we’ll post it.
