Henry Louis Mencken, better known as HL Mencken, was the great Baltimore writer, journalist and poet who established the notion that the state must support journalists so that freedom of expression remained strong and writers survived with dignity.
Mencken, born in September 1880 and died in January 1956, joined the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore’s legendary surviving newspaper, in 1906 and remained there throughout his long career, allowing him to influence one of the most notable protectors of intellectual thought in the United States.
While Mencken reigned intellectually in Baltimore and its surroundings, a few miles south, in Washington, DC, so did Art Buchwald, journalist, writer and caustic humorist, whom I managed to see always at the same table at lunches at the Sans Souci restaurant, on 17th Street, near the White House.
Mencken was called “the wise man of Baltimore,” but other less fortunate mentions spoke of “the man who hates everything.” One thing or another, he was the most influential journalist and writer on the East Coast of the United States when Baltimore was the area’s main port.
His first book, which collected poems from his youth when he entered the Baltimore Sun, at the age of 18, did not have the reception and relevance that he would achieve later. “The American Scene”, published in its first edition in 1965, would become a must-see work.
To those who said that Mencken hated everything, he replied that: “I am firmly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency.” He believed that poor judgment made him ineligible for any public, financial or revenue office in the country.
Dr. Joaquín Balaguer, five-time Dominican president, believed that the State should support journalists and writers. When he inherited the government after the fall of Trujillo, he supported the mainstream press of the time and did not give rise to the claim of friends that El Caribe belonged to them.
After 1966 in his first elected government, in the first urbanization he built called Ensanche Honduras, he reserved several apartments for journalists who needed them and began a tax exemption policy to provide cars to those who walked on foot, who were the majority.
Balaguer directly delivered apartments and when he ordered the construction of Los Jardines del Norte, he passed a good part of those apartments to the Popular Savings and Loan Association, which sold them over a period of up to 30 years, which provided many communicators with decent housing without discrimination. The misfortunes that occurred at that time with the press damaged the image of the regime.
The leader of the largest business emporium in the State in the mid-1970s asked the journalists who covered that source, which was buoyant with sugar prices, if they had houses or apartments. Given the negative response, it sponsored, via advertising, the delivery of resources that helped the beneficiaries buy houses.
Many years later, when Dr. Salvador Jorge Blanco governed and devised the construction of INVIVIENDA, he provided facilities for journalists with modest financial resources to buy in that neighborhood. Many saved their dignity and there are those who still reside in the place.
Over time, due to the low salaries they earn and the great changes in communication, there are many communicators who exhibit humility and even poverty. Prey to catastrophic diseases, without unions to protect them, the State has forgotten responsibilities.
Recently the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo rescued an old program of obtaining a single tax for professors so that they could acquire motor vehicles with the financial support of the main banks, especially the Reservas. It was on the part of the rector Eritrudis Beltrán to continue an old policy of previous rectorates. Journalists have not had the same luck.
