12-10-89 . . . I don’t know much about him except that he was a muckraking Baltimore journalist at the turn of the twentieth century, but H. L. Mencken [1880-1956] is in the news. His journals, long suppressed by court order (or perhaps by his will), have been made public. It transpires that the man was a bigot. He secretly despised blacks, Jews, and just about everyone else who differed from him in any significant way. Many journalists are aghast at the news, which shows that they have held Mencken up as a journalistic idol. What I don’t understand is why the news would affect their judgment of him as a journalist. What the news tells me is that he was a bad person; it doesn’t reflect badly on him as a reporter or editor. This is a common source of confusion. Idolization is always under a description, or as such-and-such. We worship individual X as a journalist, as a mother, as a satirist, or as a theist. From the fact that X is a good exemplar of one of these categories, it hardly follows that X is a good exemplar of another category. The same person can be a good mother and a poor satirist. So journalists should stop gnashing their teeth. They should condemn Mencken for his bigotry while at the same time admiring his journalistic acumen (assuming he had some).
This is why I have problems with national and state holidays for historical figures such as Martin Luther King [1929-1968]. I despise his theism and sexism (he was abusive toward women and unfaithful to his wife), but celebrate his commitment to equal rights for people of all races. The problem is that we honor persons, not ideas, with holidays. I fear that by holding King up as a model, we lose the ability to distinguish different aspects of his life and work. Schoolchildren, for example, may come to think that King is being honored for his religious faith, or for his philandering, when in fact we honor his political work and moral principles. Hmm. Perhaps we should have national and state holidays for ideas rather than people. We could have Equality Day, Liberty Day, Democracy Day, Capitalism Day, and, if I had my way, Animal Welfare Day. Better yet, why not chuck the idea of national and state holidays and leave the calendar free for each of us to make up our own holidays? That would solve the problem.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 