I wrote about everything from the Scopes Monkey Trial to George Washington's weariness of the American people.

Mordant, contrarian, irrepressible, satirical wits like H.L. Mencken are always a source of strength in our country. In addition to being a distinctive prose stylist, the “Sage of Baltimore” was to his time what Stewart, Colbert and Maher are to theirs. His acute readings of American politics, race, class and gender in the first half of the twentieth century are still potent. I highly recommend Vintage Mencken if you’ve never read it.

In the 1948 piece I’m excerpting, Mencken distilled a conflict in which a mixed-race group of tennis players were arrested for attempting to have a match on a Baltimore public court. Mencken’s record as a progressive on civil rights and women’s rights is commendable, though his track record with Jewish people was less distinguished. He often decried the Jewish race, but he also did chastise FDR for not providing refuge for Jewish people after Hitler’s rise to power. Even great thinkers are a mixed-bag, I guess. An excerpt from the Baltimore Evening Sun piece:

“When, on July 11 last, a gang of so-called progressives, white and black, went to Druid Hill Park to stage an inter-racial tennis combat, and were collared and jugged by the cops, it became instantly impossible for anyone to discuss the matter in a newspaper, save, of course, to report impartially the proceedings in court….

But there remains an underlying question, and it deserves to be considered seriously and without any reference whatever to the cases lately at bar. It is this: Has the Park Board any right in law to forbid white and black citizens, if they are so inclined, to join in harmless games together on public playgrounds? Again: Is such a prohibition, even supposing that it is lawful, supported by anything to be found in common sense and common decency?

I do not undertake to answer the first question, for I am too ignorant of law, but my answer to the second is a loud and unequivocal No. A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.”