Henry Louis Mencken, god of the American Language [Aethlos]
American Protective
[The following is from H.L.
Mencken's Prejudices: Third Series, 1922, pp. 133-145, first printed in
the New Republic, Sept. 29, 1920, pp. 118-120, and is described by the
author as being from his “private archaeology”, dealing with his reflections on
the growth of military ribbonalia, and what purposes this phenomena may serve,
even in civilian ranks.]
Star-Spangled Men
...What I propose is a variety
of the Distinguished Service Medal for civilians, closed to the military and
with badges of different colors and areas, to mark off varying services to
democracy. Let it run, like the Japanese Paulownia, from high to low -- the
lowest class for the patriot who sacrificed only time, money and a few nights'
sleep; the highest for the great martyr who hung his country’s altar with his
dignity, his decency and his sacred honor. For Elmer and his nervous insomnia,
a simple rosette, with an iron badge bearing the national motto, “Safety
First”; for the university president who prohibited the teaching of the enemy
language in his learned grove, heaved the works of Goethe out of the university
library, cashiered every professor unwilling to support Woodrow for the first
vacancy in the Trinity, took to the stump for the National Security League,(6),
and made two hundred speeches in moving picture theaters—for this giant of
loyal endeavor let no 100 per cent. American speak of anything less than the
grand cross of the order, with a gold badge in stained glass, a baldric of the
national colors, a violet plug hat with a sunburst on the side, the privelege
of the floor of Congress, and a pension of $10,000 a year. After all, the cost
would not be excessive; there are not many of them. Such prodigies of
patriotism are possible only to rare and gifted men. For the grand cordons of
the order, e.g., college professors who spied upon and reported the
seditions of their associates, state presidents of the American Protective
League,(7), alien property custodians, judges whose sentences of conscientious
objectors mounted to more than 50,000 years, members of George Creel’s herd of
2,000 American historians, the authors of the Sisson documents, (8), etc. --
pensions of $10 a day would be enough, with silver badges and no plug hats. For
the lower ranks, bronze badges and the legal right to the title of “The Hon.,”
already every true American’s by courtesy.” …
* * * * *
(6) A band of patriots which
made a deafening uproar in the 1914-1918 era. Its fronts were Elihu Root and
Alton B. Parker.
(7) An organization of amateur
detectives working under the agis of the Department of Justice. In 1917 its
operatives reported that I was an intimate associate and agent of “the German
nonster, Nietsky,” and I was solemnly investigated. But I was a cunning fellow
in those days and full of a malicious humor, so I notonly managed to throw of
the charge but even to write the report upon myself. I need not say that it
gave me a clean bill of health—and I still have a carbon to prove it. As a
general rule the American Protective League confined itself to easier victims.
Its specialty was harassing German waiters.
(8) Creel served as chairman of
what was called the Committee on Public Information from 1917 to 1919. Its
chief business was to propagate the official doctrine as to the causes and
issues of the war. To that end Creel recruited his horde of college historians
and they solemnly certified to the truth of everything that emanated from
Washington and London. The Sisson documents were supposed to show a sinister
conspiracy of the Russian Communists, but what the specifications were I
forget. Creel’s committed was also in charge of newspaper censorship during the
war.
* * * * *
Now, who’s got the documentation
showing Sadler’s association with the American Protective League, and/or with George
Creel? The description “amateur detective working under the agis of the
Department of Justice” sounds suspiciously familiar to a biographical admission
I have heard or read, possibly from Sprunger or Kulieke. Such “prodigies of
patriotism” should not go unnoted!
The Calamity of Appomattox
by H.L. Mencken
[From the American Mercury,
Sept., 1930, pp. 29-31]
No American historian, so far as
I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead
of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appamattox. How long would the victorious
Confederacy have endured? Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in
the doctrine of States' Rights, so often inconvenient and even paralyzing to it
during the war? Could it have remedied its plain economic deficiencies, and
become a self-sustaining nation? How would it have protected itself against
such war heroes as Beauregard and Longstreet, Joe Wheeler and Nathan D.
Forrest? And what would have been its relations to the United States, socially,
economically, spiritually and politically?
I am inclined, on all these
counts, to be optimistic. The chief evils in the Federal victory lay in the
fact, from which we still suffer abominably, that it was a victory of what we
now call Babbitts over what used to be called gentlemen. I am not arguing here,
of course, that the whole Confederate army was composed of gentlemen; on the
contrary, it was chiefly made up, like the Federal army, of innocent and
unwashed peasants, and not a few of them got into its corps of officers. But
the impulse behind it, as everyone knows, was essentially aristocratic, and
that aristocratic impulse would have fashioned the Confederacy if the fortunes
of war had run the other way. Whatever the defects of the new commonwealth
below the Potomac, it would have at least been a commonwealth founded upon a
concept of human inequality, and with a superior minority at the helm. It might
not have produced any more Washingtons, Madisons, Jeffersons, Calhouns and
Randolphs of Roanoke, but it would certainly not have yielded itself to the
Heflins, Caraways, Bilbos and Tillmans.
The rise of such bounders was a
natural and inevitable consequence of the military disaster. That disaster left
the Southern gentry deflated and almost helpless. Thousands of the best young
men among them had been killed, and thousands of those who survived came North.
They commonly did well in the North, and were good citizens. My own native town
of Baltimore was greatly enriched by their immigration, both culturally and
materially; if it is less corrupt today than most other large American cities,
then the credit belongs largely to Virginians, many of whom arrived with no
baggage save good manners and empty bellies. Back home they were sorely missed.
First the carpetbaggers ravaged the land, and then it fell into the hands of
the native white trash, already so poor that war and Reconstruction could not
make them any poorer. When things began to improve they seized whatever was
seizable, and their heirs and assigns, now poor no longer, hold it to this day.
A raw plutocracy owns and operates the New South, with no challenge save from a
proletariat, white and black, that is still three-fourths peasant, and hence
too stupid to be dangerous. The aristocracy is almost extinct, at least as a
force in government. It may survive in backwaters and on puerile levels, but of
the men who run the South today, and represent it at Washington, not 5%, by any
Southern standard, are gentlemen.
If the war had gone with the
Confederates no such vermin would be in the saddle, nor would there be any sign
below the Potomac of their chief contributions to American Kultur -- Ku
Kluxry, political ecclesiasticism, nigger-baiting, and the more homicidal
variety of wowserism. Such things might have arisen in America, but they would
not have arisen in the South. The old aristocracy, however degenerate it might
have become, would have at least retained sufficient decency to see to that.
New Orleans, today, would still be a highly charming and civilized (if perhaps
somewhat zymotic) city, with a touch of Paris and another of Port Said.
Charleston, which evn now sprouts lady authors, would also sprout political
philosophers. The University of Virginia would be what Jefferson intended it to
be, and no shouting Methodist would haunt its campus. Richmond would be, not
the dull suburb of nothing that it is now, but a beautiful and consoling
second-rate capital, comparable to Budapest, Brussels, Stockholm or The Hague.
And all of us, with the Middle West pumping its revolting silo juices into the
East and West alike, would be making frequent leaps over the Potomac, to drink
the sound red wine there and breathe the free air.
My guess is that the two
Republics would be getting on pretty amicably. Perhaps they'd have come to terms
as early as 1898, and fought the Spanish-American War together. In 1917 the
confiding North might have gone out to save the world for democracy, but the
South, vaccinated against both Wall Street and the Liberal whim-wham, would
have kept aloof -- and maybe rolled up a couple of billions of profit from the
holy crusade. It would probably be far richer today, independent, than it is
with the clutch of the Yankee mortgage-shark still on its collar. It would be
getting and using his money just the same, but his toll would be less. As
things stand, he not only exploits the South economically; he also pollutes and
debases it spiritually. It suffers damnably from low wages, but it suffers even
more from the Chamber of Commerce metaphysic.
No doubt the Confederates,
victorious, would have abolished slavery by the middle of the 80s. They were
headed that way before the war, and the more sagacious of them were all in
favor of it. But they were in favor of it on sound economic grounds, and not on
the brummagem moral grounds which persuaded the North. The difference here is
immense. In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it
debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished. The triumph of sin
in 1865 would have stimulated and helped to civilize both sides.
Today the way out looks painful
and hazardous. Civilization in the United States survives only in the big
cities, and many of them -- notably Boston and Philadelphia -- seem to be sliding
down to the cow country level. No doubt this standardization will go on until a
few of the more resolute towns, headed by New York, take to open revolt, and
try to break out of the Union. Already, indeed, it is talked of. But it will be
hard to accomplish, for the tradition that the Union is indissoluble is now
firmly established. If it had been broken in 1865, life would be far pleasanter
today for every American of any noticable decency. There are, to be sure,
advantages in Union for everyone, but it must be manifest that they are
greatest for the worst kinds of people. All the benefit that a New Yorker gets
out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the
Argentine pampas, or Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place
where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also
a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters.
[From the introduction to
"A Second Mencken Chrestomathy", edited and intro by Terry Teachout,
pp. xx-xxiii.]
At first glance, the exact
nature of this appeal is baffling. It's temptingly easy to treat Mencken as a
period piece, a controversialist whose battles were won long ago and whose work
has survived simply because it is so well writen. But wonderful as his prose
style is (and no finer prose has been written by an American), this explanation
will not do. If good writing were enough to keep polemics alive, Mencken's
Monday Articles on the ins and outs of Baltimore politics would be as widely
read as "In Memorian: W.J.B." or "The Sahara of the
Bozart." In fact, Mencken's best journalism was concerned less with
battles than with wars. At the heart of his critique of American life, for
example, is his hatred of "the whole Puritan scheme of things, with its gross
and nauseating hypocrisies, its idiotic theologies, its moral obsessions, its
pervasive Philistinism," all of which he firmly believed to be intrinsic
to the American national character. Theologies (and ideologies, their secular
brethren) come and go, but the conceptions of human nature from which they
spring are forever with us...
Much of what Mencken has to say
is, of course, entirely predictable. He is the apostle of common sense,and of a
realism so hard as to be hopelessly ill suited to the prevailing softness of
our own Age of Sensitivity.
Whatever the disorder in
question, man's irremediable stupidity was Mencken's universal diagnosis, the
horse-laugh his preferred antidote.
Those who take offense easily
are, now as ever, unlikely to find him anything other than offensive. This is
particularly true of earnest believers in what he liked to call "the
uplift." Anyone who spends his days grubbing for solutions to notoriously
intractable social problems can have little in common with the cold-eyed skeptic
who wrote in the first issue of the American Mercury: "The Editors
have heard no Voice from the burning bush. They will not cry up and offer for
sale any sovereign balm, whether political, economic or aesthetic, for all the
sorrows of the world ... The world, as they see it, is down with at least a
score of painful diseases, all of them chronic and incurable."
Even those who find Mencken's
philosophy tonic are likely to shrink from some of its specific applications.
His hardness too often shades into outright brutality; he is almost always
simplistic, and very often demonstrably wrong on factual matters. Yet the
substance of his opinions has surprisingly little to do with the pleasure we
take in his way of expressing them. He once called poetry "a comforting
piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music," a sentiment echoed
elsewhere in this volume. ("Walt Whitman was the greatest of American
poets, and for a plain reason: he got furthest from the obvious facts. What he
had to say was almost never true.") One might just as well speak of
Mencken's own poetic quality. Writing in great unbroken arcs of gusto, he
briskly sweeps the reader along from one outrageous assertion to the next...
But to dismiss Mencken as a pure
stylist, a Wodehouse-like juggler of shiny metaphors, is to ignore the fact
that his attitude toward life is the point of his work. This attitude, as has
often been remarked, is profoundly bleak: few American writers have had a
stronger sense of the futility of man's earthly existence. Yet there is nothing
lugubrious about Mencken's tragic sense of life. Perhaps the most revealing
selection in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy is the Monday Article he
wrote on the death of Albert Hildebrandt, one of his oldest friends: "The
universe is run idiotically, and its only certain product is sorrow. But there
are yet men who, by their generally pleasant spirits, by their extraordinary
capacity for making and keeping friends, yet manage to cheat, in some measure,
the common destiny of mankind, doomed like the beasts to perish." What was
true of Hildebrandt was doubly true of his distinguished obituarist, whose
habitual reply to the idiocies of the universe was a sardonic grin. "We
live in a land of abounding quackeries," he once said, "and if we do
not learn how to laugh we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the
race of viewers-with-alarm." This is the ultimate source of Mencken's
abiding appeal: "He achieves his effect," Joseph Epstein has rightly
and beautifully said, "through the magical transfer of joie de vivre."
The man who can look into the abyss and laugh is rare enough; when he can also
make his readers laugh along with him, it matters little whether he was right
or wrong about capital punishment or the novels of Henry James.
In the end, H. L. Mencken's
writing, like that of all the great essayists, is valuable not so much for what
it has to say (undeniably compelling though that often is) as for what it tells
us about the character of the man who said it. "The goods that a writer
produces," he wrote in My Life as Author and Editor, "can
never be impersonal; his character gets into them as certainly as it gets into
the work of any other creative artist, and he must be prepared to endure
investigation of it, and speculation upon it, and even gossip about it."
Surely Mencken's own character got into every word he wrote, and it is writ
large on every page of this book: witty and abrasive, self-confident and
self-contradictory, sometimes maddening, often engaging, always inimitable.
[to paraphrase the above, what I
now find valuable about the UB is not so much for what it has to say
(undeniably compelling though that often is) as for what it tells us about the
character of the men who put it together.]
"I'd rather laugh with the
sinners than cry with the saints" (Billy Joel), or with the
"uplifters"!
The argument by design
The theological argument by
design, made popular in the English-speaking countries by William Paley, is
very far from convincing. The creator it adumbrates shows only a limited
intelligence compared to His supposed masterpiece, man, and all save a few of
His inventions are inimical to life on earth rather than beneficial. There is
nothing among them that is at once as ingenious, as simple and as admirably
adapted to its uses as the wheel. I pass over the vastly more complicated
inventions of the modern era, many of them enormously superior to, say, the
mammalian heart. And I also pass over the relatively crude contrivances of this
Creator in the aesthetic field, wherein He has been far surpassed by man, as,
for example, for adroitness of design, for complexity or for beauty, the sounds
of an orchestra. Of the irrationality and wastefulness of the whole natural
process it is hardly necessary to speak. Nothing made by man resembles it here,
save only government. It is hence no wonder that the overwhelming majority of
men, at all times and everywhere, have inclined toward the belief that
government is of divine origin.
--H.L. Mencken (Minority
Report, 1956)
265
In what passes as the popular
mind, words, like the ideas they represent, become formalized, fossilized, and
emptied of intelligible significance. This is especially (though surely not
exclusively) true in America, where all thinking tends to become cant and all language
a sort of meaningless slang -- a mere exchange of what the philologists call
counter-words, i.e., worn out rubber stamps. Thus, the concept
"aristocrat" tends to become -- and has, in fact, already become --
extremely narrowed, and with it the meaning of the word. What it connotes,
intrinsically, is simply the "best" type of man -- that is, the man
whose aspirations are directed to the achievement of what is rare and
difficult, and not to the achievement of what is easy and mean -- the man, in
brief, whose capacities differ positively from those of the average man, not
only quantitatively but also qualitatively, and whose activity is spent in
doing what the average man is unable to do or afraid to do. But in the United
States aristocrat has become almost indistinguishable from loafer.
287
By an inferior man I mean one
who knows nothing that is not known to every adult, who can do nothing that
could not be learned by anyone in a few weeks, and who meanly admires mean
things.
--H.L. Mencken (from H.L. Mencken's Notebooks)
... A genuine aristocracy is
grounded upon very much different principles. Its first and most salient
character is its interior security, and the chief visible evidence of that
security is the freedom that goes with it -- not only freedom in act, the
divine right of the aristocrat to do what he jolly well pleases, so long as he
does not violate the primary guarantees and obligations of his class, but also
and more importantly freedom in thought, the liberty to try and err, the right to
be his own man. It is the instinct of a true aristocracy, not to punish
eccentricity by expulsion, but to throw a mantle of protection about it -- to
safeguard it from the suspicions and resentments of the lower orders. Those
lower orders are inert, timid, inhospitable to ideas, hostile to changes,
faithful to a few maudlin superstitions. All progress goes on on the higher
levels. It is there that salient personalities, made secure by artificial
immunities, may oscillate most widely from the normal track. It is within that
entrenched fold, out of reach of the immemorial certainties of the mob, that
extraordinary men of the lower orders may find their city of refuge, and
breathe a clear air. This, indeed, is at once the hall-mark and the
justification of an aristocracy -- that it is beyond responsibility to the
general masses of men, and hence superior to both their degraded longings and
their no less degraded aversions. It is nothing if not autonomous, curious,
venturesome, courageous, and everything if it is. It is the custodian of the
qualities that make for change and experiment; it is the class that organizes
danger to the service of the race; it pays for its high prerogatives by
standing in the forefront of the fray.
No such aristocracy, it must be
plain, is now on view in the United States. The makings of one were visible in
the Virgirnia of the later eighteenth century, but with Jefferson and
Washington the promise died. In New England, it seems to me, there was never
any aristocracy, either in being or in nascency: there was only a theocracy
that degenerated very quickly into a plutocracy on the one hand, and a caste of
sterile Gelehrten on the other -- the passion for God splitting into a
lust for dollars and a weakness for mere words. Despite the common notion to
the contrary -- a notion generated by confusing literacy with intelligence --
New England has never shown the slightest sign of a genuine enthusiasm for
ideas. It began its history as a slaughter-house of ideas, and it is to-day not
easily distinguishable from a cold-storage plant. Its celebrated adventures in
mysticism, once apparently so bold and significant, are now seen to have been
little more than an elaborate hocus-pocus -- respectable Unitarians shocking
the peasantry and scaring the horned cattle in the fields by masquerading in
the robes of Rosicrucians. The ideas that it embraced in those austere and
far-off days were stale, and when it had finished with them they were dead. ...
... The sect of professional
idealists has so far dwindled that it has ceased to be of any importance, even
as an opposition. When the plutocracy is challenged now, it is challenged by
the proletariat.
Well, what is on view in New
England is on view in all other parts of the nation, sometimes with
ameliorations, but usually with the colors merely exaggerated. What one
beholds, sweeping the eye over the land, is a culture that, like the national
literature, is in three layers -- the plutocracy on top, a vast mass of
undifferentiated human blanks at the bottom, and a forlorn intelligentisia
gasping out a precarious life between. I need not set out at any length, I
hope, the intellectual deficiencies of the plutocracy -- its utter failure to
show anything even remotely resembling the makings of an aristocracy. It is
badly educated, it is stupid, it is full of low- caste superstitions and
indignations, it is without decent traditions or informing vision; above all,
it is extraordinarily lacking in the most elemental independence and courage.
Out of this class comes the grotesque fashionable society of our big towns,
already described. Imagine a horde of peasants incredibly enriched and with
almost infinite power thrust into their hands, and you will have a fair picture
of its habitual state of mind. It shows all the stigmata of inferiority --
moral certainty, cruelty, suspicion of ideas, fear. Never did it function more
revealingly than in the late pogrom against the so-called Reds, i.e.,
against humorless idealists who, like Andrew Jackson, took the platitudes of
democracy quite seriously. The machinery brought to bear upon these feeble and
scattered fanatics would have almost sufficed to repel an invasion by the
united powers of Europe. They were hunted out of their sweat-shops and
coffee-houses as if they were so many Carranzas or Ludendorffs, dragged to jail
to the tooting of horns, arraigned before quaking judges on unintelligible
charges, condemned to defend themselves, torn from their dependent families,
herded into prison-ships, and then finally dumped in a snow waste, to be
rescued and fed by the Bolsheviki. And what was the theory at the bottom of all
these astounding proceedings? So far as it can be reduced to comprehensible
terms it was much less a theory than a fear -- a shivering, idiotic,
discreditable fear of a mere banshee -- an overpowering, paralyzing dread that
some extra-eloquent Red, permitted to emit his balderdash unwhipped, might
eventually convert a couple of courageous men, and that the courageous men,
filled with indignation against the plutocracy, might take to the highroad,
burn down a nail-factory or two, and slit the throat of some virtuous
profiteer. In order to lay this fear, in order to ease the jangled nerves of
the American successors to the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns, all the constitutional
guarantees of the citizen were suspended, the statute- books were burdened with
laws that surpass anything heard of in the Austria of Maria Theresa, the
country was handed over to a frenzied mob of detectives, informers and agents
provocateurs -- and the Reds departed laughing loudly, and were hailed by
the Bolsheviki as innocents escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane.
Obviously, it is out of reason
to look for any hospitality to ideas in a class so extravagantly fearful of
even the most palpably absurd of them. Its philosophy is firmly grounded upon
the thesis that the existing order must stand forever free from attack, and not
only from attack, but also from mere academic criticism, and its very ethics
are as firmly grounded upon the thesis that every attempt at any such criticism
is a proof of moral turpitude. Within its own ranks, protected by what may be
regarded as the privelege of the order, there is nothing to take the place of
this criticism...
* * * * *
74
Astronomers and physicists,
dealing habitually with objects and qualities far beyond the reach of the
senses, even with the aid of the most powerful aids that ingenuity has been
able to devise, tend almost inevitably to fall into the ways of thinking of men
dealing with objects and quantities that do not exist at all, e.g.
theologians and metaphysicians. Thus their speculations tend almost inevitably
to depart from the field of true science, which is that of precise observation,
and to become mere soaring empyrean. The process works backward, too. That is
to say, their reports of what they pretend actually to see are often
very unreliable. It is thus no wonder that, of all men of science, they are the
most given to flirting with theology. Nor is it remarkable that, in the popular
belief, most astronomers end by losing their minds.
198
Of all Christain dogmas, perhaps
the most absurd is that of the Atonement, for it not only certifies to the
impotence of God but also to His lack of common sense. If He is actually
all-wise and all-powerful then He might have rescued man from sin by devices
much simpler and more rational than the sorry one of engaging in fornication
with a young peasant girl, and then commissioning the ensuing love-child to
save the world. And if He is intelligent, He would have chosen a far more
likely scene for the business than an obscure corner of the Roman empire, among
a people of no influence or importance. Why not Rome itself? Why was not Jesus
sent there, instead of being confined to the back alleys of Palestine? His
followers, after his execution, must have asked themselves something like this
question, for they proceeded at once upon the missionary journeys that He had
never undertaken Himself. Their success was only moderate, for they were men of
despised castes, and the doctrine they preached was quickly corrupted by
borrowings from the various other cults of the time and from their own ignorant
speculations. Indeed, the whole machinery of propaganda was managed so clumsily
that Christianity prevailed at last by a series of political accidents, none of
them having anything to do with its fundamental truth. Even so, the
overwhelming majority of human beings remained unaffected by it, and it was
more than a thousand years before so many as half of them had heard of it.
During all this time, by Christian theory, they remained plunged in the sins
that Jesus was sent to obliterate, and countless multitudes of them must have
gone to Hell. To this day there are many millions still in that outer darkness,
including all the Moslem nations, all the great peoples of Asia, and nearly all
the savages on earth. Certainly, it would be impossible to imagine a more inept
and ineffective scheme for saving humanity. It was badly planned, its execution
was left mainly to extremely stupid men, and it failed to reach all save a
minute minority of the men and women it was designed for. I can think of no
reformer, not clearly insane, who has managed his propaganda so badly.
Meditation on Meditation
by H. L. Mencken
[From "Ad Imaginem Dei
Creavit Illum", Prejudices: Third Series (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1922), pp. 125-128.]
Man's capacity for abstract
thought, which most other mammals seem to lack, has undoubtedly given him his
present mastery of the land surface of the earth -- a mastery disputed only by
several hundred species of microscopic organisms. It is responsible for his
feeling of superiority, and under that feeling there is undoubtedly a certain
measure of reality, at least within narrow limits. But what is too often overlooked
is that the capacity to perform an act is by no means synonymous with its
salubrious exercise. The simple fact is that most of man's thinking is stupid,
pointless, and injurious to him. Of all animals, indeed, he seems the least
capable of arriving at accurate judgments in the matters that most desperately
affect his welfare. Try to imagine a rat, in the realm of rat ideas, arriving
at a notion as violently in comtempt of plausibility as the notion, say, of
Swedenborgianism, or that of homeopathy, or that of infant damnation, or that
of mental telepathy. Try to think of a congretation of educated rats gravely
listening to such disgusting intellectual rubbish as was in the public bulls of
Dr. Woodrow Wilson. Man's natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is
sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false. Let any great nation
of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded
upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most
glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so in
politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many
of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are
not reducible to logical statement at all. It is so in religion, which, like
poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. It is
so in nearly every field of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most
rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are
precisely the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first
"advanced" gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his
first lecture tour in the first chautauqua, and it will be so until the high
gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one great, final
blast of fire, mustard gas and streptcocci.
No doubt the imagination of man
is to blame for this singular weakness. That imagination, I daresay, is what
gave him his first lift above his fellow primates. It enabled him to visualize
a condition of existence better than that he was experiencing, and bit by bit
he was able to give the picture a certain crude reality. Even to-day he keeps
on going ahead in the same manner. That is, he thinks of something that he
would like to be or to get, something appreciably better than what he is or
has, and then, by the laboriious, costly method of trial and error, he
gradually moves toward it. In the process he is often severely punished for his
discontent with God's ordinances. He mashes his thumb, he skins his shin; he
stumbles and falls; the prize he reaches out for blows up in his hands. But bit
by bit he moves on, or, at all events, his heirs and assigns move on. Bit by
bit he smooths the path beneath his remaining leg, and achieves pretty toys for
his remaining hand to play with, and accumulates delights for his remaining ear
and eye.
Alas, he is not content with
this slow and sanguinary progress! Always he looks further and further ahead.
Always he imagines things just over the sky-line. This body of imaginings
constitutes his stock of sweet beliefs, his corpus of high faiths and
confidences -- in brief, his burden of errors. And that burden of errors is
what distinguishes man, even above his capacity for tears, his talents as a
liar, his excessive hypocrisy and poltroonery, from all the other orders of
mammalia. Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the
king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only
by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself, but also and
more particularly by himself -- by his incomparable talent for searching out
and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.
THE BALLGAME
--H.L. Mencken
["The American: His Morals", Smart Set, July 1913, p. 88]
[Mencken's father was part owner of a Baltimore professional baseball team in
the 1880s.]
[It stimulates] a childish and
orgiastic local pride, a typical American weakness, and ... it offers an
admirable escape for that bad sportsmanship and savage bloodthirst which appear
in all the rest of the American's diversions. An American crowd does not go to
a ... [ball] game to see a fair and honest contest, but to see the visiting
club walloped and humiliated. If the home club can't achieve the walloping
unaided, the crowd helps -- usually by means no worse than mocking and
reviling, but sometimes with fists and beer bottles. And if, even then, the
home club is drubbed, it becomes the butt itself, and is lambasted even more
brutally than the visitors. The thirst of the crowd is for victims, and if it
can't get them in one way it will get them in another.
On Being an American
by H.L. Mencken
(from Prejudices, Third Series)
4
All the while I have been
forgetting the third of my reasons for remaining so faithful a citizen of the
Federation, despite all the lascivious inducements from expatriates to follow
them beyond the seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I
succumb. It is the reason which grows out of my mediaeval but unashamed taste
for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the
grosser varieties. The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest
show on earth. It is a show which avoids diligently all the kinds of clowning
which tire me most quickly -- for example, royal ceremonials, the tedious
hocus-pocus of haut politique, the taking of politics seriously -- and
lays chief stress upon the kinds which delight me unceasingly -- for example,
the ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operations of
master rogues, the pursuit of witches and heretics, the desperate struggles of
inferior men to claw their way into Heaven. We have clowns in constant practice
among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state as a Jack
Dempsey is above a paralytic -- and not a few dozen or score of them, but whole
droves and herds. Human enterprises which, in all other Christian countries,
are resigned despairingly to an incurable dullness -- things that seem devoid
of exhilirating amusement, by their very nature -- are here lifted to such vast
heights of buffoonery that contemplating them strains the midriff almost to
breaking. I cite an example: the worship of God. Everywhere else on earth it is
carried on in a solemn and dispiriting manner; in England, of course, the
bishops are obscene, but the average man seldom gets a fair chance to laugh at
them and enjoy them. Now come home. Here we not only have bishops who are
enormously more obscene than even the most gifted of the English bishops; we
have also a huge force of lesser specialists in ecclesiastical mountebankery --
tin-horn Loyolas, Savonarolas and Xaviers of a hundred fantastic rites, each
performing untiringly and each full of a grotesque and illimitable
whimsicality. Every American town, however small, has one of its own: a holy
clerk with so fine a talent for introducing the arts of jazz into the salvation
of the damned that his performance takes on all the gaudiness of a four-ring
circus, and the bald announcement that he will raid Hell on such and such a
night is enough to empty all the town blind-pigs and bordellos and pack his
sanctuary to the doors. And to aid him and inspire him there are travelling
experts to whom he stands in the relation of a wart to the Matterhorn --
stupendous masters of theological imbecility, contrivers of doctrines utterly
preposterous, heirs to the Joseph Smith, Mother Eddy and John Alexander Dowie
tradition -- Bryan, Sunday, and their like. These are the eminences of the
American Sacred College. I delight in them. Their proceedings make me a happier
American.
Turn, now, to politics.
Consider, for example, a campaign for the Presidency. Would it be possible to
imagine anything more uproariously idiotic -- a deafening, nerve-wracking
battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and
Sganarelle, Gobbo and Dr. Cook -- the unspeakable, with fearful snorts,
gradually swallowing the inconceivable? I defy any one to match it elsewhere on
this earth. In other lands, at worst, there are at least intelligible issues,
coherent ideas, salient personalities. Somebody says something, and somebody
replies. But what did Harding say in 1920, and what did Cox reply? Who was
Harding, anyhow, and who was Cox? Here, having perfected democracy, we lift the
whole combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics. Here we load a
pair of palpably tin cannon with blank cartridges charged with talcum power,
and so let fly. Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy reminder
that it is serious, and that some one may be hurt. I hold that this elevation
of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that
no-where else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been
developed to such fineness...
... Here politics is purged of
all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with
such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a
campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for "King Lear," or a
hanging, or a course of medical journals.
But feeling better for the
laugh. Ridi si sapis, said Martial. Mirth is necessary to wisdom, to
comfort, above all to happiness. Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is
the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication. Here the
buffoonery never stops. What could be more delightful than the endless struggle
of the Puritan to make the joy of the minority unlawful and impossible? The
effort is itself a greater joy to one standing on the side-lines than any or
all of the carnal joys it combats. Always, when I contemplate an uplifter at
his hopeless business, I recall a scene in an old- time burlesque show,
witnessed for hire in my days as a dramatic critic. A chorus girl executed a
fall upon the stage, and Rudolph Krausemeyer, the Swiss comdeian, rushed to her
aid. As he stooped painfully to succor her, Irving Rabinovitz, the Zionist
comedian, fetched him a fearful clout across the cofferdam with a slap-stick.
So the uplifter, the soul-saver, the Americanizer, striving to make the
Republic fit for Y.M.C.A. secretaries. He is the eternal American, ever moved
by the best of intentions, ever running a la Krausemeyer to the rescue
of virtue, and ever getting his pantaloons fanned by the Devil. I am naturally
sinful, and such spectacles caress me. If the slap-stick were a sash-weight,
the show would be cruel, and I'd probably complain to the Polizei. As it
is, I know that the uplifter is not really hurt, but simply shocked. The blow,
in fact, does him good, for it helps get him into Heaven, as exegetes prove
from Matthew v, 11: Hereux serez-vous, lorsqu'on vous outragera, qu'on vous
persecutera, and so on. As for me, it makes me a more contented man, and
hence a better citizen. One man prefers the Republic because it pays better
wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober and his
daughter chaste. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the
cathedral at Chartres. Another because, living here, he can read the New York Evening
Journal. Another because there is a warrant out for him somewhere else. Me,
I like it because it amuses me to my taste. I never get tired of the show. It
is worth every cent it costs.
That cost, it seems to me is
very moderate. Taxes in the United States are not actually high. I figure, for
example, that my private share of the expense of maintaining the Hon. Mr.
Harding in the White House this year will work out to less than 80 cents. Try
to think of better sport for the money: in New York it has been estimated that
it costs $8 to get comfortably tight, and $17.50, on an average, to pinch a
girl's arm. The United States Senate will cost me perhaps $11 for the year, but
against that expense set the subscription price of the Congressional Record,
about $15, which, as a journalist, I receive for nothing. For $4 less than
nothing I am thus entertained as Solomon never was by his hooch dancers. Col.
George Brinton McClellan Harvey costs me but 25 cents a year; I get Nicholas
Murray Butler free. Finally, there is young Teddy Roosevelt, the naval expert.
Teddy costs me, as I work it out, about 11 cents a year, or less than a cent a
month. More, he entertains me doubly for the money, first as a naval expert,
and secondly as a walking attentat upon democracy, a devastating proof
that there is nothing, after all, in that superstition. We Americans subscribe
to the doctrine of human equality -- and the Rooseveltii reduce it to an
absurdity as brilliantly as the sons of Veit Bach. Where is your equal
opportunity now? Here in this Eden of clowns, with the highest rewards of
clowning theoretically open to every poor boy -- here in the very citadel of
democracy we found and cherish a clown dynasty!
[Various selections from Minority
Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks, 1956.]
62
In the field of practical morals
popular judgments are often sounder than those of the self-appointed experts.
These experts seldom show any talent for the art and mystery they undertake to
profess; on the contrary, nine-tenths of them are obvious quacks. They are
responsible for all the idiotic moral reforms and innovations that come and go,
afflicting decent people. And they are the main, and often the only advocates
of moral ideas that have begun to wear out, and deserve to be scrapped. The
effort to put down birth control, led by Catholic theologians but with a
certain amount of support from Protestant colleagues, offers a shining case in
point. The more the heat is applied to them, the more Catholic women seem to
resort to the devices of the Devil, on sale in every drugstore. Many of these
women are genuinely pious, but into their piety there has been introduced an
unhappy doubt, perhaps only half formulated. It is a doubt about the
professional competence of their moral guides and commanders. They have not
only begun to view the curious fiats of bishops and archbishops with a growing
indifference; they have also begun to toy with the suspicion that even the
Pope, on occasion, may be all wet. His first anathemas against contraception
were plain and unqualified, but of late he has begun to hedge prudently, and it
is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to
mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.
This concession is a significant admission that the original position of the
moral theologians was untenable. In other words, it is an admission that they
were wrong about a capital problem of their trade -- and that the persons they
sought to teach were right.
Bryan
by H.L. Mencken
II
What was behind that consuming
hatred? At first I thought that it was mere evangelical passion. Evangelical
Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of
Christ was founded upon love. But even evangelical Christians occasionally
loose their belts and belch amicably; I have known some who, off duty, were
very benignant. ...
One day it dawned on me that
Bryan, after all, was an evangelical Christain only by sort of afterthought --
that his career in this world, and the glories thereof, had actually come to an
end before he ever began whooping for Genesis. So I came to this conclusion:
that what really moved him was a lust for revenge. The men of the cities had
destroyed him and made a mock of him; now he would lead the yokels against
them. Various facts clicked into the theory, and I hold it still. The hatred in
the old man's burning eyes was not for the enemies of God; it was for the
enemies of Bryan.
Thus he fought his last fight,
eager only for blood. It quickly became frenzied and preposterous, and after
that pathetic. All sense departed from him. He bit right and left, like a dog
with rabies. He descended into demagogy so dreadful that his very associates
blushed. His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up -- to lead his
forlorn mob against the foe. That foe, alas, refused to be alarmed. It insisted
upon seeing the battle as a comedy. Even Darrow, who knew better, occasionally
yielded to the prevailing spirit. Finally, he lured poor Bryan into a folly
almost incredible.
I allude to his astounding
argument against the notion that man is a mammal. I am glad I heard it, for
otherwise I'd never believe it. There stood the man who had been thrice a
candidate for the Presidency of the Republic -- and once, I believe, elected --
there he stood in the glare of the world, uttering stuff that a boy of eight
would laugh at! The artful Darrow led him on: he repeated it, ranted for it,
bellowed it in his cracked voice. A tragedy, indeed! He came into life a hero,
a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. Now he was passing out a pathetic fool.
...
IV
... Bryan was a vulgar and
common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant
and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his
time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe,
watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in
civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a
poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an
almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all
fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a
gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.
(The Baltimore Evening Sun,
July 27, 1925)
"Well, let us not laugh.
The believing mind is a curious thing. It must absorb its endless rations of
balderdash, or perish."
--H.L. Mencken
H.L. Mencken (from H.L.
Mencken's Notebooks)
141
Casuistry has got a bad name in
the world, mainly, I suppose, because of the dubious uses to which it was put
during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by some of its Jesuit
practitioners. But it really is a very useful art, and its influence upon the
thinking of mankind has probably been much more beneficial than deleterious.
Some of the most valuable liberties of the modern age were attained by the use
of adept casuistry. It was impossible to argue for them openly, but they could
be supported effectively by the tricks invented by theological casuists. The
legal fictions that broke down the old rigidity of English law had the same
origin. It is a pity that American law is not developing more of them.
The True Immortal
by H.L. Mencken
(From the Smart Set, Oct., 1919, pp. 84-85)
If, in the course of long years, the great masses of the plain people gradually
lose their old faiths, it is only to fill the gaps with new faiths that restate
the old ones in new terms. Nothing, in fact, could be more commonplace than the
observation that the crazes which periodically ravage the proletariat are, in
the main, no more than distorted echoes of delusions cherished centuries ago.
The fundamental religious ideas of the lower orders of Christendom have not
changed materially in 2,000 years, and they were old when they were first
borrowed from the heathen of Asia Minor and Northern Africa. The Iowa Methodist
of today, imagining him able to understand them at all, would be able to accept
the tenets of Augustine without changing more than a few accents and
punctuation marks. Every Sunday his raucous ecclesiastics batter his ears with
diluted and debased filches from "De Civitate Dei," and almost every
article of his practical ethics may be found clearly stated in the eminent
bishop's Ninety-third Epistle. And so in politics. The Bolsheviki of today not
only poll-parrot the balderdash of the French demagogues of 1789; they also
mouth what was gospel to every bete blonde in the Teutonic forests of
the Fifth Century.
Truth shifts and changes like a
cataract of diamonds; its aspect is never precisely the same at two successive
instants. But error flows down the channel of history like some great stream of
lava or infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a
world of chaos. It is, perhaps, the one thing that gives human society the
stability needed to save it from the wreck that ever menaces. Without their
dreams men would have fallen upon and devoured one another long ago -- and yet
every dream is an illusion, and every illusion a falsehood.
... This frank acceptance and
tolerance of the Old Adam is one of the chief sources of the Church's strength,
and probably explains more plausibly than anything else its long prosperity in
the world. It is spared thereby those moral witch-hunts that have so often
disrupted the Protestant sects, it is aided in keeping down the nuisance of
spiritual pride, and it is given a firm grip upon the lowly, who are as
conscious of their lack of saintliness as they are of their lack of wealth, and
are naturally grateful to a vast, lordly and mysterious organization which
condescends to them politely, and makes them comfortable. The whip it cracks
over them is barbed with the fear of Hell, but the cracking is done with
infinite discretion, and a fine understanding of psychology as she blows in the
lower IQ brackets. Upon the superior minority -- never large -- the Church
makes play with other weapons, some of them of a great subtlety, but the rank
and file are policed by fear alone, and its only administrative reinforcement
is a very simple system of obligations and taboos. Make your Easter duty. Avoid
meat on Friday. Keep Lent. Marry only in the Church. Bring your babies for
baptism promptly, and have plenty of them. Be respectful to your spiritual
superiors. Give to the Church's poor. Read no forbidden books. For the rest, do
as well as you can, considering the feeble strength that Yahweh hath granted
you -- and trust Holy Church, which is wise and merciful, to save you somehow
from Hell.
Christ
by H.L. Mencken
[H.L. Mencken, Treatise on
Right and Wrong, Knopf, (1934), pp. 254-255.]
The mob, having heard Christ,
turned against him, and applauded his crucifixion. His theological ideas were too
logical and too plausible for it, and his ethical ideas were enormously too
austere. What it yearned for was the old comfortable balderdash under a new and
gaudy name, and that is precisely what Paul offered it.
[Notes on Democracy,
1926, pp. 66-67]
Christ, we are told, preached no
complicated mysteries and demanded no pedantic allegiance. He knew nothing of
transubstantiation, or of reserved sacraments, or of the adoration of the
saints, or of the vestments controversy. He was even somewhat vague about
original sin. Alive today, could He qualify as a bishop? He could not. Even the
Salvation Army would put Him on probation, at least until He had mastered the
cornet. Even the Christian Scientists would bar Him from their auctionblock, at
least until He had got a morning coat and paid cash for a copy of "Science
and Health." What would the Congregatio Sancti Officii say of His
theology? What would the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public
Morals say of His ethics? What would Monsignor Manning say of His patriotism,
or of His economic views, or of His probable opinion of the great spiritual
filling-station on Morningside Heights? What these high authorities would say,
I venture, would be a plenty.
(American Mercury,
Editorial, May, 1928, p. 25)
[Baltimore Evening Sun,
June 29, 1925]
"Such obscenities as the
forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other
purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment,
among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human
progress affects everyone--that even the dullest man, in these bright days,
knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more
civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated
minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them,
perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized--though I should not like
to be put to giving names--but the great masses of men, even in this inspired
republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are
ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know
little of anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign
of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.
"Such immortal vermin, true
enough, get their share of the fruits of human progress, and so they may be
said, in a way, to have their part in it. The most ignorant man, when he is
ill, may enjoy whatever boons and usufructs modern medicine may offer--that is,
provided he is too poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to,
to take a bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public
libraries. He may look at worlds of art. He may hear good music. He has at hand
a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more tolerable: the
telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence
schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do with bringing these things into
the world than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase
them today than the birds in the air.
"On the contrary, he is
generally against them, and sometimes with immense violence. Every step in
human progress, from the first feeble stirings in the abyss of time, has been
oppressed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been
added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was
new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new
truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth- seeker who got into
their hands.
"The so-called religious
organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are
nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his
betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his
bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of
life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is
recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders--that no man of any
education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at
botttom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous--by mere abuse if it
is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law.
"Such organizations, of
course, must have leaders; there must be men in them whose ignorance and
imbecility are measurably less abject than the ignorance and imbecility of the
average. These super-Chandala often attain to a considerable power, especially
in the Democratic states. Their followers trust them and look up to them;
sometimes, when the pack is on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them.
But their puissance cannot conceal their incurrable inferiority. They belong to
the mob as surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely
the mob's hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the level of their
comprehension is of the devil. A glass of wine delights civilized men; them
themselves, drinking it, would get drunk. Ergo, wine must be prohibited. The
hypothesis of evolution is credited by all men of education'; they themselves
can't understand it. Ergo, its teaching must be put down.
"This simple fact explains
such phenomena as the Tennessee buffoonery. Nothing else can. We must think of
human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as of
something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled
towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have
an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French
Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated
and driven to cover. But a few survive--and a few are enough to carry on.
"The inferior man's reasons
for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is
complex--because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for
taking in ideas. Thus his search is for shortcuts. Their aim is to make the
unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels.
No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the
most concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the
theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic
among the submerged--and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such
quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple--and every man
prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him.
"The popularity of
Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the
same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately
complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of
knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to
peasants of to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to
streptococci. But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can
grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irrestibile
reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has
one more excuse for hating his betters.
"Politics and the fine arts
repeat the story. The issues that the former throw up are often so complex
that, in the present state of human knowledge, they must remain impenetrable,
even to the most enlightened men. How much easier to follow a mountebank with a
shibboleth--a Coolidge, a Wilson, or a Roosevelt! The arts, like the sciences,
demand special training, often very difficult. But in jazz there are simple
rhythms, comprehensible even to savages.
"What all this amounts to
is that the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually
antagonistic classes, almost two genera--a small minority that plays with ideas
and is capable of taking them in, and the vast majority that finds them
painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic
with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and
to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do
with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended,
it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.
"That is why Beethoven
survives. Of the 110,000,000 so-called human beings now who live in the United
States, flogged and crazed by Coolidge, Rotary, the Ku Klux and the newspapers,
it is probable that at least 108,000,000 have never heard of him at all. To
these immortals, made in God's image, one of the greatest artists the human
race has ever produced is not even a name. So far as they are concerned he
might as well have died at birth. The gorgeous and incomparable beauties that
he created are nothing to them. They get no value out of the fact that he existed.
They are completely unaware of what he did in the world, and would not be
interested if they were told.
"The fact saves good
Ludwig's bacon. His music survives because it lies outside the plane of popular
apprehension, like the colors beyond violet and the concept of honor. If it
could be brought within range, it would at once arouse hostility. Its
complexity would challenge; its lace of moral purpose would affright. Soon
there would be a movement to put it down, and Baptist clergymen would rage the
land denouncing it, and in the end some poor musician, taken in the un-
American act of playing it, would be put on trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers,
and railroaded to the calaboose."
Mencken on Tolerance &
Combat
Aftermath by H.L. Mencken
(written September 14, 1925 -- The Baltimore Evening Sun)
THE Liberals, in their
continuing discussion of the late trial of the infidel Scopes at Dayton, Tenn.,
run true to form. That is to say, they show all their habitual lack of humor
and all their customary furtive weakness for the delusions of Homo
neanderthalensis. I point to two of their most enlightened organs: the
eminent New York World and the gifted New Republic. The World
is displeased with Mr. Darrow because, in his appalling cross-examination of the
mountebank Bryan, he did some violence to the theological superstitions that
millions of Americans cherish. The New Republic denounces him because he
addressed himself, not to "the people of Tennessee" but to the whole
country, and because he should have permitted "local lawyers" to
assume "the most conspicuous position in the trial."
Once more, alas, I find myself
unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the World's contention
amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with
superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense.
The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it
with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and
ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then
their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in
all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.
True enough, even a
superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and
indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try
to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as
eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them
to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free
criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be
treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge. Did
Darrow, in the course of his dreadful bombardment of Bryan, drop a few shells,
incidentally, into measurably cleaner camps? Then let the garrisons of those
camps look to their defenses. They are free to shoot back. But they can't disarm
their enemy.
II
The meaning of religious
freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort
of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion.
A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and
emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so,
then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and
outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to
holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of
ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to
all the rest of us.
I do not know how many Americans
entertain the ideas defended so ineptly by poor Bryan, but probably the number
is very large. They are preached once a week in at least a hundred thousand
rural churches, and they are heard too in the meaner quarters of the great
cities. Nevertheless, though they are thus held to be sound by millions, these
ideas remain mere rubbish. Not only are they not supported by the known facts;
they are in direct contravention of the known facts. No man whose information
is sound and whose mind functions normally can conceiveably credit them. They
are the products of ignorance and stupidity, either or both.
What should be a civilized man's
attitude toward such superstitions? It seems to me that the only attitude
possible to him is one of contempt. If he admits that they have any
intellectual dignity whatever, he admits that he himself has none. If he
pretends to a respect for those who believe in them, he pretends falsely, and
sinks almost to their level. When he is challenged he must answer honestly,
regardless of tender feelings. That is what Darrow did at Dayton, and the issue
plainly justified the act. Bryan went there in a hero's shining armor, bent
deliberately upon a gross crime against sense. He came out a wrecked and
preposterous charlatan, his tail between his legs. Few Americans have ever done
so much for their country in a whole lifetime as Darrow did in two hours.
-- from The Impossible H.L.
Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories, edited by Marion
Elizabeth Rodgers, Anchor Books, 1991, pp. 608-610.
[Letter from H. L. Mencken to Marion
Bloom, Pratt Library]
April 16th, 1915
Dear Marionne,
Away with your croaking about
the futility of life! That it is meaningless I grant you, but surely not
futile. So long as there is the joy of a job well done -- whether an epic, a
fried egg or a murder -- there will be plenty of excuse for remaining alive.
The gods seem to have us by the coccyx -- but now and then we jump away and
give them the larf! This is happiness.
Tuesday, Yours, M.
I sent you a second copy of the
Smart Set last night.
Crowd Psychology
--H.L. Mencken [Smart Set,
"The Anatomy of Ochlocracy", February, 1921, pp. 139-140.]
The crowd phenomena of peace
times are more durable and more important.
Moreover, they are grounded upon
precisely the same psychological fact [as war is]. The first of these facts is
that an individual, when he joins a crowd, whether of life-long Democrats,
Methodists or professors, sacrifices his private judgment in order to partake
of the power and security that membership gives him. The second is that the
crowd con- fines its aims to one or two simple objects, and that it holds
itself together by cherishing the delusion that they are all-important and
pressing for attainment. The third is that its primary motive is almost always
fear ... this fear, of course, is seldom plainly stated; it is almost always
concealed beneath a profession of altruism. But the profession need not deceive
us. A crowd is quite incapable of altruism. The most it is capable of is to
help A, to whom it is indifferent, in order to hurt B, whom it fears and hates.
Note for an Honest
Autobiography
by H.L. Mencken
(From the Baltimore Evening Sun, June 12, 1922)
On blue, hyperacid days the
suspicion often seizes me that most of my favorite notions are nonsensical --
worse, that some of them are probably downright insane. It is a sad pleasure to
examine them thus at leisure, and pick out the flaws in them. What is left is
little save a pile of platitudes -- the apple-cores of meditation. Well, who is
better off? I know of no one, though neither do I know of anyone who admits it.
A few propositions, perhaps, are immutably true, e.g., that no man can hold his
head under water half an hour and live, that the average Congressman is a
moron, that Johah swallowed the whale. The rest is mere illusion, folly,
egomania.
Nevertheless, it comforts me to
think that, in one respect at least, I am superior to my chief opponents. That
is in the respect that, in the main, my ideas are unpopular, and hence not
profitable. No one can reasonably allege that I emit them in order to gain
political office, or to get an honorary degree from the Ohio Wesleyan
University, or to acquire the Legion d'honneur. This may seem a small
thing, but it is at least something, especially in an American. Practically all
the other men that I know try to capitalize their doctrines in some way or
other. Who ever heard of an uplifter who was not looking for a job? Or, at all
events, some one to finance his crusade? No one finances mine, such as it is.
No one ever will.
The Cult of Hope
by H.L. Mencken From Prejudices: Second Series, 1920, pp. 211-218
Of all the sentimental errors
that reign and rage in this incomparable Republic, the worst is that which
confuses the function of criticism, whether aesthetic, political or social, with
the function of reform. Almost invariably it takes the form of a protest:
"The fellow condemns without offering anything better. Why tear down
without building up?" So snivel the sweet ones: so wags the national
tongue. The messianic delusion becomes a sort of universal murrain. It is
impossible to get an audience for an idea that is not "constructive"
-- i.e., that is not glib, and uplifting, and full of hope, and hence capable
of tickling the emotions by leaping the intermediate barrier of intelligence.
In this protest and demand, of
course, there is nothing but the babbling of men who mistake their feelings for
thoughts. The truth is that criticism, if it were confined to the proposing of
alternative schemes, would quickly cease to have any force or utility at all,
for in the overwhelming majority of instances no alternative scheme of any
intelligibility is imaginable, and the whole object of the critical process is
to demonstrate it. The poet, if the victim is a poet, is simply one as bare of
gifts as a herring is of fur: no conceivable suggestion will ever make him
write actual poetry. And the plan of reform, in politics, sociology or what
not, is simply beyond the pale of reason; no change in it or improvement of it
will ever make it acheive the impossible. Here, precisely, is what is the
matter with most of the notions that go floating about the country,
particularly in the field of governmental reform. The trouble with them is not
only that they won't and don't work; the trouble with them, more importantly,
is that the thing they propose to accomplish is intrinsically, or at all events
most probably, beyond accomplishment. That is to say, the problem they are
ostensibly designed to solve is a problem that is insoluble. To tackle them
with a proof of that insolubility, or even with a colorable argument of it, is
sound criticism; to tackle them with another solution that is quite as bad, or
even worse, is to pick the pocket of one knocked down by an automobile.
Unluckily, it is difficult for
the American mind to grasp the concept of insolubility. Thousands of poor dolts
keep on trying to square the circle; other thousands keep pegging away at
perpetual motion. The number of persons so afflicted is far greater than the
records of the Patent Office show, for beyond the circle of frankly insane
enterprise there lie circles of more and more plausible enterprise, and finally
we come to a circle which embraces the great majority of human beings. These
are the optimists and chronic hopers of the world, the believers in men, ideas
and things. It is the settled habit of such folk to give ear to whatever is
comforting; it is their settled faith that whatever is desirable will come to
pass. A caressing confidence -- but one, unfortunately, that is not borne out
by human experience. The fact is that some of the things that men and women
have desired most ardently for thousands of years are not nearer realization
today than they were in the time of Rameses, and that there is not the
slightest reason for believing that they will lose their coyness on any near
tomorrow. Plans for hurrying them on have been tried since the beginning; plans
for forcing them overnight are in copious and antagonistic operation today; and
yet they continue to hold off and elude us, and the chances are that they will
keep on holding off and eluding us until the angels get tired of the show, and
the whole earth is set off like a gigantic bomb, or drowned, like a sick cat,
between two buckets.
Turn, for example, to the sex
problem. There is no half-baked ecclesiastic, bawling in his galvanized-iron
temple on a suburban lot, who doesn't know precisely how it ought to be dealt
with. There is no fantoddish old suffragette, sworn to get her revenge on man,
who hasn't a sovereign remedy for it. There is not a shyster of a district
attorney, ambitious for higher office, who doesn't offer to dispose of it in a
few weeks, given only enough help from the city editors. And yet, by the same
token, there is not a man who has honestly studied it and pondered it, bringing
sound information to the business, and understanding of its inner difficulties
and a clean and analytical mind, who doesn't believe and hasn't stated publicly
that it is intrinsically and eternally insoluble. For example, Hevelock Ellis.
His remedy is simply a denial of all remedies. He admits that the disease is
bad, but he shows that the medicine is infinitely worse, and so he proposes
going back to the plain disease, and advocates bearing it with philosophy, as
we bear colds in the head, marriage, the noises of the city, bad cooking and
the certainty of death. Man is inherently vile -- but he is never so vile as
when he is trying to disguise and deny his vileness. No prostitute was ever so
costly to a community as a prowling and obscene vice crusader, or as the
dubious legislator or prosecuting officer who jumps at such swine pipe.
[Selected dead cats from H.L.
Mencken (1880-1956) (from A Mencken Chrestomathy, Vintage, 1982]
The Scientist (1919)
The value the world sets upon motives
is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them:
mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high
above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful
men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually
urges him on is not some brummagen idea of Service, but a boundless, almost
pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find
out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator
releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing
tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.
The Physician
Hygiene is the corruption of
medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase
his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The whole hygienic
art, indeed, resolves itself into an ethical exhortation. This brings it, at
the end, into diametrical conflict with medicine proper. The true aim of medicine
is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the
consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance; he
offers absolution.
The Philosopher (1927)
There is no record in human
history of a happy philosopher: they exist only in romantic legend. Many of
them have committed suicide; many others have turned their children out of
doors and beaten their wives. And no wonder. If you want to find out how a
philosopher feels when he is engaged in the practise of his profession, go to
the nearest zoo and watch a chimpanzee at the wearying and hopeless job of
chasing fleas. Both suffer damnably, and neither can win.
The Iconoclast (1924)
The iconoclast proves enough
when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively
convincing -- that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of
doubts. The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows
who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the
highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe --
that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten
thousand syllogisms.
The Slave (1924)
Don't tell me what delusion he
entertains regarding God, or what mountebank he follows in politics, or what he
springs from, or what he submits to from his wife. Simply tell me how he makes
his living. It is the safest and surest of all known tests. A man who gets his
board and lodging on this ball in an ignominnious way is inevitably an ignominious
man.
The Feminine Mind
A man's women folk, whatever
their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him
secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and
doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a
shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs
of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine
intuition. The marks of that so-called intuition are simply a sharp and
accurate perception of reality, a habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a
relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the
substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, a magnifico,
a demi-god. The substance is a poor mountebank.
... Neither sex, without some
fertilization of the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the
highest reaches of human endeavor. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him,
is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep
by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian, or a
corporation director. And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence
which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections of
the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. The wholly manly man
lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret
dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to
dream at all.
The Declaration of Independence
A piece of platitudinous poetry
comparable to "The Psalm of Life" or Hamlet's soliloquy, has seized
such a powerful hold upon the imagination of the world's largest civilized
nation that it corrupts and conditions the whole of the national thinking. ...
So potent among us is a mere string of sonorous phrases, a piece of windy
flapdoodle, a rhapsody almost empty of intelligible meaning, and probably
composed under the influence of ethyl alcohol. And yet, as I say, it is more
powerful than a million swords. It looms larger than the massive fact of
Gettysburg. It is worth more than the whole Civil War. The man who loosed it
upon posterity has left it a vaster heritage than the man who invented
baseball.
--H.L. Mencken [Smart Set, "Critics of More or Less Badness",
November, 1914, pp. 153-154.] From The Diary of H. L. Mencken, edited by
Charles A. Fecher, Vintage, New York (1989).
Baltimore, November 2, 1944.
It is astonishing how little the
war impinges on me. I am, of course, rooked like everyone else by excessive
taxes, and now and then some eatable that I like is unprocurable (or procurable
only by giving up an enormous number of ration points); but in general I am
hardly affected by the great effort to save humanity and ruin the United
States. So far, no one that I know has been killed in the war, or even injured,
and I find it hard to pump up any interest in the tall talk in the newspapers
every day. ... Their correspondence from the various fronts seldom undertakes to
tell precisely what is going on: it is simply rooting for the home team. I long
ago gave up protesting against it. Paul Patterson not only believes that it is
what the readers of the Sun want; he also swallows most of it himself. I
have some doubt myself that anything better would be feasible. If any effort
were made to report the war objectively and truthfully there would be a public
sensation, and a great deal more denunciation than approval. The American
people are now wholly at the mercy of demagogues, and it would take a
revolution to liberate and disillusion them. I see no sign of any such
revolution, either in the immediate future or within the next generation. When
the soldiers come home it will become infamous to doubt -- and dangerous to
life and limb. (pp. 334-335).
Baltimore, January 29,1945.
My heart symptoms continue and
tend to grow worse. Night before last I had the worst spell so far. I awoke
from a disturbed and idiotic dream with a sense of smothering, and lay awake
the better part of an hour. My pulse was but 72 and my heart was beating
strongly, but there was a general feeling of considerable discomfort, with a
sense of impending collapse. It interests me to note how little the fear of
death is present at such times. It ought to be there, but it simply isn't. I
like in bed trying to figure out whether I should call to August for help and
go to hospital, but I always decide against it, and gradually fall asleep. My
last thoughts are of my business affairs, now in pretty good shape. ... I have
no affairs in progress that could not be wound up quickly. I am sorry that I'll
probably not be able to finish some of the projects I have long had in mind ...
But I do not mourn over these things, and my days are fairly placid and
contented, though it irks me to be unable to work and for the first time in my
life I am experiencing boredom. Maybe there will be some improvement later on,
and I may be able to return to my desk, but it seems unlikely. Looking back
over a life of hard work, I find that my only regret is that I didn't work even
harder. But this is somewhat absurd: I have actually worked hard enough. There
is very little to show for it, but considering my bad start and rather meagre
opportunities, I have at least accomplished something. I am only sorry that
I'll probably not live long enough to take advantage of the reaction from the
present war -- if, indeed, there is ever any reaction. Sometimes I doubt it.
The American people seem to be committed to mountebanks for ever more. (pp.
351-352).
(From H.L. Mencken's Notes on
Democracy, Knopf, 1926)
Democracy and Liberty
The Will to Peace
Whenever the liberties of Homo
vulgaris are invaded and made a mock of in a gross and contemptuous manner,
... there are always observers who marvel that he bears the outrage with so
little murmuring. Such observers only display their unfamiliarity with the
elements of democratic science. The truth is that the common man's love of
liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary.
As I have argued, he is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a
bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of
the herd, and is willing to take the herdsman with it. Liberty is not a thing
for such as he. He cannot enjoy it rationally himself, and he can think of it
in others only as something to be taken away from them. It is, when it becomes
a reality, the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority of
men, like knowledge, courage and honour. A special sort of man is needed to
understand it, nay, to stand it -- and he is inevitably an outlaw in democratic
societies. The average man doesn't want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.
... What the common man longs
for in this world, before and above all his other longings, is the simplest and
most ignominious sort of peace -- the peace of a trusty in a well-managed
penitentiary. He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it
above his dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above
his liberty. The fact, perhaps, explains his veneration for policemen, in all
the forms they take -- his belief that there is a mysterious sanctity in law,
however absurd it may be in fact. A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in
return for obedience, to protect him (a) from his superiors, (b) from his
equals, and (c) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly
the most esteemed of them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it
is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, insurance
collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves
in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies girls. It is a
democratic invention.
Here, though the common man is deceived,
he starts from a sound premiss: to wit, that liberty is something too hot for
his hands -- or, as Nietzsche put it, too cold for his spine. Worse, he sees in
it something that is a weapon against him in the hands of his enemy, the man of
superior kidney. Be true to your nature, and follow its teachings: this
Emersonian counsel, it must be manifest, offers an embarassing support to every
variety of droit de seigneur. The history of democracy is a history of
efforts to force successive minorities to be untrue to their nature. Democracy,
in fact, stands in greater peril of the free spirit than any sort of despotism
ever heard of. The despot, at least, is always safe in one respect: his own
belief in himself cannot be shaken. But democracies may be demoralized and run
amok, and so they are in vast dread of heresy, as a Sunday-school
superintendent is in dread of scarlet women, light wines and beer, and the
unreadable works of Charles Darwin. It would be unimaginable for a democracy to
submit serenely to such gross dissents as Frederick the Great not only
permitted, but even encouraged. Once the mob is on the loose, there is no
holding it. So the subversive minority must be reduced to impotence; the
heretic must be put down. (pp. 147-150)
The Democrat as Moralist
Liberty gone, there remains the
majestic phenomenon of democratic law. A glance at it is sufficient to show the
identity of democracy and Puritanism. The two, indeed, are but different facets
of the same gem. In the psyche they are one. For both get their primal essence
out of the inferior man's fear and hatred of his betters, born of his
observation that, for all his fine theories, they are stronger and of more
courage than he is, and that as they go through this dreadful world they have a
far better time. Thus envy comes in; if you overlook it you will never
understand Puritanism. It is not, of course, a speciality of democratic man. It
is the common possession of all men of the ignoble and incompetent sort, at all
times and everywhere. But it is only under democracy that it is liberated; it
is only under democracy that it becomes the philosophy of the state. ... The
day after a successful revolution is a blue day for the late autocrat, but it
is also a blue day for every other superior man. The murder of Lavoisier was a
phenomenon quite as significant as the murder of Louis XVI. We need no
scientists in France, shouted MM. of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Wat Tyler,
four centuries before, reduced it to an even greater frankness and simplicity:
he hanged every man who confessed to being able to read and write.
Democracy, as a political
scheme, may be defined as a device for releasing this hatred born of envy, and
for giving it the force and dignity of law. Tyler, in the end, was dispatched
by Walworth; under democracy he becomes almost the ideal Good Man. It is very
difficult to disentangle the political ideas of this anthropoid Good Man from
his theological ideas: they constantly overlap and coalesce, and the democratic
state, despite the contrary example of France, almost always shows a strong
tendency to be also a Puritan state. Puritan legislation, especially in the
field of public law, is a thing of many grandiose pretensions and a few simple
and ignoble realities. The Puritan, discussing it voluptuously, always tries to
convince himself (and the rest of us) that it is grounded upon altruistic and
evangelical motives -- that its aim is to work the other fellow's benefit
against the other fellow's will. Such is the theory behind Prohibition, comstockery,
vice crusading, and all its other familiar devices of oppression. ... (pp.
152-155).
... The Puritan, once his mainly
imaginary triumphs over the flesh and the devil are forgotten, always turns out
to be a poor stick of a man -- in brief, a natural democrat. His triumphs in
the field of government are as illusory as his triumphs as metaphysician and
artist. No Puritan has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a
symphony worth hearing, or a poem worth reading -- and I am not forgetting John
Milton, who was not a Puritan at all, but a libertarian, which is the exact
opposite. The whole Puritan literature is comprised in "The Pilgrim's
Progress." Even in the department wherein the Puritan is most proud of
himself, i.e., that of moral legislation, he has done only second and
third rate work. His fine schemes for bringing his betters down to his own
depressing level always turn out badly. In the whole history of human
law-making there is no record of a failure worse than that of Prohibition in the
United States. ... (p. 157)
...
It must be plain that this
process of law-making by orgy, with fanatics supplying the motive-power and
unconsciouable knaves steering the machine, is bound to fill the statute-books
with enactments that have no rational use or value save that of serving as
instruments of psychopathological persecution and private revenge. This is
found to be thecase, in fact, in almost every American State. The grotesque
anti-syndicalist laws of California, the anti-evolution laws of Tennessee and
Mississippi, and the acts for the enforcement of Prohibition in Ohio and
Indiana are typical. They involve gross invasions of the most elementary rights
of the free citizen, but they are popular with the mob because they have a
virtuous smack and provide it with an endless succession of barbarous but
thrilling shows. ... (pp. 159-160)
...
For such foul and pestiferous
proceedings, of course, moral excuses are always offered. The district attorney
is an altruist whose one dream is Law Enforcement; he cannot be terrified by
the power of money; he is the spokesman of the virtuous masses against the
godless and abominable classes. The same buncombe issues from the
Prohibitionists, comstocks, hunters of Bolshevists, and other such frauds. Its
hollowness is constantly revealed. The Prohibitionists, when they foisted their
brummagem cure-all upon the country under cover of the war hysteria, gave out
that their advocacy of it was based upon a Christian yearning to abate
drunkenness, and so abolish crime, poverty and disease. They preached a
millennium, and no doubt convinced hundreds and thousands of naive and
sentimental persons, not themselves Puritans, nor even democrats. That
millennium, as everyone knows, has failed to come in. Not only are crime, poverty
and disease undiminished, but drunkennes itself, if the police statistics are
to be believed, has greatly increased. The land rocks with the scandal.
Prohibiition has made the use of alcohol devilish and even fashionable, and so
vastly augmented the numbers of users. The young of both sexes, mainly innocent
of the cup under license, now take to it almost unanimously. In brief,
Prohibition has not only failed to work the benefits that its proponents
promised in 1917; it has brought in so many new evils that even the mob has
turned against it. But do the Prohibitionists admit the fact frankly, and
repudiate their original nonsense? They do not. On the contrary, they keep on
demanding more and worse enforcement statutes -- that is to say, more and worse
devices for harassing and persecuting their opponents. The more obvious the
failure becomes, the more shamelessly they exhibit their genuine motives.
...(pp. 162-163)
Danger to Democracy
I believe, and have often
argued, that the battle of ideas should be international -- that it is idiotic
to expect any one country to offer hospitality to every imaginable sort of man.
I do not fit into the United States very well. My skepticism is intolerably
offensive to the normal American man; only the man under strong foreign
influence sees anything in it save a gross immoraltiy ... if the notions of the
right-thinkers are correct, then such stuff as mine ... ought to be put down by
law ... free speech is too dangerous to a democaracy. [Letter (NYPL); to Burton
Rascoe, Chicago Tribune, 1920.]
Democracy
Democracy is the theory that
intelligence is dangerous. It assumes that no idea can be safe until those who
can't understand it have approved it. [S.S.; Pertinent and Impertinent, by Owen
Hatteras (pseudonym); June, 1913, p. 57.]
Democracy
The theory that two theives will
steal less than one. [ibid., p.58]
Democracy
Democracy is the liberty of the
have-nots. Its aim is to destroy the liberty of the haves. [S.S.; Origins;
November, 1922, p. 47.]
Democracy
... [I]f democracy has any
genuine merit, if it shows any virtue that all other forms of government lack,
it is the merit and virtue of being continuously amusing, of offering the plain
people a ribald and endless show. This merit I certainly do not decry. It is
valuable, and deserves praise. For government, in its essence, is a harsh and
oppressive thing, and unless some glamor can be thrown about it, of the
mysterious, the melodramatic or the comic, it tends to be unbearable. [A.M.;
Editorial; September, 1924, p. 33.]
Democracy
Here is tragedy -- and here is
America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely
the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it
may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the
public sense, is a respectable vacuum. ["More Tips for Novelists", in
the Chicago Tribune; May 2, 1926.]
Democracy
[I]t is one of the peculiar
intellectual accompaniments of democracy that the concept of the insoluble
becomes unfashionable -- nay, almost infamous. To lack a remedy is to lack the
very license to discuss disease. The causes of this are to be sought, without
question, in the nature of democracy itself. It came into the world as as
cure-all, and it remains primarily a cure-all to this day. ["The Future of
Democracy" in Notes on Democracy (1926), pp. 195-196.]
Democracy is Puritanism
Liberty gone, there remains the
majestic phenomenon of democratic law. A glance at it is sufficient to show the
identity of democracy and Puritanism. The two, indeed, are but different facets
of the same gem. ... Both get their primal essence out of the inferior man's
fear and hatred of his betters ... thus envy comes in; if you overlook it you
will never understand democracy, and you will never understand Puritanism. It
is not, of course, a specialty of democratic man. It is the common possession
of all men of the ignoble and incompetent sort, at all times and everywhere.
But it is only under democracy that it is liberated; it is only under democracy
that it becomes the philosophy of the state. ["The Democrat as
Moralist" in Notes on Democracy (1926), pp. 152-153.]
Democratic Dream
The difference between the mob
and the plutocracy is, after all, very slight. They run to common concepts of
the true and the good, and are largely identical in personnel. The gap
separating a banker and a labor leader is infinitely less than the gap
separating either from a Washington. Neither has any coherent concept of the
common weal; to both government is simply a device for promoting their own
fortunes. No restraint of tradition and obligation lies upon either. In brief,
they are alike democrats. [A.M., "Kultur in the Republic",
October, 1927, p. 257.]
Democratic Ideas
It was Americans who invented the
curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of
thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was
Americans who invented the right-thinker. ... In the face of this singular
passion for conformity, this dread of novelty and originality, it is obvious
that the man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out
of public life. He may slide into office once or twice, but soon or late he is
bound to be held up, examined and incontinently kicked out. This leaves the
field to the intellectual jelly-fish and inner tubes. ["Bayard vs.
Lionheart" in the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920.]
Democratic Utopia
How, in spite of the
incurable imbecility of the great masses of men, are we to get a reasonable
measure of common sense and decency into the conduct of the world? The Liberal
answer (much more clearly stated by H.G. Wells in "The Outline of
History" than by Mr. Walter Lippmann in ... "Public Opinion" is,
in essence, simply a variant of the old democratic answer: by spreading
enlightenment, by democratizing information, by combatting what is adjudged to
be false by what is adjudged to be true. But this scheme, however persuasively
it may be set forth, invariably goes to wreck upon two or three immovable
facts. One is the fact that a safe majority of the men and women in every
modern society are congenitally uneducable, save within very narrow limits --
that it is no more possible to teach them what every voter theoretically should
know than it is to teach a chimpanzee to play the viol da gamba. Another
is the fact that the same safe majority, far from having any natural yearning
to acquire this undescribed body of truth, has a natural and apparently
incurable distrust of it ... A third (and it is more important than either of
the other two) is that there exists no body of teachers in Christendom capable
of teaching the truth, even supposing it to be known ... The inevitable
tendency of pedagogy ... is to preserve and propagate the lies that happen to
be currently respectable, which is to say, that happen to be salubrious to the
current masters of the mob. [S.S., "Demagoguery as Art and Science",
April, 1922, pp. 138-139.]
Equality
Once a year we reaffirm the
doctrine that all men are free and equal. All the rest of the twelvemonth we
devote our energies to proving that they are not. ["Men Versus the
Man"; 1910, p. 152.]
First Amendment
The purport, though not the
letter, of its first two strophes is that every free-born Americano shall stand
clear of ecclesiastical domination, and be at liberty to serve, dodge or
bamboozle Omnipotence by whatever devices appeal to his taste, or his lack of
it. As the common phrase has it, church and state are separate in the Federal
Union, with the province of each plainly marked out, and each forbidden to
invade the province of the other. But in the common phrase, as usual, there is
only wind. The fact is that the United States, save for a short while in its
infancy, while the primal infidels survived, has always diluted democracy with
theocracy. Practially all our political campaigns have resolved themselves into
witch-hunts by the consecrated, and all our wars have been fought to hymn
tunes. It remains so to this day, despite the murrain of jazz and gin. [A.M.;
Editorial; October, 1928, p. 156.]
A Free People
Liberty in itself, to be sure,
cannot bring in the millenium. It cannot abolish the inherent weaknesses of man
-- an animal but lately escaped from the jungle. It cannot take the place of
intelligence, courage, honor. But the free man is at least able to be
intelligent, courageous and honorable if the makings are in him. Nothing stands
in the way of his highest functioning. He may go as far as nature intended him
to go, and maybe a step or two beyond. Free, he may still be dull, timorous and
untrustworthy. He may be shiftless and worthless. But it will not be against
his will; it will not be in spite of himself. Free, he will be able to make the
most of every virtue that is actually in him, and he will live and die under
the kind of government he wants and deserves. ["Why Liberty?", in the
Chicago Tribune; January 30, 1927.]
Happy Democracy
I have seen many theoretical
objections to democracy, and sometimes urge them with such heat that it
probably goes beyond the bound of sound taste, but I am thoroughly convinced,
nonetheless, that the democratic nations are happier than any other. The United
States today, indeed, is probably the happiest the world has ever seen. Taxes
are high, but they are still well within the means of the taxpayer: he could
pay twice as much and still survive. The laws are innumerable and idiotic, but
only prisoners in the penitentiaries and persons under religious vows ever obey
they. The country is governed by rogues, but there is no general dislike of
rogues: on the contrary, they are esteemed and envied. Best of all, the people
have the pleasant feeling that they can make improvements at any time they want
to -- ... in other words, they are happy. Democrats are always happy. Democracy
is a sort of laughing gas. It will not cure anything, perhaps, but it
unquestionably stops the pain. [A.M.; "The Master Illusion", March,
1925, p. 319.]
The Huckster
[A] right which every huckster,
as one of the Common People, indubitably possesses, and which no city ordinance
or police fiat can ever take away from him ... is his sacred right to make a
nuisance of himself -- a right which every American citizen cherishes as the
one unmistakable symbol of his superiority to all loathsome foreigners. ["The
Free Lance" in the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 3, 1911.]
HR (From H.L. Mencken's Notes
on Democracy, Knopf, 1926)
Coda
Democracy itself becomes a substitute for the old religion, and the antithesis of it: the Ku Kluxers, though their reasoning may be faulty, are not far off the facts in their conclusion