Also, she was a fraud pure and unadulterated—a fraud deliberate, unconscionable and unmitigated. She started out in life as a professional spiritualist, and the banal tricks of that amusing trade were always her chief reliances. She materialized the forms of Koot Hoomi and her other preposterous mahatmas precisely as the hard-working mediums in back streets materialize the forms of Wah-Wah the Indian chief. That is to say, she had them confected of stuffed pillows and other such lowly stuff, and then danced them before her dupes in dark rooms. She had a cabinet with a sliding door in the back, and from it she produced letters from Tibet (all written in her own hand, with curious Russified letters) and other such marvels. Her books were all clumsy plagiarisms. In “Isis Unveiled” a diligent critic discovered 2000 passages borrowed from other treatises on occultism, not to mention 700 blunders “in names, words and numbers” and 600 “mis-statements of fact.” She was caught over and over again. Her very assistants exposed her more than once, with exact specifications. But she relied confidently upon the illimitable credulity of her followers, and was not disappointed. Like the patrons of Mrs. Eddy, they were insatiable gluttons for punishment. The more she was exposed, the more firmly they believed in her.
Thousands of them continue to do so to this day. Theosophy has never made the worldly success of Christian Science, but it still has a ponderable following, both in Europe and in America, and every now and then the faithful are worked by some new operator. Its tenets are unanimously nonsensical. They are not merely dubious; they are downright insane. In part they are borrowed from the mooney speculations of such European mystics as Jakob Böhme, in part they come from the common claptrap of professional occultists (which is to say, of persons on a level, morally and intellectually, with mind-readers at county fairs), and in part they are a stale and ignorant rehash of so-called oriental philosophy. This oriental philosophy is the product of Hindus who believe that cows have souls, that adepts can fly through the air without the use of wings or gasoline, and that a man who permits his daughter to go unmarried so much as twenty-four hours beyond the onset of puberty is doomed to Hell. In brief, it is the product of degraded ignoramuses who make India a sewer of superstition.
How does it come that such imbecilities win converts in the West, and are even spoken of respectfully, now and then, by presumably learned men? There are two reasons. The first is that they are embodied in scriptures which also include a great deal of metaphysics—and metaphysics, to certain types of mind, always seems profound, even when it is palpably balderdash. The other is that not a few of the more ancient Indian ideas, working their way westward by way of Persia, Egypt and Greece, were embedded in Christianity by the Early Fathers, and have thus come to have a familiar and pious flavor. But they are just as silly in the Book of Revelation and in the lucubrations of Athanasius, Tertullian and Augustine as they are in the Indian Vedas. To discuss them seriously is to turn one’s back upon every intellectual decency. They are precisely equivalent to the philosophizing of phrenologists, chiropractors and Communists.
One Blavatsky tells far more about the human race than whole herd of psychologists. Her works offer massive proof that, even in the midst of what seems to be civilization, Neanderthal Man is still with us.
The Executive Secretary
From PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES, 1927, pp. 266–72
SOME time ago, encountering a bishop of my acquaintance on a train, I found him suffering from a bad cold and what used to be called a fit of the vapors. The cause of his dual disorder soon became manifest. He was smarting under the slings and arrows of executive secretaries. By virtue of his transcendental office, he was naturally a man of wide influence in the land, and so they tried to enlist his interest in their multitudinous and often nefarious schemes. Every morning at 8 o’clock, just as he was rolling over for a last brief dream of Heaven, he was dragged to the telephone to hear their night-letters, and there, on unlucky days, he stood for as much as half an hour, with his episcopal feet bare, and rage gradually mounting in his episcopal heart. Thus, on a cold morning, he had caught his cold, and thus he had acquired his bad humor.
This holy man, normally a most amiable fellow, told me that he believed the number of executive secretaries in the United States was increasing at the rate of at least a thousand a week. He said that he knew of 30,000 in the field of Christian and moral endeavor alone. He estimated that the average number of dues-paying members behind each one did not run much beyond half a dozen. Nine-tenths of them, he said, were supported by two or three well-heeled fanatics. These fanatics, mainly retired Babbitts and their wives, longed to make a noise in the world, and so escape oblivion. It was the essence of the executive secretary’s art and mystery to show them how to do it. Chiefly it was done by discovering bugaboos and giving chase to them. But secondarily it was done by hauling poor ecclesiastics out of bed on frosty mornings, and making them listen to endless night-letters about the woes of the Jews, the need of intensive missionary effort in Siam, the plot of Moscow to set up soviets in Lowell, Mass., and the absolute necessity of deeper waterways from the Lakes to the Atlantic.
The executive secretary is relatively new in the world. Like his colleague in well-paid good works, the Y.M.C.A. secretary, he has come into being since the Civil War. Compared to him, his predecessor of ante-bellum days was an amateur and an idiot. That predecessor had no comfortable office in a gaudy skyscraper, he got no lavish salary, and he had no juicy expense-account. On the contrary, he paid his own way, and, especially when he worked for Abolition, which was usually, he sometimes had to take a beating into the bargain. The executive secretary of today is something else again. He belongs to the order of live wires. He speaks the language of up-and-coming men, and is not sparing with it at the sessions of Rotary and Kiwanis. Not uncommonly a shady and unsuccessful newspaper reporter or a press-agent out of a job, he quickly becomes, by virtue of his craft, a Man of Vision. The cause that he represents for cash in hand is not merely virtuous; it is, nine times out of ten, divinely inspired. If it fails, then civilization will also fail.
It is a good job that he has—far better than legging it on the street for some gorilla of a city editor—far, far better than traversing the sticks ahead of a No.4 company. There is no need to get up at 7 a.m. and there is no need to fume and strain after getting up. Once three or four—or maybe even only one or two—easy marks with sound bank accounts have been snared, the new “national” – or perhaps it is “international” – association is on its legs, and all that remains is to have brilliant stationery printed, put in a sightly stenographer, and begin deluging bishops, editors and the gullible generally with literature. The executive secretary, if he has any literary passion in him, may prepare this literature himself, but more often he employs experts to do it. Once a year he launches a drive. But it is only for publicity. The original suckers pay the freight. When they wear out, the executive secretary starts a new association.
Such sharks now swarm in every American city. The office-buildings are full of them. Their prosperity depends very largely upon the singular complaisance of the newspapers. Some time ago Mr. Stanley Walker, a New York journalist of sense and experience, examined a typical copy of one of the great New York dailies. He found that there were sixty-four items of local news in it—and that forty-two of them could be plainly traced to executive secretaries, and other such space-grabbers. The executive secretary, of course, does not have at his editors crudely. He seldom accompanies his item of “news” with any intimation that he is paid a good salary for planting it, and he discourages all inquiries into the actual size, aims and personnel of his organization. Instead he commonly postures as the mere agent of men and women known to be earnest and altruistic philanthropists. These philanthropists are the suckers upon whom he feeds. They pay his salary, maintain his office, and keep up his respectability in newspaper offices. What do they get out of it themselves? In part, no doubt, an honest feeling that they are doing good: the executive secretary, in fact, has
to convince them of it before he is in a position to tackle the newspapers at all. But in part, also, they enjoy the publicity—and maybe other usufructs too. In the United States, indeed, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
Some time ago, sweating under this assault of executive secretaries, the editors of a great American newspaper hit upon a scheme of relief. It took the form of a questionnaire—something not seldom used, and to vast effect, by executive secretaries themselves. This questionnaire had a blank in which the executive secretary was asked to write his full name and address, and the amount of his annual salary. In other blanks there was room for putting down the total income and outgo of his association, with details of every item amounting to more than 1% of the whole, and for a full list of its contributors and employés, with the amount given by every one of the former contributing more than 1% and the salary received by every one of the latter getting more than 1%. This simple questionnaire cut down the mail received from executive secretaires by at least one half. Many of them did not answer at all. Many others, answering, revealed the not surprising fact that their high-sounding national and international organizations were actually small clubs of a few men and women, and that they themselves consumed most of the revenues. It is a device that might be employed effectively by other American newspapers. When the executive secretaries return their answers by mail, which is usually the case, they are under pressure to answer truthfully, for answering otherwise is using the mails to obtain money by fraud, and many worthy men are jugged at Atlanta and Leavenworth for that offense.
The Husbandman
From PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES, 1924, pp. 43–60.
First printed in the American Mercury, March, 1924, pp. 293–96
LET the farmer, so far as I am concerned, be damned forevermore. To Hell with him, and bad luck to him. He is a tedious fraud and ignoramus, a cheap rogue and hypocrite, the eternal Jack of the human pack. He deserves all that he ever suffers under our economic system, and more. Any city man, not insane, who sheds tears for him is shedding tears of the crocodile.
No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed, is known to students of the Anthropoidea. When the going is good for him he robs the rest of us up to the extreme limit of our endurance; when the going is bad he comes bawling for help out of the public till. Has anyone ever heard of a farmer making any sacrifice of his own interest, however slight, to the common good? Has anyone ever heard of a farmer practising or advocating any political idea that was not absolutely self-seeking—that was not, in fact, deliberately designed to loot the rest of us to his gain? Greenbackism, free silver, the government guarantee of prices, bonuses, all the complex fiscal imbecilities of the cow State John Baptists—these are the contributions of the virtuous husbandmen to American political theory. There has never been a time, in good seasons or bad, when his hands were not itching for more; there has never been a time when he was not ready to support any charlatan, however grotesque, who promised to get it for him. Only one issue ever fetches him, and that is the issue of his own profit. He must be promised something definite and valuable, to be paid to him alone, or he is off after some other mountebank. He simply cannot imagine himself as a citizen of a commonwealth, in duty bound to give as well as take; he can imagine himself only as getting all and giving nothing.
Yet we are asked to venerate this prehensile moron as the Ur-burgher, the citizen par excellence, the foundation-stone of the state! And why? Because he produces something that all of us must have—that we must get somehow on penalty of death. And how do we get it from him? By submitting helplessly to his unconscionable blackmailing—by paying him, not under any rule of reason, but in proportion to his roguery and incompetence, and hence to the direness of our need. I doubt that the human race, as a whole, would submit to that sort of high-jacking, year in and year out, from any other necessary class of men. But the farmers carry it on incessantly, without challenge or reprisal, and the only thing that keeps them from reducing us, at intervals, to actual famine is their own imbecile knavery. They are all willing and eager to pillage us by starving us, but they can’t do it because they can’t resist attempts to swindle each other. Recall, for example, the case of the cotton-growers in the South. Back in the 1920s they agreed among themselves to cut down the cotton acreage in order to inflate the price—and instantly every party to the agreement began planting more cotton in order to profit by the abstinence of his neighbors. That abstinence being wholly imaginary, the price of cotton fell instead of going up—and then the entire pack of scoundrels began demanding assistance from the national treasury—in brief, began demanding that the rest of us indemnity them for the failure of their plot to blackmail us.
The same demand is made sempiternally by the wheat farmers of the Middle West. It is the theory of the zanies who perform at Washington that a grower of wheat devotes himself to that banal art in a philanthropic and patriotic spirit—that he plants and harvests his crop in order that the folks of the cities may not go without bread. It is the plain fact that he raises wheat because it takes less labor than any other crop—because it enables him, after working no more than sixty days a year, to loaf the rest of the twelve months. If wheat-raising could be taken out of the hands of such lazy fellahin and organized as the production of iron or cement is organized, the price might be reduced by two-thirds, and still leave a large profit for entrepreneurs. But what would become of the farmers? Well, what rational man gives a hoot? If wheat went to $10 a bushel tomorrow, and all the workmen of the cities became slaves in name as well as in fact, no farmer in this grand land of freedom would consent voluntarily to a reduction of as much as ⅛ of a cent a bushel. “The greatest wolves,” said E. W. Howe, a graduate of the farm, “are the farmers who bring produce to town to sell.” Wolves? Let us not insult Canis lupus. I move the substitution of Hyæna hyæna.
Meanwhile, how much truth is in the common theory that the husbandman is harassed and looted by our economic system, that the men of the cities prey upon him—specifically, that he is the chronic victim of such devices as the tariff, railroad regulation, and the banking system? So far as I can make out, there is none whatever. The net effect of our present banking system is that the money accumulated by the cities is used to finance the farmers, and that they employ it to blackmail the cities. As for the tariff, is it a fact that it damages the farmer, or benefits him? Let us turn for light to the worst tariff act ever heard of in human history: that of 1922. It put a duty of 30 cents a bushel on wheat, and so barred out Canadian wheat, and gave the American farmer a vast and unfair advantage. For months running the difference in the price of wheat on the two sides of the American-Canadian border—wheat raised on farms not a mile apart—ran from 25 to 30 cents a bushel. Danish butter was barred out by a duty of 8 cents a pound—and the American farmer pocketed the 8 cents. Potatoes carried a duty of 50 cents a hundredweight—and the potato-growers of Maine, eager to mop up, raised such an enormous crop that the market was glutted, and they went bankrupt, and began bawling for government aid. High duties were put, too, upon meats, upon cheese, upon wool—in brief, upon practically everything that the farmer produced. But his profits were taken from him by even higher duties upon manufactured goods, and by high freight rates? Were they, indeed? There was, in fact, no duty at all upon many of the things he consumed. There was no duty, for example, upon shoes. The duty upon woolen goods gave a smaller advantage to the manufacturer than the duty on wool gave to the farmer. So with the duty on cotton goods. Automobiles were cheaper in the United States than anywhere else on earth. So were all agricultural implements. So were groceries. So were fertilizers.
But here I come to the brink of an abyss of statistics, and had better haul up. The enlightened reader is invited to investigate them for himself; they will bring him, I believe, some surprises. They by no means exhaust the case against the consecrated husbandman. I have said that the only political idea he can grasp is one wh
ich promises him a direct profit. It is, alas, not quite true: he can also grasp one which has the sole effect of annoying and damaging his enemy, the city man. The same mountebanks who get to Washington by promising to augment his gains and make good his losses devote whatever time is left over from that enterprise to saddling the rest of us with oppressive and idiotic laws, all hatched on the farm. There, where the cows low through the still night, and the jug of Peruna stands behind the stove, and bathing begins, as at Biarritz, with the vernal equinox—there is the reservoir of all the nonsensical legislation which makes the United States a buffoon among the great nations. It was among country Methodists, practitioners of a theology degraded almost to the level of voodooism, that Prohibition was invented and it was by country Methodists, nine-tenths of them actual followers of the plow, that it was fastened upon the rest of us, to the damage of our bank accounts, our dignity and our viscera. What lay under it, and under all the other crazy enactments of its category, was no more and no less than the yokel’s congenital and incurable hatred of the city man—his simian rage against everyone who, as he sees it, is having a better time than he is.
The same animus is visible in innumerable other moral statutes, all ardently supported by the peasantry. For example, the Mann Act. The aim of this amazing law, of course, is not to put down adultery; it is simply to put down that variety of adultery which is most agreeable. What got it upon the books was the constant gabble in the rural newspapers about the byzantine debaucheries of urban antinomians—rich stockbrokers who frequented Atlantic City from Friday to Monday, movie actors who traveled about the country with beautiful wenches, and so on. Such aphrodisiacal tales, read beside the kitchen-stove by hinds condemned to monogamous misery with stupid, unclean and ill-natured wives, naturally aroused in them a vast detestation of errant cockneys, and this detestation eventually rolled up enough force to attract the attention of the quacks who make laws at Washington. The result was the Mann Act. Since then a number of the cow States have passed Mann Acts of their own, usually forbidding the use of automobiles “for immoral purposes.” But there is nowhere a law forbidding the use of cow-stables, hay-ricks and other such familiar rustic ateliers of sin. That is to say, there is nowhere a law forbidding yokels to drag virgins into infamy by the crude technic practised since Tertiary times on the farms; there are only laws forbidding city youths to do it according to the refined technic of the great Babylons.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 41
