Robert McHenry: H.L. Mencken: Prohibition, the War on Drugs, and the Dead Hand of Puritanism

[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.]

It is neither his birthday nor an anniversary of his death, which are my usual weak pegs on which to hang a little note about some writer, but I could not wait for one of those to roll by to share this. Henry Louis Mencken, usually known as H.L. Mencken, was a journalist of unusual breadth of knowledge and understanding and a critic of strong views and vigorous expression. In 1926 he published a little book called Notes on Democracy, in which he — if you will permit me a bit of vivid metaphor — performed vivisection on the dogma underlying the American political system and revealed the offal within.

Here is a long paragraph on the so-called “noble experiment” of Prohibition:

The Prohibitionists, when they foisted their brummagem cure-all upon the country under cover of the war hysteria, gave out that their advocacy of it was based upon a Christian yearning to abate drunkenness, and so abolish crime, poverty and disease. They preached a millennium, and no doubt convinced hundreds of thousands of naive and sentimental persons, not themselves Puritans, nor even democrats....