Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  Then came Aimée, with the oldest, safest tricks out of the pack of Dr. Billy Sunday, Dr. Gipsy Smith and the rest of the old-time hell-robbers, and to them she added capers from her circus days. In a month she had Los Angeles sitting up. In six months she had it in an uproar. In a year she was building her rococo temple and her flamboyant Bible College and the halfwits were flocking in from twenty States. Today, if her temple were closed by the police, she could live on her radio business alone. Every word she utters is carried on the air to every forlorn hamlet in those abominable deserts, and every day the mail brings her a flood of money.

  The effort to jail her has disingenuousness in it, and the more civilized Angeleños all sympathize with her, and wish her well. Her great success raised up two sets of enemies, both powerful. One was made up of the regular town clergy, who resented her raids upon their customers. The other was composed of the town Babbitts who began to fear that her growing celebrity was making Los Angeles ridiculous. So it was decided to bump her off, and her ill-timed morganatic honeymoon with the baldheaded and wooden-legged Mr. Ormiston offered a good chance. But it must be manifest to any fair observer that there is very little merit in the case against her. What she is charged with, in essence, is perjury, and the chief specification is that, when asked if she had been guilty of unchastity, she said no. I submit that no self-respecting judge in the Maryland Free State, drunk or sober, would entertain such a charge against a woman, and that no Maryland grand jury would indict her. It is unheard of, indeed, in any civilized community for a woman to be tried for perjury uttered in defense of her honor. But in California, as everyone knows, the process of justice is full of unpleasant novelties, and so poor Aimée, after a long and obscene hearing, has been held for trial.

  The betting odds in the Los Angeles saloons are 50 to 1 that she will either hang the jury or get a clean acquittal. I myself, tarrying in the town, invested some money on the long end, not in avarice, but as a gesture of sympathy for a lady in distress. The local district attorney has the newspapers on his side, and during the progress of Aimée’s hearing he filled one of them, in the chivalrous Southern California manner, with denunciations of her. But Aimée herself has the radio, and I believe that the radio will count most in the long run. Twice a day, week in and week out, she caresses the anthropoids of all that dusty, forbidding region with her lubricious coos. And twice a day she meets her lieges of Los Angeles face to face, and has at them with her shiny eyes, her mahogany hair, her eloquent hips, and her lascivious voice. It will be a hard job, indeed, to find twelve men and true to send her to the hoosegow. Unless I err grievously, our Heavenly Father is with her.

  XVI. ECONOMICS

  To Him That Hath

  From the Smart Set, May, 1920, pp. 33–34

  PERHAPS the most valuable of all human possessions, next to an aloof and sniffish air, is the reputation of being well-to-do. Nothing else so neatly eases one’s way through life. There is in 90% of all men—and in 99% of all Marxists, who value money far beyond its worth, and are always thinking of it and itching for it—an irresistible impulse to crook the knee to wealth, to defer to the power that it carries with it, to see all sorts of superiorities in the man who has it, or is said to have it. True enough, envy goes with the craven neck, but it is envy somehow purged of menace: the inferior man, at bottom, is afraid to do evil to the man with money; he is even afraid to think evil of him—that is, in any patent and offensive way. What stays his natural hatred of his superior, I daresay, is the sneaking hope that he may get some of the money by being polite—that it will pay him better to caress than to strike.

  Whatever the psychological process, he always arrives at a great affability. Give out the news that one has just made a killing in the stock market, or robbed some confiding widow of her dower, or swindled the government in some patriotic enterprise, and at once one will discover that one’s shabbiness is a charming eccentricity, and one’s judgment of wines worth hearing, and one’s political hallucinations worthy of attention. The man who is thought to be poor never gets a fair chance. No one wants to listen to him. No one gives a damn what he thinks or knows or feels. No one has any desire for his good opinion. I discovered this principle early in life, and have put it to use ever since. I have got a great deal more out of men (and women) by having the name of being a well-heeled fellow than I have ever got by being decent to them, or by dazzling them with my sagacity, or by hard industry, or by a personal beauty that is singular and ineffable.

  Capitalism

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Jan. 14, 1935

  ALL the quacks and cony-catchers now crowding the public trough at Washington seem to be agreed upon one thing, and one thing only. It is the doctrine that the capitalistic system is on its last legs, and will presently give place to something nobler and more “scientific.” There is, of course, no truth in this doctrine whatsoever. It collides at every point with the known facts. There is not the slightest reason for believing that capitalism is in collapse, or that anything proposed by the current wizards would be any better. The most that may be said is that the capitalistic system is undergoing changes, some of them painful. But those changes will probably strengthen it quite as often as they weaken it.

  We owe to it almost everything that passes under the general name of civilization today. The extraordinary progress of the world since the Middle Ages has not been due to the mere expenditure of human energy, nor even to the flights of human genius, for men had worked hard since the remotest times, and some of them had been of surpassing intellect. No, it has been due to the accumulation of capital. That accumulation permitted labor to be organized economically and on a large scale, and thus greatly enhanced its productiveness. It provided the machinery that gradually diminished human drudgery, and liberated the spirit of the worker, who had formerly been almost indistinguishable from a mule. Most of all, it made possible a longer and better preparation for work, so that every art and handicraft greatly widened its scope and range, and multitudes of new and highly complicated crafts came in.

  We owe to capital the fact that the medical profession, for example, is now really useful to mankind, whereas formerly it was useful only to the charlatans who practised it. It took accumulated money to provide the long training that medicine began to demand as it slowly lifted itself from the level of a sorry trade to that of a dignified art and science—money to keep the student while he studied and his teachers while they instructed him, and more money to pay for the expensive housing and materials that they needed. In the main, all that money came from private capitalists. But whether it came from private capitalists or from the common treasury, it was always capital, which is to say, it was always part of an accumulated surplus. It never could have been provided out of the hand-to-mouth income of a non-capitalistic society.

  When the Bolsheviki, a gang of frauds almost comparable to our own Brain Trust, took over the control of affairs in Russia, they had to throw overboard at once one of the cardinal articles of their ostensible creed. That article was to the effect that all the sorrows of the world were due to the fact that the workingman, under capitalism, had lost ownership in his tools. All the classical authorities on Socialism, from Marx and Engels downward, had stressed this loss heavily, and the Utopia they visioned was always one in which the workingman should get his tools back, and become an independent producer, working for himself alone, and giving none of the value he created to a wicked capitalist. But the moment the Bolsheviki came into power they had to shelve all this, and since then nothing has been heard about it save from their American gulls. A shrewd set of shysters, eager only to run Russia as their private preserve, they saw instantly that their main job was to accumulate capital, for without it half of their victims would starve. The old capital of the country had been destroyed by war. An easy way to get more would have been to borrow it, but no one would lend, so the Bolsheviki had to accumulate fresh capital of their own.

  This they managed to do by sweating the Ru
ssian workers in a manner never before seen on earth, at all events in modern times. The workers, at the start, resisted, especially the farmers, and in consequence Russia had a couple of famines, and the hat had to be passed in the capitalistic countries to feed the starving. But by slaughtering the rebellious farmers and organizing the jobless into a huge army, the Bolsheviki presently managed to bring the workers of Russia to heel, and since then those poor fish have been worked like prisoners in a chain gang, and have got pretty much the same wages. All the produce of their labor, over and above subsistence far more suitable to rats than to men, has gone into the coffers of the Bolsheviki. Thereby the Bolsheviki have accumulated a store of new capital, and now they use it not only to build ever larger and larger factories, each manned by hordes of workers who own nothing but their hands, but also to provide luxurious quarters for themselves, including an embassy at Washington so gaudy that it is the envy of every banker in the town.

  Thus one of the fundamental principles of Marxism has been reduced to absurdity in the house of its professed disciples. They may be scoundrels, and no doubt they are, but they also have a considerable cunning, and are thus well aware that nothing properly describable as modern civilization can be carried on without capital. And by capital I mean precisely what they mean when they denounce it for foreign consumption—that is, I mean a surplus accumulated, not in the pockets of workers, but in the pockets of persons who provide them with the means to work, and not under control of those who produce it, but under the control of those who have managed to collar it. The shabby politicians, puerile pedagogues and briefless lawyers who have raged and roared at Washington since 1933 would go the same way if they had the chance. Some of them, perhaps, are actually stupid enough to believe that the world could get along without capitalism, but others surely must be shrewd enough to note what has happened in Russia. But whether they are only plain idiots or clever rogues, they all talk grandly about capitalism’s decay, and even those who allege that they are trying to save it keep on mouthing the nonsense that it is on its deathbed. You will find the same hollow blah in all the organs of the More Abundant Life, and every day it issues from some dotty pedagogue yearning for a Government job.

  There is no sense in it whatever. The modern world could no more get along without accumulated capital than it could get along without police or paved streets. The greatest change imaginable is simply the change that has occurred in Russia – a transfer of capital from private owners to professional politicians. If you think this would do the individual any good, then all you need do to be undeceived is to ask any American letter-carrier. He works for a master capitalist named Uncle Sam—and he will be glad to tell you how hard he has to sweat for every nickel he gets.

  On Getting a Living

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, May 12, 1924

  SINCE the great reform in medical education in America, launched by the American Medical Association some years ago, it has become, to all intents and purposes, a sheer impossibility for a medical student to work his way to a degree. He could do it very readily in the old days. Everywhere there were medical colleges that would accept a youth direct from the plow and turn him out a full-fledged M.D. in three years of easy work. But no more. Today he must have an A.B. or at least the half of it before he may even begin to study, and then he must put in four years of extremely hard work before he gets his M.D., and pledge himself to service a year or two more as an interne before he begins to practise.

  It seems harsh, but why should the rest of us get into a sweat about it? For one, I see no sound reason. I haven’t the slightest objection to being dosed and consoled, when I am ill, by a medical man whose father (or someone else) paid for his education, and who thus got it in comfort and with an easy mind. I can discern absolutely no ground for believing that the doctor who had to spend half or two-thirds of his time in college getting a living should be any more competent. Nor, for that matter, any more humane in his charges. It is not well-to-do men who love money most, but men who are needy. I do not say, of course, that every student who works his way must necessarily succumb to the fumes of the dollar; I merely say that he is enormously more apt to succumb than his brother of easier means. His attention is concentrated too constantly and painfully upon the question of getting a living, and that sort of attitude is obviously a bad one to bring into any of the arts or sciences. The artist and the scientist—and the physician, in a sense, is both—is a man who is presumed to be interested primarily in his work, not in its emoluments. He can do genuinely good work, indeed, only to the extent that he is so interested. The moment he begins habitually to engage in enterprises that offer him only profit he ceases to be either an artist or a scientist, and becomes a mere journeyman artisan.

  True enough, a medical man who is intensely interested in his work, without regard to its material rewards—such a medical man often makes a great deal of money. If he has genuine ability, indeed, he almost invariably does so. But it is extremely difficult to put the cart before the horse. That is to say, it is extremely difficult to practise medicine primarily as a business, and at the same time keep up its dignity as an art and a science. The man who does so is on the wrong track. He is heading toward the chiropractors, not toward the Oslers.

  The change that has come over medical education is relatively recent. With it has come a tremendous improvement in the equipment of the young medical man. In the old days he often entered college defectively prepared, and after struggling through found that he was barely started. Some men, of unusual resolution, kept up the struggle—getting a living, so to speak, with one hand and continuing their professional training with the other. But the majority succumbed to a few easy formulæ and got no further; the country was crowded with half-educated and incompetent doctors. Today there is a palpable improvement. The Class A medical schools, to be sure, cannot engage to turn out only first-rate men, but they can at least get rid of the hopeless incompetents—they can at least guarantee that no man will be launched upon the public unless he is decently equipped and of reasonable fitness for his work.

  This will work a hardship upon the young man who cannot meet the new standards, and it will work a hardship scarcely less upon the young man who can meet them only by dint of herculean effort and sacrifice. But what these men lose the general public will gain, and surely that gain is not to be sniffed at. Now and then, perhaps, a young man of great promise, well fitted naturally for medical work, will be kept out, but for every such man a hundred utter incompetents will be kept out. The bitter must go with the sweet. Eventually, no doubt, there will be funds for the assistance of likely students who can’t pay their own way, as there are already funds for the assistance of young men who aspire to the sacerdotal art and mystery. Meanwhile, the study of medicine will tend to be restricted to the sons of well-to-do fathers. Well, why not? I see no reason for believing that the sons of well-to-do fathers, taking one with another, are apt to be less fitted for it than the sons of poor fathers: on the contrary, I am convinced that they are apt to be far more fitted for it. In any case, we patients have no reason to complain—and there are many more of us than there are of medical students.

  All the professions in America would be materially improved in dignity and usefulness if they became more snobbish—that is, if they were less accessible to novices from the sub-professional classes. There is no impediment in this grand and puissant Republic to the rise of any family from the lowest economic depths to the heights of learning, power and honor, and no reflective man would have it otherwise; but nothing, I submit, is accomplished by speeding the process unduly, or by attempting to short-circuit it. A family ought to seek economic security before it aspires higher; its first business should be to get the means to pay its way. This is surely not a difficult enterprise, for it is accomplished every day by thousands of persons of very modest capacities. We all hear so much about the millionaires that we overlook the much more numerous fellows, obscure Babbitts, most of them, who succeed less
gaudily but every bit as surely—the hundreds of thousands of Americans who accumulate enough to keep the wolf from the door and to give their children good starts in life. The children of the millionaires are often crushed beneath their money, and the children of the poor are crippled and ruined by the lack of it. But the children of the Babbitts have the world before them. They can do whatever they want to do—and that freedom is of immense value to them in whatever they undertake.

  I believe that it would be a very good thing for the country if they monopolized the professions, as they do in almost all other countries. Frederick the Great, asked why he gave commissions in the Prussian army only to Junker, replied simply, “Because they will not lie and cannot be bought.” A profound saying. The essence of a genuine professional man is that he cannot be bought. He is least apt to be bought, I believe, when his need of money is least exigent and desperate.

  Personal Note

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, June 12, 1922

  THE EASIEST job I have ever tackled in this world is that of making money. It is, in fact, almost as easy as losing it. Almost, but not quite.

  XVII. PEDAGOGY

  The Educational Process

  From EDUCATION, PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES, 1922, pp. 238–65.

  First printed in the New York Evening Mail, Jan. 23, 1918

  NEXT to the clerk in holy orders, the fellow with the foulest job in the world is the schoolmaster. Both are underpaid, both fall steadily in authority and dignity, and both wear out their hearts trying to perform the impossible. How much the world asks of them, and how little they can actually deliver! The clergyman’s business is to save the human race from Hell. If he saves one-eighth of one per cent, even within the limits of his narrow flock, he does magnificently. The schoolmaster’s is to spread the enlightement, to make the great masses of the plain people think—and thinking is precisely the thing that the great masses of the plain people are congenitally and eternally incapable of.