The New Woodrow
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/August 18, 1924
A week having been devoted by the principal Democratic journals of the country to deluging the Hon. John W. Davis with cataracts of pomade, vaseline, goose-grease, cold cream and other unguents, perhaps it may be lawful now to observe that his historic speech of acceptance was, after all, no very great shakes — that any lawyer of the general intelligence of, say, a bank cashier or a Federal judge might have delivered one just as good, and that many lawyers, even without the aid of wind music and the huzzahs of bootleggers, would have probably done better.
Dr. Davis, of course, is no Harding.
That is to say, he is no donkey.
He employs the English language in a manner that shows he has a decent respect for it.
His manner, even when he rants, is polished and refined.
One cannot imagine his own rhetoric making him puff and sweat.
Nevertheless, it remains mere rhetoric at bottom, and hence hollow.
Only once in his speech, and that when he indulged himself in the banality of denouncing poor Fall, Denby and Daugherty, did he come down to plain propositions, clearly stated.
The rest was mere sound and fury, signifying nothing.
It was the immemorial blather of a candidate for office under democracy, addressing multitudes unfamiliar with ideas and incapable of thought.
It was the sort of sonorous bilge that delights Kiwanis Clubs, attendants at Methodist revivals, and the editorial writers for party newspapers.
I point specifically to three salient passages — those dealing with the wholesale corruption at Washington, with Prohibition and with the so-called League of Nations.
What did Dr. Davis have to say about these enormously important issues — perhaps the most important now before the country?
He had nothing to say — that is, nothing that was precise, apposite and illuminating.
He simply lathered each one with rhetoric and then passed on.
Here, for example, is what he said of Prohibition:
“For no reason that is apparent to me the question has been asked, as, perhaps, it will continue to be asked until it has been definitively answered, what views I hold concerning the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment and the statutes passed to put it into effect."
"Why the question?"
"Is it not the law?"
"I would hold in contempt any public official who took oath with uplifted hand an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, making at the same time a mental reservation whereby a single word of that great document is excluded from his vow.”
And so on, and so on.
Who could imagine any more disingenuous begging of a question?
You know and I know, and Dr. Davis well knew when he emptied this nonsense upon the Clarksburg moonshiners, that no one had ever solicited him to agree to disregard the Eighteenth Amendment — that, for all its wholesale violation by millions of Americans, no proposal that the President of the United States formally repudiate and nullify it has ever been made by anyone.
In other words, he knew quite well that the question he asked himself had never been asked of him by any other man.
And he knew quite as well that another and very different question had been asked of him, to wit, Do you favor changing the Volstead act?
This real question he evaded, and it must be assumed that he evaded it deliberately, for he is surely not stupid enough to confuse it with the other.
That is to say, it must be assumed that he deliberately dodged a highly important and pressing issue because it was dangerous — because answering it like an honest man might lose votes for him.
Such is the shifty politician we are now asked to venerate!
Such is the new candidate for the shoes of Washington and Jefferson!
Try to imagine Washington skulking up an alley in any such manner.
If you can imagine it, then go out into the street and give three cheers for Dr. Davis.
His discussion of the colossal thieving that went on under Harding was even less frank.
In brief, what was his contention?
Simply that all this thieving was started in Washington by the Ohio gang — that nothing of the sort had ever been heard of there until poor Gamaliel took the oath.
He rang the changes upon his thesis, and it took him to his highest peak of eloquence.
The days of 1917 and 1918 were “heroic” and full of “moral grandeur”; no jobholder under the Martyr Woodrow showed the slightest “taint of dishonesty or corruption”; it is a “libelous suggestion” that the Harding reign of mirth had anything to do with any “demoralization attendant upon the great war.”
What is to be thought of an educated man, even though he be a politician, who discharges such arrant nonsense upon the public air?
Does anyone seriously believe that Dr. Davis has never heard of the airship scandals, with their loot of $900,000,000 — 9,000 times as much as Fall got?
Or that he is unfamiliar with the operations of the Alien Property Custodian and the Chemical Foundation?
Or that he has no knowledge of the stupendous stealings that went on in the shipyards, the munition plants and at the army camps during the war?
The truth is, of course, that Dr. Davis knows about all these things quite as well as you and I know about them.
Yet he tries to make it appear, in a public statement of the first importance, that he doesn’t.
He deliberately evades the bald and inescapable facts.
Are such childish evasions the marks of a candid man?
And when a man is guilty of them is it a reason for making him President?
The learned gentleman’s dealing with the League of Nations issue was almost equally disingenuous.
On the one hand, he credited the League of Nations with a high virtue and utility which everyone knows it has not shown; and on the other hand he talked vaguely and without sense of the vast benefits to be derived from American participation in its chicaneries.
I know of very few persons who are against a League of Nations per se.
Almost everyone believes that such an organization, if honestly administered, would tend to promote peace in the world, and so lift the present excessive burden of taxation.
It could not, perhaps, prevent wars altogether, but it might at least help to diminish their number.
The objection to the present League of Nations is that it has no such object in fact, and no such effect.
It is simply a convenient device for enabling the victors in the late war to hold on to their loot.
In so far as it has worked, it is because they have agreed upon the division; in so far as it has failed, it is because they have quarreled.
How would it improve this gang of thieves by adding one more thief — and that one a very rich and bold one?
The sole effect of the addition, it seems to me, would be to make quarrels more frequent.
The United States, already safely within the English orbit, would simply aid England in her struggle against France, and so force France to look for help elsewhere.
The United States, meanwhile, would not give her services for nothing — that is, her bankers and their political valets would not give their services for nothing.
Are they doing so in London today?
Did they do so in Paris a year ago?
Go ask the European taxpayers who are about to pay a bonus of 7 per cent. for American money, and then start paying interest on it at 7 per cent. for 90 years!
If the United States joined the League, indeed, probably the only visible effect would be a vast intensification of the general distrust and dislike of Americans, already violent enough, God knows.
We would be the capitalists of the firm, and the honest debtors and working men would naturally hate us.
In the end the temptation to get their money back by combining against us would be almost irresistible.
If we go in, then let us simultaneously order a Goose-Step Day for at least once a month.
I do not argue that there is any ready solution for the present international problem.
I merely argue that Dr. Davis’ solution is vague and nonsensical — that it is almost as bad as Dr. Harding’s unintelligible scheme of a World Court.
Its author attempted no plausible exposition of it.
He did not bother to come down to details and specifications.
In other words, he did not talk like a sensible man presenting an idea to other sensible men; he talked like a politician spouting empty words from the stump.
His whole harangue had that character.
To praise it as a clear statement of issues, and to argue that it dealt with them candidly and illuminatingly, is simply to utter nonsense.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... w-woodrow/
H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
Meditations on the Campaign
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/August 25, 1924
Having now devoted a solid month to examining the high and low words of the partisans of the Hon. John W. Davis, of Wall Street, West Virginia, I can only report that I have yet to encounter any sound reason for voting for him.
The more these partisans argue that he is a true Progressive, and hot for all the sure cures now on tap, the more they prove that the Hon. Mr. La Follette is even truer and even hotter.
And the more they try to make it appear that he is, notwithstanding, a safe and sane man, and one to be trusted fully by every citizen with money in the bank, the more they make it plain that the Hon. Mr. Coolidge is even safer and saner, and still more to be trusted.
In a word, the hon. gentleman falls between two stools.
He is, in a very real sense, not in the fight at all; he is simply a sort of bystander — far from innocent, perhaps, but still not actively engaged.
The actual combatants are the Hon. Mr. La Follette and the Hon. Mr. Coolidge.
Each of these great statesmen stands for something that is simple and obvious — something that anyone may understand.
Dr. Coolidge is for the Haves and Dr. La Follette is for the Have Nots.
But whom is Dr. Davis for?
I’m sure I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.
I have read all his state papers with dreadful diligence, and yet all I can gather from them is that he is for himself.
A sense of this fact seems to be going through the country.
The Davis campaign is at a standstill.
La Follette is belaboring Coolidge, and the friends of Coolidge are belaboring La Follette, but no one seems to think it worthwhile to belabor Davis.
He is simply concealed in the crowd, like a bootlegger at a wedding.
The sore men, in so far as they have any intelligence at all, seem to be unanimously in favor of La Follette, and the Babbitts, with sound instinct, are all hot for Coolidge.
But who is hot for Davis?
Not even the political morons south of the Potomac.
They will probably vote for him, as they would vote for the devil or even the Pope on a Democratic ticket, but they are no more hot for him than a Federal Judge is hot for the Constitution.
In all this there is a great deal more than mere accident.
What ails the hon. gentleman, primarily, is simply the fact that he lacks all the qualities of leadership — that he is fundamentally not a leader at all, but only a follower.
His career, as it is described by his friends, is quite devoid of anything plausibly describable as intellectual enterprise.
There is no record that he has ever taken the lead in anything, either as statesman or as politician.
He was so little original and rambunctious as a Congressman that the attention of the late Woodrow, who hated all men of forceful personality, was attracted to him, and he was made Solicitor-General.
He was so careful and undistinguished as Solicitor-General that he was promoted to the Court of St. James.
He was so easy a mark at the Court of St. James that the English gave three cheers when they heard that he had been nominated for the Presidency.
What share has the hon. gentleman had in the great political controversies of the past ten years — the most troubled era since the Civil War?
Absolutely none.
What has he had to say about Prohibition?
Nothing save a few disingenuous platitudes.
What about the League issue?
Nothing but vague nonsense, by the Creel Press Bureau out of Crews House.
What about the Ku Klux?
Not a word.
What about the growth of paternalism in government, the idiotic multiplications of laws, the intolerable increase of jobholders?
Several years ago, when he was President of the American Bar Association, he delivered a feeble harangue upon the subject — a harangue reading much like a warmed-over Evening Sunpaper editorial of six or eight months before.
Since becoming candidate he has evaded the matter.
No one knows clearly what he thinks about it.
His presidency at the American Bar Association coincided exactly with a revolt against the wholesale invasions of the Bill of Rights that were begun under Wilson and continued under Harding.
Lawyers in all parts of the country took part in this revolt — men as diverse as Senator Thomas J. Walsh and Dean Roscoe Pound of Harvard, Clarence Darrow and Feather Duster Hughes.
But Dr. Davis took no part in it.
To this day he has uttered no word about it.
Is he in favor of shoving men into jail without jury trials, or is he against it?
No one knows.
The learned gentleman’s complete failure as a public man, indeed, has forced his partisans to fall back upon his eminence as a lawyer.
But what is this eminence worth — that is, in a candidate for the presidency?
It seems to me that it is worth precisely nothing.
A man might be the most successful lawyer in the United States, and yet be quite unfit for the office of county sheriff, congressman, or even federal judge.
There is nothing in the daily life of a trial lawyer that prepares a man to execute the laws; his experience only increases his competence to evade and make a mock of them.
He is engaged professionally, day in and day out, in defending persons who have done so.
Dr. Davis has been so engaged for years.
Now he says that he is proud of his career.
Why not?
His clients, in the main, have been very well heeled, and they have made him rich.
I have nothing to say against his satisfaction.
It seems to me that it is quite honorable to desire to be rich.
It is also quite honorable, at all events in America, to want to be a successful lawyer, an adroit jail-robber.
All I contend is that these aspirations are incompatible with the yearning to be President of the United States.
The two things simply do not hang together.
It is as if I, who have devoted my whole life to advocating Darwinism and other such heresies, should suddenly print a card announcing my candidacy for a bishopric, or, to make the analogy closer, for the stool of St. Peter.
The majority of the faithful, I believe, would resent my candidacy, and with sound reason.
In the same way a great many Americans resent the candidacy of the Hon. Mr. Davis.
Perhaps the fact explains, in part, the palpable flaccidity of his campaign.
But there is a better explanation, I believe, in his lack of all the qualities of genuine leadership — his apparent incapacity to get ahead of ideas and pull them along with him.
He is a highly respectable man, but he is nothing else.
Even Dr. Coolidge, for all his puerility, has this capacity.
In his whole life he has probably never thought an original thought, but he has at least shown a talent for dramatizing the thoughts of others.
In the present campaign he has very neatly seized the leadership of the Babbitts.
Every idea that is honorable and of good report in Pullman smoke-rooms, on the verandas of golf clubs, among university presidents, at luncheons of the Kiwanis Club and where sweaters and usurers meet — all this rubbish he has welded into a system of politics, nay, of statecraft, of jurisprudence, of epistemology, almost of theology, and made himself the prophet of it.
He has shoved himself an inch ahead of his lieges.
He is one degree hotter for the existing order than they are themselves.
On the other rampart stands Dr. La Follette, obviously a genuine leader, even to the eye of his bitterest enemies.
No one has ever accused La Follette of following anyone.
He has always been in the forefront of the fray, alike when the going was good, as in Wisconsin when he mowed down the Babbitts, and in Washington during the war, when his foes tried to dispose of him.
American fashion, by hitting him below the belt.
La Follette is so gaudily the leader that he is followed by thousands who are hot against him.
The sheer force of his personality drags along the whole pack of visionaries.
His own cellar contains relatively few jugs of peruna, but he is so thrilling that his guests willingly bring their own.
If all these guests could agree upon one brand La Follette would carry twenty-five states, including Illinois and New York.
But they simply can’t.
For Progressives are like Christians in this: that they hate one another far more than they hate the heathen.
The devil doesn’t have to fight the Catholics; he leaves the business to the Ku Klux, i.e., to the Methodists and Baptists.
Just so the Progressives devour one another, to the delight and edification of the Babbitts.
Some of them, resisting even La Follette’s vast magnetism, have already turned upon him.
Others have begun to row among themselves.
I believe that by the Tuesday following the first Monday in November the whole pack will be in chaos, and dog will be eating dog.
Cal, as I argued several weeks ago, will get the labor vote, old Sam Gompers to the contrary notwithstanding.
And he will also get many other votes now credited to La Follette.
My guess is that he will be elected to the woolsack of Washington and Lincoln by an immense majority.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -campaign/
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/August 25, 1924
Having now devoted a solid month to examining the high and low words of the partisans of the Hon. John W. Davis, of Wall Street, West Virginia, I can only report that I have yet to encounter any sound reason for voting for him.
The more these partisans argue that he is a true Progressive, and hot for all the sure cures now on tap, the more they prove that the Hon. Mr. La Follette is even truer and even hotter.
And the more they try to make it appear that he is, notwithstanding, a safe and sane man, and one to be trusted fully by every citizen with money in the bank, the more they make it plain that the Hon. Mr. Coolidge is even safer and saner, and still more to be trusted.
In a word, the hon. gentleman falls between two stools.
He is, in a very real sense, not in the fight at all; he is simply a sort of bystander — far from innocent, perhaps, but still not actively engaged.
The actual combatants are the Hon. Mr. La Follette and the Hon. Mr. Coolidge.
Each of these great statesmen stands for something that is simple and obvious — something that anyone may understand.
Dr. Coolidge is for the Haves and Dr. La Follette is for the Have Nots.
But whom is Dr. Davis for?
I’m sure I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.
I have read all his state papers with dreadful diligence, and yet all I can gather from them is that he is for himself.
A sense of this fact seems to be going through the country.
The Davis campaign is at a standstill.
La Follette is belaboring Coolidge, and the friends of Coolidge are belaboring La Follette, but no one seems to think it worthwhile to belabor Davis.
He is simply concealed in the crowd, like a bootlegger at a wedding.
The sore men, in so far as they have any intelligence at all, seem to be unanimously in favor of La Follette, and the Babbitts, with sound instinct, are all hot for Coolidge.
But who is hot for Davis?
Not even the political morons south of the Potomac.
They will probably vote for him, as they would vote for the devil or even the Pope on a Democratic ticket, but they are no more hot for him than a Federal Judge is hot for the Constitution.
In all this there is a great deal more than mere accident.
What ails the hon. gentleman, primarily, is simply the fact that he lacks all the qualities of leadership — that he is fundamentally not a leader at all, but only a follower.
His career, as it is described by his friends, is quite devoid of anything plausibly describable as intellectual enterprise.
There is no record that he has ever taken the lead in anything, either as statesman or as politician.
He was so little original and rambunctious as a Congressman that the attention of the late Woodrow, who hated all men of forceful personality, was attracted to him, and he was made Solicitor-General.
He was so careful and undistinguished as Solicitor-General that he was promoted to the Court of St. James.
He was so easy a mark at the Court of St. James that the English gave three cheers when they heard that he had been nominated for the Presidency.
What share has the hon. gentleman had in the great political controversies of the past ten years — the most troubled era since the Civil War?
Absolutely none.
What has he had to say about Prohibition?
Nothing save a few disingenuous platitudes.
What about the League issue?
Nothing but vague nonsense, by the Creel Press Bureau out of Crews House.
What about the Ku Klux?
Not a word.
What about the growth of paternalism in government, the idiotic multiplications of laws, the intolerable increase of jobholders?
Several years ago, when he was President of the American Bar Association, he delivered a feeble harangue upon the subject — a harangue reading much like a warmed-over Evening Sunpaper editorial of six or eight months before.
Since becoming candidate he has evaded the matter.
No one knows clearly what he thinks about it.
His presidency at the American Bar Association coincided exactly with a revolt against the wholesale invasions of the Bill of Rights that were begun under Wilson and continued under Harding.
Lawyers in all parts of the country took part in this revolt — men as diverse as Senator Thomas J. Walsh and Dean Roscoe Pound of Harvard, Clarence Darrow and Feather Duster Hughes.
But Dr. Davis took no part in it.
To this day he has uttered no word about it.
Is he in favor of shoving men into jail without jury trials, or is he against it?
No one knows.
The learned gentleman’s complete failure as a public man, indeed, has forced his partisans to fall back upon his eminence as a lawyer.
But what is this eminence worth — that is, in a candidate for the presidency?
It seems to me that it is worth precisely nothing.
A man might be the most successful lawyer in the United States, and yet be quite unfit for the office of county sheriff, congressman, or even federal judge.
There is nothing in the daily life of a trial lawyer that prepares a man to execute the laws; his experience only increases his competence to evade and make a mock of them.
He is engaged professionally, day in and day out, in defending persons who have done so.
Dr. Davis has been so engaged for years.
Now he says that he is proud of his career.
Why not?
His clients, in the main, have been very well heeled, and they have made him rich.
I have nothing to say against his satisfaction.
It seems to me that it is quite honorable to desire to be rich.
It is also quite honorable, at all events in America, to want to be a successful lawyer, an adroit jail-robber.
All I contend is that these aspirations are incompatible with the yearning to be President of the United States.
The two things simply do not hang together.
It is as if I, who have devoted my whole life to advocating Darwinism and other such heresies, should suddenly print a card announcing my candidacy for a bishopric, or, to make the analogy closer, for the stool of St. Peter.
The majority of the faithful, I believe, would resent my candidacy, and with sound reason.
In the same way a great many Americans resent the candidacy of the Hon. Mr. Davis.
Perhaps the fact explains, in part, the palpable flaccidity of his campaign.
But there is a better explanation, I believe, in his lack of all the qualities of genuine leadership — his apparent incapacity to get ahead of ideas and pull them along with him.
He is a highly respectable man, but he is nothing else.
Even Dr. Coolidge, for all his puerility, has this capacity.
In his whole life he has probably never thought an original thought, but he has at least shown a talent for dramatizing the thoughts of others.
In the present campaign he has very neatly seized the leadership of the Babbitts.
Every idea that is honorable and of good report in Pullman smoke-rooms, on the verandas of golf clubs, among university presidents, at luncheons of the Kiwanis Club and where sweaters and usurers meet — all this rubbish he has welded into a system of politics, nay, of statecraft, of jurisprudence, of epistemology, almost of theology, and made himself the prophet of it.
He has shoved himself an inch ahead of his lieges.
He is one degree hotter for the existing order than they are themselves.
On the other rampart stands Dr. La Follette, obviously a genuine leader, even to the eye of his bitterest enemies.
No one has ever accused La Follette of following anyone.
He has always been in the forefront of the fray, alike when the going was good, as in Wisconsin when he mowed down the Babbitts, and in Washington during the war, when his foes tried to dispose of him.
American fashion, by hitting him below the belt.
La Follette is so gaudily the leader that he is followed by thousands who are hot against him.
The sheer force of his personality drags along the whole pack of visionaries.
His own cellar contains relatively few jugs of peruna, but he is so thrilling that his guests willingly bring their own.
If all these guests could agree upon one brand La Follette would carry twenty-five states, including Illinois and New York.
But they simply can’t.
For Progressives are like Christians in this: that they hate one another far more than they hate the heathen.
The devil doesn’t have to fight the Catholics; he leaves the business to the Ku Klux, i.e., to the Methodists and Baptists.
Just so the Progressives devour one another, to the delight and edification of the Babbitts.
Some of them, resisting even La Follette’s vast magnetism, have already turned upon him.
Others have begun to row among themselves.
I believe that by the Tuesday following the first Monday in November the whole pack will be in chaos, and dog will be eating dog.
Cal, as I argued several weeks ago, will get the labor vote, old Sam Gompers to the contrary notwithstanding.
And he will also get many other votes now credited to La Follette.
My guess is that he will be elected to the woolsack of Washington and Lincoln by an immense majority.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -campaign/
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
Goose-Step Day
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/September 8, 1924
Of the good intentions of the amiable gentlemen, clerical and lay, who prepare to protest publicly against the ceremonies of Goose-Step Day there can be no doubt, but it must be equally plain that their virtuous horror will get them nowhere.
Their scheme, indeed, belongs to the New Thought, not to realism; they are trying to put out a fire by mental magnetism.
What they assume, however they may sophisticate the fact, is that the way to prevent war is to make it easy for the other fellow.
The truth is that the way to prevent it is to make it unprofitable for the other fellow.
Two means to that end instantly suggest themselves.
One is the device of getting such armaments in readiness that the other fellow is sure to suffer a dreadful beating, even if he wins.
This scheme was invented by the Germans, and they put it into practice with such effect that it is now advocated unanimously by the military men of all nations, which is to say, by all the men who are most competent, technically, to estimate it.
The other device may be described roughly as that of the generous friend.
Its essence is the doctrine that fairness and decency pay — that the other fellow will not be tempted to take anything by force so long as he can get all he can reasonably want by peaceful means.
This second device is very familiar to the private relations of man and man, and even shows itself, at times, in business.
The men I like in this world, and get on with amicably, are men who give me something that I want — amusement, instruction, flattery, protection, and so on.
Why do I treat them politely, even when they may chance to annoy me, and never think of having at them in a hostile manner?
Simply because I know that my dealings with them will be more satisfactory — that I will get more out of them — if I am friendly to them than if I am hostile to them.
They are in the same boat exactly.
My goodwill is more valuable to them than anything they could get out of me by making war upon me.
Thus we are what is called friends, and their attitude to me, like mine to them, is tolerant, generous, decent and fair.
There have always been men in the world who dreamed of setting up relations of the same sort between nations, but they have always seen their dreams fail of realization, for nations, for some reason that I do not know, are a great deal less intelligent than individual men, and hence a great deal less decent.
Consider, for example, the case of the United States.
As nations go in this world, it is surely not the worst; in fact, one might plausibly argue that, morally at least, it is one of the best.
Nevertheless, it is essentially a liar, a coward and a blackguard, and every other nation in the world is well aware of the fact.
Everywhere on earth it is distrusted, and with sound reason.
Nowhere has it any honest and disinterested friends.
If it came to disaster tomorrow the whole world would rejoice.
The facts upon which this universal distrust are based are not imaginary; they are very real.
The United States, for a generation past, has been hard at work converting friends into enemies.
During the first part of the late war it lost the friendship of one side by selling it out to the other side for cash in hand, and the friendship of the other side by demanding a usurious price.
And during the second half it aggravated the former injury by waging war in an ungallant and hysterical manner and the latter by carrying on fresh and worse extortions in the name of altruism.
These protestations of altruism do not deceive Europe.
The English and their allies do not remember the American troops that saved them; they have begun, indeed, to deny that American troops saved them, and to remember only the three years of going it alone, with Uncle Sam taking their money, and the staggering demand for more money when it was all over.
For one Englishman who has heard of Chateau Thierry or Admiral Creel’s battle with the U-boats there are a hundred who have heard of the flow of British gold to America.
And the Germans with their friends do not remember Dr. Wilson’s mellow eloquence at Versailles or the lofty protestation that the United States wanted no profit out of the war; they remember only the bogus neutrality of 1914-17, the armistice swindle, and the doings of the Alien Property Custodian.
Let it be assumed that these enmities are ungrounded, or, at all events, exaggerated.
They remain facts none the less.
I know of no way to get rid of them.
Even if all the war loot were returned, half to one side and half to the other, the old soreness would remain.
General Pershing, I believe, advocates some such scheme, at least with respect to the allies; he wants to remit all the remaining war debts.
But even General Pershing is plainly aware that that would not convert hatred into friendship, for in the same breath he advocates colossal preparations for the next war.
That war, it seems to me, is bound to come as soon as the distrusts which now divide Europe begin to abate, and concerted action is once more possible.
The nations over there are now all at loggerheads.
Every one of them was badly used in the war, and everyone puts the blame on the others.
But on one thing, at least, they are all agreed, and that is upon the doctrine that the United States somehow swindled the whole gang — that it made off with the plum-pudding while they were fighting for it.
This feeling of having been done in is precisely what makes wars.
Nations do not go to war, at least in theory, to grab something that is not theirs; they go to war to recover what has been taken from them.
Americans who read only American papers get but the vaguest echoes of this hatred.
Even when the French mobbed the American participants in the Olympic games the facts were glossed over.
It is constantly represented that the United States is about to “save” Europe, and that Europe is pathetically grateful.
Europe is actually nothing of the sort.
It sees in every act of “salvation” only one more effort to squeeze it out of money.
What did the London Conference accomplish?
It left the French sore, the Germans raging, and the English full of new suspicion.
All the while the Japs sharpen their two-handed swords in the Far East and Latin America flames with indignation against the Yankee bully and thief.
Is this a good time to disarm?
Then it is a good time to let the insurance lapse after the cellar has been filled with gasoline.
There has never been a time in American history when the country faced more bitter enemies or more formidable foes.
In case war came tomorrow it would find us without a single dependable ally.
Even England could not go safely beyond neutrality — and we taught the whole world, England included, how neutrality can be made profitable in 1914-17.
It is thus nonsense, at this time, to talk of putting up the musket.
The real danger lies in the probability that Goose-Step Day will turn out to be a fiasco — that the rest of the world will hear only that it has been muddled and that pacifist attack muddled it.
What news could be more grateful to the intelligent Japs?
It is obvious that they would fall upon us tomorrow if they thought it safe.
Well, every time they hear of a pacifist meeting they will put it down as that much safer.
But if Goose-Step Day shows a vast swarming of the booboisie and a magnificent rattling of swords they will be disposed to go slowly.
Here I attempt no denunciation of the fundamental pacifist position.
Let it be granted that war is evil and ought to be put down.
But let us not try to put it down by making it easy for the other fellow: his temptation is already almost more than he can bear.
The way to dissuade him is by reducing that temptation, either by arming to the teeth or by going out of the swindling business.
The latter, I take it, is too much to hope for.
Even the pacifists seem to abandon the effort to halt the robberies going on in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Nicaragua and elsewhere; as for the noble enterprise of “saving” Europe at seven per cent., they appear actually to favor it.
So long as these things go on there will be blood upon the moon.
And so long as there is blood upon the moon the judicious thing to do will be to keep the boobs goose-stepping.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -step-day/
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/September 8, 1924
Of the good intentions of the amiable gentlemen, clerical and lay, who prepare to protest publicly against the ceremonies of Goose-Step Day there can be no doubt, but it must be equally plain that their virtuous horror will get them nowhere.
Their scheme, indeed, belongs to the New Thought, not to realism; they are trying to put out a fire by mental magnetism.
What they assume, however they may sophisticate the fact, is that the way to prevent war is to make it easy for the other fellow.
The truth is that the way to prevent it is to make it unprofitable for the other fellow.
Two means to that end instantly suggest themselves.
One is the device of getting such armaments in readiness that the other fellow is sure to suffer a dreadful beating, even if he wins.
This scheme was invented by the Germans, and they put it into practice with such effect that it is now advocated unanimously by the military men of all nations, which is to say, by all the men who are most competent, technically, to estimate it.
The other device may be described roughly as that of the generous friend.
Its essence is the doctrine that fairness and decency pay — that the other fellow will not be tempted to take anything by force so long as he can get all he can reasonably want by peaceful means.
This second device is very familiar to the private relations of man and man, and even shows itself, at times, in business.
The men I like in this world, and get on with amicably, are men who give me something that I want — amusement, instruction, flattery, protection, and so on.
Why do I treat them politely, even when they may chance to annoy me, and never think of having at them in a hostile manner?
Simply because I know that my dealings with them will be more satisfactory — that I will get more out of them — if I am friendly to them than if I am hostile to them.
They are in the same boat exactly.
My goodwill is more valuable to them than anything they could get out of me by making war upon me.
Thus we are what is called friends, and their attitude to me, like mine to them, is tolerant, generous, decent and fair.
There have always been men in the world who dreamed of setting up relations of the same sort between nations, but they have always seen their dreams fail of realization, for nations, for some reason that I do not know, are a great deal less intelligent than individual men, and hence a great deal less decent.
Consider, for example, the case of the United States.
As nations go in this world, it is surely not the worst; in fact, one might plausibly argue that, morally at least, it is one of the best.
Nevertheless, it is essentially a liar, a coward and a blackguard, and every other nation in the world is well aware of the fact.
Everywhere on earth it is distrusted, and with sound reason.
Nowhere has it any honest and disinterested friends.
If it came to disaster tomorrow the whole world would rejoice.
The facts upon which this universal distrust are based are not imaginary; they are very real.
The United States, for a generation past, has been hard at work converting friends into enemies.
During the first part of the late war it lost the friendship of one side by selling it out to the other side for cash in hand, and the friendship of the other side by demanding a usurious price.
And during the second half it aggravated the former injury by waging war in an ungallant and hysterical manner and the latter by carrying on fresh and worse extortions in the name of altruism.
These protestations of altruism do not deceive Europe.
The English and their allies do not remember the American troops that saved them; they have begun, indeed, to deny that American troops saved them, and to remember only the three years of going it alone, with Uncle Sam taking their money, and the staggering demand for more money when it was all over.
For one Englishman who has heard of Chateau Thierry or Admiral Creel’s battle with the U-boats there are a hundred who have heard of the flow of British gold to America.
And the Germans with their friends do not remember Dr. Wilson’s mellow eloquence at Versailles or the lofty protestation that the United States wanted no profit out of the war; they remember only the bogus neutrality of 1914-17, the armistice swindle, and the doings of the Alien Property Custodian.
Let it be assumed that these enmities are ungrounded, or, at all events, exaggerated.
They remain facts none the less.
I know of no way to get rid of them.
Even if all the war loot were returned, half to one side and half to the other, the old soreness would remain.
General Pershing, I believe, advocates some such scheme, at least with respect to the allies; he wants to remit all the remaining war debts.
But even General Pershing is plainly aware that that would not convert hatred into friendship, for in the same breath he advocates colossal preparations for the next war.
That war, it seems to me, is bound to come as soon as the distrusts which now divide Europe begin to abate, and concerted action is once more possible.
The nations over there are now all at loggerheads.
Every one of them was badly used in the war, and everyone puts the blame on the others.
But on one thing, at least, they are all agreed, and that is upon the doctrine that the United States somehow swindled the whole gang — that it made off with the plum-pudding while they were fighting for it.
This feeling of having been done in is precisely what makes wars.
Nations do not go to war, at least in theory, to grab something that is not theirs; they go to war to recover what has been taken from them.
Americans who read only American papers get but the vaguest echoes of this hatred.
Even when the French mobbed the American participants in the Olympic games the facts were glossed over.
It is constantly represented that the United States is about to “save” Europe, and that Europe is pathetically grateful.
Europe is actually nothing of the sort.
It sees in every act of “salvation” only one more effort to squeeze it out of money.
What did the London Conference accomplish?
It left the French sore, the Germans raging, and the English full of new suspicion.
All the while the Japs sharpen their two-handed swords in the Far East and Latin America flames with indignation against the Yankee bully and thief.
Is this a good time to disarm?
Then it is a good time to let the insurance lapse after the cellar has been filled with gasoline.
There has never been a time in American history when the country faced more bitter enemies or more formidable foes.
In case war came tomorrow it would find us without a single dependable ally.
Even England could not go safely beyond neutrality — and we taught the whole world, England included, how neutrality can be made profitable in 1914-17.
It is thus nonsense, at this time, to talk of putting up the musket.
The real danger lies in the probability that Goose-Step Day will turn out to be a fiasco — that the rest of the world will hear only that it has been muddled and that pacifist attack muddled it.
What news could be more grateful to the intelligent Japs?
It is obvious that they would fall upon us tomorrow if they thought it safe.
Well, every time they hear of a pacifist meeting they will put it down as that much safer.
But if Goose-Step Day shows a vast swarming of the booboisie and a magnificent rattling of swords they will be disposed to go slowly.
Here I attempt no denunciation of the fundamental pacifist position.
Let it be granted that war is evil and ought to be put down.
But let us not try to put it down by making it easy for the other fellow: his temptation is already almost more than he can bear.
The way to dissuade him is by reducing that temptation, either by arming to the teeth or by going out of the swindling business.
The latter, I take it, is too much to hope for.
Even the pacifists seem to abandon the effort to halt the robberies going on in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Nicaragua and elsewhere; as for the noble enterprise of “saving” Europe at seven per cent., they appear actually to favor it.
So long as these things go on there will be blood upon the moon.
And so long as there is blood upon the moon the judicious thing to do will be to keep the boobs goose-stepping.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -step-day/
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
Notes on the Struggle
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/September 15, 1924
As the campaign wears on it becomes more and more depressing to contemplate the choice before the voters of this eminent and puissant Republic.
The Hon. Mr. Davis, I begin to believe, is already out of the running.
If he ever becomes formidable it must be by a sort of miracle.
What remains?
On the one hand the citizen may vote for Senator La Follette, and so give his ballot to a scheme of reform that, viewed in the friendliest fashion, is full of highly dubious ideas.
On the other hand, he may vote for Coolidge, and so give his indorsement to a political philosophy that is ignorant, selfish, narrow and dishonest.
It is common to say that Wall Street is unanimously in favor of Coolidge, and the fact is urged against him.
It is not quite a fact.
Wall Street, indeed, is seldom unanimously for anything.
It divides as often as Main Street, and sometimes far more sharply.
In the present case it shows some sturdy Davis sentiment and even a flicker or two of La Follette sentiment.
There are bankers who forget their safe-deposit boxes, just as there are clergyman who forget the collection plate.
But if all that is worst in Wall Street be accepted as representative of the whole, then it may be said with complete truth that the Street sweats and prays for Cal.
He is the favorite of all its jackals.
They believe that they will be safe if he is elected, and they are right.
Why do they distrust the Hon. Mr. Davis?
For the reason, I dare say, that he is too much a member of the lodge, too familiar with the secret aspirations of the grand kleagles and imperial wizards.
Once he were in the White House, Wall Street could do nothing further for him, and he would be under a strong temptation to capitalize his immense knowledge of its ways.
The money changers greatly prefer a ductile ignoramus, eager for flattery: he is vastly easier to work.
The ideal is one who has been tried on the track.
Dr. Coolidge has been tried.
And found satisfactory.
One reads the speeches of the hon. gentleman and his running mate in a bruised sort of amazement.
Is it actually possible that such drivel is admired, and makes votes?
Turn, for example, to Dr. Coolidge’s defense of the Supreme Court, made here in Baltimore a week or so ago.
His fundamental contention, it must be plain, was sound enough.
The Supreme Court may be bad, but a Congress free to make laws without any constitutional check would be a hundred times worse.
But consider some of his arguments.
Among other things, he argues that the Supreme Court was the chief existing safeguard of the right of trial by jury!
It would be hard to imagine anything more idiotic.
The Supreme Court, as a matter of fact, has done more to destroy the right of trial by jury than any other agency.
The whole system of Federal courts is now engaged, and has been engaged for years past, upon a deliberate and successful effort to blow it to pieces, first at the behest of Big Business and then at the behest of the Anti-Saloon League, and the Supreme Court has stood in the forefront of that conspiracy from the start.
Upon the very fact, indeed, the partisans of Dr. La Follette ground their demand that its powers be reduced and rigidly limited.
Yet Dr. Coolidge stands up in public and argues solemnly that the Supreme Court is the guardian of the Bill of Rights, and that all persons who criticize it are enemies of the Constitution!
How is one to account for such dreadful nonsense?
Is the eminent gentleman a numskull, or does he believe that all the rest of us are numskulls?
Or can it be that he has borrowed a leaf from the book of his eminent associate, General Dawes?
The scheme of General Dawes is simple: when his argument needs it, he lies.
I point to his endless denunciations of Dr. La Follette as the candidate of the communists.
No one knows better than Dawes that La Follette repudiated the communists long before his nomination, and that they are bitterly against him today.
Nevertheless, he seldom makes a speech without trying to identify La Follette with communism.
In brief, Dawes is a fraud, and yet, if Dr. Coolidge is called to glory, he will be President of the United States!
Such are the two statesmen who seem destined, at the moment, to triumph in November: a man whose chief arguments are nonsensical and a man whose chief arguments are mendacious.
It is a curious fact, and charmingly illustrative of American character, that such assaults upon common sense and common decency do not lose votes, but rather make them.
When Coolidge talks of the Supreme Court defending the Bill of Rights there is not laughter, but applause.
And when Dawes libels La Follette by depicting him as an agent of the Bolsheviks, the Rotarians do not hiss him; they cheer him.
Nevertheless, two extremely vulnerable men, and a properly planned attack, I believe, would do them great damage.
So far, unluckily, it has not been made.
La Follette, busy with his archaic vision of monopolies and his lamentable schemes to curse the country with more and more jobholders, has left the offensive to his running-mate, Wheeler, obviously a third-rate performer.
Davis, instead of dissipating the fog with blasts of honesty and common sense, has devoted himself chiefly to academic pronunciamentos, many of them very evasive.
His solitary statement of his position on the Prohibition question was disingenuous and discreditable — a plain dodging of the plain issue.
It fooled neither the drys nor the wets and so got him nowhere.
What he appears to lack is simply courage — the only thing that can save his bacon, if it is to be saved at all.
If he keeps on pussy-footing he will fade out of the picture completely, especially if McAdoo and Al Smith take to the stump for him.
They will probably make very few votes for him; they will merely shoulder him out of the limelight, and cause the voters to forget him.
His chance, slim at best, lies in a bold and vigorous attack.
The best opening for him, I believe, is offered by Prohibition.
Despite all the effort to pump up other issues, the wet-or-dry issue remains the liveliest in all parts of the country.
The Ku Klux issue is everywhere submerged in it, and beside it all the other issues now heard of grow pale.
Not one American in a hundred is actively interested in the League of Nations; not one in a thousand is noticeably wrought up about the petty stealings of the friends of Dr. Daugherty; not one in ten thousand ever shows any excitement about states’ rights.
But Prohibition is talked of everywhere, endlessly and with passion, and especially is it talked of in the big cities.
Well, it is precisely in the big cities that Dr. Davis must win, if he is to win at all.
Let him pledge himself to law enforcement all he pleases.
If he also pledges himself to work for a modification of the Volstead Act he will sweep New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore and a dozen other big cities, and some of these cities will carry states with them.
Moreover, there will be some very populous states among them, with many votes in the Electoral College — more than enough to counterbalance the loss of half a dozen to the dry cow-States.
The wet vote in most of the big cities now seems to be edging toward La Follette.
In two cases out of three its loss will be borne by Davis, not by Coolidge.
In other words, the wet vote Democratic.
But can Davis afford to shock the dry South?
Why not?
The South is helpless, as usual.
It will have to vote for him, wet or dry, or see its whole political organization go to pot, with the accursed Moor triumphant.
Moreover, what reason is there to believe that the South is actually dry?
I know of none.
The truth is that the Anti-Saloon League, like its secular arm, the Ku Klux Klan, is everywhere in difficulties in the South, and that a secret ballot tomorrow would probably show every `state south of the Potomac, with the possible exception of North Carolina, to be wringing wet.
The people down there, in truth, tire of government by Methodist dervishes, and nothing would please them more than a fair chance to prove it.
Here is Dr. Davis’ chance.
The prize offered to him consists of New York, Maryland, Missouri, and probably Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts — in all, 101 electoral votes, enough to give poor Cal, with La Follette on his back in the cow-States, the fan-tods.
Will he grab it?
My prediction is that he will not.
Instead, he will continue to make speeches about American idealism and the “moral grandeur” of the late Martyr Wilson.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -struggle/
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/September 15, 1924
As the campaign wears on it becomes more and more depressing to contemplate the choice before the voters of this eminent and puissant Republic.
The Hon. Mr. Davis, I begin to believe, is already out of the running.
If he ever becomes formidable it must be by a sort of miracle.
What remains?
On the one hand the citizen may vote for Senator La Follette, and so give his ballot to a scheme of reform that, viewed in the friendliest fashion, is full of highly dubious ideas.
On the other hand, he may vote for Coolidge, and so give his indorsement to a political philosophy that is ignorant, selfish, narrow and dishonest.
It is common to say that Wall Street is unanimously in favor of Coolidge, and the fact is urged against him.
It is not quite a fact.
Wall Street, indeed, is seldom unanimously for anything.
It divides as often as Main Street, and sometimes far more sharply.
In the present case it shows some sturdy Davis sentiment and even a flicker or two of La Follette sentiment.
There are bankers who forget their safe-deposit boxes, just as there are clergyman who forget the collection plate.
But if all that is worst in Wall Street be accepted as representative of the whole, then it may be said with complete truth that the Street sweats and prays for Cal.
He is the favorite of all its jackals.
They believe that they will be safe if he is elected, and they are right.
Why do they distrust the Hon. Mr. Davis?
For the reason, I dare say, that he is too much a member of the lodge, too familiar with the secret aspirations of the grand kleagles and imperial wizards.
Once he were in the White House, Wall Street could do nothing further for him, and he would be under a strong temptation to capitalize his immense knowledge of its ways.
The money changers greatly prefer a ductile ignoramus, eager for flattery: he is vastly easier to work.
The ideal is one who has been tried on the track.
Dr. Coolidge has been tried.
And found satisfactory.
One reads the speeches of the hon. gentleman and his running mate in a bruised sort of amazement.
Is it actually possible that such drivel is admired, and makes votes?
Turn, for example, to Dr. Coolidge’s defense of the Supreme Court, made here in Baltimore a week or so ago.
His fundamental contention, it must be plain, was sound enough.
The Supreme Court may be bad, but a Congress free to make laws without any constitutional check would be a hundred times worse.
But consider some of his arguments.
Among other things, he argues that the Supreme Court was the chief existing safeguard of the right of trial by jury!
It would be hard to imagine anything more idiotic.
The Supreme Court, as a matter of fact, has done more to destroy the right of trial by jury than any other agency.
The whole system of Federal courts is now engaged, and has been engaged for years past, upon a deliberate and successful effort to blow it to pieces, first at the behest of Big Business and then at the behest of the Anti-Saloon League, and the Supreme Court has stood in the forefront of that conspiracy from the start.
Upon the very fact, indeed, the partisans of Dr. La Follette ground their demand that its powers be reduced and rigidly limited.
Yet Dr. Coolidge stands up in public and argues solemnly that the Supreme Court is the guardian of the Bill of Rights, and that all persons who criticize it are enemies of the Constitution!
How is one to account for such dreadful nonsense?
Is the eminent gentleman a numskull, or does he believe that all the rest of us are numskulls?
Or can it be that he has borrowed a leaf from the book of his eminent associate, General Dawes?
The scheme of General Dawes is simple: when his argument needs it, he lies.
I point to his endless denunciations of Dr. La Follette as the candidate of the communists.
No one knows better than Dawes that La Follette repudiated the communists long before his nomination, and that they are bitterly against him today.
Nevertheless, he seldom makes a speech without trying to identify La Follette with communism.
In brief, Dawes is a fraud, and yet, if Dr. Coolidge is called to glory, he will be President of the United States!
Such are the two statesmen who seem destined, at the moment, to triumph in November: a man whose chief arguments are nonsensical and a man whose chief arguments are mendacious.
It is a curious fact, and charmingly illustrative of American character, that such assaults upon common sense and common decency do not lose votes, but rather make them.
When Coolidge talks of the Supreme Court defending the Bill of Rights there is not laughter, but applause.
And when Dawes libels La Follette by depicting him as an agent of the Bolsheviks, the Rotarians do not hiss him; they cheer him.
Nevertheless, two extremely vulnerable men, and a properly planned attack, I believe, would do them great damage.
So far, unluckily, it has not been made.
La Follette, busy with his archaic vision of monopolies and his lamentable schemes to curse the country with more and more jobholders, has left the offensive to his running-mate, Wheeler, obviously a third-rate performer.
Davis, instead of dissipating the fog with blasts of honesty and common sense, has devoted himself chiefly to academic pronunciamentos, many of them very evasive.
His solitary statement of his position on the Prohibition question was disingenuous and discreditable — a plain dodging of the plain issue.
It fooled neither the drys nor the wets and so got him nowhere.
What he appears to lack is simply courage — the only thing that can save his bacon, if it is to be saved at all.
If he keeps on pussy-footing he will fade out of the picture completely, especially if McAdoo and Al Smith take to the stump for him.
They will probably make very few votes for him; they will merely shoulder him out of the limelight, and cause the voters to forget him.
His chance, slim at best, lies in a bold and vigorous attack.
The best opening for him, I believe, is offered by Prohibition.
Despite all the effort to pump up other issues, the wet-or-dry issue remains the liveliest in all parts of the country.
The Ku Klux issue is everywhere submerged in it, and beside it all the other issues now heard of grow pale.
Not one American in a hundred is actively interested in the League of Nations; not one in a thousand is noticeably wrought up about the petty stealings of the friends of Dr. Daugherty; not one in ten thousand ever shows any excitement about states’ rights.
But Prohibition is talked of everywhere, endlessly and with passion, and especially is it talked of in the big cities.
Well, it is precisely in the big cities that Dr. Davis must win, if he is to win at all.
Let him pledge himself to law enforcement all he pleases.
If he also pledges himself to work for a modification of the Volstead Act he will sweep New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore and a dozen other big cities, and some of these cities will carry states with them.
Moreover, there will be some very populous states among them, with many votes in the Electoral College — more than enough to counterbalance the loss of half a dozen to the dry cow-States.
The wet vote in most of the big cities now seems to be edging toward La Follette.
In two cases out of three its loss will be borne by Davis, not by Coolidge.
In other words, the wet vote Democratic.
But can Davis afford to shock the dry South?
Why not?
The South is helpless, as usual.
It will have to vote for him, wet or dry, or see its whole political organization go to pot, with the accursed Moor triumphant.
Moreover, what reason is there to believe that the South is actually dry?
I know of none.
The truth is that the Anti-Saloon League, like its secular arm, the Ku Klux Klan, is everywhere in difficulties in the South, and that a secret ballot tomorrow would probably show every `state south of the Potomac, with the possible exception of North Carolina, to be wringing wet.
The people down there, in truth, tire of government by Methodist dervishes, and nothing would please them more than a fair chance to prove it.
Here is Dr. Davis’ chance.
The prize offered to him consists of New York, Maryland, Missouri, and probably Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts — in all, 101 electoral votes, enough to give poor Cal, with La Follette on his back in the cow-States, the fan-tods.
Will he grab it?
My prediction is that he will not.
Instead, he will continue to make speeches about American idealism and the “moral grandeur” of the late Martyr Wilson.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -struggle/
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
The Side Show
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/September 22, 1924
The Hon. George Heller, M. D., who announces that he will run for Congress in the Third District against the Hon. John Philip Hill, LL.B., is evidently one of the romantic optimists who make existence in this vale so nonsensical and so charming.
Over the corpse of the Hon. Tony Dimarco, LL.B., the wettest of the wets, he flings himself upon the barbed wire.
I only hope that the Polish precinct bosses who back him will stick on election day, and so ease the contusions along his gluteus maximus.
Is there any sign that the Third District tires of the Hon. Mr. Hill?
I can detect none.
A district made up of enlightened freemen never tires of a congressman so long as he gives it a good show.
At the art of providing this good show the hon. gentleman is a virtuoso — perhaps the greatest seen in these latitudes since the Hon. Frank C. Wachter was translated to a higher sphere.
He understands his constituents thoroughly, and he is an extremely resourceful and amusing fellow.
His onslaughts upon the Volstead Act have been far more exhilarating than those of any other congressman, and also, I believe, far more effective.
He has had the wit to see that it is useless to rant and howl against the act in the traditional congressional manner — that the Anti-Saloon League and its serfs are no more open to argument than a whirling dervish is open to argument.
Instead, he has had at them, and at the law itself, with the artful and devastating devices of ridicule, he has carried the whole imposture to a reductio ad absurdum.
Very few men in this world have the skill to meet ridicule without damage, and certainly the humorless Methodist who passes as District Attorney in these parts is not one of them.
The Hon. Mr. Hill has got him on the floor, and is having a great deal of fun with him.
And he has also pulled the legs from under that other dull Wesleyan, the Hon. Roy Ass Haynes.
The dilemma confronting the Hon. Mr. Haynes is very serious.
If he tries to shove the Hon. Mr. Hill into jail he will only make a martyr of him, and so double the effectiveness of his opposition; moreover, railroading a congressmen may turn out to be far more difficult than disposing of a poor Italian woman with no money and no friends.
And if he lets him run on he will only confess, publicly and shamelessly, that the Volstead Act is a snare and a delusion — that there are holes in it big enough to admit a five-ton truck, and that Prohibition is not actually enforced upon all citizens alike.
No matter which path he takes, the going will cause him to sweat, and every drop of sweat he sheds will mean a vote for the Hon. Mr. Hill.
For the constituents of the hon. gentleman seem to be convinced, as he is, that the Volstead Act is not only intolerably oppressive but also grossly unfair and dishonest — that its actual purpose is not to put down the use of alcoholic beverages absolutely, but simply to harass and damage the sort of folks who are hated by country Methodists.
This, I believe, is a fair statement of the motives behind it.
The farmer can still make cider and wine, and the Prohibition Commissioner refuses flatly to put a limit on its content of alcohol, but the city man is liable to raid, assault and even murder the moment he sets a batch of mash to fermenting.
Who gets any benefit out of this law?
Obviously, only the yokel.
He has his cider, and he sees a horde of blacklegs turned loose to annoy his economic and theological enemy.
The Hon. Mr. Hill has thrown up this fact very brilliantly, not by the usual method of moral denunciation, but by the far more agreeable and forcible method of burlesque.
He has made the Prohibitionists look silly, and thereby he has done them grave damage.
I believe that, as a result of his clowning, the effectiveness of Prohibition propaganda has been diminished in Baltimore by at least a half.
The holy cause, indeed, is sick unto death, and shaking money out of the Sunday-schools grows harder and harder.
If it were not for the fact that scores of job-holders live by nursing it, it would turn up its heels and die.
The old class of philosophical Prohibitionists is now almost extinct.
The cause is carried on wholly by gentlemen who get their living out of it.
Meanwhile, the Hon. Mr. Hill adroitly butters his own parsnips.
Certainly no other Maryland congressman since the Civil War has made a more vivid impression on his colleagues in two terms, or got more attention from the country in general.
The rest of the State delegation in the lower House consists of vacuums.
The only one of its members who has ever been heard of beyond the borders of the State is a bogus dry who was lately investigated by the House.
It turned out that he was innocent.
In other words, Maryland’s representatives even fail to get any share of the Washington swag.
They are simply nonentities.
If all of them save the Hon. Mr. Hill were murdered by Prohibition enforcement agents tomorrow, the news would be sent out without any mention of their names.
But Hill has been heard of, and his forays against the Anti-Saloon League and its lackeys get attention all over the country.
They make first-page news; they get big headlines.
These headlines, it seems to me, do an excellent service to the Maryland Free State.
They inform the nation that there is at least one State remaining in which the imbecilities of Prohibition are regarded with disdain — that there is one State in which the majority of the people yet cherish and believe in liberty, and can afford to laugh at its enemies.
The fact is made plain that Maryland suffers Prohibition unwillingly — that it to imposed upon the people by the new Federal despotism, and that they will throw it off as soon as they can.
Surely this is not a bad impression to get about.
Soon or late there is bound to be a revulsion against all the current snouting and oppression in America, and the State that leads it will not go unhonored.
The local Babbitts posture obscenely in the complaisant Sunpaper every time they lure another soap-factory to Baltimore.
But try to imagine a civilized man looking for a comfortable place to live.
Would he choose a city full of soap-factories, or a city with just laws and a respect for liberty?
What Baltimore needs, obviously, is more civilized inhabitants.
We have enough Babbitts now, and they have brought in enough serfs and morons.
But even the Babbitts, living in Maryland, are measurably better than the Babbitts elsewhere.
This is one of the few American States in which, in the State courts, the constitutional guarantees of the citizen are jealously guarded.
Unlike New York, Pennsylvania and most of the Western States, we have no laws limiting the free play of opinion; any Marylander is at liberty to set forth his honest sentiments, in private or in public, without interference by the Polizei.
No so-called soap-boxer, however extravagant and idiotic, has ever been sent to prison in Maryland.
The American Legion, which devotes itself in the West to slugging alleged Reds, i.e., all persons who do not believe that the government is perfect, would not dare to attempt it here.
Our Chambers of Commerce have no committees to regulate what wage-slaves shall think.
We have produced no Mitchell Palmers, Lusks or Archibald Stevensons.
This freedom from tyranny is due to purely State action, and springs out of a purely State tradition.
As one of the United States, Maryland is subject, like all the rest, to the oppressions of Federal law, and the judicial revision of the Bill of Rights by the Federal courts.
But surely not willingly.
Our State courts engage in no such rewriting of the Constitution.
They respect it today as they respected it yesterday, and under its protection the citizen enjoys all his rights, unmolested by raids upon them under cover of so-called law.
This freedom, it seems to me, is something very valuable.
It is, perhaps, more valuable than anything else that the citizen of a modern state can hope for.
It is the basis of all security, and of all happiness.
Its overt benefits are everywhere present.
I point to one example: the experience of Maryland with the Ku Klux Klan.
To the north and to the south the Klan has caused great turmoils; in Maryland it has been as harmless as the Knights of Pythias.
And why?
Simply because the tradition of the State is against government by Klan methods — because the Klan found it impossible to get any official support, the foundation of its strength elsewhere.
There are States in which governors and judges have cringed to it — but Maryland is not one of them.
Well, the same rustic Methodists and Baptists who launched the Anti-Saloon League also launched the Klan, led by the same pastors.
They were able, with the Anti-Saloon League, to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, and to destroy its principal guarantees.
But they were not able, with the Klan, to destroy liberty in Maryland.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... side-show/
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/September 22, 1924
The Hon. George Heller, M. D., who announces that he will run for Congress in the Third District against the Hon. John Philip Hill, LL.B., is evidently one of the romantic optimists who make existence in this vale so nonsensical and so charming.
Over the corpse of the Hon. Tony Dimarco, LL.B., the wettest of the wets, he flings himself upon the barbed wire.
I only hope that the Polish precinct bosses who back him will stick on election day, and so ease the contusions along his gluteus maximus.
Is there any sign that the Third District tires of the Hon. Mr. Hill?
I can detect none.
A district made up of enlightened freemen never tires of a congressman so long as he gives it a good show.
At the art of providing this good show the hon. gentleman is a virtuoso — perhaps the greatest seen in these latitudes since the Hon. Frank C. Wachter was translated to a higher sphere.
He understands his constituents thoroughly, and he is an extremely resourceful and amusing fellow.
His onslaughts upon the Volstead Act have been far more exhilarating than those of any other congressman, and also, I believe, far more effective.
He has had the wit to see that it is useless to rant and howl against the act in the traditional congressional manner — that the Anti-Saloon League and its serfs are no more open to argument than a whirling dervish is open to argument.
Instead, he has had at them, and at the law itself, with the artful and devastating devices of ridicule, he has carried the whole imposture to a reductio ad absurdum.
Very few men in this world have the skill to meet ridicule without damage, and certainly the humorless Methodist who passes as District Attorney in these parts is not one of them.
The Hon. Mr. Hill has got him on the floor, and is having a great deal of fun with him.
And he has also pulled the legs from under that other dull Wesleyan, the Hon. Roy Ass Haynes.
The dilemma confronting the Hon. Mr. Haynes is very serious.
If he tries to shove the Hon. Mr. Hill into jail he will only make a martyr of him, and so double the effectiveness of his opposition; moreover, railroading a congressmen may turn out to be far more difficult than disposing of a poor Italian woman with no money and no friends.
And if he lets him run on he will only confess, publicly and shamelessly, that the Volstead Act is a snare and a delusion — that there are holes in it big enough to admit a five-ton truck, and that Prohibition is not actually enforced upon all citizens alike.
No matter which path he takes, the going will cause him to sweat, and every drop of sweat he sheds will mean a vote for the Hon. Mr. Hill.
For the constituents of the hon. gentleman seem to be convinced, as he is, that the Volstead Act is not only intolerably oppressive but also grossly unfair and dishonest — that its actual purpose is not to put down the use of alcoholic beverages absolutely, but simply to harass and damage the sort of folks who are hated by country Methodists.
This, I believe, is a fair statement of the motives behind it.
The farmer can still make cider and wine, and the Prohibition Commissioner refuses flatly to put a limit on its content of alcohol, but the city man is liable to raid, assault and even murder the moment he sets a batch of mash to fermenting.
Who gets any benefit out of this law?
Obviously, only the yokel.
He has his cider, and he sees a horde of blacklegs turned loose to annoy his economic and theological enemy.
The Hon. Mr. Hill has thrown up this fact very brilliantly, not by the usual method of moral denunciation, but by the far more agreeable and forcible method of burlesque.
He has made the Prohibitionists look silly, and thereby he has done them grave damage.
I believe that, as a result of his clowning, the effectiveness of Prohibition propaganda has been diminished in Baltimore by at least a half.
The holy cause, indeed, is sick unto death, and shaking money out of the Sunday-schools grows harder and harder.
If it were not for the fact that scores of job-holders live by nursing it, it would turn up its heels and die.
The old class of philosophical Prohibitionists is now almost extinct.
The cause is carried on wholly by gentlemen who get their living out of it.
Meanwhile, the Hon. Mr. Hill adroitly butters his own parsnips.
Certainly no other Maryland congressman since the Civil War has made a more vivid impression on his colleagues in two terms, or got more attention from the country in general.
The rest of the State delegation in the lower House consists of vacuums.
The only one of its members who has ever been heard of beyond the borders of the State is a bogus dry who was lately investigated by the House.
It turned out that he was innocent.
In other words, Maryland’s representatives even fail to get any share of the Washington swag.
They are simply nonentities.
If all of them save the Hon. Mr. Hill were murdered by Prohibition enforcement agents tomorrow, the news would be sent out without any mention of their names.
But Hill has been heard of, and his forays against the Anti-Saloon League and its lackeys get attention all over the country.
They make first-page news; they get big headlines.
These headlines, it seems to me, do an excellent service to the Maryland Free State.
They inform the nation that there is at least one State remaining in which the imbecilities of Prohibition are regarded with disdain — that there is one State in which the majority of the people yet cherish and believe in liberty, and can afford to laugh at its enemies.
The fact is made plain that Maryland suffers Prohibition unwillingly — that it to imposed upon the people by the new Federal despotism, and that they will throw it off as soon as they can.
Surely this is not a bad impression to get about.
Soon or late there is bound to be a revulsion against all the current snouting and oppression in America, and the State that leads it will not go unhonored.
The local Babbitts posture obscenely in the complaisant Sunpaper every time they lure another soap-factory to Baltimore.
But try to imagine a civilized man looking for a comfortable place to live.
Would he choose a city full of soap-factories, or a city with just laws and a respect for liberty?
What Baltimore needs, obviously, is more civilized inhabitants.
We have enough Babbitts now, and they have brought in enough serfs and morons.
But even the Babbitts, living in Maryland, are measurably better than the Babbitts elsewhere.
This is one of the few American States in which, in the State courts, the constitutional guarantees of the citizen are jealously guarded.
Unlike New York, Pennsylvania and most of the Western States, we have no laws limiting the free play of opinion; any Marylander is at liberty to set forth his honest sentiments, in private or in public, without interference by the Polizei.
No so-called soap-boxer, however extravagant and idiotic, has ever been sent to prison in Maryland.
The American Legion, which devotes itself in the West to slugging alleged Reds, i.e., all persons who do not believe that the government is perfect, would not dare to attempt it here.
Our Chambers of Commerce have no committees to regulate what wage-slaves shall think.
We have produced no Mitchell Palmers, Lusks or Archibald Stevensons.
This freedom from tyranny is due to purely State action, and springs out of a purely State tradition.
As one of the United States, Maryland is subject, like all the rest, to the oppressions of Federal law, and the judicial revision of the Bill of Rights by the Federal courts.
But surely not willingly.
Our State courts engage in no such rewriting of the Constitution.
They respect it today as they respected it yesterday, and under its protection the citizen enjoys all his rights, unmolested by raids upon them under cover of so-called law.
This freedom, it seems to me, is something very valuable.
It is, perhaps, more valuable than anything else that the citizen of a modern state can hope for.
It is the basis of all security, and of all happiness.
Its overt benefits are everywhere present.
I point to one example: the experience of Maryland with the Ku Klux Klan.
To the north and to the south the Klan has caused great turmoils; in Maryland it has been as harmless as the Knights of Pythias.
And why?
Simply because the tradition of the State is against government by Klan methods — because the Klan found it impossible to get any official support, the foundation of its strength elsewhere.
There are States in which governors and judges have cringed to it — but Maryland is not one of them.
Well, the same rustic Methodists and Baptists who launched the Anti-Saloon League also launched the Klan, led by the same pastors.
They were able, with the Anti-Saloon League, to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, and to destroy its principal guarantees.
But they were not able, with the Klan, to destroy liberty in Maryland.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... side-show/
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
Preachers of the Word
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/September 29, 1924
Misericordia superexaltatur judicio, which is to say, mercy is superior to justice.
The saying is credited by the learned to Pope Innocent III, one of the truly great occupants of Peter’s chair — in fact, a veritable Harding or even Coolidge among popes.
He said it in the first days of the thirteenth century.
Since then there have been great improvements in Christian doctrine.
In Chicago, the other day, a Catholic parish priest rose in his pulpit, bawled for the blood of the Judean youths, Leopold and Loeb, and delivered a dreadful denunciation of Judge Caverly for sparing their necks.
This Latin brother was singular, considering his rite, but in plenty of company, considering merely his sacred office.
On the same day a multitude of Protestant clergymen in Chicago relieved themselves of sentiments to the same general effect.
Judging by the press dispatches, indeed, the whole service of God in the town on that day consisted of barbaric yells for the Lord High Executioner.
No other subject seems to have been mentioned in the churches.
One and all, the anointed of God served Him by heating up the faithful to hatred and revenge, and by reviling a judge who had been guilty of mercy.
One and all, they screamed for the lives of two fellow-creatures.
Alas, not a rare spectacle, in this great moral age!
A day or two earlier — or was it later? — a gang of clerics from Annapolis, accompanied by pious laymen, appeared before the Hon. Edward M. Parrish, parole commissioner, and protested bitterly against the parole of a man lying in Annapolis jail.
Their argument, as reported in the Sunpaper, seems to have been very simple.
This gentleman, it appears, had deliberately violated the law.
Ergo, it was the first duty of the State to keep him in jail — not to dissuade him from his evil ways, but to get revenge upon him!
As I say, such episodes are not rare.
I could fill columns with them.
The sacred office, of late, becomes indistinguishable from that of the policeman and hangman.
The Beatitudes are repealed, and reenacted with jokers.
Divine worship becomes a sort of pursuit of villains, with rope and tar-pot.
It is the prime duty of the clerk in holy orders, not to combat sin, but to chase, nab and butcher the concrete sinner.
The congregation in which the True Faith runs highest is that one in which there is the steadiest and most raucous demand for blood.
Four or five years ago, when the Ku Klux Klan first got on its legs, I made certain inquiries into its origin and nature, and came to the conclusion that it was no more than the Anti-Saloon League in a fresh bib and tucker, and that, in consequence, its head men were mainly Baptist and Methodist clergymen.
That conclusion, printed to this place, caused protests, and one amiable Baptist clergyman had at me to the extent of two columns.
But who denies the fact today?
Surely no one of any intelligence.
The Klan, studied at length, turns out to be exactly what the Anti-Saloon League is: a device for organizing the hatreds of evangelical Christians.
The Anti-Saloon League is devoted to pursuing those they hate on ethical grounds and the Klan to pursuing those they hate for reasons of dogma.
Neither has any other purpose.
Both are run by Baptist and Methodist clergymen, some retired from the sacerdotal office but all full of evangelical zeal and all extraordinarily savage and bloodthirsty.
One hears nothing from these holy men save endless demands that this man be deported, that one tarred and feathered, and the other one jailed.
The Methodists, a year or so ago, were actually advocating murder.
East, West, North and South, the malevolent carnival goes on.
Everywhere the faithful are urged to animosity, brutality, hatred, revenge.
Everywhere neighbor is aroused against neighbor, and every sign of Christian charity is denounced as criminal.
And everywhere this devil’s brew is stirred vigorously by men sworn to preach the gospel of Christ.
In view of such phenomena, it surely becomes ridiculous to ask, as certain Christians of an elder school do, what is the matter with the churches?
What would be the matter with the theaters, if they took off all their plays and put on funerals and surgical operations?
What would be the matter with the bootleggers if they swindled their clients with ginger-pop and coca-cola?
What ails the churches is that large numbers of them have abandoned Christianity, lock, stock and barrel.
What ails them in that some of them, and by no means the least in wealth and influence, are now among the bitterest and most diligent enemies of Christianity ever heard of in this Republic.
Personally, I have little need for the basic consolations of the Christian faith.
I am not naturally religious, and seldom seek peace beyond the realm of demonstrable facts.
Even my virtues, such as they are, are not properly describable as Christian.
If I let an enemy go, it is because I disdain him, not because I pity him.
If I do not steal, it is not because I fear hell but because I am too vain.
But I am not blind, nevertheless, to the comfort that Christianity gives to other men.
It is, for them, an escape from realities too harsh to be borne.
It is a way of life that offers them sanctuary from the pains of everyday living, and gives them rest when they are weary and heavy-laden.
When they are errant, it offers them mercy.
When they faint, it speaks to them of love.
True or not, this faith is beautiful.
More, it is useful — more useful, perhaps, than any imaginable truth.
Its effect is to slow down and ameliorate the struggle for existence.
It urges men to forget themselves now and then, and to think of others.
It succors the weak and protects the friendless.
It preaches charity, pity, mercy.
Let philosophers dispute its premises if they will, but let no fool sneer at its magnificent conclusions.
As a body of scientific fact it may be dubious, but it remains the most beautiful poetry that man has yet produced on this earth.
Well, try to imagine a man full of a yearning for the consolations of that poetry.
He is tired of the cannibalistic combat that life is; he longs for peace, comfort, consolation.
He goes to church.
A few hymns are sung, and there arises in the pulpit a gentleman told off to preach.
This gentleman, it quickly appears, is not currently merchanting peace.
The Beatitudes are not his text.
He turns to the Old Testament.
There he finds a text to his taste.
And, leaping from it as from a springboard, he gives over an hour to damning his fellow-men.
He wants them to be sent to jail, to be deported, to be hanged.
He demands that the business be dispatched forthwith.
He denounces mercy as a weakness and forgiveness as base.
Our Christian friend, with a yell of despair, rushes from the basilica and seeks another.
There he hears the pastor call upon the agents of Prohibition to shoot bootleggers.
He seeks a third.
The pastor denounces girls who kiss their beaux as harlots, and demands that they be taken by the Polizei and cast into jail.
He seeks a fourth.
The pastor praises a Federal Judge for refusing a jury trial to a victim of the Anti-Saloon League.
He turns to a fifth.
The rev. rector calls upon God to singe and palsy the pope.
A sixth.
The shepherd urges his sheep to watch their neighbors, and report every suspicious whiff.
A seventh.
The Bolsheviki are on the grill.
An eighth.
Demands that more prisoners be hanged.
A ninth. . . .
But by this time another atheist in on his way to the public library, at 18 knots an hour, to read Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and Nietzsche . . . or maybe Tolstoi.
The Christians are being driven out of the churches; their places are being filled by hunters and trappers, i.e., by brutes.
A few old-fashioned pastors survive, but they diminish.
As they pass, their flocks will have to resort once more to catacombs.
There will be, eventually. a Twentieth Amendment.
It will proscribe the Beatitudes, as the Eighteenth already proscribes the Eucharist.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -the-word/
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/September 29, 1924
Misericordia superexaltatur judicio, which is to say, mercy is superior to justice.
The saying is credited by the learned to Pope Innocent III, one of the truly great occupants of Peter’s chair — in fact, a veritable Harding or even Coolidge among popes.
He said it in the first days of the thirteenth century.
Since then there have been great improvements in Christian doctrine.
In Chicago, the other day, a Catholic parish priest rose in his pulpit, bawled for the blood of the Judean youths, Leopold and Loeb, and delivered a dreadful denunciation of Judge Caverly for sparing their necks.
This Latin brother was singular, considering his rite, but in plenty of company, considering merely his sacred office.
On the same day a multitude of Protestant clergymen in Chicago relieved themselves of sentiments to the same general effect.
Judging by the press dispatches, indeed, the whole service of God in the town on that day consisted of barbaric yells for the Lord High Executioner.
No other subject seems to have been mentioned in the churches.
One and all, the anointed of God served Him by heating up the faithful to hatred and revenge, and by reviling a judge who had been guilty of mercy.
One and all, they screamed for the lives of two fellow-creatures.
Alas, not a rare spectacle, in this great moral age!
A day or two earlier — or was it later? — a gang of clerics from Annapolis, accompanied by pious laymen, appeared before the Hon. Edward M. Parrish, parole commissioner, and protested bitterly against the parole of a man lying in Annapolis jail.
Their argument, as reported in the Sunpaper, seems to have been very simple.
This gentleman, it appears, had deliberately violated the law.
Ergo, it was the first duty of the State to keep him in jail — not to dissuade him from his evil ways, but to get revenge upon him!
As I say, such episodes are not rare.
I could fill columns with them.
The sacred office, of late, becomes indistinguishable from that of the policeman and hangman.
The Beatitudes are repealed, and reenacted with jokers.
Divine worship becomes a sort of pursuit of villains, with rope and tar-pot.
It is the prime duty of the clerk in holy orders, not to combat sin, but to chase, nab and butcher the concrete sinner.
The congregation in which the True Faith runs highest is that one in which there is the steadiest and most raucous demand for blood.
Four or five years ago, when the Ku Klux Klan first got on its legs, I made certain inquiries into its origin and nature, and came to the conclusion that it was no more than the Anti-Saloon League in a fresh bib and tucker, and that, in consequence, its head men were mainly Baptist and Methodist clergymen.
That conclusion, printed to this place, caused protests, and one amiable Baptist clergyman had at me to the extent of two columns.
But who denies the fact today?
Surely no one of any intelligence.
The Klan, studied at length, turns out to be exactly what the Anti-Saloon League is: a device for organizing the hatreds of evangelical Christians.
The Anti-Saloon League is devoted to pursuing those they hate on ethical grounds and the Klan to pursuing those they hate for reasons of dogma.
Neither has any other purpose.
Both are run by Baptist and Methodist clergymen, some retired from the sacerdotal office but all full of evangelical zeal and all extraordinarily savage and bloodthirsty.
One hears nothing from these holy men save endless demands that this man be deported, that one tarred and feathered, and the other one jailed.
The Methodists, a year or so ago, were actually advocating murder.
East, West, North and South, the malevolent carnival goes on.
Everywhere the faithful are urged to animosity, brutality, hatred, revenge.
Everywhere neighbor is aroused against neighbor, and every sign of Christian charity is denounced as criminal.
And everywhere this devil’s brew is stirred vigorously by men sworn to preach the gospel of Christ.
In view of such phenomena, it surely becomes ridiculous to ask, as certain Christians of an elder school do, what is the matter with the churches?
What would be the matter with the theaters, if they took off all their plays and put on funerals and surgical operations?
What would be the matter with the bootleggers if they swindled their clients with ginger-pop and coca-cola?
What ails the churches is that large numbers of them have abandoned Christianity, lock, stock and barrel.
What ails them in that some of them, and by no means the least in wealth and influence, are now among the bitterest and most diligent enemies of Christianity ever heard of in this Republic.
Personally, I have little need for the basic consolations of the Christian faith.
I am not naturally religious, and seldom seek peace beyond the realm of demonstrable facts.
Even my virtues, such as they are, are not properly describable as Christian.
If I let an enemy go, it is because I disdain him, not because I pity him.
If I do not steal, it is not because I fear hell but because I am too vain.
But I am not blind, nevertheless, to the comfort that Christianity gives to other men.
It is, for them, an escape from realities too harsh to be borne.
It is a way of life that offers them sanctuary from the pains of everyday living, and gives them rest when they are weary and heavy-laden.
When they are errant, it offers them mercy.
When they faint, it speaks to them of love.
True or not, this faith is beautiful.
More, it is useful — more useful, perhaps, than any imaginable truth.
Its effect is to slow down and ameliorate the struggle for existence.
It urges men to forget themselves now and then, and to think of others.
It succors the weak and protects the friendless.
It preaches charity, pity, mercy.
Let philosophers dispute its premises if they will, but let no fool sneer at its magnificent conclusions.
As a body of scientific fact it may be dubious, but it remains the most beautiful poetry that man has yet produced on this earth.
Well, try to imagine a man full of a yearning for the consolations of that poetry.
He is tired of the cannibalistic combat that life is; he longs for peace, comfort, consolation.
He goes to church.
A few hymns are sung, and there arises in the pulpit a gentleman told off to preach.
This gentleman, it quickly appears, is not currently merchanting peace.
The Beatitudes are not his text.
He turns to the Old Testament.
There he finds a text to his taste.
And, leaping from it as from a springboard, he gives over an hour to damning his fellow-men.
He wants them to be sent to jail, to be deported, to be hanged.
He demands that the business be dispatched forthwith.
He denounces mercy as a weakness and forgiveness as base.
Our Christian friend, with a yell of despair, rushes from the basilica and seeks another.
There he hears the pastor call upon the agents of Prohibition to shoot bootleggers.
He seeks a third.
The pastor denounces girls who kiss their beaux as harlots, and demands that they be taken by the Polizei and cast into jail.
He seeks a fourth.
The pastor praises a Federal Judge for refusing a jury trial to a victim of the Anti-Saloon League.
He turns to a fifth.
The rev. rector calls upon God to singe and palsy the pope.
A sixth.
The shepherd urges his sheep to watch their neighbors, and report every suspicious whiff.
A seventh.
The Bolsheviki are on the grill.
An eighth.
Demands that more prisoners be hanged.
A ninth. . . .
But by this time another atheist in on his way to the public library, at 18 knots an hour, to read Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and Nietzsche . . . or maybe Tolstoi.
The Christians are being driven out of the churches; their places are being filled by hunters and trappers, i.e., by brutes.
A few old-fashioned pastors survive, but they diminish.
As they pass, their flocks will have to resort once more to catacombs.
There will be, eventually. a Twentieth Amendment.
It will proscribe the Beatitudes, as the Eighteenth already proscribes the Eucharist.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -the-word/
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
Editorial (on Journalism)
H.L. Mencken
American Mercury/October, 1924
One of the agreeable spiritual phenomena of this great age is the soul-searching now in progress among American journalists.
Fifteen years ago, or even ten years ago, there was scarcely a sign of it.
The working newspaper men of the Republic were then almost as complacent as so many Federal judges or generals in the army.
When they discussed their art and mystery at all, it was only to smack their chests proudly, boasting of their vast power in public matters, of their adamantine resistance to all the less tempting varieties of bribes, and of the fact that a crooked politician, giving them important news confidentially, could rely upon them to mangle it beyond recognition before publishing it.
I describe a sort of Golden Age.
Salaries had been going up since the dawn of the new century, and so the journalist began to feel his oats.
For the first time in history he was paid as well as the Neanderthal men slinging rolls of paper in the cellar.
He began to own two hats, two suits of clothes, two pairs of shoes.
He was happy.
But at the heart of his happiness, alas, there gnawed a canker worm.
One enemy remained, unscotched and apparently unscotchable, to wit, the business manager.
The business manager, at will, could send up a blue slip and order him fired.
In the face of that menace his literary superiors were helpless, up to and including the editor-in-chief.
All of them were under the hoof of the business manager, and all the business manager ever thought of was advertising.
Let an advertiser complain, and off went a head.
It was the great war for human freedom, I believe, that brought the journalist deliverance from that old hazard; he was, perhaps, one of its few real beneficiaries.
As the slaughter increased on Flanders fields and business grew better and better at home, reporters of any capacity whatever got to be far too scarce to fire loosely.
Moreover, the business manager, with copy pouring into the advertising department almost unsolicited, began to lose all his old fear of advertisers, and then even some of his congenital respect for them.
It was a seller’s market, in journalism as in the pants business.
Customers were no longer kissed.
The new spirit spread like a benign pestilence, and presently it invaded even editorial rooms.
In almost every great American city some flabbergasted advertiser, his money in his hand, sweat pouring from him as if he had seen a ghost, was kicked out with spectacular ceremonies.
All the principal papers, growing rich, began also to grow independent, virtuous, even virginal.
No —— — – ——— could dictate to them, God damn!
So free reading notices disappeared, salaries continued to climb, and the liberated journalist, taking huge sniffs of free air, began to think of himself as a professional man.
Upon that cogitation he is still engaged, and all the weeklies that print the news of his craft are full of its fruits.
He elects representatives and they meet in lugubrious conclave to draw up codes of ethics.
He begins to read books dealing with professional questions of other sorts — even books not dealing with professional questions.
He changes his old cynical view of schools of journalism, and is lured, now and then, into lecturing in them himself.
He no longer thinks of his calling as a business, like the haberdasher’s or tallow chandler’s, or as a game, like the stockbroker’s or faro dealer’s, but as a profession, like the jurisconsult’s or gynecologist’s.
His purpose is to set it on its legs as such — to inject plausible theories into its practice, and rid it of its old casualness and opportunism.
He ceases to see it as a craft to be mastered in four days and abandoned at the first sign of a better job.
He begins to talk darkly of the long apprenticeship necessary to master its technic, of the wide information and profound sagacity needed to adorn it, of the high rewards that it offers — or may offer later on — to the man of true talent and devotion.
Once he thought of himself, whenever he thought at all, as what Beethoven called a free artist — a gay fellow careening down the charming highways of the world, the gutter ahead of him but joy in his heart.
Now he thinks of himself as a citizen of weight and responsibility, a beginning publicist and public man, sworn to the service of the born and unborn, heavy with duties to the Republic and to himself.
He begins to surround himself with taboos.
There are things that he will not do, even to get a piece of news.
There are things that are infra dig.
And there are things that simply must be done, all advertisers save the very largest to the contrary notwithstanding.
In all this, I fear, there is some illusion, as there always is in human thinking.
The journalist can no more see himself realistically than a bishop can see himself realistically.
He gilds and engauds the picture a bit, unconsciously and irresistibly.
For one thing, and a most important one, he is probably somewhat in error about his professional status.
He remains, for all his dreams, a hired man — the business manager, though he doesn’t do it very often now, is still free to demand his head — and a hired man is not a professional man.
The essence of a professional man is that he is answerable, for his professional conduct, only to his professional peers.
A physician cannot be fired by anyone, save when he has voluntarily converted himself into a job-holder; he is secure in his livelihood so long as he keeps his health and can render service to his patients.
A lawyer is in the same boat.
So is a dentist.
So, even, is a horse doctor.
But the journalist still lingers in a twilight zone, along with the trained nurse, the embalmer, the evangelical clergyman and the great majority of engineers.
He cannot sell his services directly to the consumer, but only to entrepreneurs, and so those entrepreneurs have the power of veto over all his soaring fancies.
His codes of ethics are all right so long as they do not menace newspaper profits; the moment they do so the business manager, now quiescent, will begin to growl again.
Nor has he the same freedom that the lawyer and the physician have when it comes to fixing his own compensation; what he faces is not a client but a boss.
Above all, he is unable, as yet, to control admissions to his craft.
It is constantly recruited, on its lowest levels, from men who have little professional training or none at all, and some of these men master its chief mysteries very quickly.
Thus even the most competent journalist faces at all times a severe competition, easily expanded at need, and so he cannot afford to be too saucy.
When a managing editor is fired there is always another one waiting to take his place, but there is seldom another place waiting for the victim.
All these things diminish the autonomy of the American journalist, and hamper his effort to lift his trade to the professional level.
When he talks of codes of ethics, indeed, he sometimes falls into mere tall talk, for he cannot enforce the rules he so solemnly draws up — that is, in the face of dissent from above.
Nevertheless, his discussion of the subject is still not wholly absurd, for there remain plenty of rules that he can enforce, and I incline to think that there are more of them than of the other kind.
Most of the evils that continue to beset journalism today, in truth, are not due to the rascality of owners nor even to the Kiwanian bombast of business managers, but simply and solely to the stupidity, cowardice and Philistinism of working newspaper men.
The majority of them, in almost every American city, are ignoramuses, and not a few of them are also bounders.
All the knowledge that they pack into their brains is, in every reasonable cultural sense, useless; it is the sort of knowledge that belongs, not to a professional man, but to a police captain, a railway mail-clerk or a board boy in a brokerage house.
It is a mass of trivialities and puerilities; to recite it would be to make even a barber or a bartender beg for mercy.
What is missing from it is everything worth knowing — everything that enters into the common knowledge of educated men.
There are managing editors in the United States, and scores of them, who have never heard of Kant or Johannes Müller and never read the Constitution of the United States; there are city editors who do not know what a symphony is, or a streptococcus, or the Statute of Frauds; there are reporters by the thousand who could not pass the entrance examination for Harvard or Tuskegee, or even Yale.
It is this vast ignorance that makes American journalism so pathetically feeble and vulgar, and so generally disreputable no less.
A man with so little intellectual enterprise that, dealing with news daily, he goes through life without taking in any news that is worth knowing — such a man, you may be sure, is as lacking in true self-respect as he is in curiosity.
Honor does not go with stupidity.
If it belongs to professional men, it belongs to them because they constitute a true aristocracy — because they have definitely separated themselves from the great masses of men.
The journalists, in seeking to acquire it, put the cart before the horse.
Nevertheless, I believe that they can still acquire it.
But not by passing idle resolutions, not by drawing up codes of ethics that most of their fellows laugh at, as a Congressman laughs at a gentleman.
The job before them — that is, before the civilized minority of them — is to purge their trade before they seek to dignify it — to clean house before they paint the roof and raise a flag.
Can the thing be done?
It not only can be done; it has been done.
There are dozens of papers in the United States that already show a determined effort to get out of the old slough.
Any managing editor in the land, if he has the will, can carry his own paper with them.
He is under no compulsion, save rarely, to employ this or that hand; it is not often that owners, or even business managers, take any interest in that business, save to watch the payroll.
Is the piper trifling, ill-informed, petty and unfair?
Is its news full of transparent absurdities?
Are its editorials ignorant and without sense?
Is it written in blowsy, slip-shod English, full of clichés and vulgarities — English that would disgrace a manager of prize-fighters or a county superintendent of schools?
Then the fault belongs plainly, not to some remote man, but to the proximate man — to the man who lets such drivel slide under his nose.
He could better it if he wanted to, you may be sure.
There is in all history no record of a newspaper owner who complained because his paper was well edited.
And I know of no business manager who objected when the complaints pouring in upon him, of misrepresentations, invasions of privacy, gross inaccuracies and other such nuisances, began to lighten.
Not a few managing editors, as I say, are moving in the right direction.
There has been a noticeable improvement, during the past dozen years, in the general tone of American newspapers.
They are, I believe, measurably more accurate than they used to be, and many of them are better written.
A great number of them are less absurdly partisan, particularly in the smaller cities.
Save in the South and in the remoter fastnesses of New England the old-time party organ has gone out of fashion.
With it has gone the old-time reporter, and in his place there is appearing a young fellow of better education and generally finer mettle.
The uplifters of the craft try to make him increase and to that end encourage schools of journalism.
But these seminaries, so far, show two palpable defects.
On the one hand, they are seldom manned by men of any genuine professional standing, or of any firm notion of what journalism is about.
On the other hand, they are all far too easy in their requirements for admission.
Probably half of them, indeed, are simply refuges for students too stupid to tackle the other professions.
They offer snap courses, and they promise quick jobs.
The result is that the graduates coming out of them are mainly second-raters — that young men and women issuing from the general arts courses make far better material for journalism.
What ails these schools of journalism, in brief, is that they are not yet professional schools, but simply trade schools.
Their like is to be found, not in the schools of medicine and law, but in the institutions that teach barbering, bookkeeping and chiropractic.
Obviously, the remedy for their general failure is to borrow a leaf from the book of the medical men, and weed out the incompetents, not after they have finished, but before they have begun.
Twenty-five years ago any yokel who had got through the three R’s was free to study medicine in the United States.
In three years, and sometimes in two years, he was turned out to practice upon his fellow hinds, and once he had his license it was a practical impossibility to challenge him.
But now there is scarcely a medical school in the United States that does not demand a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent as a prerequisite to entrance, and the term of study in all of them is four years, and it must be followed by at least one year of hospital service.
This reform was not achieved by passing laws against the old hedge schools; it was achieved simply by setting up the competition of good schools.
The latter gradually elbowed the former out.
Their graduates had immense advantages.
They had professional prestige from the moment of their entrance into practice.
The public quickly detected the difference between them and their competitors from the surviving hedge schools.
Soon the latter began to disintegrate, and now all save a few of them have disappeared.
The medical men improved their profession by making it more difficult to become a medical man.
Today the thing is a practical impossibility to any young man who is not of genuine intelligence.
But at least four-fifths of the so-called schools of journalism still admit any aspirant who can make shift to read and write.
The pedagogues who run them cannot be expected to devote much thought or money to improving them; they are in the position of the quacks who used to run the hedge medical schools.
The impulse toward improvement, if it ever comes at all, must come from the profession they presume to serve.
Here is a chance for the editorial committees and societies of journalists that now spring up on all sides.
Let them abandon their vain effort to frame codes of ethics and devote themselves to the nursery.
If they can get together a committee on schools of journalism as wise and as bold as the Council on Medical Education of the American Medical Association they will accomplish more in a few years than they can hope to accomplish with academic codes of ethics in half a century.
Journalism will become a profession the moment it grows difficult to become a journalist.
All the rest will follow.
The old fond theory, still surviving in many a newspaper office, that it is somehow discreditable for a reporter to show any sign of education and culture, that he is most competent and laudable when his intellectual baggage most closely approaches that of a police lieutenant or a district leader — this theory will fall before the competition of novices who have been adequately trained, and have more in their heads than their mere training.
Journalism, compared to the other trades of educated men, is surely not unattractive, even today.
It is more amusing than the army or the cloth, and it offers a better living at the start than either medicine or the law.
There is a career in it for the young man of original mind and forceful personality — a career leading to great power and even to a sort of wealth.
In point of fact, it has always attracted such young men, else it would be in an even lower state than it is now.
It would attract a great many more of them if public opinion within the craft were more favorable to them — if they were less harassed by the commands of superiors of no dignity, and the dislike of fellows of no sense.
Every time two of them are drawn in they draw another.
The problem is to keep them.
That is the central problem of journalism in the United States today.
I seem to be in a mood for constructive criticism.
Let me add one more pearl of wisdom before I withdraw.
I put it in the form of a question.
Suppose the shyster lawyers of every town organized a third-rate club, called it the Bar Association, took in any bootlegger or precinct politician who could raise the dues, and then announced publicly, from the Courthouse steps, that it represented the whole bar, and that membership in it was an excellent form of insurance — that any member who paid his dues would get very friendly consideration, if he ever got into trouble, from the town’s judges and district attorney.
And suppose the decent lawyers of the town permitted this preposterous pretension to go unchallenged — and some of them even gave countenance to it by joining the club.
How long would the legal profession in that town retain its professional honor and dignity?
How many laymen, after two years, would have any respect left for any lawyer, even a judge?
Yet the journalists of the United States permit that precise thing to go on under their noses.
In almost every city of the country there is a so-called Press Club, and at least three-fourths of them are exactly like the hypothetical Bar Association that I have described.
They are run by newspaper men of the worst type — many of them so incompetent and disreputable that they cannot even get jobs on newspapers.
They take the money of all the town grafters and rascals on the pretense that newspaper favors go with its receipt.
They are the resorts of idlers and blackmailers.
They are nuisances and disgraces.
Yet in how many towns have they been put down?
In how many towns do the decent newspaper men take any overt action against them?
My proposal is very simple.
I propose that they be shut up, East, West, North and South, before anything more is said about codes of newspaper ethics.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... ournalism/
H.L. Mencken
American Mercury/October, 1924
One of the agreeable spiritual phenomena of this great age is the soul-searching now in progress among American journalists.
Fifteen years ago, or even ten years ago, there was scarcely a sign of it.
The working newspaper men of the Republic were then almost as complacent as so many Federal judges or generals in the army.
When they discussed their art and mystery at all, it was only to smack their chests proudly, boasting of their vast power in public matters, of their adamantine resistance to all the less tempting varieties of bribes, and of the fact that a crooked politician, giving them important news confidentially, could rely upon them to mangle it beyond recognition before publishing it.
I describe a sort of Golden Age.
Salaries had been going up since the dawn of the new century, and so the journalist began to feel his oats.
For the first time in history he was paid as well as the Neanderthal men slinging rolls of paper in the cellar.
He began to own two hats, two suits of clothes, two pairs of shoes.
He was happy.
But at the heart of his happiness, alas, there gnawed a canker worm.
One enemy remained, unscotched and apparently unscotchable, to wit, the business manager.
The business manager, at will, could send up a blue slip and order him fired.
In the face of that menace his literary superiors were helpless, up to and including the editor-in-chief.
All of them were under the hoof of the business manager, and all the business manager ever thought of was advertising.
Let an advertiser complain, and off went a head.
It was the great war for human freedom, I believe, that brought the journalist deliverance from that old hazard; he was, perhaps, one of its few real beneficiaries.
As the slaughter increased on Flanders fields and business grew better and better at home, reporters of any capacity whatever got to be far too scarce to fire loosely.
Moreover, the business manager, with copy pouring into the advertising department almost unsolicited, began to lose all his old fear of advertisers, and then even some of his congenital respect for them.
It was a seller’s market, in journalism as in the pants business.
Customers were no longer kissed.
The new spirit spread like a benign pestilence, and presently it invaded even editorial rooms.
In almost every great American city some flabbergasted advertiser, his money in his hand, sweat pouring from him as if he had seen a ghost, was kicked out with spectacular ceremonies.
All the principal papers, growing rich, began also to grow independent, virtuous, even virginal.
No —— — – ——— could dictate to them, God damn!
So free reading notices disappeared, salaries continued to climb, and the liberated journalist, taking huge sniffs of free air, began to think of himself as a professional man.
Upon that cogitation he is still engaged, and all the weeklies that print the news of his craft are full of its fruits.
He elects representatives and they meet in lugubrious conclave to draw up codes of ethics.
He begins to read books dealing with professional questions of other sorts — even books not dealing with professional questions.
He changes his old cynical view of schools of journalism, and is lured, now and then, into lecturing in them himself.
He no longer thinks of his calling as a business, like the haberdasher’s or tallow chandler’s, or as a game, like the stockbroker’s or faro dealer’s, but as a profession, like the jurisconsult’s or gynecologist’s.
His purpose is to set it on its legs as such — to inject plausible theories into its practice, and rid it of its old casualness and opportunism.
He ceases to see it as a craft to be mastered in four days and abandoned at the first sign of a better job.
He begins to talk darkly of the long apprenticeship necessary to master its technic, of the wide information and profound sagacity needed to adorn it, of the high rewards that it offers — or may offer later on — to the man of true talent and devotion.
Once he thought of himself, whenever he thought at all, as what Beethoven called a free artist — a gay fellow careening down the charming highways of the world, the gutter ahead of him but joy in his heart.
Now he thinks of himself as a citizen of weight and responsibility, a beginning publicist and public man, sworn to the service of the born and unborn, heavy with duties to the Republic and to himself.
He begins to surround himself with taboos.
There are things that he will not do, even to get a piece of news.
There are things that are infra dig.
And there are things that simply must be done, all advertisers save the very largest to the contrary notwithstanding.
In all this, I fear, there is some illusion, as there always is in human thinking.
The journalist can no more see himself realistically than a bishop can see himself realistically.
He gilds and engauds the picture a bit, unconsciously and irresistibly.
For one thing, and a most important one, he is probably somewhat in error about his professional status.
He remains, for all his dreams, a hired man — the business manager, though he doesn’t do it very often now, is still free to demand his head — and a hired man is not a professional man.
The essence of a professional man is that he is answerable, for his professional conduct, only to his professional peers.
A physician cannot be fired by anyone, save when he has voluntarily converted himself into a job-holder; he is secure in his livelihood so long as he keeps his health and can render service to his patients.
A lawyer is in the same boat.
So is a dentist.
So, even, is a horse doctor.
But the journalist still lingers in a twilight zone, along with the trained nurse, the embalmer, the evangelical clergyman and the great majority of engineers.
He cannot sell his services directly to the consumer, but only to entrepreneurs, and so those entrepreneurs have the power of veto over all his soaring fancies.
His codes of ethics are all right so long as they do not menace newspaper profits; the moment they do so the business manager, now quiescent, will begin to growl again.
Nor has he the same freedom that the lawyer and the physician have when it comes to fixing his own compensation; what he faces is not a client but a boss.
Above all, he is unable, as yet, to control admissions to his craft.
It is constantly recruited, on its lowest levels, from men who have little professional training or none at all, and some of these men master its chief mysteries very quickly.
Thus even the most competent journalist faces at all times a severe competition, easily expanded at need, and so he cannot afford to be too saucy.
When a managing editor is fired there is always another one waiting to take his place, but there is seldom another place waiting for the victim.
All these things diminish the autonomy of the American journalist, and hamper his effort to lift his trade to the professional level.
When he talks of codes of ethics, indeed, he sometimes falls into mere tall talk, for he cannot enforce the rules he so solemnly draws up — that is, in the face of dissent from above.
Nevertheless, his discussion of the subject is still not wholly absurd, for there remain plenty of rules that he can enforce, and I incline to think that there are more of them than of the other kind.
Most of the evils that continue to beset journalism today, in truth, are not due to the rascality of owners nor even to the Kiwanian bombast of business managers, but simply and solely to the stupidity, cowardice and Philistinism of working newspaper men.
The majority of them, in almost every American city, are ignoramuses, and not a few of them are also bounders.
All the knowledge that they pack into their brains is, in every reasonable cultural sense, useless; it is the sort of knowledge that belongs, not to a professional man, but to a police captain, a railway mail-clerk or a board boy in a brokerage house.
It is a mass of trivialities and puerilities; to recite it would be to make even a barber or a bartender beg for mercy.
What is missing from it is everything worth knowing — everything that enters into the common knowledge of educated men.
There are managing editors in the United States, and scores of them, who have never heard of Kant or Johannes Müller and never read the Constitution of the United States; there are city editors who do not know what a symphony is, or a streptococcus, or the Statute of Frauds; there are reporters by the thousand who could not pass the entrance examination for Harvard or Tuskegee, or even Yale.
It is this vast ignorance that makes American journalism so pathetically feeble and vulgar, and so generally disreputable no less.
A man with so little intellectual enterprise that, dealing with news daily, he goes through life without taking in any news that is worth knowing — such a man, you may be sure, is as lacking in true self-respect as he is in curiosity.
Honor does not go with stupidity.
If it belongs to professional men, it belongs to them because they constitute a true aristocracy — because they have definitely separated themselves from the great masses of men.
The journalists, in seeking to acquire it, put the cart before the horse.
Nevertheless, I believe that they can still acquire it.
But not by passing idle resolutions, not by drawing up codes of ethics that most of their fellows laugh at, as a Congressman laughs at a gentleman.
The job before them — that is, before the civilized minority of them — is to purge their trade before they seek to dignify it — to clean house before they paint the roof and raise a flag.
Can the thing be done?
It not only can be done; it has been done.
There are dozens of papers in the United States that already show a determined effort to get out of the old slough.
Any managing editor in the land, if he has the will, can carry his own paper with them.
He is under no compulsion, save rarely, to employ this or that hand; it is not often that owners, or even business managers, take any interest in that business, save to watch the payroll.
Is the piper trifling, ill-informed, petty and unfair?
Is its news full of transparent absurdities?
Are its editorials ignorant and without sense?
Is it written in blowsy, slip-shod English, full of clichés and vulgarities — English that would disgrace a manager of prize-fighters or a county superintendent of schools?
Then the fault belongs plainly, not to some remote man, but to the proximate man — to the man who lets such drivel slide under his nose.
He could better it if he wanted to, you may be sure.
There is in all history no record of a newspaper owner who complained because his paper was well edited.
And I know of no business manager who objected when the complaints pouring in upon him, of misrepresentations, invasions of privacy, gross inaccuracies and other such nuisances, began to lighten.
Not a few managing editors, as I say, are moving in the right direction.
There has been a noticeable improvement, during the past dozen years, in the general tone of American newspapers.
They are, I believe, measurably more accurate than they used to be, and many of them are better written.
A great number of them are less absurdly partisan, particularly in the smaller cities.
Save in the South and in the remoter fastnesses of New England the old-time party organ has gone out of fashion.
With it has gone the old-time reporter, and in his place there is appearing a young fellow of better education and generally finer mettle.
The uplifters of the craft try to make him increase and to that end encourage schools of journalism.
But these seminaries, so far, show two palpable defects.
On the one hand, they are seldom manned by men of any genuine professional standing, or of any firm notion of what journalism is about.
On the other hand, they are all far too easy in their requirements for admission.
Probably half of them, indeed, are simply refuges for students too stupid to tackle the other professions.
They offer snap courses, and they promise quick jobs.
The result is that the graduates coming out of them are mainly second-raters — that young men and women issuing from the general arts courses make far better material for journalism.
What ails these schools of journalism, in brief, is that they are not yet professional schools, but simply trade schools.
Their like is to be found, not in the schools of medicine and law, but in the institutions that teach barbering, bookkeeping and chiropractic.
Obviously, the remedy for their general failure is to borrow a leaf from the book of the medical men, and weed out the incompetents, not after they have finished, but before they have begun.
Twenty-five years ago any yokel who had got through the three R’s was free to study medicine in the United States.
In three years, and sometimes in two years, he was turned out to practice upon his fellow hinds, and once he had his license it was a practical impossibility to challenge him.
But now there is scarcely a medical school in the United States that does not demand a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent as a prerequisite to entrance, and the term of study in all of them is four years, and it must be followed by at least one year of hospital service.
This reform was not achieved by passing laws against the old hedge schools; it was achieved simply by setting up the competition of good schools.
The latter gradually elbowed the former out.
Their graduates had immense advantages.
They had professional prestige from the moment of their entrance into practice.
The public quickly detected the difference between them and their competitors from the surviving hedge schools.
Soon the latter began to disintegrate, and now all save a few of them have disappeared.
The medical men improved their profession by making it more difficult to become a medical man.
Today the thing is a practical impossibility to any young man who is not of genuine intelligence.
But at least four-fifths of the so-called schools of journalism still admit any aspirant who can make shift to read and write.
The pedagogues who run them cannot be expected to devote much thought or money to improving them; they are in the position of the quacks who used to run the hedge medical schools.
The impulse toward improvement, if it ever comes at all, must come from the profession they presume to serve.
Here is a chance for the editorial committees and societies of journalists that now spring up on all sides.
Let them abandon their vain effort to frame codes of ethics and devote themselves to the nursery.
If they can get together a committee on schools of journalism as wise and as bold as the Council on Medical Education of the American Medical Association they will accomplish more in a few years than they can hope to accomplish with academic codes of ethics in half a century.
Journalism will become a profession the moment it grows difficult to become a journalist.
All the rest will follow.
The old fond theory, still surviving in many a newspaper office, that it is somehow discreditable for a reporter to show any sign of education and culture, that he is most competent and laudable when his intellectual baggage most closely approaches that of a police lieutenant or a district leader — this theory will fall before the competition of novices who have been adequately trained, and have more in their heads than their mere training.
Journalism, compared to the other trades of educated men, is surely not unattractive, even today.
It is more amusing than the army or the cloth, and it offers a better living at the start than either medicine or the law.
There is a career in it for the young man of original mind and forceful personality — a career leading to great power and even to a sort of wealth.
In point of fact, it has always attracted such young men, else it would be in an even lower state than it is now.
It would attract a great many more of them if public opinion within the craft were more favorable to them — if they were less harassed by the commands of superiors of no dignity, and the dislike of fellows of no sense.
Every time two of them are drawn in they draw another.
The problem is to keep them.
That is the central problem of journalism in the United States today.
I seem to be in a mood for constructive criticism.
Let me add one more pearl of wisdom before I withdraw.
I put it in the form of a question.
Suppose the shyster lawyers of every town organized a third-rate club, called it the Bar Association, took in any bootlegger or precinct politician who could raise the dues, and then announced publicly, from the Courthouse steps, that it represented the whole bar, and that membership in it was an excellent form of insurance — that any member who paid his dues would get very friendly consideration, if he ever got into trouble, from the town’s judges and district attorney.
And suppose the decent lawyers of the town permitted this preposterous pretension to go unchallenged — and some of them even gave countenance to it by joining the club.
How long would the legal profession in that town retain its professional honor and dignity?
How many laymen, after two years, would have any respect left for any lawyer, even a judge?
Yet the journalists of the United States permit that precise thing to go on under their noses.
In almost every city of the country there is a so-called Press Club, and at least three-fourths of them are exactly like the hypothetical Bar Association that I have described.
They are run by newspaper men of the worst type — many of them so incompetent and disreputable that they cannot even get jobs on newspapers.
They take the money of all the town grafters and rascals on the pretense that newspaper favors go with its receipt.
They are the resorts of idlers and blackmailers.
They are nuisances and disgraces.
Yet in how many towns have they been put down?
In how many towns do the decent newspaper men take any overt action against them?
My proposal is very simple.
I propose that they be shut up, East, West, North and South, before anything more is said about codes of newspaper ethics.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... ournalism/
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
Clinical Notes
George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken
American Mercury/October, 1924
The Triumph of Illusion. — As many of the great battles of the world are won by a blind following of illusion as by a realistic facing of facts.
The illusion of Joan of Arc’s sainthood drew the French to victory over the English in the Fifteenth Century as the illusion of democracy drew the American colonists to triumph over the English in the Eighteenth.
The first Crusaders, sweeping in a trail of white glory toward the East, were carried along on the invincible shoulders of divine illusion, and it was only when the purple illusion of Cleopatra’s love deserted him that Mark Antony met defeat at arms: under the warm spell of that illusion he defeated both Brutus and Cassius at Philippi.
It was the illusion that Thomas Jonathan Jackson was like a stone wall that led his soldiers in gray to stand like rocks and bounce back to threefold defeat the men in blue who, without a similar illusion to support them, followed McClellan at Bull Run and Banks at Winchester and Cedar Mountain.
What Hath God Wrought! — In one of the Eastern bituminous coal-fields, on the slope of the Appalachian Mountains, a strike of miners has been in progress for three years.
Ordinarily, such a struggle is marked by a great deal of human suffering, affectingly described in the New Republic.
According to the precedents, all the strikers in the present case should be dead or in jail by now, and their wives and children should be homeless and in the last stages of starvation.
But an agent lately returned from the scene tells me that no such horrors, nor any other, are actually on view.
Instead, the strikers are well fed and easy in manner, their wives are arrayed in the latest habiliments recommended by Vogue, and their children are fat, merry and learning to be sinful.
By what process has this miracle been achieved?
By the simplest process imaginable.
By the process, in brief, of amending the Constitution of the United States.
It is the Eighteenth Amendment that is responsible — the Amendment and the Volstead Act.
The strikers, instead of starting to starve the day they struck, or throwing themselves with blood-curdling hosannas upon the bayonets and artillery of the mineguards — instead of resorting to such pre-Volsteadian follies, and so filling the New Republic with hot and sanguinary stuff, they retired in a peaceable manner to the high hills adjacent to the mines, constructed a series of large stills in the woods, and proceeded forthwith to the manufacture of a meritorious grade of white mule.
Today, they are not only eating regularly; they are getting rich.
For they had the sagacity, from the very start, to enlist the mine-guards, their hereditary enemies, on their side.
These guards now patrol the mountain trails for miles around, and keep a sharp lookout for Prohibition enforcement officers.
When one is sighted he is laid for, seized, given a beating, and put aboard a train for home.
If he returns, one of his ears is cut off.
If he returns a second time he is executed painlessly, and his carcass thrown to the wild hogs of the mountain side.
For months running, so my agent says, not a single Prohibition officer has ventured into those wilds.
The honest miners refuse absolutely to pay graft.
They are thus enabled to sell their product at a fair price.
Once a week they load a tank car marked “Gasoline! Dangerous!” and start it for Washington.
Four days later it comes back empty, and the sum of $8,250 is passed to their credit on the books of an eminent Washington trust company.
Thus a community long dedicated to hard and cruel labor, with intervals of the most abject misery, is now prosperous and happy.
The fact is to be set to the honor of the Hon. Mr. Volstead, otherwise an ass.
Moreover, the benefits that he has brought to that remote mountainside also radiate elsewhere.
The inhabitants, like the rest of us, have to burn coal in Winter.
Formerly they stole it from the mine company.
Now they buy it in an adjoining valley, and so make work steadier for the miners there.
More important still, they keep Washington supplied with a pure brand of forty-rod at a moderate price.
There is enough to go round, and it is within the means of all.
The processes of government are thus lubricated.
The men who make and administer the laws are happier and more efficient.
Every American citizen, even unto the remotest hamlets, is the gainer.
The downfall of the Republic, by a small but appreciable interval, is postponed.
Per Contra. — I cannot entirely agree with those critics who inveigh against propaganda in art and who maintain that propaganda, having no place in art, ruins art in its presence.
Great art, they contend, proves nothing, should seek to prove nothing, may prove nothing.
Many of the world’s masterpieces confound such critics.
“Hamlet” proves that it is futile for man to fight destiny, as “Macbeth” proves that evil thought and wrongdoing can profit no man.
“The Mikado” is veiled propaganda against certain British weaknesses and peccadillos, as are also “Iolanthe,” “Pinafore” and “The Pirates of Penzance.”
Wagner wrote “Der Fliegende Hollander” to prove that musical criticism as it was practiced in Dresden at the time was ridiculous: the opera is propaganda against all standpat criticism.
Beethoven’s Ninth was composed to prove that his old teacher, Albrechtsberger, was something of a hanswurst.
It proved it: it still proves it.
Cervantes wrote “Don Quixote,” so he himself said, “to break down the vogue and authority of books of chivalry and to render abhorred of men the false and absurd stories contained in books of chivalry.”
There is social and political propaganda in Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” as there are political plea and argument in Shaw’s finest play, “Caesar and Cleopatra.”
What is the wonderful ceiling in the Sistine Chapel but Michelangelo’s successful attempt to prove that sculptural drawing may, in decoration, be the superior of painting?
Human Progress. — During the six months ending June 30 there were but five lynchings in the South — the lowest record in forty years.
How is one to account for the fact?
I point to two obvious influences: that of the Ku Klux Klan and that of the radio.
Both have served to relieve the dreadful tedium of life in the late Confederacy, and so the Chandala have not had to resort to homicide for entertainment.
The Klan has worked against the old wholesale butchery in two ways.
In the first place, it has taken formal charge of all lynchings, and so introduced order into them, and even a sort of jurisprudence.
It will not countenance hanging or burning a blackamoor unless there is some plausible evidence of his guilt; it prohibits the old system of doing one to death in mere naughtiness.
In the second place, it gives the hinds of the backwoods so much other entertainment, with its ceaseless processions, tarrings and featherings, raids upon bootleggers and loose women, ceremonious visits to Baptist tabernacles, and so on, that they have been cured of their ancient boredom, and are thus less inclined than they used to be to dispose of it by orgy.
The radio has worked in much the same way.
In the remotest fastnesses of Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi the peasants are now in nightly contact with the great currents of human thought.
They hear speeches by Dr. Coolidge, William Jennings Bryan and the most subtle thinkers in the Chautauqua movement.
They may tune in on stock quotations, baseball scores, or bedtime stories.
Brass bands play for them, and they are soothed and mellowed by lectures on the cement industry and mental magnetism.
There is thus no reason why they should swarm out into the night, pursue an Aframerican with dogs, and waste ten gallons of gasoline burning him.
In the old days they were driven to it by sheer desperation.
Life, at times, became insupportable without a show.
But now they have a continuous show, and it is cheap, astounding and infinitely varied.
I believe that the legalization of dancing among the Methodists will work to the same benign end.
Until a few months ago any Methodist who pranced with his girl was condemned to hell by his pastor, and the death-beds of those who defied the mandate were made horrible by their yells.
But then the Methodist General Conference suddenly lifted the ban, and now any member of the communion is free to cavort all he pleases, so long as he does it in a reasonably decorous manner.
This revolutionary change in policy is not yet generally known in the South, where news travels slowly, but soon or late it is bound to penetrate to the remotest swamps and hills.
When it does so, the rustics will have another way to entertain themselves, and the adjacent Moors will be even safer than now.
More, the Baptists will have to follow suit, else they will lose all their members to the church of Wesley.
In the end, with the radio sparking, the Klan performing its public evolutions, and the sound of jig music filling the air, the Confederate States will be full of happiness, and a lynching will become as rare as it was in Sodom and Gomorrah, or as it is today in Paris, Biarritz or Union Hill, N. J.
Years ago, I anticipated the transformation now taking place.
That is to say, I proposed setting up brass bands in all the Southern country towns, and introducing bullfighting into Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
It was my contention that every bull that was killed would save a Christian Ethiop.
I now formally withdraw my proposal as no longer apposite.
Its purposes have been met by the radio, the Klan meeting and the dance.
The Methodists, I hear, think of following their surrender to Terpsichore with a surrender to Thespis.
If they do, then the Southern blacks will become almost as free, safe and happy as they were under slavery.
For in all human history there has never been a lynching in a town visited regularly by competent burlesque troupes.
The Englishman and the American. — There is always this difference, I find, between them.
I have known many Americans who would not mind living in England, but I have never yet found an Englishman who said he would care to live in the United States.
A Phase of American Criticism. — The peruser of the art of criticism as it is currently practiced in the daily and weekly gazettes of the Etats Unis becomes steadily conscious of the fact that there has arisen a body of clichés with which that criticism answers those persons whose work and ideas do not happen to meet with its approval.
There was a time, in the history of even this daily and weekly criticism, when its adverse criticism was based upon at least a measure of understanding of the point of view it championed and upon a sufficient familiarity with the other side of the question to make its adverse comment at once comprehensible and fair.
Today, however, there is small disposition to box the other man’s viewpoint with any degree of intelligence or honesty.
A study of such criticism reveals neither this intelligence nor honesty; it reveals, further, neither a tonic ridicule nor a sharp and devastating irony; it reveals, further still, neither the faculty for a good healthy horse-laugh nor a whacking and explosive slapstick.
It tries to kill off its opponent by childish and inane means.
It employs the tactics of the kindergarten.
Thus, when it finds itself at a loss as to sound and destructive criticism, it invariably falls back upon such recriminatory stencils as “So-and-so reminds one of a small boy drawing caricatures with a piece of chalk on the schoolhouse fence” or “One cannot expect a man like So-and-so to understand the principles by which the rest of us are guided.”
The word tradition similarly looms large in the kind of criticism of which I am speaking.
Whenever one of these critics doesn’t accurately know what is wrong with an opponent’s point of view, save that it seems to be wrong to him, he takes refuge in blaming it either upon the other man’s traditions or lack of them.
Again, we hear endless whiffle about “bad boys” — a bad boy, apparently, being anyone who doesn’t believe exactly what the commentator concerned believes, and about “disrespectful attitude toward his elders,” as if respect for age were an article in the doctrine of sound criticism.
More and more, in this daily and weekly criticism, a man’s ideas and performances are criticized less from the viewpoint of their honest worth and importance than from their adherence to or departure from the punctilio of the place and moment.
Manners are rated above merit.
A suave and poiseful nincompoop is regarded as the superior of a rough and forceful intelligence.
The battle is not one of sound sense or effective seltzer-siphons; the battle is one in which the critic seeks to confound and put to rout his opponent with provincial rubber-stamps.
Historical Note. — The first law against lèse-majesté heard of in Rome was proclaimed not by an emperor, but by Saturninus, a democratic tribune.
Its aim was not to protect the throne against the populace but to protect the populace against the aristocracy.
Observation CMXXIII. — The apparent romanticism of women is chiefly only appearance.
They seem to take love more seriously than men, but that they really do so does not follow.
Many of the romantic gestures that they make are no more than proofs of their hard realism.
They are so realistic that they see clearly that realism is an impossible philosophy in this world — that its practice would make life unbearable.
So they swathe it in make-believe.
Men have much less sense.
They try to grapple with reality — and come ignominiously to grief.
The temple that shelters Truth is guarded by many dragons, and they have long teeth.
Worse, it is guarded by Katzenjammer.
The Comedy of Sex. — In the current oppressively ubiquitous cackling of sex one finds the intelligentsia inclining more and more to the view that sex, far from being the sour-visaged tragedy that it is commonly supposed to be, is really of the essence of pure comedy.
While this point of view is, of course, anything but new — having been the established philosophy of all bachelors and Turks over the age of twelve since the beginning of the Eleventh Century — it seems to me that, for all its major authenticity, it is not without its soupçon of a hole.
Sex is a comedy, true enough; it borders, indeed, upon farce; but, like a comedy or a farce, it is played upon something approximating a theatre stage.
The parties to the performance, the actors, are most often entirely serious about it, as are the actors of comedy and farce ever.
The humor of sex is enjoyed not by the actors directly concerned in it, but by the onlookers, the audience.
The bridegroom is not a comedian in his own eyes; he is a comedian in the eyes of his audience.
The bride herself is wistful and a bit wet of eye; the wheezes are reserved for the mob around the punchbowl.
Paraphrasing Horace Walpole, sex is a tragedy to him who feels and a comedy to him who thinks.
In the grip of sex, no man has ever thought.
Sex, to the participant in its theoretical excitements, is thus ever purely emotional and hence removed, at least for the time being, from the domain of comedy.
It may be funny in retrospect, but so too in retrospect are three-fourths of the tragedies of the world.
Plot and Character. — That character is always more important than plot in literature and drama is proved by the fact that we usually remember character in proportion as we forget plot.
One remembers Huckleberry Finn; but what was the plot of “Huckleberry Finn”?
One remembers Uncle Tom; but what was the plot of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”?
One remembers Ben Hur; but what was the plot of “Ben Hur”?
And so, too, with Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, King Lear, Tom Jones, Fanny Hill, Madame Bovary, Thérèse Raquin, Lord Jim, and a hundred others.
The general trends of theme one may recall, but the plots have vanished from memory.
Only the characters remain.
Note in the Margin of a Treatise on Psychology. — As I stoop to lace my shoe you hit me over the coccyx with a length of hickory (Carya laciniosa).
I conclude instantly that you are a jackass.
This is the whole process of human thought in little.
This is free will.
Historical Note. — No woman can be too beautiful and be a lady.
The Champion. — Of the forty-eight sovereign States of this imperial federation, which is the worst?
In what one of them is a civilized man most uncomfortable?
Over half the votes, if the question were put to a vote, would probably be divided between California and Georgia.
Each, in its way, is almost unspeakable.
Georgia, of course, has never been civilized, save in a small area along the tidewater.
Even in the earliest days of the Republic, it was regarded as barbaric by its neighbors.
But California, at one time, promised to develop a charming and enlightened civilization.
There was a touch of tropical balm in its air, and a touch of Latin and even oriental color in its ideas.
Like Louisiana, it seemed likely to resist Americanization for many years; perhaps forever.
But now California, the old California, is simply extinct.
What remains is an Alsatia of retired Ford agents and crazy fat women — a paradise of Rotary and the New Thought.
Its laws are the most extravagant and idiotic ever heard of in Christendom.
Its public officers, and particularly its judges, are famous all over the world for their imbecilities.
When one hears of it at all, one hears that some citizen has been jailed for reading the Constitution of the United States, or that some new swami in a yellow bedtick has got all the realtors’ wives of Los Angeles by the ears.
When one hears of it further, it is only to learn that some distinguished movie wench in Hollywood has murdered another lover.
The State is run by its Chambers of Commerce, which is to say, by the worst variety of resident Babbits.
No man of any dignity seems to have any part in its public life.
Not an idea ever comes out of it — that is, not an idea beyond the grasp of a Kiwanis Club secretary, a Christian Science sorcerer, or a grand wizard of the American Legion.
Twice, of late, it has offered the country candidates for the presidency.
One was the Hon. Hiram Johnson and the other was the Hon. William Gibbs McAdoo!
Only Vermont can beat that record.
The minority of civilized Californians — who recently, by the way, sent out a call from Los Angeles for succor, as if they were beset by wolves! — commonly lay the blame for this degeneration of a once proud commonwealth upon the horde of morons that has flowed in from Iowa, Nebraska and the other cow-States, seeking relief from the bitter climate of the steppes.
The California realtors have been luring in these hinds for a generation past, and they now swarm in all the Southern towns, especially Los Angeles.
They come in with their savings, are swindled and sent home, and so make room for more.
While they remain and have any part of their money left, they patronize the swamis, buy oil stock, gape at the movie gals, and pack the Methodist churches.
Unquestionably, the influence of such vacuums has tended to degrade the general tone of California life; what was once a Spanish fiesta is now merely an upper Mississippi valley street-carnival.
But it is not to be forgotten that the Native Sons have gone down the chute with the newcomers — that there is little more sign of intellectual vigor in the old stock than there is in the new stock.
A few intransigents hold out against the tide of 100 per cent Americanism, but only a few.
The rest bawl against the Reds as loudly as any Iowa steer-stuffer.
The truth is that it is unjust to blame Iowa for the decay of California, for Iowa itself is now moving up, not down.
And so is Nebraska.
A few years ago both States were as sterile, intellectually, as Guatemala, but both are showing signs of progress today, and in another generation or two, as the Prohibition lunacy passes and the pall of Methodism begins to lift they will probably burst into very vigorous activity.
Some excellent stock is in them; it is very little contaminated by what is called Anglo-Saxon blood.
Iowa even today, is decidedly more civilized than California.
It is producing more ideas, and, more important still, it is carrying on a much less violent war against ideas.
I doubt whether any man who read the Constitution in Davenport or Des Moines would be jailed for it, as Upton Sinclair (or one of his friends) was in Pasadena.
The American Legion might protest, but the police would probably do nothing, for the learned judges of the State would not entertain the charge.
Thus California remains something of a mystery.
The whole United States, of course, has been going downhill since the beginning of the century, but why should one State go so much faster than the others?
Is the climate to blame?
Hardly.
The climate of San Francisco is thoroughly un-Californian, and yet San Francisco is almost as dead as Los Angeles.
It was there, indeed, that that California masterpiece, the Mooney case, was staged; it was there that the cops made three efforts to convict poor Fatty Arbuckle of murder in the first degree; it was there that the late Dr. Abrams launched a quackery that went Mother Eddy one better.
San Francisco, once the home of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, is now ravaged by Baptist dervishes and Prohibition enforcement officers.
But if the climate is not to blame, then what is?
Why should a great State, lovely physically and of romantic history, so violently renounce all sense and decency?
What has got into it?
God alone knows!
The case of Georgia is simpler.
It happens to be the chief battle ground between the poor white trash who have been in control of the whole South since the Civil War and the small but growing minority of civilized rebels.
That battle is going on all over the South, but in Georgia it is especially bitter, for there the poor-white trash are very strongly entrenched, and desperately determined to beat their antagonists.
They have many advantages.
They control the Legislature, they have the support of most of the newspapers, and they have produced a number of leaders of great boldness.
Hence the Ku Klux Klan.
Hence the prohibition of Darwinism.
Hence the tax of $1,000 a performance on grand opera.
But Georgia, though it is thus in the depths, is not hopeless.
There are civilized Georgians, and they are by no means inactive.
Today they carry on their fight against apparently hopeless odds, but if they keep their resolution they may win tomorrow.
At all events, they keep on fighting, bravely and even gayly.
But in California, as I have said, the civilized minority is in despair.
In Los Angeles, indeed, it has gone so far that it has thrown up its hands and cast itself upon the Christian charity of the rest of the country.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... cal-notes/
George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken
American Mercury/October, 1924
The Triumph of Illusion. — As many of the great battles of the world are won by a blind following of illusion as by a realistic facing of facts.
The illusion of Joan of Arc’s sainthood drew the French to victory over the English in the Fifteenth Century as the illusion of democracy drew the American colonists to triumph over the English in the Eighteenth.
The first Crusaders, sweeping in a trail of white glory toward the East, were carried along on the invincible shoulders of divine illusion, and it was only when the purple illusion of Cleopatra’s love deserted him that Mark Antony met defeat at arms: under the warm spell of that illusion he defeated both Brutus and Cassius at Philippi.
It was the illusion that Thomas Jonathan Jackson was like a stone wall that led his soldiers in gray to stand like rocks and bounce back to threefold defeat the men in blue who, without a similar illusion to support them, followed McClellan at Bull Run and Banks at Winchester and Cedar Mountain.
What Hath God Wrought! — In one of the Eastern bituminous coal-fields, on the slope of the Appalachian Mountains, a strike of miners has been in progress for three years.
Ordinarily, such a struggle is marked by a great deal of human suffering, affectingly described in the New Republic.
According to the precedents, all the strikers in the present case should be dead or in jail by now, and their wives and children should be homeless and in the last stages of starvation.
But an agent lately returned from the scene tells me that no such horrors, nor any other, are actually on view.
Instead, the strikers are well fed and easy in manner, their wives are arrayed in the latest habiliments recommended by Vogue, and their children are fat, merry and learning to be sinful.
By what process has this miracle been achieved?
By the simplest process imaginable.
By the process, in brief, of amending the Constitution of the United States.
It is the Eighteenth Amendment that is responsible — the Amendment and the Volstead Act.
The strikers, instead of starting to starve the day they struck, or throwing themselves with blood-curdling hosannas upon the bayonets and artillery of the mineguards — instead of resorting to such pre-Volsteadian follies, and so filling the New Republic with hot and sanguinary stuff, they retired in a peaceable manner to the high hills adjacent to the mines, constructed a series of large stills in the woods, and proceeded forthwith to the manufacture of a meritorious grade of white mule.
Today, they are not only eating regularly; they are getting rich.
For they had the sagacity, from the very start, to enlist the mine-guards, their hereditary enemies, on their side.
These guards now patrol the mountain trails for miles around, and keep a sharp lookout for Prohibition enforcement officers.
When one is sighted he is laid for, seized, given a beating, and put aboard a train for home.
If he returns, one of his ears is cut off.
If he returns a second time he is executed painlessly, and his carcass thrown to the wild hogs of the mountain side.
For months running, so my agent says, not a single Prohibition officer has ventured into those wilds.
The honest miners refuse absolutely to pay graft.
They are thus enabled to sell their product at a fair price.
Once a week they load a tank car marked “Gasoline! Dangerous!” and start it for Washington.
Four days later it comes back empty, and the sum of $8,250 is passed to their credit on the books of an eminent Washington trust company.
Thus a community long dedicated to hard and cruel labor, with intervals of the most abject misery, is now prosperous and happy.
The fact is to be set to the honor of the Hon. Mr. Volstead, otherwise an ass.
Moreover, the benefits that he has brought to that remote mountainside also radiate elsewhere.
The inhabitants, like the rest of us, have to burn coal in Winter.
Formerly they stole it from the mine company.
Now they buy it in an adjoining valley, and so make work steadier for the miners there.
More important still, they keep Washington supplied with a pure brand of forty-rod at a moderate price.
There is enough to go round, and it is within the means of all.
The processes of government are thus lubricated.
The men who make and administer the laws are happier and more efficient.
Every American citizen, even unto the remotest hamlets, is the gainer.
The downfall of the Republic, by a small but appreciable interval, is postponed.
Per Contra. — I cannot entirely agree with those critics who inveigh against propaganda in art and who maintain that propaganda, having no place in art, ruins art in its presence.
Great art, they contend, proves nothing, should seek to prove nothing, may prove nothing.
Many of the world’s masterpieces confound such critics.
“Hamlet” proves that it is futile for man to fight destiny, as “Macbeth” proves that evil thought and wrongdoing can profit no man.
“The Mikado” is veiled propaganda against certain British weaknesses and peccadillos, as are also “Iolanthe,” “Pinafore” and “The Pirates of Penzance.”
Wagner wrote “Der Fliegende Hollander” to prove that musical criticism as it was practiced in Dresden at the time was ridiculous: the opera is propaganda against all standpat criticism.
Beethoven’s Ninth was composed to prove that his old teacher, Albrechtsberger, was something of a hanswurst.
It proved it: it still proves it.
Cervantes wrote “Don Quixote,” so he himself said, “to break down the vogue and authority of books of chivalry and to render abhorred of men the false and absurd stories contained in books of chivalry.”
There is social and political propaganda in Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” as there are political plea and argument in Shaw’s finest play, “Caesar and Cleopatra.”
What is the wonderful ceiling in the Sistine Chapel but Michelangelo’s successful attempt to prove that sculptural drawing may, in decoration, be the superior of painting?
Human Progress. — During the six months ending June 30 there were but five lynchings in the South — the lowest record in forty years.
How is one to account for the fact?
I point to two obvious influences: that of the Ku Klux Klan and that of the radio.
Both have served to relieve the dreadful tedium of life in the late Confederacy, and so the Chandala have not had to resort to homicide for entertainment.
The Klan has worked against the old wholesale butchery in two ways.
In the first place, it has taken formal charge of all lynchings, and so introduced order into them, and even a sort of jurisprudence.
It will not countenance hanging or burning a blackamoor unless there is some plausible evidence of his guilt; it prohibits the old system of doing one to death in mere naughtiness.
In the second place, it gives the hinds of the backwoods so much other entertainment, with its ceaseless processions, tarrings and featherings, raids upon bootleggers and loose women, ceremonious visits to Baptist tabernacles, and so on, that they have been cured of their ancient boredom, and are thus less inclined than they used to be to dispose of it by orgy.
The radio has worked in much the same way.
In the remotest fastnesses of Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi the peasants are now in nightly contact with the great currents of human thought.
They hear speeches by Dr. Coolidge, William Jennings Bryan and the most subtle thinkers in the Chautauqua movement.
They may tune in on stock quotations, baseball scores, or bedtime stories.
Brass bands play for them, and they are soothed and mellowed by lectures on the cement industry and mental magnetism.
There is thus no reason why they should swarm out into the night, pursue an Aframerican with dogs, and waste ten gallons of gasoline burning him.
In the old days they were driven to it by sheer desperation.
Life, at times, became insupportable without a show.
But now they have a continuous show, and it is cheap, astounding and infinitely varied.
I believe that the legalization of dancing among the Methodists will work to the same benign end.
Until a few months ago any Methodist who pranced with his girl was condemned to hell by his pastor, and the death-beds of those who defied the mandate were made horrible by their yells.
But then the Methodist General Conference suddenly lifted the ban, and now any member of the communion is free to cavort all he pleases, so long as he does it in a reasonably decorous manner.
This revolutionary change in policy is not yet generally known in the South, where news travels slowly, but soon or late it is bound to penetrate to the remotest swamps and hills.
When it does so, the rustics will have another way to entertain themselves, and the adjacent Moors will be even safer than now.
More, the Baptists will have to follow suit, else they will lose all their members to the church of Wesley.
In the end, with the radio sparking, the Klan performing its public evolutions, and the sound of jig music filling the air, the Confederate States will be full of happiness, and a lynching will become as rare as it was in Sodom and Gomorrah, or as it is today in Paris, Biarritz or Union Hill, N. J.
Years ago, I anticipated the transformation now taking place.
That is to say, I proposed setting up brass bands in all the Southern country towns, and introducing bullfighting into Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
It was my contention that every bull that was killed would save a Christian Ethiop.
I now formally withdraw my proposal as no longer apposite.
Its purposes have been met by the radio, the Klan meeting and the dance.
The Methodists, I hear, think of following their surrender to Terpsichore with a surrender to Thespis.
If they do, then the Southern blacks will become almost as free, safe and happy as they were under slavery.
For in all human history there has never been a lynching in a town visited regularly by competent burlesque troupes.
The Englishman and the American. — There is always this difference, I find, between them.
I have known many Americans who would not mind living in England, but I have never yet found an Englishman who said he would care to live in the United States.
A Phase of American Criticism. — The peruser of the art of criticism as it is currently practiced in the daily and weekly gazettes of the Etats Unis becomes steadily conscious of the fact that there has arisen a body of clichés with which that criticism answers those persons whose work and ideas do not happen to meet with its approval.
There was a time, in the history of even this daily and weekly criticism, when its adverse criticism was based upon at least a measure of understanding of the point of view it championed and upon a sufficient familiarity with the other side of the question to make its adverse comment at once comprehensible and fair.
Today, however, there is small disposition to box the other man’s viewpoint with any degree of intelligence or honesty.
A study of such criticism reveals neither this intelligence nor honesty; it reveals, further, neither a tonic ridicule nor a sharp and devastating irony; it reveals, further still, neither the faculty for a good healthy horse-laugh nor a whacking and explosive slapstick.
It tries to kill off its opponent by childish and inane means.
It employs the tactics of the kindergarten.
Thus, when it finds itself at a loss as to sound and destructive criticism, it invariably falls back upon such recriminatory stencils as “So-and-so reminds one of a small boy drawing caricatures with a piece of chalk on the schoolhouse fence” or “One cannot expect a man like So-and-so to understand the principles by which the rest of us are guided.”
The word tradition similarly looms large in the kind of criticism of which I am speaking.
Whenever one of these critics doesn’t accurately know what is wrong with an opponent’s point of view, save that it seems to be wrong to him, he takes refuge in blaming it either upon the other man’s traditions or lack of them.
Again, we hear endless whiffle about “bad boys” — a bad boy, apparently, being anyone who doesn’t believe exactly what the commentator concerned believes, and about “disrespectful attitude toward his elders,” as if respect for age were an article in the doctrine of sound criticism.
More and more, in this daily and weekly criticism, a man’s ideas and performances are criticized less from the viewpoint of their honest worth and importance than from their adherence to or departure from the punctilio of the place and moment.
Manners are rated above merit.
A suave and poiseful nincompoop is regarded as the superior of a rough and forceful intelligence.
The battle is not one of sound sense or effective seltzer-siphons; the battle is one in which the critic seeks to confound and put to rout his opponent with provincial rubber-stamps.
Historical Note. — The first law against lèse-majesté heard of in Rome was proclaimed not by an emperor, but by Saturninus, a democratic tribune.
Its aim was not to protect the throne against the populace but to protect the populace against the aristocracy.
Observation CMXXIII. — The apparent romanticism of women is chiefly only appearance.
They seem to take love more seriously than men, but that they really do so does not follow.
Many of the romantic gestures that they make are no more than proofs of their hard realism.
They are so realistic that they see clearly that realism is an impossible philosophy in this world — that its practice would make life unbearable.
So they swathe it in make-believe.
Men have much less sense.
They try to grapple with reality — and come ignominiously to grief.
The temple that shelters Truth is guarded by many dragons, and they have long teeth.
Worse, it is guarded by Katzenjammer.
The Comedy of Sex. — In the current oppressively ubiquitous cackling of sex one finds the intelligentsia inclining more and more to the view that sex, far from being the sour-visaged tragedy that it is commonly supposed to be, is really of the essence of pure comedy.
While this point of view is, of course, anything but new — having been the established philosophy of all bachelors and Turks over the age of twelve since the beginning of the Eleventh Century — it seems to me that, for all its major authenticity, it is not without its soupçon of a hole.
Sex is a comedy, true enough; it borders, indeed, upon farce; but, like a comedy or a farce, it is played upon something approximating a theatre stage.
The parties to the performance, the actors, are most often entirely serious about it, as are the actors of comedy and farce ever.
The humor of sex is enjoyed not by the actors directly concerned in it, but by the onlookers, the audience.
The bridegroom is not a comedian in his own eyes; he is a comedian in the eyes of his audience.
The bride herself is wistful and a bit wet of eye; the wheezes are reserved for the mob around the punchbowl.
Paraphrasing Horace Walpole, sex is a tragedy to him who feels and a comedy to him who thinks.
In the grip of sex, no man has ever thought.
Sex, to the participant in its theoretical excitements, is thus ever purely emotional and hence removed, at least for the time being, from the domain of comedy.
It may be funny in retrospect, but so too in retrospect are three-fourths of the tragedies of the world.
Plot and Character. — That character is always more important than plot in literature and drama is proved by the fact that we usually remember character in proportion as we forget plot.
One remembers Huckleberry Finn; but what was the plot of “Huckleberry Finn”?
One remembers Uncle Tom; but what was the plot of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”?
One remembers Ben Hur; but what was the plot of “Ben Hur”?
And so, too, with Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, King Lear, Tom Jones, Fanny Hill, Madame Bovary, Thérèse Raquin, Lord Jim, and a hundred others.
The general trends of theme one may recall, but the plots have vanished from memory.
Only the characters remain.
Note in the Margin of a Treatise on Psychology. — As I stoop to lace my shoe you hit me over the coccyx with a length of hickory (Carya laciniosa).
I conclude instantly that you are a jackass.
This is the whole process of human thought in little.
This is free will.
Historical Note. — No woman can be too beautiful and be a lady.
The Champion. — Of the forty-eight sovereign States of this imperial federation, which is the worst?
In what one of them is a civilized man most uncomfortable?
Over half the votes, if the question were put to a vote, would probably be divided between California and Georgia.
Each, in its way, is almost unspeakable.
Georgia, of course, has never been civilized, save in a small area along the tidewater.
Even in the earliest days of the Republic, it was regarded as barbaric by its neighbors.
But California, at one time, promised to develop a charming and enlightened civilization.
There was a touch of tropical balm in its air, and a touch of Latin and even oriental color in its ideas.
Like Louisiana, it seemed likely to resist Americanization for many years; perhaps forever.
But now California, the old California, is simply extinct.
What remains is an Alsatia of retired Ford agents and crazy fat women — a paradise of Rotary and the New Thought.
Its laws are the most extravagant and idiotic ever heard of in Christendom.
Its public officers, and particularly its judges, are famous all over the world for their imbecilities.
When one hears of it at all, one hears that some citizen has been jailed for reading the Constitution of the United States, or that some new swami in a yellow bedtick has got all the realtors’ wives of Los Angeles by the ears.
When one hears of it further, it is only to learn that some distinguished movie wench in Hollywood has murdered another lover.
The State is run by its Chambers of Commerce, which is to say, by the worst variety of resident Babbits.
No man of any dignity seems to have any part in its public life.
Not an idea ever comes out of it — that is, not an idea beyond the grasp of a Kiwanis Club secretary, a Christian Science sorcerer, or a grand wizard of the American Legion.
Twice, of late, it has offered the country candidates for the presidency.
One was the Hon. Hiram Johnson and the other was the Hon. William Gibbs McAdoo!
Only Vermont can beat that record.
The minority of civilized Californians — who recently, by the way, sent out a call from Los Angeles for succor, as if they were beset by wolves! — commonly lay the blame for this degeneration of a once proud commonwealth upon the horde of morons that has flowed in from Iowa, Nebraska and the other cow-States, seeking relief from the bitter climate of the steppes.
The California realtors have been luring in these hinds for a generation past, and they now swarm in all the Southern towns, especially Los Angeles.
They come in with their savings, are swindled and sent home, and so make room for more.
While they remain and have any part of their money left, they patronize the swamis, buy oil stock, gape at the movie gals, and pack the Methodist churches.
Unquestionably, the influence of such vacuums has tended to degrade the general tone of California life; what was once a Spanish fiesta is now merely an upper Mississippi valley street-carnival.
But it is not to be forgotten that the Native Sons have gone down the chute with the newcomers — that there is little more sign of intellectual vigor in the old stock than there is in the new stock.
A few intransigents hold out against the tide of 100 per cent Americanism, but only a few.
The rest bawl against the Reds as loudly as any Iowa steer-stuffer.
The truth is that it is unjust to blame Iowa for the decay of California, for Iowa itself is now moving up, not down.
And so is Nebraska.
A few years ago both States were as sterile, intellectually, as Guatemala, but both are showing signs of progress today, and in another generation or two, as the Prohibition lunacy passes and the pall of Methodism begins to lift they will probably burst into very vigorous activity.
Some excellent stock is in them; it is very little contaminated by what is called Anglo-Saxon blood.
Iowa even today, is decidedly more civilized than California.
It is producing more ideas, and, more important still, it is carrying on a much less violent war against ideas.
I doubt whether any man who read the Constitution in Davenport or Des Moines would be jailed for it, as Upton Sinclair (or one of his friends) was in Pasadena.
The American Legion might protest, but the police would probably do nothing, for the learned judges of the State would not entertain the charge.
Thus California remains something of a mystery.
The whole United States, of course, has been going downhill since the beginning of the century, but why should one State go so much faster than the others?
Is the climate to blame?
Hardly.
The climate of San Francisco is thoroughly un-Californian, and yet San Francisco is almost as dead as Los Angeles.
It was there, indeed, that that California masterpiece, the Mooney case, was staged; it was there that the cops made three efforts to convict poor Fatty Arbuckle of murder in the first degree; it was there that the late Dr. Abrams launched a quackery that went Mother Eddy one better.
San Francisco, once the home of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, is now ravaged by Baptist dervishes and Prohibition enforcement officers.
But if the climate is not to blame, then what is?
Why should a great State, lovely physically and of romantic history, so violently renounce all sense and decency?
What has got into it?
God alone knows!
The case of Georgia is simpler.
It happens to be the chief battle ground between the poor white trash who have been in control of the whole South since the Civil War and the small but growing minority of civilized rebels.
That battle is going on all over the South, but in Georgia it is especially bitter, for there the poor-white trash are very strongly entrenched, and desperately determined to beat their antagonists.
They have many advantages.
They control the Legislature, they have the support of most of the newspapers, and they have produced a number of leaders of great boldness.
Hence the Ku Klux Klan.
Hence the prohibition of Darwinism.
Hence the tax of $1,000 a performance on grand opera.
But Georgia, though it is thus in the depths, is not hopeless.
There are civilized Georgians, and they are by no means inactive.
Today they carry on their fight against apparently hopeless odds, but if they keep their resolution they may win tomorrow.
At all events, they keep on fighting, bravely and even gayly.
But in California, as I have said, the civilized minority is in despair.
In Los Angeles, indeed, it has gone so far that it has thrown up its hands and cast itself upon the Christian charity of the rest of the country.
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