American Protective Lg.
[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.]
…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!
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 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)
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.
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…
* * * * *
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.
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.
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.
--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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
--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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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 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.]
The theory that two theives will steal less than one. [ibid., p.58]
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.]
… [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.]
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.]
[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.]
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.]
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.]
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.]
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.]
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.]
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.]
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.]
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.]
[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)
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 that Holy Church is its enemy. It shows all the magical potency of the great systems of faith. It has the power to enchant and disarm; it is not vulnerable to logical attack. … It is impossible, by any device known to philosophers, to meet doctrines of that sort; they obviously lie outside the range of logical ideas. There is, in the human mind, a natural taste for such hocus-pocus. It greatly simplifies the process of ratiocination, which is unbearably painful to the great majority of men. What dulls and baffles the teeth may be got down conveniently by an heroic gulp. … Democracy is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal mysticism. One cannot discuss it without colliding with preposterous postulates, all of them cherished like authentic hairs from the whiskers of Moses himself. I have alluded to its touching acceptance of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God—that every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved. There are corrollaries that are even more naive. One, for example, is to the general effect that optimism is a virtue in itself—that there is a mysterious merit in being hopeful and of glad heart, even in the presence of adverse and immovable facts. This curious notion turns the glittering wheels of Rotary, and is the motive power of the politial New Thoughters called Liberals. … The man who hopes absurdly, it appears, is in some fantastic and gaseous manner a better citizen than the man who detects and exposes the truth. Bear this sweet democratic axiom clearly in mind. It is, fundamentally, what is the matter with the United States. (pp. 197-200)
by H.L. Mencken
… Catholic authority … argues that even revelation can have no validity save it be supported by evidence. … And so we arrive, perhaps, at an understanding of the process whereby Catholic moralists have come to reject certain of the plain instructions of Holy Writ, e.g., against taking interest, eating shellfish, and suffering witches to live, and to invent and credit to Omnipotence others that are plainly not in it, e.g., against slavery, the patria potestas, suicide, contraception and divorce. Their general position seems to be that though God undoubtedly made a revelation it was incomplete, and in some parts ill-advised, and that it is thus subject to enlightened revision.
(from Treatise on Right and Wrong; 1934, p. 59.) From “The Critical Process” (1921)
"Truth, indeed, is something that is believed in completely only by persons who have never tried personally to pursue it to its fastnesses and grab it by the tail. It is the adoration of second-rate men—men who always received it as second-hand. Pedagogues believe in immutable truths and spend their lives trying to determine them and propagate them; the intellectual progress of man consists largely of a concerted effort to block and destroy their enterprise. Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed. In whole departments of human inquiry it seems to me quite unlikely that the truth ever will be discovered. Nevertheless, the rubber-stamp thinking of the world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth—that error and truth are simply opposites. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. This is the whole history of the intellect in brief. The average man of today does not believe in precisely the same imbecilities that the Greek of the Fourth Century before Christ believed in, but the things that he does believe in are often quite as idiotic.”
by H.L. Mencken (from The Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1927.)
THE MORE I plow through the literature confected by the eugenists and their allies, the birth controllers, the more I am convinced that their great cause is mainly blather. Somehow, what they write so indignantly always reminds me of the music of certain of the so-called moderns, who wander around in a maze of tonalities without landing anywhere. In none of their books have I ever found a clear definition of the superiority they talk about so copiously. At one time they seem to identify it with high intelligence. At another time with character, i.e., moral stability, and yet another time with mere fame, i.e., luck. Was Napoleon I a superior man, as I am privately inclined to believe, along with many of the eugenists? Then so was Aaron Burr, if in less measure. Was Paul of Tarsus? Then so was Brigham Young. Were the Gracchi? Then so were Karl Marx and William Jennings Bryan.
This matter of superiority, indeed, presents cruel and ineradicable difficulties. If it is made to run with service to the human race the eugenist is soon mired, for many men held to be highly useful are obviously second rate, and leave third rate progeny behind them; for example, Gen. Grant. And if it is made to run with mere intellectual brilliance and originality the troubles that loom up are just as serious, for men of that rare quality are generally felt to be dangerous, and sometimes they undoubtedly are. The case of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is in point. I suppose that no rational person today, not even an uncured Liberty Loan orator or dollar a year man, would argue seriously that Nietzsche was inferior. On the contrary, his extraordinary gifts are unanimously admitted. But what of his value to the human race? And what of his eugenic fitness?
It is not easy to answer these questions. Nietzsche, in fact, preached a gospel that, to most human beings, is unbearable, and it will probably remain unbearable for centuries to come. Its adoption by Dr. Coolidge, by and with the advice and consent of the senate, would plunge this republic into dreadful woe. And Nietzshce himself was a chronic invalid who died insane—the sort of wreck who, had he lived into our time, would have been a customer of chiropractors. Worse, he suffered from a malady of a scandalous nature, and of evil effects upon the sufferer’s offspring. Was it good or bad luck for the world, eugenically speaking, that he was a bachelor?
But their vagueness about the exact nature of superiority is not the only thing that corrupts the fine fury of the eugenists. Even more dismaying is their gratuitous assumption that all of the socially useful and laudable qualities (whatever they may be) are the exclusive possession of one class of men, and that the other classes lack them altogether. This is plainly not true. All that may be truthfully said of such qualities is that they appear rather more frequently in one class than in another. But they are rare in all classes, and the difference in the frequency of their occurrence between this class and that one is not very great, and of little genuine importance.
If all the biologists in the United States were hanged tomorrow (as has been proposed by the Mississippi clergy) and their children with them, we’d probably still have a sufficiency of biologists in the next generation. There might not be as many as we have today, but there would be enough. They would come out of the families of bricklayers and politicians, bootleggers and bond salesmen. Some of them, indeed, might even come out of the families of Mississippi ecclesiastics. For the supply of such men, like the supply of synthetic gin, always tends to run with the demand. Whenever the supply is short the demand almost automatically augments it.
Every one knows that this is true on the lower levels. Before baseball was invented there were no Ty Cobbs and Babe Ruths; now they appear in an apparently endless series. Before the Wright brothers made their flight there were no men skilled at aviation; now there are multitudes of highly competent experts. The eugenists forget that the same thing happens on the higher levels. Whenever the world has stood in absolute need of a genius he has appeared. And though it is true that he has usually come out of the better half of humanity, it is also true that he has sometimes come out of the worst half. Beethoven was the grandson of a cook and the son of a drunkard, and Lincoln’s forebears for many generations were nobodies.
The fact is that the difference between the better sort of human beings and the lesser sort, biologically speaking, is very slight. There may be, at the very top, a small class of people whose blood is preponderantly superior and distinguished, and there may be, at the bottom, another class whose blood is almost wholly debased, but both are very small. The folks between are all pretty much alike. The baron has a great deal of peasant blood in him and the peasant has some blood that is blue. The natural sinfulness of man is enough to make sure of that. No man in this world can ever be quite certain that he is the actual great-great-grandson of the great-great-grandfather whose memory he venerates.
Thus when the relatively superior and distinguished class ceases to be fecund (a phenomenon now visible everywhere in the world) natural selection comes to the rescue by selecting out and promoting individuals from the classses below. These individuals are probably just as sound in blood as any one in the class they enter. Their sound blood has been concealed, perhaps for generations, but it has been there all the time. If Abraham Lincoln’s ancestry were known with any certainty it would probably be found to run back to manifestly able and distinguished men. There are many more such hidden family trees in the folk.
The eugenists simply overlook them. They are also singularly blind to many familiar biological phenomena—for example, the appearance of mutations or sports. It is not likely that a commonplace family will produce a genius, but nevertheless it is by no means impossible: the thing has probably happened more than once. They forget, too, the influence of environment in human society. Mere environment, to be sure, cannot produce a genius, but it can certainly help him enormously after he is born. If a potential Wagner were born to a Greek bootblack in Toledo, O., tomorrow, the chances of his coming to fruition and fame would be at least even. But if he were born an Arab in the Libyan desert or to a fundamentalist in Rhea county, Tenn., the chances are that he would be a total loss.
The eugenists constantly make the false assumption that a healthy degree of human progress demands a large supply of first rate men. Here they succumb to the modern craze for mass production. Because a hundred policemen, or garbage men, or bootleggers are manifestly better than one, they conclude absurdly that a hundred Beethovens would be better than one. But this is not true. The actual value of a genius often lies in his singularity. If there had been a hundred Beethovens the music of all of them would be very little known today, and so its civilizing effect would be appreciably less than it is.
The number of first rate men necessary to make a high civilization is really very small. If the United States could produce one Shakespeare or Newton or Bach or Michelangelo of Vesalius a century it would be doing better than any nation has ever done in history. Such culture as we have is due to a group of men so small that all of them alive at one time could be hauled in a single Pullman train. Once I went through Who’s Who in America, hunting for the really first rate men among its 27,000 names—that is, for the men who had really done something unique and difficult, and of value to the human race. I found 200. The rest of the 27,000 were simply respectable blanks.
An overproduction of geniuses, indeed, would be very dangerous, for though they make for progress they also tend to disturb the peace. Imagine a country housing 100 head of Aristotles! It would be as unhappy as a city housing 100 head of Jesse Jameses. Even quasi-geniuses are a great burden upon society. There are in the United States today 1,500 professional philosophers—that is, men who make their living at the trade. The country would be far better off if all save two or three of them were driving taxicabs or serving with the Rum Fleet.
by H.L. Mencken (From Prejudices: A Selection, James T. Farrell, ed.)
Some time ago, encountering an eminent bishop of my acquaintance, I found him suffering from a bad cold and what used to be called the vapors. The cause of his dual disorder soon became manifest. He was smarting under the slings and arrows of executive secretaries. By virtue of his lofty and transcendental office, he was naturally a man of wide influence in the land, and so they tried to enlist his interest in their multitudinous and often nefarious schemes. Every morning at 8 o’clock, just as he was rolling over for a last brief dream of Heaven, he was dragged to the telephone to hear their eloquent and lascivious night-letters, and there, on unlucky days, he stood for as much as half an hour, with his episcopal feet bare, and rage gradually mounting in his episcopal heart. Thus, on a cold morning, he had caught his cold, and thus he had acquired his bad humor.
This holy man, normally a most amiable fellow, told me that he believed the number of executive secretaries in the United States was increasing at the rate of at least a thousand a week. He said that he knew of 30,000 in the field of Christian and moral endeavor alone. There were, he told me, 8000 more engaged in running various pacifist societies, and more than 10,000 operating organizations for the detection and scotching of Bolsheviki. He estimated that the average number of dues-paying members behind each one did not run beyond half a dozen. Nine-tenths of them, he said, were supported by two or three well-heeled fanatics. These fanatics, mainly retired Babbitts and their wives, longed to make a noise in the world, and so escape oblivion. It was the essence of the executive secretary’s art and mystery to show them how to do it. Chiefly it was done by discovering bugaboos and giving chase to them. But secondarily it was done by hauling poor ecclesiastics out of bed on frosty mornings, and making them listen to endless night-letters about the woes of the Armenians, the need of intensive missionary effort in Siam, the plot of Moscow to set up soviets in Lowell, Mass., the high ideals of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the absolute necessity of deeper waterways from the Lakes to the Atlantic.
The executive secretary is relatively new in the world. Like his colleague in well-paid good works, the Y.M.C.A. secretary, he has come into being since the Civil War. Compared to him, his predecessor of ante-bellum days was an amateur and and idiot. That predecessor had no comfortable office in a gaudy skyscraper, he got no lavish salary, and he had no juicy expense-account. On the contrary, he paid his own way, and especially when he worked for Abolition, which was usually, he sometimes had to take a beating into the bargain. The executive secretary of to-day, as Perlmutter would say, is something else again. He belongs to the order of live wires. He speaks the language of up-and-coming men, and is not sparing with it at the sessions of Rotary and Kiwanis. In origin, not uncommonly a shady and unsuccessful newspaper reporter or a press-agent out of a job, he quickly becomes, by virtue of his craft, a Man of Vision. The cause that he represents for cash in hand is not merely virtuous; it is, nine times out of ten, divinely inspired. If it fails, then civilization will also fail, and the heroic doings at Chateau Thierry and Hog Island will have been in vain.
It is a good job that he has—far better than legging it on the street for some gorilla of a city editor—far, far better than traversing the sticks ahead of a No. 4 company. There is no need to get up at 7 A.M. and there is no need to fume and strain after getting up. Once three or four—or maybe even only one or two—easy marks with sound bank accounts have been snared, the new “national"—or perhaps it is “international" association is on its legs, and all that remains is to have brilliant statiionery printed, put in an amiable and sightly stenographer, and begin deluging bishops, editors and the gullible generally with literature. The executive secretary, if he has any literary passion in him, may prepare this literature himself, but more often he employs experts to do it. Once a year he launches a drive. But it is only for publicity. The original suckers pay the freight. When they wear out the executive secretary starts a new "international” association.
Such sharks now swarm in every American city. The office-buildings are full of them. Their prosperity depends very largely upon the singular complaisance of the newspapers. The average American managing editor went through so dreadful a bath of propaganda during the late war, and was so thoroughly convinced that resisting it was a form of treason, that he is now almost unable to detect it from genuine news…
I suggest this plan as a means of cutting down the present baleful activity of executive secretaries, but I am not so optimistic as to believe that it could conceivably dispose of them altogether. In the higher ranks of the profession are gentlemen so skillful that they no longer send out press-matter: they make actual news. To that aristocracy belong the adept executive secretaries who run such organizations as the Anti-Saloon League. These masters of the art do not beg for good-will in newspaper offices: they thrive upon ill-will quite as well as upon good-will. How are they to be got rid of? I am sure I don’t know. In all probability the American people are doomed to suffer them forever, as they seem to be doomed to suffer Prohibition agents, revivalists, the radio and Congress.
Theologians are well aware, deep down in their hearts, that faith alone is not sufficient to make even half-wits believe in their mumbo jumbo; they sense a need to sweeten the dose with such testimony as would convince a judge and jury. The result of their labours in that direction, continued through many centuries, has been only to reduce human reason to the quaking and malarious thing that it is today … gradually broken down all the natural barriers between fact and fiction, sense and nonsense,and converted logic into a weapon that mauls the truth far more than it defends it.
H.L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods, 1930, pp. 311-312.
H.L. Mencken
… The crowd phenomena of peace times are more durable and more important. Moreover, they are grounded upon precisely the same psychological facts. 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 confines 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, or, as Mr. Martin puts it, hate. 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. Beyond that it cannot go. Altruism, like honor, is the exclusive possession of individuals—and of very few individuals.
For years past I have devoted odd moments to the study of the uplifters who rage in These States—the Prohibitionists, vice crusaders, book censors, Blue Sunday advocates and other such fauna. I know a great many of them, and have had rather unusual opportunities to examine them. All of them profess to be altruists, and yet all of them, at bottom, are animated by fear. Consider, for example, the old fellows who specialize in sexual suppressions—campaigns against short skirts, peek-a-boo waists, bedroom farces, dancing, spooning in the parks, naughty literature, nude statuary, and so on. Ostensibly, what they propose to do is to save the young—especially, in Comstock’s phrase, "females of immature mind.” Actually, their purpose is to save themselves. In other words, they are men severly menaced by the slightest sexual provocation—men of abnormal and often bizarre eroticism—men in constant dread that they will not be able to police themselves. To you or to me, normal men, it is difficult to understand their horror of the most banal indelicacy. The spectacle of a nude statue has no more effect on me than the spectacle of a beer-keg. When a fat woman shows me her legs, I am not filled with designs for stealing her from her husband; I am filled with thanks to God that she has a husband, and that he is watchful. …
… These men, seeking each other for support and consolation, constitute a crowd, and it functions exactly like any other crowd. That is to say, it functions orgiastically, emotionally, furiously, without rhyme or reason -- above all, without honesty or honor. As Mr. Martin shows, democracy tends to become in