Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
December 1969 | Volume 21, Issue 1
Letters from “An American Mother”
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
Except in their lovelorn columns, newspapers today discourage the use of pen names by their letter writers. Gone are “Civitas,” “Veritas,” and “Pro Bono Publico” of an earlier time. Less and less frequent are opinions signed “Angry,” “Disappointed,” or “Irate Taxpayer.” But even rarer than the pen name is the put-on letter by the tongue-in-cheek writer. Like “An American Mother” …
An American Mother first appeared in the early 1920’s in the Forum column of the Baltimore Evening Sun . Mark Twain would have liked her if he had been around. Her letters were pure spoof, but they were so well done that each one provoked a dozen or more replies, expressing agreement or outrage, sympathy or disapproval.
“Mother” was an unyielding moralist, a militant Prohibitionist, a staunch defender of the Sunday blue laws, and a devoted churchgoer opposed to the theory of evolution, to Italian opera, and to nude statues. She had the knack for taking something that nearly everyone regarded as fairly innocent (an opera, for instance) and discovering that it was immoral (she objected to Tristan and Isolde because it “condoned free love”). Frequently she offended someone or some group, always perfectly naturally but in a way that demanded response. Almost invariably she committed some blunder in stating her argument, an error of fact or logic that called for correction. In 1925, during the Scopes trial over the legality of teaching evolution, one of her letters began: “Sir: I think that trial of religious liberty down in Dayton is the most wonderful thing since Martin Luther stood up before the Cardinals and said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ …”
On the positive side, she proposed a Get-Baptized Week, prayer meetings on streetcars for young people on their way to work, and enforcement of the Ten Commandments by the police. “Why,” she demanded, “does not Baltimore get a man like Admiral Smedley Butler at the head of our police force?”
An American Mother’s letters continued to appear in the Sun for nearly twenty years. During that time she convinced thousands of her readers that she was real. There were some who recognized and savored the gag, looked forward to each new letter—and were sure An American Mother was really Baltimore’s sage and satirist, H. L. Mencken. “Mother” was not Mencken, and except for the editor of the Sun and a handful of others (Mencken among them) no one knew who she was until she died.
An American Mother died of a heart attack in April, 1941—and then, in a news story, the Sun revealed that she was neither an American (originally), a mother, nor even a woman. “She” was Holger A. Koppel, the familiar white-haired representative of Denmark in Baltimore and dean of the city’s consular corps.
Koppel was born in Copenhagen in 1871. He came to the United States when lie