Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  The people of Wiseman, of course, are not really cut off from what is called civilization, despite the fact that they are snowed in from the middle of September to the middle of May, and surrounded by oceans of mud for two other months of every year. They get their groceries and a part of their clothing from the Outside, they have a wireless station to give them news, and at a pinch they can call an airplane from Fairbanks and be walking on paved streets in a couple of hours—that is, if the weather permits, which it often doesn’t. A United States marshal lives among them, to police them if necessary, and there is also a United States commissioner, to order them to jail in Fairbanks in case they attempt counterfeiting, the manufacture of bootleg oleomargarine, the robbery of the mails, or piracy upon the high seas. But beyond that they are sufficient unto themselves, and Mr. Marshall shows at length how peacefully they live together, how easily they escape most of the evils that go with life Outside, and how content they are to remain in their remote isolation.

  The seventy-seven white inhabitants (I include the colored brother among them, as Mr. Marshall does, for he is very light) offer a very fair cross-section of the people of the United States. Forty-five of them are native-born, and thirty-two are foreign-born, and among the latter are five Germans, five Scandinavians, three Herzogovinans, two Englishmen, two Austrians, and single representatives of Finland, Wales, Poland, Lithuania, Dalmatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and the Shetland Islands. Fifty of the seventy-seven are country-bred, and all save two are the masters of useful trades, ranging from that of the farmer to those of the carpenter, blacksmith, electrician, baker, lumberman and butcher. Most of them have been in the Arctic a long while, and so their average age is somewhat above that of the American at home. Seven enjoy the honor of being female, and of these ladies one is a trained nurse, one is a schoolma’am, and two on their arrival from Outside long ago were prostitutes, though they have long since reformed.

  The amazing thing about these people is how amicably they dwell together, and how little their apparent hardships oppress them. There is absolutely no color line among them. The lonely colored brother has every right, whether legal or social, that any other citizen has, and the Eskimos have precisely the same. When there is a communal dance, which is very often, every man, woman and child in the settlement is invited, regardless of race, color or wealth. A few of the inhabitants are pretty well heeled, but the great majority are poor, and there is no division along the line of money. If a given citizen falls into difficulties, and runs short of provender or other supplies, they are furnished instantly and without condescension by those who can spare them. If some one becomes ill and must be sent to Fairbanks or Seattle for treatment, the bills of the airplane man, the doctors and the hospital are shared by all, with each contributing according to his means. There is, of course, nothing approaching real communism. Every man’s property is his own, and his right to it is respected by everyone. But in times of stress everything finds its way into a common pot, and so there is never any destitution. During the Hoover Depression the people of Wiseman heard of it as they heard of the battles in Manchuria—as of something remote from their concerns, and a bit fantastic. They noticed that they got less than usual for their furs, but that was all they knew of it by direct evidence.

  In this far-flung and frostbitten Arcady the ordinary moral machinery of an American village is completely lacking. There is no church, and save for the inconspicuous devotions of a retired female missionary and a couple of pious Eskimos there is no regular practise of any religion. Most of the white males are skeptics, and so are most of the Eskimos, both male and female. In the palmy days of Prohibition no one paid any heed to it. The sexual behavior of adults is thought to be their own business, and no one presumes to harbor unfavorable views of it. Some of the Eskimo ladies are amiable, and now and then one of them falls in love with a white gentleman to the tune of a more or less public uproar, including the composition of amorous doggerel. But it is not considered seemly to denounce her disposition of her person, and hence there is no scandal, though people may remark her doings in a quietly satirical manner.

  Crime is almost unknown in the Koyukuk country. At the height of the Alaska gold-rush it had a great many more inhabitants than it has now, but in its whole history there have been but three murders, one committed by a crazy man and the other two by a prospector in defense of his claim. There have been some fights but not many, and none of a serious nature; sentiment in the community is strongly opposed to quarrelling. Thefts are very rare, and the largest on record involved but $150. The wealth of most of the people is in the form of gold-dust, which is easily purloined, but they do not fear robbers, and never lock their doors when they leave home. Rape is regarded as a heinous crime and if there were ever a case of it the offender would be roughly handled, but there has never been a case. Adultery is unknown as either crime or sin, for public opinion in Wiseman holds that it is nobody’s business save that of the contracting parties, and even the aggrieved spouse is expected to take it in a placid and philosophical manner.

  Mr. Marshall gave the Binet-Simon test to forty-five of the adults of the settlement, and to most of the children. He found an extraordinarily large proportion of high IQ’s. The Wisemannites, in fact, turned out to be on the general mental level of Harvard professors, members of the General Staff of the Army, and the superior minority of bootleggers, investment bankers and magazine editors. Only fourteen per cent fell below the American average, whereas forty-six per cent ranked above it. This fact, I believe, offers a plausible explanation of their felicity. They are naturally intelligent, and there is no agency among them to war upon their intelligence, and make it dangerous. They have no newspapers. They have no politicians. Their police force is rudimentary and impotent. Above all, they are not cursed with theologians. Thus they are free to be intelligent, and what is more, to be decent.

  Bring On the Clowns

  From THE BUTTE BASHKIRTSEFF, PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp. 127–28

  A mongrel and inferior people, incapable of any spiritual aspiration above that of second-rate English colonials, we seek refuge inevitably in the one sort of superiority that the lower castes of men can authentically boast, to wit, superiority in docility, in credulity, in resignation, in morals. We are the most moral race in the world; there is not another that we do not look down upon in that department; our confessed aim and destiny as a nation is to inoculate them all with our incomparable rectitude. In the last analysis, all ideas are judged among us by moral standards; moral values are our only permanent tests of worth, whether in the arts, in politics, in philosophy or in life itself. Even the instincts of man, so intrinsically immoral, so innocent, are fitted with moral false-faces. That bedevilment by sex ideas which punishes continence, so abhorrent to nature, is converted into a moral frenzy, pathological in the end. The impulse to cavort and kick up one’s legs, so healthy, so universal, is hedged in by incomprehensible taboos; it becomes stealthy, dirty, degrading. The desire to create and linger over beauty, the sign and touchstone of man’s rise above the brute, is held down by doubts and hesitations; when it breaks through it must be so by orgy and explosion, half ludicrous and half pathetic. Our function, we like to believe, is to teach and inspire the world. We are wrong. Our function is to amuse the world. We are the Bryan, the Henry Ford, among the nations.

  II. POLITICS

  The Politician Under Democracy

  From NOTES ON DEMOCRACY, 1926, pp. 104–08

  HE IS A man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of the boot-polish. He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his inferiors in sense. His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses. He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him. I do not describe the democratic politician at his inordi
nate worst; I describe him as he is encountered in the full sunshine of normalcy. He may be, on the one hand, a cross-roads idler striving to get into the State Legislature by grace of the local mortgage-sharks and evangelical clergy, or he may be, on the other, the President of the United States. It is almost an axiom that no man may make a career in politics in the Republic without stooping to such ignobility: it is as necessary as a loud voice. Now and then, to be sure, a man of sounder self-respect may make a beginning, but he seldom gets very far. Those who survive are nearly all tarred, soon or late, with the same stick. They are men who, at some time or other, have compromised with their honor, either by swallowing their convictions or by whooping for what they believe to be untrue. They are in the position of the chorus-girl who, in order to get her humble job, has had to admit the manager to her person. And the old birds among them, like chorus-girls of long experience, come to regard the business resignedly and even complacently. It is the price that a man who loves the clapper-clawing of the vulgar must pay for it under the democratic system. He becomes a coward and a trimmer ex officio. Where his dignity was in the days of his innocence there is now only a vacuum in the wastes of his subconscious. Vanity remains to him, but not pride.

  Thus the ideal of democracy is reached at last: it has become a psychic impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the Federal Union, save by a combination of miracles that must tax the resourcefulness even of God. But despite that grim dilemma there are still idealists, chiefly professional Liberals, who argue that it is the duty of a gentleman to go into politics—that there is a way out of the quagmire in that direction. The remedy, it seems to me, is quite as absurd as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate. When they argue for it, they simply argue, in words but little changed, that the remedy for prostitution is to fill the bawdy-houses with virgins. The same alternatives confront the political aspirant who is what is regarded in America as a gentleman—that is, who is one not susceptible to open bribery in cash. The moment his leg goes over the political fence, he finds the mob confronting him, and if he would stay within he must adapt himself to its tastes and prejudices. In other words, he must learn all the tricks of the regular mountebanks. When the mob pricks up its ears and begins to whinny, he must soothe it with balderdash. He must allay its resentment of the fact that he is washed behind the ears. He must anticipate its crazes, and join in them vociferously. He must regard its sensitiveness on points of morals, and get what advantage he can out of his anæsthesia on points of honor. More, he must make terms with the mob-masters already performing upon its spines, chiefly agents of prehensile minorities. If he neglects these devices he is swiftly heaved over the fence, and his career in statecraft is at an end.

  The Joboisie

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 19, 1923

  Practically all the elective offices in the United States, indeed, up to and including that of President, are filled by men who are just as much professional job-holders as the most forlorn clerk in the office of the chief clerk to the assistant secretary to the Fifth Assistant Postmaster-General. They had other jobs before they got their present jobs, and they will seek yet other jobs the moment their terms expire. It is almost impossible to think of an exception. Even Woodrow Wilson, who had but one public office before he became President—even Dr. Wilson, at the end of his second term, was simultaneously a candidate for a third term, for the presidency of the League of Nations, and for the first vacancy in the Trinity.

  The Men Who Rule Us

  1 Grant

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Sept. 30, 1931

  Intelligence has been commoner among American Presidents than high character, but Grant ran against the stream by having a sort of character without any visible intelligence whatever. He was almost the perfect military man—dogged, devoted and dumb. In the White House he displayed an almost inconceivable stupidity. Whatever was palpably untrue convinced him instantly, and whatever was crooked seemed to him to be noble. If the American people could have kept him out of the presidency by prolonging the Civil War until 1877, it would have been an excellent investment. A more honest man never lived, but West Point and bad whiskey had transformed his cortex into a sort of soup.

  2 Harding

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 19, 1923

  No one on this earth has ever heard the Hon. Mr. Harding say anything intelligent. No one has ever heard him repeat an intelligent saying of anyone else without making complete nonsense of it. In the coining and dissemination of words that are absolutely devoid of sensible meaning, in the wholesale emission of sonorous and deafening bilge—in brief, in the manufacture and utterance of precisely the stuff that the plain people admire and venerate—he has no peer under Heaven.

  3 Coolidge

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 9, 1925

  The man’s merits, in the Babbitt view, are immense and incomparable. He seems, indeed, scarcely like a man at all, but more like some miraculous visitation or act of God. He is the ideal made visible, if not audible—perfection put into a cutaway coat and trotted up and down like a mannequin in a cloak and suit atelier. Nor was there any long stress of training him—no season of doubt and misgiving. Nature heaved him forth full-blown, like a new star shot into the heavens. In him the capitalistic philosophy comes to its perfect and transcendental form. Thrift, to him, is the queen of all the virtues. He respects money in each and every one of its beautiful forms—pennies, nickels, dimes, dollars, five-dollar bills, and so on ad infinitum. He venerates those who have it. He believes that they have wisdom. He craves the loan and use of that wisdom. He invites them to breakfast, and listens to them. The things they revere, he reveres. The things they long for, he longs to give them.

  4 Mussolini

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 3, 1931

  One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a politician. Indeed, he is probably the most perfect specimen of the genus politician on view in the world today. His career has been impeccably classical. Beginning life as a ranting Socialist of the worst type, he abjured Socialism the moment he saw better opportunities for himself on the other side, and ever since then he has devoted himself gaudily to clapping Socialists in jail, filling them with castor oil, sending blacklegs to burn down their houses, and otherwise roughing them. Modern politics has produced no more adept practitioner. He is its Shakespeare, its Michelangelo, its Bach.

  Liberty and Democracy

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, April 13, 1925

  Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter. A democratic state may profess to venerate the name, and even pass laws making it officially sacred, but it simply cannot tolerate the thing. In order to keep any coherence in the governmental process, to prevent the wildest anarchy in thought and act, the government must put limits upon the free play of opinion. In part, it can reach that end by mere propaganda, by the bald force of its authority—that is, by making certain doctrines officially infamous. But in part it must resort to force, i.e., to law. One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually, their aim is to penalize heretical opinions. At least ninety-five Americans out of every 100 believe that this process is honest and even laudable; it is practically impossible to convince them that there is anything evil in it. In other words, they cannot grasp the concept of liberty. Always they condition it with the doctrine that the state, i.e., the majority, has a sort of right of eminent domain in acts, and even in ideas—that it is perfectly free, whenever it is so disposed, to forbid a man to say what he honestly believes. Whenever his notions show signs of becoming “dangerous,” i.e., of being heard and attended to, it exercises that prerogative. And the overwhelming majority of citizens believe in supporting it in the outrage.

  Incl
uding especially the Liberals, who pretend—and often quite honestly believe—that they are hot for liberty. They never really are. Deep down in their hearts they know, as good democrats, that liberty would be fatal to democracy—that a government based upon shifting and irrational opinion must keep it within bounds or run a constant risk of disaster. They themselves, as a practical matter, advocate only certain narrow kinds of liberty—liberty, that is, for the persons they happen to favor. The rights of other persons do not seem to interest them. If a law were passed tomorrow taking away the property of a large group of presumably well-to-do persons—say, the bond-holders of the railroads—without compensation and even without colorable reason, they would not oppose it; they would be in favor of it. The liberty to have and hold property is not one that they recognize. They believe only in the liberty to envy, hate and loot the man who has it.

  Leaves from a Note-book

  1

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 12, 1923