No one, however, wrote more exhaustively about Mencken's life than Mencken himself. At his death he had put under seal at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library perhaps 800,000 unpublished words in a diary and other biographical manuscripts not to be opened until he had been long dead. These provided a great deal of fresh fodder for Menckenians, some of it with scandal value, especially the revelation that he had a streak of blue-stocking anti-Semitism. The disclosure produced despairing cries of pained disappointment, as it was bound to in an age no longer indifferent to the dangers of such prejudice.
Nowhere was the disappointment more painful than in Baltimore. Anti-Semitism of Mencken's sort was so shockingly drab, so ordinary, such a shamefully shabby imperfection. A man of Mencken's stature should have only magnificent defects. In mythologizing him, Baltimore had come to think of him as superior to the common country-club bigot. And now here was this indisputable diary evidence. Carl Schoettler, an Evening Sun staff writer, captured the sense of disgusted disappointment in three deadly adjectives: "His prejudices are commonplace, casual and banal." No one said, "Say it ain't so, Henry." Everybody thought it, though. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mencken advocated free immigration for German Jews to the U.S., which certainly put him far more tolerant on that matter than the state department which was sending ships of Jews back to Germany at the time.
Mencken was always a reliable defender of the rights of dissidents(Jewish, black, etc.) in the face of oppression. I repeat my point. "Blue stocking" anti-semitic comments or not, Mencken did more for the rights of the oppressed than you and I will ever do and deserves our admiration, not sniping.