Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  But what better offers? Something enormously better. The simple device, in brief, of condemning the detected pickpocket to lose the third phalange of the index finger of his right hand—a quick, safe, wholly painless operation, almost as easy as having a boil lanced. And yet quite as certain in its effects as life imprisonment. The pickpocket is not appreciably mutilated. The loss of that one phalange does not show itself. He is fit for almost any honest work that can be imagined. But he can no more pick a pocket, with the chief of his highly trained tools gone, than a fiddler, in like case, could play a cadenza. All of his special capacity for crime is gone, and with it his special temptation is gone, too. At every other variety of felony he is as much an amateur and blunderer as the judge on the bench.

  I present only this one concrete example of what might be accomplished if we could rid our criminal laws of falsehood and sentimentality, and restore them to sense. The mind of every reflective judge must be full of simple, just and effective punishments that he would inflict if he could—punishments enormously more apt and efficient than the fine which penalizes too little and the imprisonment which penalizes arbitrarily, unintelligibly and usually too much. Why jail embezzlers? Why not put them to work as slaves of their victims, and make them work out what they have stolen? Why jail wife-beaters? Why not try to discourage them with a few strokes of the bastinado? Why jail grafters in office? Why not simply seize their stealings, strip them bare, and then forbid them the city, state and country?

  Many old revival: ducking, whipping, transportation, branding, forfeiture of goods. They are simpler and cheaper than those we have; it is obvious that they would work better. In the South Seas we have scores of almost uninhabited islands. Why not ship our felons out there and let them learn discipline by preying on one another? Or send them to Arkansas to butcher the politicians and clergy? It is not only a way to get rid of them, and of the heavy expense of keeping them; it is a way to civilize Arkansas and the South Seas. Criminals are like the rest of us. Given the right kind of chance, they show their sound metal. Australia was settled by them, so were Maryland, and part of Virginia. Who notices it, or even remembers it, today?

  In the forfeiture of goods there are the same great possibilities. This punishment would be the best of all weapons against stock-waterers, trade-restrainers, war-profiteers and other such powerful recalcitrants. Personally, I am in favor of these scoundrels, but if they are criminals by law, then let us deal with them in a way that will dispose of them. The fine of $29,240,000, even if collected, would not have hurt John D. Rockefeller. But a decree of forfeiture, taking over all his goods and making invalid any contract made with him or any security owned by him, would have converted him into a penniless Baptist colporteur overnight, and so brought down the price of gasoline.

  Every day, by extra-legal means, our judges try to reach out for these new and more effective penalties. The punishment provided by law for one of the commonest of police court offenses—the stupid yielding to amorous suggestion called seduction—is a complex and unworkable combination of fine by instalments and threat of imprisonment. No sane judge ever inflicts it. What he does is to make the victim marry the party of the first part. The device is just and sensible, and it works. The victim is appropriately penalized for his numskullery, and the damage that society might have suffered from it is obliterated.

  This is what we need in punishments—first, a reasonable fitness and justice, and secondly, a removal of the damage or menace to social order and security. Our present system fails in both departments. It is arbitrary, unintelligent and alternately too cruel and too soft; and it wholly fails to make crime difficult and unattractive.

  The Penalty of Death

  FROM FOUR MORAL CAUSES, PREJUDICES: FIFTH SERIES, 1926, pp. 21–27. With additions from the Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 23, 1925, and April 5, 1926

  OF the arguments against capital punishment that issue from uplifters, two are commonly heard most often, to wit:

  1. That hanging a man (or frying him or gassing him) is a dreadful business, degrading to those who have to do it and revolting to those who have to witness it.

  2. That it is useless, for it does not deter others from the same crime.

  The first of these arguments, it seems to me, is plainly too weak to need serious refutation. All it says, in brief, is that the work of the hangman is unpleasant. Granted. But suppose it is? It may be quite necessary to society for all that. There are, indeed, many other jobs that are unpleasant, and yet no one thinks of abolishing them—that of the plumber, that of the soldier, that of the garbage-man, that of the priest hearing confessions, that of the sand-hog, and so on. Moreover, what evidence is there that any actual hangman complains of his work? I have heard none. On the contrary, I have known many who delighted in their ancient art, and practised it proudly.

  In the second argument of the abolitionists there is rather more force, but even here, I believe, the ground under them is shaky. Their fundamental error consists in assuming that the whole aim of punishing criminals is to deter other (potential) criminals—that we hang or electrocute A simply in order to so alarm B that he will not kill C. This, I believe, is an assumption which confuses a part with the whole. Deterrence, obviously, is one of the aims of punishment, but it is surely not the only one. On the contrary, there are at least half a dozen, and some are probably quite as important. At least one of them, practically considered, is more important. Commonly, it is described as revenge, but revenge is really not the word for it. I borrow a better term from the late Aristotle: katharsis. Katharsis, so used, means a salubrious discharge of emotions, a healthy letting off of steam. A school-boy, disliking his teacher, deposits a tack upon the pedagogical chair; the teacher jumps and the boy laughs. This is katharsis. What I contend is that one of the prime objects of all judicial punishments is to afford the same grateful relief (a) to the immediate victims of the criminal punished, and (b) to the general body of moral and timorous men.

  These persons, and particularly the first group, are concerned only indirectly with deterring other criminals. The thing they crave primarily is the satisfaction of seeing the criminal actually before them suffer as he made them suffer. What they want is the peace of mind that goes with the feeling that accounts are squared. Until they get that satisfaction they are in a state of emotional tension, and hence unhappy. The instant they get it they are comfortable. I do not argue that this yearning is noble; I simply argue that it is almost universal among human beings. In the face of injuries that are unimportant and can be borne without damage it may yield to higher impulses; that is to say, it may yield to what is called Christian charity. But when the injury is serious Christianity is adjourned, and even saints reach for their sidearms. It is plainly asking too much of human nature to expect it to conquer so natural an impulse. A keeps a store and has a bookkeeper, B. B steals $700, employs it in playing at dice or bingo, and is cleaned out. What is A to do? Let B go? If he does so he will be unable to sleep at night. The sense of injury, of injustice, of frustration will haunt him like pruritus. So he turns B over to the police, and they hustle B to prison. Thereafter A can sleep. More, he has pleasant dreams. He pictures B chained to the wall of a dungeon a hundred feet underground, devoured by rats and scorpions. It is so agreeable that it makes him forget his $700. He has got his katharsis.

  The same thing precisely takes place on a larger scale when there is a crime which destroys a whole community’s sense of security. Every law-abiding citizen feels menaced and frustrated until the criminals have been struck down—until the communal capacity to get even with them, and more than even, has been dramatically demonstrated. Here, manifestly, the business of deterring others is no more than an afterthought. The main thing is to destroy the concrete scoundrels whose act has alarmed everyone, and thus made everyone unhappy. Until they are brought to book that unhappiness continues; when the law has been executed upon them there is a sigh of relief. In other words, there is katharsis.

  I
know of no public demand for the death penalty for ordinary crimes, even for ordinary homicides. Its infliction would shock all men of normal decency of feeling. But for crimes involving the deliberate and inexcusable taking of human life, by men openly defiant of all civilized order—for such crimes it seems, to nine men out of ten, a just and proper punishment. Any lesser penalty leaves them feeling that the criminal has got the better of society—that he is free to add insult to injury by laughing. That feeling can be dissipated only by a recourse to katharsis, the invention of the aforesaid Aristotle. It is more effectively and economically achieved, as human nature now is, by wafting the criminal to realms of bliss.

  The real objection to capital punishment doesn’t lie against the actual extermination of the condemned, but against our brutal American habit of putting it off so long. After all, every one of us must die soon or late, and a murderer, it must be assumed, is one who makes that sad fact the cornerstone of his metaphysic. But it is one thing to die, and quite another thing to lie for long months and even years under the shadow of death. No sane man would choose such a finish. All of us, despite the Prayer Book, long for a swift and unexpected end. Unhappily, a murderer, under the irrational American system, is tortured for what, to him, must seem a whole series of eternities. For months on end he sits in prison while his lawyers carry on their idiotic buffoonery with writs, injunctions, mandamuses, and appeals. In order to get his money (or that of his friends) they have to feed him with hope. Now and then, by the imbecility of a judge or some trick of juridic science, they actually justify it. But let us say that, his money all gone, they finally throw up their hands. Their client is now ready for the rope or the chair. But he must still wait for months before it fetches him.

  That wait, I believe, is horribly cruel. I have seen more than one man sitting in the death-house, and I don’t want to see any more. Worse, it is wholly useless. Why should he wait at all? Why not hang him the day after the last court dissipates his last hope? Why torture him as not even cannibals would torture their victims? The common answer is that he must have time to make his peace with God. But how long does that take? It may be accomplished, I believe, in two hours quite as comfortably as in two years. There are, indeed, no temporal limitations upon God. He could forgive a whole herd of murderes in a millionth of a second. More, it has been done.

  On Hanging a Man

  From my Foreword to BY THE NECK, by my brother, August Mencken; Hastings House, publishers, New York, 1940. With additions from the Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 16, 1926

  IN my capacity of newspaper reporter I have been a spectator at nine hangings. It is my firm impression that this operation, if competently carried out, is a humane method of putting criminals to death, though perhaps it is not quite as quick as electrocution. The drop now used in the United States could be improved, as I shall indicate, but it is seldom that it causes any unnecessary physical pain or mental anguish. The blow delivered to the criminal’s upper works when he reaches suddenly the end of the rope is at least as formidable as a crack on the head with an ax, and I believe that in most cases it causes immediate unconsciousness, or, at all events, such a scattering of the faculties that the condemned is hardly able to suffer. The rope, if properly knotted, thereupon presses heavily upon the blood vessels supplying the brain, and if any trace of consciousness survives it must be suspended by anoxemia in not more than eight or ten seconds. It is highly probable that this pressure, producing an irreversible cerebral anemia, is the actual cause of death in most cases. Fracture or dislocation of the cervical vertebrae is the exception rather than the rule, and asphyxia is scarcely more than a by-product. A criminal executed by a competent hangman shows no sign of suffering. He drops straight through the trap, and when he comes to rest remains hanging motionless. There is no struggle. After a little while the legs draw up a bit, but not violently. The heart keeps up a gradual diminishing beating for ten or twelve minutes, but all consciousness has departed, and the criminal dies without apparent pain.

  In England a ring is inserted at the end of the rope, with other end passing through it, and as a result the pressure that I have mentioned is more violent, and the criminal probably loses his senses almost instantly. The hangman’s knot that is generally favored in the United States is rather less efficient, if only because rope slides across rope less facilely than across metal. But when the knot is made by competent hands it works very well, and is not cruel. An advantage of hanging is that it does not mutilate the body of the victim. The rope naturally leaves marks on the soft tissues of the neck, but it does not break the skin, and the marks themselves have almost disappeared before the body leaves the place of execution. Electrocution, as everyone knows, sometimes produces burns, and moreover, it involves shaving at least a part of the head. Putting a man to death with poisonous gases is even worse, for it causes a general discoloration, and there is no reason to believe that it is either quick or painless.

  It is unpleasant, I grant you, to see a man put to death, but the brutality of it is immensely overestimated by those who have never enjoyed that honor. They forget this technical skill that can make even killing painless and humane. And they forget that the victim himself is almost always a brute with little more sensitiveness than an ox. I witnessed recently.1 He went to his death with a swagger, and obviously full of an imbecile delight in the attention he was attracting. His occupations in his last days were those of a happy half-wit, and his final message, delivered through the tabloid newspaper, the Baltimore Post, was precisely the sort of defiant rubbish that such a moron would be expected to formulate and delight in. The whole thing, to him, was a gaudy show, and it was quite impossible for any rational man, observing him at the end, to have any very active sympathy for him.

  A new State law has got rid of the obscene crowds that used to flock to hangings, and of the bungling that once made them revolting. The gallows at the Penitentiary is admirably designed. Whittemore dropped at least ten feet, and he was unconscious instantly. Save for one brief drawing up of the legs as he died he didn’t move an inch. The old-time jail yard gallows was a wooden structure with a high step, and the condemned had to climb up that step. It was a dreadful ordeal. He could see the noose a long way off. But Whittemore, stepping out of a second-story door on to a high platform, was on the trap before he saw the rope at all. If he had not delayed the proceedings to bawl a nonsensical farewell 2 he would have been dead in less than a minute after he emerged. As it was, he dropped in less than two minutes. Was the thing horrible as a spectacle? No more than the most trivial surgery. One does not see a man hanged. One sees a black bag.

  I have spoken of Whittemore as a moron. The term is probably flattering. His farewell message in the post and his philosophical autobiography in the same instructive paper, published a few months ago, showed the mentality of a somewhat backward boy of ten. Such professional killers, I believe, are nearly all on the same level: a Gerald Chapman is very rare among them, as a man of honor is rare in Congress. The sentimentalists, observing the fact, employ it as an argument against capital punishment. It is immoral, they contend, for the State to take the life of a creature so palpably stupid, and hence so little capable of sound judgment and decent behavior. But all this, it seems to me, is full of bad logic. The State of Maryland did not kill Whittemore because he was a moron: it killed him because he had demonstrated conclusively that his continued existence was incompatible with the reasonable safety of the rest of us. What difference did it make whether his criminality was due to lack of intelligence, or, as in the case of Chapman, to intelligence gone rancid? The only important thing was that he was engaged habitually, and apparently incorrigibly, in gross and intolerable attacks upon the public security. What was to be done about it? He had been sent to prison without effect. He had actually committed a murder in prison. There remained only the device of taking his life, and so getting rid of a dangerous and demoralizing nuisance.

  To argue that society, confronted by such a rogue, has
no right to take his life is to argue that it has no rights at all—that it cannot even levy a tax or command a service without committing a crime. There are, to be sure, men who so argue, and some of their arguments are very ingenious. But they have not converted any considerable body of reflective men and women. The overwhelming majority of people believe that, when a man adopts murder as his trade, society is justified in putting him to death. They have believed it in all ages and under all forms of government, and I am convinced that they still believe it today. The execution of Whittemore was almost unanimously approved in Maryland. If he had escaped the gallows there would have been an uproar, and it would have been justified.

  The opponents of capital punishment have firmer ground under them when they object to the infliction of the death penalty upon criminals other than professional murderers. The public opinion of Christendom long ago revolted against its employment to put down minor crimes: for example, theft. There has been, of late, a revolt against its use even in certain varieties of murder, and that revolt, I believe, is largely responsible for the increasing difficulty of getting convictions in capital cases, and the increasing tendency of the courts to upset convictions by legal quackery. The truth is that our criminal codes need a thorough overhauling. The old categories of crime are only too often archaic and irrational. It is absurd to hang an aggrieved husband for killing his wife and her lover, and let a professional murderer live because, in a given case, the State is unable to prove premeditation. The test should be, not the instant intention, but the antecedent circumstances. Every one of us, under easily imaginable conditions, may commit a premeditated murder. But that possibility does not make us professional criminals, and it does not necessarily justify the death penalty in case we succumb. Juries obviously have felt that way, for many a murderer has escaped under the so-called unwritten law.