THE VINTAGE
MENCKEN
Copyright 1917, 1918, 1920, 1924, 1926, 1927, 193
1941, 1943, 1943, 1949, 1955 by Alfred A. Knop
rights reserved. Distributed in Canada by Random I
Canada Tjmif^ Toronto. Manufactured in the Unitt
of America.
AN INTRODUCTION TO H. L. MENCKEN
BY Attstair Cootp
This book was put together in a period which, in spite
of the anxious humility forced on us by the atom and
hydrogen bombs, has much in common with the 1920*1
that Mencken came to immortalize and to deflate. Since
his day there are slicker types of demagogues in
politics and new schools of necromancy in advertising,
show business, industry, psychiatry, and public rela-
tions, to go no further. Following their antics in these
later days as a newspaper reporter, I have often thought
that Mencken should be living and writing at this hour*
So this volume is meant incidentally to recall to die
tamed radicals who cut their intellectual teeth on him
what manner of man he was; but mainly to introduce
to a generation that never read him a writer who more
and more strikes me as the master craftsman of daily
journalism in the twentieth century. He has written
nothing since his stroke in 1948, and it is surely no se-
cret that he ceased to be a missionary force long before
ALISTAIB COOKE
then. To be precise, it was the Roosevelt era that
brought him to the mat.
At first glance, the New Deal might appear to offer
just the sort of target he loved: a big popular idol, an
idealist in the Wilsonian tradition who was yet undis-
mayed by the shifts and audacities necessary to get his
own way; moreover, a liberal with the further stigma
of having gone back on a patrician upbringing for "the
people's" sake. But as a matter of record the New Deal
was Mencken's Waterloo, and Roosevelt his Wellington.
To jeer at democratic government when it paid off in
filet mignon and a car in every garage was one thing.
To pipe the same tune in the unfunny days of I2>-
000,000 unemployed was another. Mencken's thunder
issued from an immaterial mind, but also from a full
stomach. In the thirties it impressed only those who
feared die hungrier chorus of die breadlines. It was al-
ways plain that Mencken had a clear eye for the reali-
ties that conceived the Roosevelt period. He saw that
the way ahead for America lay between no such simple
choices as he had laid down between "the aristocrat**
the "first-rate man** speaking his mind and the "boo-
boisie" that had no mind to speak. But this thesis was
his specialty, and in a vulgar time it had made him fa-
mous. He naturally came to hate the man and the shift
of history that made it an anachronism. The decline of
his prestige was very swift, and he was honest enough
to recognize it. In the middle 1930*5 he all but aban-
doned the preoccupation of his palmy days, his self-
chosen trade as "a critic of ideas.** He turned to his old
hobby of the American language, rewrote once again
the original volume^ and, to clinch his reputation if
it was ever in doubt as the classical authority on the
English of the United States, put out in the next ten
years two magnificent Supplements to the parent work.
As he moved into his sixties he amused himself by put-
ting on paper a few recollections of his childhood in
Baltimore. These fugitive magazine pieces blossomed
ri
An Introduction to H. L. Mencken
into a three-volume autobiography, completed by the
end of 1943. After the war he concerned himself almost
wholly with his notes on the language, but he roused
himself in 1948 to cover the presidential nominating
conventions. In the fall of that year he came down with
a cerebral thrombosis.
When it seemed, seven years ago, that Mencken was
on the point of death, I first thought of collecting the
best of his work, putting the stress on the newspaper
pieces that had outlived more pretentious stuff and on
the memoirs in which emerged the beautiful, well-tem-
pered, and funny style of his later years, My obituary
of him, written in dutiful haste on a November night
while its subject lay in an oxygen tent, is happily still
in galley proof in the home office of the Manchester
Guardian. And since Mencken was born in 1880, what
was intended as a memorial tribute has turned into a
seventy-fifth birthday present.
For the newcomers to this prince of journalists, a
brief account of his life, from his birth into his prime,
may be in order. Henry Louis Mencken was born on
September 12, 1880, in Baltimore, Maryland. His family,
which he was proud to discover was in the collateral
line of one Luder Mencke, a learned lawyer who em-
ployed Johann Sebastian Bach as a choirmaster, left
Germany in the turbulent exodus of 1848, and his
grandfather settled in the German section of Baltimore
as a cigar-maker. His son, August, in time started his
own tobacco business, which did very well indeed and
would have cushioned a more docile son through man-
hood, matrimony, and middle age. But young Henry,
the first born of three sons and a daughter, discovered
Huckleberry Finn at the age of nine, an event he was
later to describe as "the most stupendous of my whole
life."
It was enough to turn him for a few absorbed years
into a bookworm, until in his late teens he aban-
doned his heavy reading "in favor of life itself.** The
vii
ALISTAIB COOKB
marvels of the ordinary life around him provoked in
him a warm desire "to lay in all the worldly wisdom of
a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, and a
midwife.** Newspaper work appeared to him to offer
this reward in the shortest order, and on the Monday
morning after his father died, in January 1899, he put
on his best suit and appeared in the city room of the
Baltimore Morning Herald. There was nothing for
him, and on the many nights he came hopefully back
he was waved away by the night editor. But he turned
up mechanically every night for a month and was at
last sent off to see how a rural suburb had survived a
blizzard. He found nothing more remarkable than the
rumor of a horse-stealing, a fiveJine report of which,
however, appeared in the Herald next morning, to the
ecstasy of its author (see page 26).
From then on, Mencken would be a newspaperman
all his life, and it was the tide he liked best. Being also
a man proud of his roots, he resisted through the
most fabulous fame in American journalistic history-
all allurements to move to New York, Chicago, and
other metropolises. He stayed in Baltimore and of Bal-
timore, continuing to live to this day in the modest
house his family had taken him to when he was three
years old* After six years on the Herald, he moved in
his twenties to the Baltimore Sunpapers, with whom
he stayed on and off as an editorial writer, columnist,
and reporter down to the time of his stroke. Even
when he was editing the Smart Set and the American
Mercury, he remained never more than a few nights a
week in New York, and got on the train as soon as pos-
sible to repair from what he called "a third-rate Baby-
lon* to the frowzier charms of Baltimore and "the im-
mense protein factory of Chesapeake Bay. 1 *
Almost from the start Mencken had a reputation
among Baltimore newsmen as a boy wonder, in the
sense that he learned everything that can be practically
learned about a newspaper in a few years, and that hie
_
0m
An Introduction to E. L. Mencken
was extraordinarily industrious and fertile. But he
showed in his early youth very few gleams of the io-
vective style that was to make him within a decade or
two the terror of the lawmakers, the churches, the
businessmen, and the respectable citizenry, first of Bal-
timore and then of the whole Republic. But the fer-
ment was stewing in him and needed only some strong
precipitate to cause him to explode. Nietzsche and Ber-
nard Shaw were the missing sparks. He discovered
them in his mid-twenties, matched himself favorably
against their Olympian stature^ and decided on his life
work: to be the native American Voltaire, the enemy
of all puritans, the heretic in the Sunday school, die
one-man demolition crew of the genteel tradition,
the unregenerate neighborhood brat who stretches a
string in the alley to trip the bourgeoisie on its pious
homeward journey.
The Sunpapcrs soon gave Mencken, aside from his
reporting duties, a daily column in which to let off
steam. And he at once began to scald all the most re-
spected institutions of the land, peeling off with a
daily vengeance the layers of Victorianism that still en-
crusted American and English life. He did this in a
prose that started as a drunken parody of almost any
iconoclast he admired. Nietzsche suggested the out-
landish metaphors, Macaulay the feigned omniscience^
Ambrose Bierce the sheer shockability, and some local
journalistic oldsters the flamboyance that was then
fashionable in American newspaper writing. Shaw
taught him most, and it is possible that the stranger
to American writing will at first think of Mencken,
as I did, as a windier, inferior Shaw* At his best he
offered to the young something of the same tonic:
the joy of seeing the enemy soundly hog-tied and hand-
cuffed, the sense of sharing the empyrean with an arch-
angel. Both men are superior popular educators who
kick up a terrific dust on the intellectual middle pla-
teau between the philistine and the first-rate scholar*
ALI8TAIB COOKS
What makes both of them more memorable than many
of their betters is their style.
But the pleasures of Shaw's prose, like the pleasures
of most sermons, are a good deal more malicious than
they are advertised. And without wanting to prolong
a comparison that is invidious, and perhaps scandalously
unfair to Shaw's superior intellect and satirical power,
I should like to note that Mencken, for one thing, is
devoid of malice, for another of puritanism, and so he
wholly lacks the shrill spinster note that in the end
wearies all but the most dedicated of Shaw's disciples*
Shaw is a drum-beater, an evangelist, a hedgehog (in
Isaiah Berlin's vivid metaphor) who relates everything
he sees and feels to a central vision of what he believes
life ought to be. Mencken not only had an innate, foxy
suspicion of all hedgehogs; his attempts to focus into a
single theory his observations on politics and beliefs are
defeated by his insight into the politicians who practice
the politics and the human beings who hold the beliefs*
And if this is a defeat, it is also the triumph of a first-rate
fox over a second-rate hedgehog. What has stood the test
of time and the exhaustion of the Mencken cult is not*
it seems to me, his orderly essays on religion or his
healthy but noisy crusade against the genteel tradition; it
is his reflections on "the sex uproar" of the Twenties^
his reports of political conventions and evolution trials,
an evening with Valentino, the memory of a minor revo-
lution in Cuba, a devastating comment on the Gray*
Snyder murder indeed, much of what book-writers with
one foot already in obscurity call "transient" journalism*
The one prepared indictment that keeps its clarion fresh-
ness through the years is that against the plutocracy. This
may be because every time the United States is launched
on a new prosperity, the plutocrats take to the bridge
again to dictate our values while the country-club guests
reappear to set the tone of our seagoing manners. The
long peroration to "The National Letters," written in
1920, is a classic diagnosis of a disease that seems to
An Introduction to H. L. Mencken
afflict us about once every quarter-century; and a
Mencken twenty years younger, writing it in 1950, need
hardly have blotted a sentence.
Looking over the whole range of his work today, we
can see that if he was overrated in his day as a thinker
(though not more so than his victims), he was vasdy
underrated as a humorist with one deadly sensible eye
on the behavior of the human animal. He helped along
this misconception by constandy reminding people that
he was a critic of ideas, which was true only as the
ideas were made flesh. He was, in fact, a humorist by
instinct and a superb craftsman by temperament. So
that when all his private admirations were aped and
exhausted, there emerged the style of H. L. Mencken,
purified and mellowed in later years, a style flexible,
fancy-free, ribald, and always beautifully lucid: a native
product unlike any other style in the language.
This Introduction is beginning to turn into an essay,
and I had better keep the reader no longer from the
pleasures to come. I wanted to avoid yet another col-
lection of random pieces with little shape or order. The
Mencken bed-book has already appeared. It is H. L.'s
own huge anthology known as A Mencken Chrestoin-
athy. I have followed his sensible instinct here only in
reprinting almost nothing of his youthful work and
very little of his political musings later than 1933.
But I wanted to do something that was beyond die
purpose of the Chrestomathy, namely to give to the
new Mencken reader a running account of his life
as he wrote and lived it. This means that I have begun
with his own memories of his childhood and early
newspaper days, even though they were written as
late as the 1940'$, in his most mature style. Similarly,
I have sandwiched in his account of a newspaper ex-
pedition to the Caribbean at the period when the
experience came his way. The only part of his writing
that is not represented here is his immense contribu-
tion to the study of the language. There are many short
ALISTAtB COOKS
delightful passages and a flick of mischief on nearly
every page, but his linguistic writing is most impressive
by the sheer mass and sustained excellence of its schol-
arship. Its quality can no more be suggested in a few
pages than the suspense of The Emperor Jones can be
conveyed by a few tappings of the tom-tom that is
heard throughout the play.
The introductory notes are mostly Mencken's own.
Where they are not, I have initialed them. It remains
for me only to say how grateful I am to Hamilton
Owens and Clement Vitek for letting me raid the files
of the Sunpapers at indecently short notice; and to the
stalwart Blanche and Alfred Knopf for their philosoph-
ical tolerance of a working newspaperman who is al-
ways on the wing. Finally, I must express my gratitude
and affection to the master himself, who blessed this
project from the rather helpless sidelines on which he
sits these days with so much humor and fortitude.
A.C.
Summer 1955
CONTENTS
AN INTRODUCTION TO H. L. MENCKEN by ALISTAIR COOKE V
1. INTRODUCTION TO THE UNIVERSE 3
2. THE BALTIMORE OF THE EIGHTIES 4
3. ADVENTURES OF A Y.M.C.A. LAD l8
4. TEXT FOR NEWSPAPER DAYS 25
5. FIRST APPEARANCE IN PRINT 26
6. RECOLLECTIONS OF NOTABLE COPS 27
7. THEODORE DREISER 35
8. GORE IN THE CARIBBEES 57
9. PATER PATRIAE ft]
10. QUID EST VERTTAS 68
11. THE ART ETERNAL 69
12. THE SKEPTIC J$
13. THE INCOMPARABLE BUZZ-SAW 74
ty A BUND SPOT 75
15. ABRAHAM LINCOLN 77
I& LODGE 80
17. CAVIA COBAYA 84
18. THE NATIONAL LETTERS 85
Ip. STAR-SPANGLED MEN 106
20. THE ARCHANGEL WOODROW Zl6
21. THE LIBERTINE 120
22. THE LURE OF BEAUTY 122
23. THE GOOD MAN 126
CONTENTS
24. THE ANGLO-SAXON 127
ag, HOLT WRIT 137
AFTERTHOUGHTS
26. MASTERS OF TONE 14!
27. THE NOBLE EXPERIMENT &|2
28. THE ARTIST 146
29. CHIROPRACTIC 148
JO. THE HILLS OF 2ION 153
31. IN MEMORIAM: w. j. B. 161
32. THE AUTHOK AT WORK 167
33- VALENTINO 170
34* A GLANCE AHEAD X74
35. THE LIBIDO FOR THE UGLY 177
36. TRAVAIL l82
37. A GOOD MAN GONE WRONG 185
38. THE COMEDIAN l88
39- MR. JUSTICE HOLMES 189
40. THE CALAMITY OF APPOMAITOX 197
41* THE NEW ARCHlT.bCTU.RB 201
42. THE NOMINATION OF F. D. R. 204
43. A GOOD MAN IN A BAD TRADE 215
44. COOUDGE 219
45- THE WALLACE PARANOIA 223
46. MENCKEN'S LAST STAND 227
47* SENTENTIAE 23!
48. EXEUNT OMNES 233
49* EPITAPH 24O
&VO
HLM*HLM*HLM*HLM
In the following pages a * indicates an omission
from the text as originally published*
INTRODUCTION TO THE UNIVERSE
11883}
(FROM Happy Day*, 1940)
the instant I first became aware of
the cosmos we all infest I was sitting in my mother's
lap and blinking at a great burst of lights, some of
them red and others green, but most of them only the
bright yellow of flaring gas. The time: the evening of
Thursday, September 13, 1883, which was the day after
my third birthday. The place: a ledge outside the sec-
ond-story front windows of my father's cigar factory
at 368 Baltimore street^ Baltimore, Maryland, USA*
fenced off from space and disaster by a sign bearing the
majestic legend: AUG. MENCKEN & BRO. The occa-
sion: the third and last annual Summer Nights* Garni*
val of the Order of Orioles, a society that adjourned
sine die, with a thumping deficit, the very next morn-
ing, and has since been forgotten by the whole human
race.
At that larval stage of my life, of course, I knew noth-
ing whatever about the Order of Orioles, just as I knew
Zl
ALISTA1B COOKS
delightful passages and a flick of mischief on nearly
every page, but his linguistic writing is most impressive
by the sheer mass and sustained excellence of its schol-
arship. Its quality can no more be suggested in a few
pages than the suspense of The Emperor Jones can be
conveyed by a few tappings of the tom-tom that is
heard throughout the play.
The introductory notes are mostly Mencken's own.
Where they are not^ I have initialed them. It remains
for me only to say how grateful I am to Hamilton
Owens and dement Vitek for letting me raid the files
of the Sunpapers at indecently short notice; and to the
stalwart Blanche and Alfred Knopf for their philosoph-
ical tolerance of a working newspaperman who is al-
ways on the wing. Finally, I must express my gratitude
and affection to the master himself, who blessed this
project from the rather helpless sidelines on which he
sits these days with so much humor and fortitude.
A.C.
Summer 1955
CONTENTS
AN INTRODUCTION TO H. L. MENCKEN by AUSTATR COOKE V
1. INTRODUCTION TO THE UNIVERSE 3
2. THE BALTIMORE OF THE EIGHTIES 4
3. ADVENTURES OF A Y-M.OA. LAD l8
4* TEXT FOR NEWSPAPER DATS 25
5* FIRST APPEARANCE IN PRINT 26
& RECOLLECTIONS OF NOTABLE COPS 27
7. THEODORE DREISER 35
8. GORE IN THE CARIBBEES 57
9. PATER PATRIAB (f]
10. QUID EST VERTTAS 68
11. THE ART ETERNAL 69
12* THE SKEPTIC 73
13. THE INCOMPARABLE BUZZ-SAW 74
14* A BUND SPOT 75
X5. ABRAHAM LINCOLN 77
l6. LODGE 80
17* CAVIA COBAYA 84
28. THE NATIONAL LETTERS 85
2<). STAR-SPANGLED MEN 206
20. THE ARCHANGEL WOODROW Il6
21. THE LIBERTINE 220
22. THE LURE OF BEAUTT 122
23. THE GOOD MAN 226
CONTENTS
24. THE ANGLO-SAXON 127
2g. HOLY WRIT 137
AFTERTHOUGHTS
26. MASTERS OF TONE 14!
27. THE NOBLE EXPERIMENT 1^2
28. THE ARTIST 146
29. CHIROPRACTIC 148
30. THE HILLS OF ZION 153
31. IN MEMORIAM: w. j. B. 161
32. THE AUTHOR AT WORK 167
33- VALENTINO 170
34* A GLANCE AHEAD 174
35* THE LIBIDO FOR THE UGLY 177
36. TRAVAIL l82
37* A GOOD MAN GONE WRONG 185
38. THE COMEDIAN 1 88
39- MR. JUSTICE HOLMES 189
4O. THE CALAMITY OF APPOMATTOX 197
41* THE NEW ARCHITECTURE 2OI
42. THE NOMINATION OF F. D. R. 204
43* A GOOD MAN IN A BAB TRADE 215
44- COOLIDGE 219
45* THE WALLACE PARANOIA 223
46. MENCKEN'S LAST STAND 227
47 SENTENTIAE 23!
48. EXEUNT OMNES 233
49* EPITAPH
HLM*HLM*HLM*HLM
In the following pages a * indicates an omission
from the text as originally published*
INTRODUCTION TO THE UNIVEESE
[188S]
Happy Vays, 1940)
the instant I first became aware of
the cosmos we all infest I was sitting in my mother's
lap and blinking at a great burst of lights, some of
them red and others green, but most of them only the
bright yellow of flaring gas. The time: the evening of
Thursday, September 13, 1883, which was the day after
my third birthday. The place: a ledge outside the sec-
ond-story front windows of my father's cigar factory
at 368 Baltimore street, Baltimore, Maryland, U.SA!,
fenced off from space and disaster by a sign bearing the
majestic legend: AUG. MENCKEN & BRO. The occa-
sion: the third and last appeal Summer Nights* Carni-
val of the Order of Orioles, a society that adjourned
sine die, with a thumping deficit, the very next morn-
ing, and has since been forgotten by the whole human
race.
At that larval stage of my life, of course, I knew noth-
ing whatever about the Order of Orioles, just as I knew
3
H. L. MENCKEN
nothing whatever about the United States, though I
had been born to their liberties, and was entitled to the
protection o their army and navy. All I was aware of,
emerging from the unfathomable abyss of nonentity,
was die fact that the world I had just burst into seemed
to be very brilliant, and that peeping at it over my fa-
ther's sign was somewhat hard on my still gelatinous
bones. So I made signals of distress to my mother and
was duly hauled into her lap, where I first dozed and
then snored away until the lights went out, and the
family buggy wafted me home^ stiL asleep*
THE BALTIMORE OF THE EIGHTIES
[188ffs]
(FXOM Happy Days, 1940)
The city into which I was born in 1880 had a
reputation all over for what the English, in their real-
estate advertising, are fond of calling the amenities. So
far as I have been able to discover by a labored search o
contemporary travel-books, no literary tourist, however
waspish he may have been about Washington, Niagara
Falls, the prairies of the West, or even Boston and
New York, ever gave Baltimore a bad notice. They
all agreed, often with lubricious gloats and gurgles, (a)
that its indigenous victualry was unsurpassed in the
Republic, (*) that its native Caucasian females of all
ages up to thirty-five were of incomparable pulchritude^
and as amiable as they were lovely, and (c) that its
home-life was spacious, charming, 'full of creature com*
forts, and highly conducive to die facile and orderly
propagation of the species.
There was some truth in all these articles, but
The Baltimore of the Eighties
regret to have to add, too much. Perhaps the one that
came closest to meeting scientific tests was the first.
Baltimore lay very near the immense protein factory of
Chesapeake Bay, and out of the bay it ate divinely. I
well recall the time when prime hard crabs of the chan-
nel species, blue in color, at least eight inches in length
along the shell, and with snow-white meat almost a$
firm as soap, were hawked in Rollins street of Summer
mornings at ten cents a dozen. The supply seemed to be
almost unlimited, even in the polluted waters of the
Patapsco river, which stretched up fourteen miles from
the bay to engulf the slops of the Baltimore canneries
and fertilizer factories. Any poor man could go down
to the banks of the river, armed with no more than a
length of stout cord, a home-made net on a pole, and a
chunk of cat's meat, and come home in a couple of
hours with enough crabs to feed his family for two
days. Soft crabs, of course, were scarcer and harder to
snare^ and hence higher in price, but not much. More
than once, hiding behind my mother's apron, I helped
her to buy them at the door for two-and-a-twelfth cents
apiece. And there blazes in my memory like a comet
the day when she came home from Rollins market
complaining with strange and bitter indignation that
the fishmongers there including old Harris, her favor-
itehad begun to sell shad roe. Hitherto, stretching
back to 'the first settlement of Baltimore Town, they
had always thrown it in with the fish. Worse, she re-
ported that they had now entered upon an illegal com-
bination to lift the price of the standard shad of twenty
inches enough for the average family, and to spare
from forty cents to half a dollar. When my father came
home for lunch and heard this incredible news, he pre-
dicted formally that the Repijblic would never survive
the Nineteenth Century.
Terrapin was not common eating in those days, any
more than it is in these, but that was mainly because
few women liked it^ just as few like k today. It was
S
H. L. MENCKEN
then assumed that their distaste was due to the fact that
its consumption involved a considerable kvage with
fortified wines, but they still show no honest en-
thusiasm for it, though Prohibition converted many o
them into very adept and eager boozers. It was not, in
my infancy, within the reach of the proletariat, but it
was certainly not beyond the bourgeoisie. My mother,
until well past the turn of the century, used to buy pint
jars of the picked meat in Hollins market, with plenty
of rich, golden eggs scattered through it, for a dollar a
jar. For the same price it was possible to obtain two
wild ducks of respectable if not royal species and the
open season ran gloriously from die instant the first
birds wandered in from Labrador to the time the last
stragglers set sail for Brazil. So far as I can remember,
my mother never bought any of these ducks, but that
was only because the guns, dogs and eagle eye of my
uncle Henry, who lived next door, kept us oversupplicd
all Winter.
Garden-truck was correspondingly cheap, and so was
fruit in season. Out of season we seldom saw it at alL
Oranges, which cost sixty cents a dozen, came in at
Christmas, and not before. We had to wait until May
for strawberries, asparagus, fresh peas, carrots, and even
radishes. But when the huge, fragrant strawberries of
Anne Arundel county (pronounced Ann'ranl) ap-
peared at last they went for only five cents a box. All
Spring the streets swarmed with hucksters selling
such things: they called themselves, not hucksters, but
Arabs (with the first a as in day), and announced their
wares with loud, raucous, unintelligible cries, much
worn down by phonetic decay. In Winter the principal
howling was done by colored men selling shucked oys-
ters out of huge cans. In the dark backward and abysm
of time their cry must have been simply "Oysters!", but
generations of Aframerican larynxes had debased it to
"Awneeeeeeel", with the final e*s prolonged until the
vendor got out of breath. He always wore a blue-and-
6
The Baltimore of the Eighties
white checked apron, aad that apron was also the uni-
form of the colored butlers of the Baltimore gentry
when engaged upon their morning work sweeping the
sidewalk, scouring the white marble front steps, polish-
ing up tie handle of the big front door, and bragging
about their white folks to their colleagues to port and
starboard.
Oysters were not too much esteemed in the Balti-
more of my youth, nor are they in the Baltimore of
today. They were eaten, of course, but not often, for
serving them raw at the table was beyond the usual do-
mestic technic of the time, and it was difficult to cook
them in any fashion that made them consonant with
contemporary ideas of elegance. Fried, they were fit only
to be devoured at church oyster-suppers, or gobbled in
oyster-bays by drunks wandering home from scenes of
revelry. The more celebrated oyster-houses of Balti-
morefor example, Kelly's in Eutaw street were pa-
tronized largely by such lamentable characters. It was
their playful custom to challenge foolish-looking
strangers to wash down a dozen raw Chincoteagues
with half a tumbler of Maryland rye: the town belief
was that this combination was so deleterious as to be
equal to die kick of a mule. If the stranger survived,
they tried to inveigle him into eating another dozen
with sugar sprinkled on them: this dose was supposed
to be almost certainly fatal. I grew up believing that
the only man in history who had ever actually swal-
lowed it and lived was John L. Sullivan.
There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be pre-
pared in fifty ways and that all of them are good. The
range of oyster dishes is much narrower, and they are
much less attractive. Fried oysters I have just men-
tioned. Stewed, they are undoubtedly edible, but only
in the sorry sense that oatmeal or boiled rice is edible.
Certainly no Baltimorean not insane would argue that
an oyster stew has any of the noble qualities of the two
great crab soups shore style (with vegetables) and
H. L. MENCKEN*
bisque (with cream). Both of these masterpieces were
on tap in the old Rennert Hotel when I lunched there
daily (years after the term of the present narrative) and
both were magnificent. The Rennert also offered an
oyster pot-pie that had its points, but the late Jeff
Davis, manager of the hotel (and the last public virtu-
oso of Maryland cookery), once confessed to me that
its flavor was really due to a sly use of garlic. Such
concoctions as panned and scalloped oysters have never
been eaten in my time by connoisseurs, and oyster frit-
ters (always called flitters in Baltimore) are to be had
only at free-for-all oyster-roasts and along the wharves.
A roasted oyster, if it be hauled off the fire at the exact
instant the shell opens, is not to be sniffed at, but get-
ting it down is a troublesome business, for the shell is
too hot to be handled without mittens. Despite this in-
convenience, there arc still oyster-roasts in Baltimore
on Winter Sunday afternoons, and since the collapse o
Prohibition they have been drawing pretty good houses.
When the Elks give one they hire a militia armory, lay
in a thousand kegs of beer, engage 200 waiters, and pre-
pare for a mob. But the mob is not attracted by the oys-
ters alone; it comes mainly to eat hot-dogs, barbecued
beef and sauerkraut and to wash down these lowly vict-
uals with the beer.
The greatest crab cook of the days I remember was
Tom McNulty, originally a whiskey drummer but in
die end sheriff of Baltimore, and die most venerated
oyster cook was a cop named Fred. Tom's specialty was
made by spearing a slice of bacon on a large fork, jam-
ming a soft crab down on it, holding the two over a
charcoal brazier until the bacon had melted over the
crab, and then slapping both upon a slice of hot toast.
This titbit had its points, I assure you, and I never
think of it without deploring Tom's too early transla-
tion to bliss eternal. Fred devoted himself mainly to
oyster flitters. The other cops rolled and snuffled in his
masterpieces like cats in catnip, but I never could see
8
The Baltimore of the Eighties
much virtue in them. It was always my impression, per*
haps in error, that he fried them in curve grease bor-
rowed from the street railways. He was an old-time
Model T flat-foot, not much taller than a fire-plug, but
as big around the middle as a load of hay. At the end of
a busy afternoon he would be spattered from head to
foot with blobs of flitter batter and wild grease.
It was the opinion of my father, as I have recorded,
that all the Baltimore beers were poisonous, but he
nevertheless kept a supply of them in the house for
visiting plumbers, tinners, cellar-inspectors, tax-asses-
sors and so on, and for Class D social callers. I find by
his bill file that he paid $1.20 for a case of twenty-four
bottles. His own favorite malt liquor was Anheuser-
Busch, but he also made occasional experiments with
the other brands that were then beginning to find a na-
tional market: some of them to survive to this day, but
the most perished under Prohibition. His same bill file
shows that on December 27, 1883, he paid Courtney,
Fairall & Company, then the favorite fancy grocers of
Baltimore, $4 for a gallon of Monticello whiskey. It re*
tails now for from $3 to $3.50 a quart. In those days it
was always straight, for the old-time Baltimoreans re-
garded blends with great suspicion, though many of
the widely-advertised brands of Maryland rye were o
that character. They drank straight whiskey straight,
disdaining both diluents and chases. I don't recall ever
seeing my father drink a high-ball; the thing must
have existed in his day, for he lived on to 1899, but he
probably regarded its use as unmanly and ignoble. Be-
fore every meal, including breakfast, he ducked into the
cupboard in the dining-room and poured out a substan-
tial hooker of rye, and when he emerged he was always
sucking in a great whiff of air to cool off his tonsils.
He regarded this appetizer as necessary to his well-
being. He said that it was the best medicine he had ever
found for toning up his stomach.
How the stomachs of Baltimore survived at all in
9
H. L. MENCKEN
those days is a pathological mystery. The standard eve-
ning meal tended to be light, but the other two were
terrific. The repertoire for breakfast, beside all the
known varieties of pancake and porridge, included such
things as ham and eggs, broiled mackerel, fried smelts,
beef hash, pork chops, country sausage, and even-
God help us allf what would now be called Welsh
rabbit. My father, save when we were in the country,
usually came home for lunch, and on Saturdays, with
no school, my brother Charlie and I sat in. Our favorite
Winter lunch was typical of the time. Its main dishes
were a huge platter of Norfolk spots or other pan-fish,
and a Himalaya of corn-cakes. Along with this combi-
nation went succotash, buttered beets, baked potatoes,
string beans, and other such hearty vegetables. When
oranges and bananas were obtainable they followed for
dessert sliced, and with a heavy dressing of grated co-
coanut. The calorie content of two or three helpings
of such powerful aliments probably ran to 3000. We'd
all be somewhat subdued afterward, and my father al-
ways stretched out on the dining-room lounge for a
nap. In the evening he seldom had much appetite, and
would usually complain that cooking was fast going
downhill in Baltimore, in accord with the general de-
cay of human society. Worse, he would warn Charlie
and me against eating too much, and often he under-
took to ration us. We beat this sanitary policing by
laying in a sufficiency in the kitchen before sitting
down to table. As a reserve against emergencies we
kept a supply of ginger snaps, mushroom crackers, all-
day suckers, dried apricots and solferino taffy in a
cigar-box in our bedroom. In fear that it might spoil, or
that mice might sneak up from the cellar to raid it, we
devoured this stock at frequent intervals, and it had to
be renewed.
The Baltimoreans of those days were complacent be-
yond the ordinary, and agreed with their envious vis-
itors that life in tick town was swell. I can't recall ever
10
The Baltimore of the Eighties
hearing anyone complain of the fact that there was a
great epidemic of typhoid fever every Summer, and a
wave of malaria every Autumn, and more than a scat-
tering of smallpox, especially among the colored folk
in the alleys, every Winter. Spring, indeed, was the only
season free from serious pestilence, and in Spring the
communal laying off of heavy woolen underwear was
always followed by an epidemic of colds. Our house in
Hollins street, as I first remember it, was heated by
Latrobe stoves, the invention of a Baltimore engineer*
They had mica windows (always called isinglass) that
made a cheery glow, but though it was warm enough
within the range of that glow on even the coldest Win-
ter days, their flues had little heat to spare for the rooms
upstairs. My brother and I slept in Canton-flannel night-
drawers with feathers above us and underneath, but
that didn't help us much on January mornings when
all the windows were so heavily frosted that we
couldn't see outside. My father put in a steam-heating
plant toward the end of the eighties the first ever
seen in Hollins street, but such things were rare until
well into the new century. The favorite central heating
device for many years was a hot-air furnace that was
even more inefficient than the Latrobe stove. The only
heat in our bathroom was supplied from the kitchen,
which meant that there was none at all until the hired
girl began to function below. Thus my brother and I
were never harassed by suggestions of morning baths, at
least in Winter. Whenever it was decided that we had
reached an intolerable degree of grime, and measures
were taken to hound us to the bathroom, we went into
the vast old zinc-lined tub together, and beguiled the
pains of getting clean by taking toy boats along. Once
we also took a couple of goldfish, but the soap killed
them almost instantly*
At intervals of not more than a month in Winter a
water-pipe froze and burst, and the whole house was
cold and clammy until the plumbers got through their
11
H. L. MENCKEN
slow-moving hocus-pocus. Nothing, in those days,
seemed to work. All the house machinery was con-
stantly out of order. The roof sprang a leak at least
three times a year, and I recall a day when the cellar
was flooded by a broken water-main in Hollins street^
and my brother and I had a grand time navigating it in
wooden washtubs. No one, up to that time, had ever
thought of outfitting windows with fly-screens. Flies
overran and devoured us in Summer, immense swarms
of mosquitoes were often blown in from the swamps to
the southwest, and a miscellany of fantastic moths,
gnats, June-bugs, beetles, and other insects, some of
them of formidable size and pugnacity, buzzed around
the gas-lights at night.
We slept under mosquito canopies, but they were of
flimsy netting and there were always holes in them, so
that when a mosquito or fly once got in he had us all
to himself, and made the most of it It was not uncom-
mon, in Summer, for a bat to follow the procession.
When this happened my brother and I turned out with
brooms, baseball bats and other weapons, and pursued
the hunt to a kill The carcass was always nailed to the
backyard fence the next morning, with the wings
stretched out as far as possible, and boys would come
from blocks around to measure and admire it. When-
ever an insect of unfamiliar species showed up we tried
to capture it, and if we succeeded we kept it alive in a
pill-box or baking-powder can. Our favorite among
pill-boxes was the one that held Wright's Indian Vege-
table Pills (which my father swallowed every time he
got into a low state), for it was made of thin sheets of
wood veneer, and was thus more durable than the
druggists* usual cardboard boxes.
Every public place in Baltimore was so furiously beset
by bugs of all sorts that communal gatherings were im-
possible on hot nights. The very cops on the street
corners spent a large part of their time slapping mos-
quitoes and catching flics. Our pony Frank had a fly*
12
The Baltimore of the Eighties
net, but it operated only when he was in motion; in his
leisure he was as badly used as the cops. When arc-lights
began to light the streets, along about ,1885, they at-
tracted so many beetles o gigantic size that their glare
was actually obscured. These beetles at once acquired
the name of electric-light bugs, and it was believed that
the arc carbons produced them by a kind of sponta-
neous generation, and that their bite was as dangerous
as that of a tarantula. But no Baltimorean would ever
admit categorically that this Congo-like plague of flying
things, taking one day with another, was really serious,
or indeed a plague at all. Many a time I have seen my
mother leap up from the dinner-table to engage the
swarming flies with an improvised punkah, and heard
her rejoice and give humble thanks simultaneously that
Baltimore was not the sinkhole that Washington was.
These flies gave no concern to my brother Charlie
and me; they seemed to be innocuous and even friendly
compared to the chiggers, bumble-bees and hornets that
occasionally beset us. Indeed, they were a source of
pleasant recreation to us, for very often, on hot Sum-
mer evenings, we would retire to the kitchen, stretch
out flat on our backs on the table, and pop away at
them with, slingshots as they roosted in dense clumps
upon the ceiling. Our favorite projectile was a square o
lemon-peel, roasted by the hired girl. Thus prepared, it
was tough enough to shoot straight and kill certainly*
but when it bounced back it did not hurt us. The hire!
girl, when she was in an amiable mood, prepared us
enough of these missiles for an hour's brisk shooting,
and in the morning she had the Red Cross job of sweep-
ing the dead flics off die ceiling. Sometimes there were
hundreds of them, lying dead in sticky windrows. When
there were horse-flies from the back alley among thcnij
which was not infrequently, they leaked red mamma*
lian blood, which was an extra satisfaction to us. The
stables that lined the far side of the alley were vast
hatcheries of such flics, some of which reached a gigaa*
IS
H. I* MENCKEN
tic size. When we caught one we pulled off its wings
and watched it try idiotically to escape on foot, or re-
moved its legs and listened while it buzzed in a loud
and futile manner. The theory taught in those days was
that creatures below the warm-blooded level had no
feelings whatever, and in feet rather enjoyed being
mutilated. Thus it was an innocent and instructive
matter to cut a worm into two halves, and watch them
wriggle off in opposite directions. Once my brother and
I caught a turtle, chopped off its head, and were amazed
to see it march away headless. That experience, in
truth, was so astonishing as to be alarming, and we
never monkeyed with turtles thereafter. But we got a
good deal of pleasure, first and last, out of chasing and
butchering toads, though we were always carefal to
avoid taking them in our hands, for the juice of their
kidneys was supposed to cause warts.
At the first smell of hot weather there was a tremen-
dous revolution in Hollins street. All the Brussels car-
pets in the house were jimmied up and replaced by
sleazy Chinese matting, all the haircloth furniture was
covered with linen covers, and every picture, mirror,
gas bracket and Rogers group was draped in fly netting.
The carpets were wheelbarrowed out to Steuart's hill by
professional carpet beaters of the African race, and
there flogged and flayed until the heaviest lick yielded
no more dust Before the mattings could be laid all the
floors had to be scrubbed, and every picture and mirror
had to be taken down and polished. Also, the lace cur-
tains had to come down, and the ivory-colored Holland
shades that hung in Winter had to be changed to blue
ones, to filter out the Summer sun. The lace curtains
were always laundered before being put away a for-
midable operation involving stretching them on huge
frameworks set up on trestles in the backyard. All this
iqaroar was repeated in reverse at the ides of September.
TTbe^ mattings came up, the carpets went down, the
furniture was stripped of its covers, the pictures, mir-
u
The Baltimore of the Eighties
TOTS and gas brackets lost their netting, and the blue
Holland shades were displaced by the ivory ones. It al-
ways turned out, of course^ that the flies of Summer
had got through the nettings with ease, and left every
picture peppered with their calling cards. The large
pier mirror between the two windows of the parlor usu-
ally got a double dose, and it took the hired girl half a
day to renovate it, climbing up and down a ladder in
the clumsy manner of a policeman getting over a fencc^
and dropping soap, washrags, hairpins and other gear
on the floor*
The legend seems to prevail that there were no sewers
in Baltimore until after the World War, but that is
something of an exaggeration. Our house in Rollins
street was connected with a private sewer down the
alley in the rear as early as I have any recollection of it,
and so were many other houses, especially in the newer
parts of the town. But I should add that we also had a
powder-room in the backyard for the accommodation of
laundresses, whitewashes and other visiting members
of the domestic faculty, and that there was a shallow
sink under it that inspired my brother and me with
considerable dread. Every now and then some child in
West Baltimore fell into such a sink, and had to be
hauled out, besmeared and howling, by the cops. The
one in our yard was pumped out and fumigated every
Spring by a gang of colored men who arrived on a
wagon that was called an OEA.i^ odorless excavat-
ing apparatus. They discharged this social-minded duty
with great fervor and dispatch, and achieved non-odor*
iferousness, in the innocent Aframerican way, by burn-
ing buckets of rosin and tar. The whole neighborhood
choked on the black, greasy, pungent smoke for hours
afterward. It was thought to be an effective preventive
of cholera, smallpox and tuberculosis.
All the sewers of Baltimore, whether private or pub-
lic, emptied into the Back Basin in those days, just as all
those of Manhattan empty into the North and East
15
H. L. MENCKEN
rivers to this day* But I should add that there was a
difference, for the North and East rivers have swift
tidal currents, whereas the Back Basin, distant 170
miles from the Chesapeake capes, had only the most
lethargic. As a result it began to acquire a powerful
aroma every Spring, and by August smelled like a bil-
lion polecats. This stench radiated all over downtown
Baltimore, though in Hollins street we hardly ever de-
tected it Perhaps that was due to the fact that West
Baltimore had rival perfumes of its own for example^
the emanation from the Wilkins hair factory in the
Frederick road, a mile or so from Union Square. When
a breeze from the southwest, bouncing its way over the
Wilkins factory, reached Hollins street the effect was al-
most that of poison gas. It happened only seldom, but
when it happened it was surely memorable. The house-
holders of die vicinage always swarmed down to the
City Hall the next day and raised blue hell, but they
never got anything save promises. In feet, it was not
until the Wilkinses went into the red and shut down
their factory that the abomination abated and its place
was then taken, for an unhappy year or two, by the de-
generate cosmic rays projected from a glue factory lying
in the same general direction. No one, so far as I know,
ever argued that these mephitic blasts were salubrious,
but it is a sober fact that town opinion held that the
bouquet of the Back Basin was. In proof thereof it was
pointed out that the clerks who sweated all Summer in
the little coops of offices along the Light street and
Pratt street wharves were so remarkably long-lived that
many of them appeared to be at least 100 years old, and
that the colored stevedores who loaded and unloaded
Ac Bay packets were the strongest^ toughest, drunken-
cst and most thieving in the whole port.
The Baltimore of the eighties was a noisy town, for
the impact of iron wagon tires on hard cobblestone
was almost like that of a hammer on an anviL To be
sure, there was a dirt road down the middle of every
16
The Baltimore of the Eighties
street, kept in repair by the accumulated sweepings of
the sidewalks, but this cushioned track was patronized
only by hay-wagons from the country and like occa-
sional traffic: milk-men, grocery deliverymcn and other
such regulars kept to the areas where the cobbles were
naked, and so made a fearful clatter. In every way, in
fact, city life was much noiser then than it is now. Chil-
dren at play were not incarcerated in playgrounds and
policed by hired ma'ms, but roved the open streets, and
most of their games involved singing or yelling. At
Christmas-time they began to blow horns at least a
week before the great day, and kept it up until all the
horns were disabled, and in Summer they began cele-
brating the Fourth far back in June and were still ex-
ploding fire-crackers at the end of July. Nearly every
house had a dog in it, and nearly all die dogs barked
more or less continuously from 4 ajtn. until after mid-
night. It was still lawful to keep chickens in backyards,
and many householders did so. All within ear range of
Hollins street appeared to divide them as to sex in the
proportion of a hundred crowing roosters to one cluck-
ing hen. My grandfather Mencken once laid in a coop
of Guineas, unquestionably the noisiest species of Avcs
known to science. But his wife, my step-grandmother,
had got in a colored clergyman to steal diem before the
neighbors arrived with the police.
In retired by-streets grass grew between the cobble-
stones to almost incredible heights, and it was not un-
common for colored rag-and-bone men to pasture their
undernourished horses on it. On the steep hill making
eastward from the Washington Monument, in the very
heart of Baltimore, some comedian once sowed wheat,
and it kept on coming up for years thereafter. Every
Spring the Baltimore newspapers would report on the
prospects bf the crop, and visitors to the city were taken
to see it. Most Baltimoreans of that era, in fact, took a
fierce, defiant pride in the bucolic aspects of their
city. They would boast that it was the only great scar
17
H. L. MENCEEN
port on earth in which dandelions grew in the streets in
Spring. They believed that all such vegetation was
healthful, and kept down chills and fever. I myself once
had proof that the excess of litter in the streets was not
without its value to mankind. I was riding the pony
Frank when a wild thought suddenly seized him, and
he bucked me out of the saddle in the best manner of
a Buffalo Bill bronco. Unfortunately, my left foot was
stuck in the stirrup, and so I was dragged behind him
as he galloped off. He had gone at least a block before a
couple of colored boys stopped him. If the cobblestones
of Strieker street had been bare I'd not be with you to-
day. As it was, I got no worse damage than a series of
harsh scourings running from my neck to my heels.
The colored boys took me to Reveille's livery-stable^
and stopped the bloodshed with large gobs of spider
web. It was the hemostatic of choice in Baltimore
when I was young. If, perchance, it spread a little tet-
anus, then the Baltimorcans blamed the mercies of God.
ADVENTURES OF A Y.M.C.A. LAD [1894}
(ROM Heathen Days, 1943)
When I reach the shades at last it will no
doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my
dossier, that I was once a member of the YJtf .CA. Yet.
a fact is a fact. What is more remarkable, I was not re-
cruited by a missionary to the heathen, but joined at the
suggestion of my father, who enjoyed and deserved the
name of an infidel I was then a little beyond fourteen
years old, and a new neighborhood branch of the Y,
housed in a nobby pressedrbrick building, had just been
opened in West Baltimore, only a few blocks from our
home in Hollins street The whole upper floor was
18
Adventures of a YM.C.A. Lad
given over to a gymnasium, and it was this bait, I
gathered, that fetched my father, for I was already a
bookworm and beginning to be a bit round-shouldered,
and he often exhorted me to throw back my shoulders
and stick out my chest.
Apparently he was convinced that exercise on the
wooden horse and flying rings would cure my scholarly
stoop, and make a kind of grenadier of me. If so, he was
in error, for I remain more or less Bible-backed to this
day, and am often mistaken for a Talmudist All that
the YJvl.CA.'s horse and rings really accomplished was
to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for
Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every
variety of callisthenics, so that I sail begrudge the tri-
fling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub,
and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes
sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man
guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or
profit under the United States, and all female athletes
would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Ar-
gentine.
Indeed, I disliked that gymnasium so earnestly that
I never got beyond its baby-class, which was devoted to
teaching freshmen how to hang their clothes in the
lockers, get into their work-suits, and run around the
track. I was in those days a fast runner and could do
the 100 yards, with a fair wind, in something better than
fourteen seconds, but how anyone could run on a quad-
rangular track with sides no more than fifty feet long
was quite beyond me. The first time I tried it I slipped
and slid at aU four corners, and the second time I came
down with a thump that somehow contrived to skin
both my shins. The man in charge of the establishment
the boys all called him Professor thereupon put me
to the punching-bag, but at my fourth or fifth wallop
it struck back, and I was floored again. After that I
tried all the other insane apparatus in the place, includ-
ing the horizontal bars, but I always got into trouble
19
H. L. MENCKEN
very quickly, and never made enough progress to
hurt myself seriously, which might have been some
comfort, at least on the psychological side. There were
other boys who fell from the highest trapezes, and had
to be sent home in hacks, and yet others who broke
their arms or legs and were heroic figures about the
building for months afterward, but the best I ever man-
aged was a bloody nose, and that was caused, not
by my own enterprise, but by another boy falling on me
from somewhere near the roof. If he had landed six
inches farther inshore he might have fractured my
skull or broken my neck, but all he achieved was to
scrape my nose. It hurt a-plenty, I can tell you, and it
hurt still worse when the Professor doused it with ar-
nica, and splashed a couple of drops into each of my
eyes.
Looking back over the years, I see that that ghastly
gymnasium, if I had continued to frequent it^ might
have given me an inferiority complex, and bred me up
a foe of privilege. I was saved, fortunately, by a congen-
ital complacency that has been a godsend to me, more
than once, in other and graver situations. Within a few
weeks I was classifying all the boys in the place in the
inverse order of their diligence and prowess, and that
classification, as I have intimated, I adhere to at the
present moment. The youngsters who could leap from,
bar to bar without slipping and were facile on die tra-
peze I equated with simians of the genus Hylobaus,
and convinced myself that I was surprised when they
showed a capacity for articulate speech. As for the
weight-lifter^ chinners, somcrsaulters, leapcrs and other
such virtuosi of striated muscle, I dismissed them as
Anthropoidca far inferior, in all situations calling for
taste or judgment, to schoolteachers or mules.
I should add that my low view of these prizemen was
unaccompanied by personal venom; on the contrary, I
got on with them very well, and even had a kind of lik-
ing for some of themr-that is, in their private capacities,
SO
Adventures of a YM.CJL. Lad
Very few, I discovered, were professing Christians,
though the Y.M.C.A., in those days even more than
now, was a furnace of Protestant divinity. They swore
when they stubbed their toes, and the older of them en-
tertained us youngsters in the locker-room with their
adventures in amour. The chief free-and-easy trysting-
place in West Baltimore, at the time, was a Baptist
church specializing in what was called "young people's
work." It put on gaudy entertainments, predomi-
nantly secular in character, on Sunday nights, and
scores of the poor working girls of the section dropped
in to help with the singing and lasso beaux. I gathered
from the locker-room talk that some of those beaux de-
manded dreadful prices for their consent to the lasso-
ing. Whether this boasting was true or not I did not
know, for I never attended the Sabbath evening orgies
myself, but at all events it showed that those who did so
were of an antinomian tendency, and far from ideal
Y.M.GA. fodder. When the secretaries came to the
gymnasium to drum up customers for prayer-meetings
downstairs the Lotharios always sounded razzberrics
and cleared out.
On one point all hands were agreed, and that was on
the point that the Professor was what, in those days,
was called a pain in the neck. When he mounted a
bench and yelled "Fellows!" my own blood always ran
cold, and his subsequent remarks gave me a touch of
homicidal mania. Not until many years afterward,
when a certain eminent politician* in Washington took
to radio crooning, did I ever hear a more offensive
voice. There were tones in it like the sound of molasses
dripping from a barrel. It was not at all effeminate, but
simply saccharine. Had I been older in worldly wisdom
it would have suggested to me a suburban curate gar-
gling over the carcass of a usurer who had just left the
parish its richest and stupidest widow* As I was, an in-
nocent boy, I could only compare it to the official chirp-
*Le* RDIL A-C.
SI
K. L. MENCKEN
ing of a Sunday-school superintendent. What the Pro-
fessor had to say was usually sensible enough, and I
don't recall him ever mentioning either Heaven or
Hell; it was simply his tone and manner that offended
me. He is now dead, I take it, for many years, and I
only hope that he has had good luck post mortem, but
while he lived his harangues to his students gave me a
great deal of unnecessary pain, and definitely slanted
my mind against the Y.M .CA. Even when, many years
later, I discovered as a newspaper correspondent that
the Berlin outpost thereof, under the name of the
chrialiche Verein jungcr Manner, was so enlightened
that it served beer in its lamissary, I declined to change
my attitude.
But I was driven out of the YJMCA. at last, not by
the Professor nor even by his pupils in the odoriferous
gymnasiumwhat a foul smell, indeed, a gymnasium
has! how it suggests a mixture of Salvation Army, ele-
phant house, and county jail! but by a young member
who, so far as I observed, never entered the Professor's
domain at all. He was a pimply, officious fellow of
seventeen or eighteen, and to me, of course, he seemed
virtually a grown man. The scene of his operations was
the reading-room, whither I often resorted in self-de-
fense when the Professor let go with "Fellows!" and be-
gan one of his hortations. It was quiet there, and
though most of the literature on tap was pietistic I en-
joyed going through it, for my long interest in the
sacred sciences had already begun. One evening, while
engaged upon a pamphlet detailing devices for catching
boys and girls who knocked down part of their Sunday-
school money, I became aware of the pimply one, and
presently saw him go to a bookcase and select a book.
Dropping into a chair, he turned its pages feverishly,
and presently he found what he seemed to be looking
for, and cleared his throat to attract attention. The
four or five of us at the long table all looked up*
"See here, fellows," he began again that ghasdy "fel-
88
Adventures of a YM.CA. Lad
lows!" "let me have your ears for just a moment. Here
is a book** holding it up "that is worth all the other
books ever written by mortal man. There is nothing like
it on earth except the One Book that our Heavenly
Father Himself gave us. It is pure gold, pure meat.
There is not a wasted word in it. Every syllable is a per-
fect gem. For example, listen to this **
What it was he read I don't recall precisely, but I re-
member that it was some thumping and appalling plat-
itude or other something on the order of "Honesty is
the best policy," "A guilty conscience needs no accuser,"
or "It is never too late to mend." I guessed at first that
he was trying to be ironical, but it quickly appeared
that he was quite serious, and before his audience man-
aged to escape he had read forty or fifty such specimens
of otiose rubbish, and following nearly every one of
them he indulged himself in a little homily, pointing up
its loveliness and rubbing in its lesson. The poor ass, it
appeared, was actually enchanted, and wanted to spread
his joy. It was easy to recognize in him the anti-social
animus of a born evangelist, but there was also some-
thing else a kind of voluptuous delight in the shabby
and preposterous, a perverted aestheticism like that of a
latter-day movie or radio fan, a wild will to roll in and
snuffle balderdash as a cat rolls in and snuffles catnip.
I was, as I have said, less than fifteen years old, but I
had already got an overdose of such blah in the Mc-
Guffey Readers and penmanship copybooks of the time^
so I withdrew as quickly as possible, unhappily aware
that even the Professor was easier to take than this jit-
ney Dwight L. Moody. I got home all tuckered out^
and told my father (who was sitting up reading for the
tenth or twentieth time a newspaper account of the
hanging of two labor leaders) that the Y.M.CA. fell a
good deal short of what it was cracked up to be.
He bade me go back the next evening and try again,
and I did so in filial duty. Indeed, I did so a dozen or
more nights running, omitting Sundays, when the
H. L. MENCKEN
place was given over to spiritual exercises exclusively
But each and every night that imbecile was in the
reading-room, and each and every night he read from
that revolting book to all within ear-shot. I gathered
gradually that it was having a great run in devotional
circles, and was, in fact, a sort of moral best-seller. The
author, it appeared, was a Methodist bishop, and a great
hand at inculcating righteousness. He not only knew by
heart all the immemorial platitudes, stretching back to
die days of Gog and Magog; he had also invented many
more or less new ones, and it was these novelties that
especially aroused the enthusiasm of his disciple* I wish
I could recall some of them, but my memory has always
had 3 humane faculty for obliterating the intolerable,
and so I can't. But you may take my word for it that
nothing in the subsequent writings of Dr. Orison
Sw ett Mardcn or Dr. Frank Crane was worse.
In a little while my deliverance was at hand, for
though my father had shown only irritation when I de-
scribed to him the pulpit manner of the Professor, he
was immediately sympathetic when I told him about
the bishop's book, and the papuliferous exegete's labor-
ing of it "You had better quit," he said, "before you
hit him with a spittoon, or go crazy. There ought to be
a law against such roosters." Rooster was then his cow*
ter-word, and might signify anything from the most
high-toned and elegant Shriner, bank cashier or bar-
tender to the most scurvy and abandoned Socialist This
time he used it in its most opprobrious sense, and so my
career in the Y.M.GA. came to an end. I carried away
from it^ not only an indelible distrust of every sort o
athlete, but also a loathing of Methodist bishops, and
it was many years afterward before I could bring my-
self to admit any such right rev. father in God to my
friendship. I have since learned that some of them are
very pleasant and amusing fellows, despite their pro*
frsrional enmity to the human race, but the one who
Adventures of a YM.CA. Lad
wrote that book was certainly nothing of the sort. If, at
his decease, he escaped Hell, then moral theology is as
full of false alarms as secular law.
TEXT FOE NEWSPAPER DAYS
(F&OM Newspaper Days, 1942)
*
At a time when the respectable bourgeois
youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, op-
pressed by simian sophomores and affronted with
balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I
was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million peo-
ple, with a front seat at every public show, as free of
the night as of the day, and getting carfuls and eye-
fuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of
them taught in schools. On my twenty-first birthday, by
all orthodox cultural standards, I probably reached my
all-time low, for the heavy reading of my teens had been
abandoned in favor of life itself, and I did not return
seriously to the lamp until a time near the end of this
record. But it would be an exaggeration to say that I
was ignorant, for if I neglected the humanities I was
meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police
lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.
And it would certainly be idiotic to say that I was not
happy. The illusion that swathes and bedizens journal-
ism, bringing in its endless squads of recruits, was still
full upon me, and I had yet to taste the sharp teeth of re-
sponsibility. Life was arduous, but it was gay and care-
free. The days chased one another like kittens chasing
their tails.
Whether or not the young journalists of today live so
5
H. Ii. MENCKEN
spaciously is a question that I am not competent to an*
swer, for my contacts with them, of late years, have
been rather scanty. They undoubtedly get a great deal
more money than we did in 1900, but their freedom is
much less than ours was, and they somehow give me
the impression, seen at a distance, of complacency
rather than intrepidity. In my day a reporter who took
an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back
to the office, and even then he was little molested until
his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to
become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone
wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is
commonly fanned out to literary castrati who never
leave the office^ and hence never feel the wind of the
world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.
I well recall my horror when I heard, for the first time,
of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were
then called bicycle pants and taken to golf: k was as if
I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in
frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It
seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a
bit indelicate*
*
HBST APPEARANCE IN PRINT 118991
(FIOM the
*
A horse, a buggy and several sets of harness,
valued in all at about $250, were stolen last night from
the stable of Howard Quinlan, near Kingsville. The
county police are at work on the case, but so far no
trace of cither thieves or booty has been found*
Recollections of Notable Cops
RECOLLECTIONS OF NOTABLE COPS
[1900-10}
(FROM Newspaper Days, 1942)
Some time ago I read in a New York paper
that fifty or sixty college graduates had been appointed
to the metropolitan police force, and were being well
spoken of by their superiors. The news astonished me,
for in my reportorial days there was simply no such
thing in America as a book-learned cop, though I
knew a good many who were very smart* The force
was then recruited, not from the groves of Academe,
but from the ranks of workingmen. The best police
captain I ever knew in Baltimore was a meat-cutter by
trade^ and had lost one of his thumbs by a slip of his
cleaver, and the next best was a former bartender. All
the mounted cops were ex-hostlers passing as ex-
cavalrymen, and all the harbor police had come up
through the tugboat and garbage-scow branches of the
merchant marine. It took a young reporter a little while
to learn how to read and interpret the reports that cops
turned in, for they were couched in a special kind of
English, with a spelling peculiar to itself. If a member
of what was then called "the finest" had spelled larceny
in any way save larsensy, or arson in any way save ar-
sony, or fracture in any way save fraxr, there would
have been a considerable lifting of eyebrows. I well re-
call the horror of the Baltimore cops when the first
board to examine applicants for places on the force was
set up. It was a harmless body headed by a political den-
tist, and the hardest question in its first examination
paper was "What is the plural of ox?'/ but all the cops
in town predicted that it would quickly contaminate
07
H.- It MENCKEN
their craft with a great horde of what they called "pro-
fessors," and reduce k to the level of letter-carrying or
school-teaching.
But, as I have noted, their innocence of literae
humaniorcs was not necessarily a sign of stupidity,
and from some of them, in fact, I learned the valuable
lesson that sharp wits can lurk in unpolished skulls* I
knew cops who were matches for die most learned
and unscrupulous lawyers at the Baltimore bar, and
others who had made monkeys of the oldest and
crabbedest judges on the bench, and were generally re-
spected for it Moreover, I knew cops who were really
first-rate policemen, and loved their trade as tenderly as
so many art artists or movie actors. They were badly paid,
but they carried on their dismal work with unflagging
diligence, and loved a long, hard chase almost as much
as they loved a quick, brisk clubbing. Their one salient
failing, taking them as a class, was their belief that any
person who had been arrested, even on mere suspicion,
was unquestionably and ipso facto guilty. But that the-
ory, though k occasionally colored their testimony in a
garish manner, was grounded, after all, on nothing
worse than professional pride and esprit de corps, and
I am certainly not one to hoot at it, for my own belief
in the mission of journalism has no better support than
the same partiality, and all the logic I am aware of
stands against k.
In those days that pestilence of Service which tor-
ments the American people today was just getting
under way, and many of the multifarious duties now
carried out by social workers, statisticians, truant offi-
cers, visiting nurses, psychologists, and the vast rabble
of inspectors, smellers, spies and bogus experts of a hun-
dred different faculties other fell to the police or were
not discharged at all An ordinary flatfoot in a quiet
residential section had his hands full. In a single day he
might have to put out a couple of kitchen firc^ arrange
for the removal of a dead ranlr, guard a poor epileptic
8
Recollections of Notable Cops
having a fit on tie sidewalk, catch a runaway horse,
settle a combat with table knives between husband and
wife, shoot a cat for killing pigeons, rescue a dog or a
baby from a sewer, bawl out a white-wings for spilling
garbage, keep order on the sidewalk at two or three
funerals, and flog half a dozen bad boys for throwing
horse-apples at a blind man. The cops downtown, es-
pecially along the wharves and in the red-light districts,
had even more curious and complicated jobs, and some
of them attained to a high degree of virtuosity.
As my memory gropes backward I think, for example^
of a strange office that an old-time roundsman named
Charlie had to undertake ,cvery Spring. It was to pick
up enough skilled workmen to effect the annual re-
decoration and refurbishing of the Baltimore City JaiL
Along about May i the warden would telephone to po-
lice headquarters that he needed, say, ten head of
painters, five plumbers, two blacksmiths, a tile-setter, a
roofer, a bricklayer, a carpenter and a locksmith, and it
was Charlie's duty to go out and find them. So far as I
can recall, he never failed, and usually he produced two
or three times as many craftsmen of each category as
were needed, so that the warden had some chance to
pick out good ones. His plan was simply to make a tour
of the saloons and stews in the Marsh Market section of
Baltimore, and look over the drunks in congress
assembled. He had a trained eye^ and could detect a
plumber or a painter through two weeks* accumulation
of beard and dirt. As he gathered in his candidates* is
searched them on the spot^ rejecting those who had no
union cards, for he was a firm believer in organized
labor. Those who passed were put into storage at a po-
lice-station, and there kept (less the unfortunates who
developed delirium tremens and had to be handed over
to the resurrection-men) until the whole convoy was
ready. The next morning Gene Grannan, the police mag-
istrate, gave them two weeks each for vagrancy, loiter*
trespass, committing a nuisance, or some other
9
H. It MENCKEN
plausible misdemeanor, the warden had his staff of mas-
ter-workmen, and the jail presently bloomed out in all
its vernal finery.
Some o these toilers returned year after year, and in
the end Charlie recognized so many that he could ac-
cumulate the better part of his convoy in half an hour.
Once, I remember, he was stumped by a call for two
electricians. In those remote days there were fewer men
of that craft in practise than today, and only one could
be found When the warden put on the heat Charlie
sent him a trolley-car motorman who had run away
from his wife and was trying to be shanghaied for the
Chesapeake oyster-fleet. This poor man, being grateful
for bis security in jail, made such eager use of his
meagre electrical knowledge that the warden decided
to keep him, and even requested that his sentence be
extended Unhappily, Gene Grannan was a pretty
good amateur lawyer, and knew that such an extension
would be illegal. When the warden of the House of Cor-
rection, which was on a farm twenty miles from Balti-
more, heard how well this system was working, he put
in a requisition for six experienced milkers and a choir-
leader, for he had a herd of cows and his colored pris-
oners loved to sing spirituals. Charlie found the choir*
leader in no time, but he bucked at hunting for
milkers, and got rid of the nuisance by sending the
warden a squad of sailors who almost pulled the poor
cows to pieces.
Gene had been made a magistrate as one of the first
fruits of the rising reform movement in Baltimore, and
was a man of the chastest integrity, but he knew too
much about reformers to admire diem, and lost no
chance to afflict them. When, in 1900, or thereabout, a
gang of snoopers began to tour the red-light districts,
seeking to harass and alarm the poor working women
there denizened, he instructed the gals to empty slops
on them, and acquitted all who were brought in for
doing it, usually on the ground fogt the complaining
SO
Recollection* of Notable Cops
witnesses were disreputable persons, and could not be
believed on oath. One day, sitting in his frowsy court-
room, I saw him gloat in a positively indecent manner
when a Methodist clergyman was led out from the cells
by Mike Hogan, the turnkey. This holy man, believ-
ing that the Jews, unless they consented to be baptized,
would all go to Hell, had opened a mission in what was
then still called the Ghetto, and sought to save them.
The adults, of course, refused to have anything to do
with him, but he managed, after a while, to lure a num-
ber of \osher small boys into his den, chiefly by show-
ing them magic-lantern pictures of the Buffalo Bill
country and the Holy Land. When their fathers heard
of this there was naturally an uproar, for it was a mortal
sin in those days for an orthodox Jew to enter a Coy
Schul. The ritual for debusing offenders was an ardu-
ous one, and cost both time and money. So the Jews
came clamoring to Grannan, and he spent a couple of
hours trying to figure out some charge to lay against
the evangelist. Finally, he ordered him brought in, and
entered him on the books for "annoying persons passing
by and along a public highway, disorderly conduct^
making loud and unseemly noises, and disturbing re-
ligious worship." He had to be acquitted, of course^
but Gene scared him so badly with talk of the peniten-
tiary that he shut down his mission forthwith, and left
the Jews to their post-mortem sufferings.
As I have noted in Chapter n, Gene was a high fa-
vorite among us young reporters, for he was always
good for copy, and did not hesitate to modify the
course of justice in order to feed and edify us. One day
an ancient German, obviously a highly respectable man,
was brought in on the incredible charge of beating his
wife. The testimony showed that they had been placidly
married for more than 45 years, and seldom exchanged
so much as a bitter word. But the night before, when
the old man came home from the saloon where he
played S%at every evening, the old woman accused
SI
H. L. MENCKEN
him of having drunk more than his usual ration of
eight beers, and in the course of the ensuing debate he
gave her a gentle slap* Astounded, she let off an hysteri-
cal squawk, an officious neighbor rushed in, the cops
came on his heels, and so the old man stood before the
bar of justice, weeping copiously and with his wife
weeping even more copiously beside him. Gene pon-
dered the evidence with a frown on his face, and then
announced his judgment "The crime you are accused
of committing,'* he said, "is a foul and desperate one,
and the laws of all civilized countries prohibit it under
heavy penalties, I could send you to prison for life^ I
could order you to the whipping-post [it still exists in
Maryland, and for wife-beaters only], or I could sen-
tence you to be hanged* [Here both parties screamed.]
But inasmuch as this is your first offense I will be leni-
ent You will be taken hence to the House of Correc-
tion, and there confined for twenty years. In addition,
you are fined $10,000." The old couple missed the fine,
for at mention of the House of Correction both fainted
When the cops revived them, Gene told the prisoner
that, on reflection, he had decided to strike out the sen-
tence, and bade him go and sin no more. Husband and
wife rushed out of the courtroom hand in hand, fol-
lowed by a cop with the umbrella and market-basket
that the old woman had forgotten. A week or two later
pews came in that she was ordering the old man about
in a highly cavalier manner, and had cut down his eve-
nings of Sfat to four a wceL
The cops liked and admired Gene^ and when he was
in good form he commonly had a gallery of them in
his courtroom, guffawing at his whimsies. But despite
his popularity among them he did not pal with them,
for ne was basically a very dignified, and even some-
what stiff fellow, and knew how to call them down
sharply when their testimony before him went too far
beyond the bounds of the probable. In those days, as in
tfacsc, policemen ltd a social life almost as inbred as
SS
Recollection* of Notable Cops
that of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United
States, and outsiders were seldom admitted to their par-
ties. But reporters were exceptions, and I attended a
number of cop soirees of great elegance, with the tables
piled mountain-high with all the delicacies of the sea-
son, and a keg of beer every few feet. The graft of
these worthy men, at least in my time, was a great deal
less than reformers alleged and the envious common
people believed. Most of them, in my judgment, were
very honest fellows, at least within the bounds of rear
son. Those who patrolled the fish-markets naturally had
plenty of fish to eat, and those who manned the police-
boats in the harbor took a certain toll from the pungy
captains who brought up Baltimore's supplies of
watermelons, cantaloupes, vegetables, crabs and oysters
from the Eastern Shore of Maryland: indeed, this last
impost amounted to a kind of octroi, and at one time
the harbor force accumulated so much provender that
they had to seize an empty warehouse on the waterfront
to store it But the pungy captains gave up uncomplaia
ingly, for the pelagic cops protected them against the
thieves and highjackers who swarmed in the harbor,
and also against the land police. I never heard of cops
getting anything that the donor was not quite willing
and even eager to give. Every Italian who ran a peanut
stand knew that making them free of it was good in
sthutional promotion and the girls in the red-light dis-
tricts liked to crochet neckties, socks and pulse-wannr
crs for them. It was not unheard of for a cop to get
mashed on such a girl, rescue her from her life of
shame, and set her up as a more or less honest woman
I knew of several cases in which holy matrimony fol-
lowed. But the more ambitious girls, of course, looked
higher, and some of them, in my time, made very good
marriages. One actually married a banker, and another
died only a few years ago as the faithful and much re*
spected wife of a prominent physician. The cop always
laughed when reformers alleged that the wages of sin
SS
H. Ik MENCKEN
were death specifically, that women who sold their
persons always ended in the gutter, full of dope and
despair. They knew that the overwhelming majority
ended at the altar of God, and that nearly all of them
married better men than they could have had any
chance of meeting and roping if they had kept their
virtue.
One dismal New Year's day I saw a sergeant lose an
excellent chance to pocket $138^66 in cash money: I re-
member it brilliantly because I lost the same chance at
the same moment. There had been the usual epidemic
of suicides in the waterfront flop-houses, for the dawn
of a new year turns the thoughts of homeless men to
peace beyond the dissecting-room, and I accompanied
the sergeant and a coroner on a tour of the fatal scenes.
One of the dead men was lying on the fifth floor of a
decaying warehouse that had been turned into ten-cent
sleeping quarters, and we climbed up the long stairs to
inspect him. All the other bums had cleared out, and
the hophead clerk did not offer to go with us. We
found the deceased stretched out in a peaceful attitude^
with the rope with which he had hanged himself still
around his neck. He had been cut down, but then aban-
doned.
The sergeant loosed the rope, and began a search <rf
the dead man's pockets, looking for means to identify
him. He found nothing whatever of that sort, but from
a pants pocket he drew out a fat wad of bills, and
a hasty count showed that it contained $416. A situation
worthy of Scribe, or even Victor Hugo! Evidently the
poor fellow was one of the Russell Sages that are occa-
sionally found among bums. His money, I suppose^
had been diminishing and he had bumped himself
off in fear that it would soon be all gone. Hie sergeant
looked at the coroner, the coroner looked at me* and I
looked at the sergeant. Then the sergeant wrapped up
the money in a piece of newspaper lying nearby, and
handed it to the coroner. "It goes," he said sadly, "to the
S4
Recollections of Notable Cops
State of Maryland. The son-of-a-bitch died intestate, and
with no heirs.*'
The next day I met the coroner, and found him in a
low frame of mind. "It was a sin and a shame," he said,
"to turn that money over to the State Treasury. What
I could have done with $138.67! (I noticed he made a
fair split, but collared one of the two odd cents.) Well,
it's gone now damn the luck! I never did trust that
flatfoot,"
THEODORE DREISER
A Boo\ <>/ Preface*. 1916)
Out of the desert of American fictioncering,
so populous and yet so dreary, Dreiser stands up a
phenomenon unescapably visible, but disconcertingly
hard to explain. What forces combined to produce him
in the first place, and how has he managed to hold out
so long against the prevailing blasts of disheartening
misunderstanding and misrepresentation, of Puritan
suspicion and opposition, of artistic isolation, of com-
mercial seduction? There is something downright
heroic in the way the man has held his narrow and
perilous ground, disdaining all compromise, unmoved
by the cheap success that lies so inviting around the
corner. He has faced, in his day, almost every form of
attack that a serious artist can conceivably encounter,
and yet all of them together have scarcely budged him
an inch. He still plods along in the laborious, cheerless
way he first marked out for himself; he is quite as un-
daunted by baited praise as by bludgeoning, malignant
abuse; his later novels are, if anything, more unyield-
ingly dreiserian than his earliest As one who has long
sought to entice Kim in this direction or that, fatuously
S5
H* Xb MENCKEN
presuming to instruct him in what would improve and
profit him, I may well bear a reluctant and resigned sort
of testimony to his gigantic steadfastness. It is almost
as if any change in his manner, any concession to what
is usual and esteemed, any amelioration of his blind,
relentless exercises of force majeure, were a physical im-
possibility. One feels him at last to be authentically no
more than a helpless instrument (or victim) of that
inchoate flow of forces which he himself is so fond o
depicting as at once the answer to the riddle of life, and
a riddle ten times more vexing and accursed.
And his origins, as I say, are quite as mysterious as
his motive power. To fit him into the unrolling chart
of American, or even of English fiction is extremely
difficult. Save one thinks of H. B. Fuller (whose "With
the Procession" and "The Cliff-Dwellers'* are still re-
membered by Huneker, but by whom else? 1 ), he
seems to have had no fore-runner among us, and for all
the discussion of him that goes on, he has few avowed
disciples, and none of them gets within miles of him.
One catches echoes of him, perhaps, in Willa Sibert
Cather, in Mary S. Watts, in David Graham Phillips,
in Sherwood Anderson and in Joseph Medill Patterson,
but, after all, they are no more than echoes. In Robert
Herrick the thing descends to a feeble parody; in imita-
tors further removed to sheer burlesque. All the latter-
day American novelists of consideration are vastly more
facile than Dreiser in their philosophy, as they are in
their style. In the fact, perhaps, lies the measure of
their difference. What they lack, great and small, is the
gesture of pity, the note of awe, the profound sense of
wonder in a phrase, that "soberness of mind* 1 which
William Lyon Phelps sees as the hallmark of Conrad
and Hardy, and which even the most stupid cannot e$-
1 Fuller's disappearance is one of the strangest phenomena of Ameri-
can letters. I was astonished some time ago to discover that he was
still alive. Back in 1899 he was already so far forgotten that William
Archer mistook his name, calling him Henry Y. Puller* Vide Archer*!
ptmphkt, The American Tangnagr; New York, 1899.
ss
Theodore Dreiser
cape in Dreiser. The normal American novel, even in
its most serious forms, takes colour from the national
cocksureness and superficiality. It runs monotonously
to ready explanations, a somewhat infantile smugness
and hopefulness, a habit of reducing the unknowable
to terms of the not worth knowing. What it cannot ex-
plain away with ready formulae, as in the later Winston
Churchill,* it snickers over as scarcely worth explaining
at all, as in the later Howells. Such a brave and tragic
book as "Ethan Frome" is so rare as to be almost singu-
lar, even with Mrs. Wharton. There is, I daresay, not
much market for that sort of thing. In the arts, as in
the concerns of everyday, the American seeks escape
from the insoluble by pretending that it is solved A
comfortable phrase is what he craves beyond all things
and comfortable phrases are surely not to be sought
in Dreiser's stock.
I have heard argument that he is a follower of Frank
Norris, and two or three facts lend it a specious prob-
ability. "McTeague" was printed in 1899; "Sister Car-
rie" a year later. Moreover, Norris was the first to see
the merit of the latter book, and he fought a gallant
fight, as literary advisor to Doubleday, Page & Co.,
against its suppression after it was in type. But this
theory runs aground upon two circumstances, the first
being that Dreiser did not actually read "McTeague,"
nor, indeed, grow aware of Norris, until after "Sister
Carrie" was completed, and the other being that his
development, once he began to write other books, was
along paths far distant from those pursued by Norris
himself. Dreiser, in truth, was a bigger man than Nor-
ris from the start; it is to the latter's unending honour
that he recognized the fact instantcr, and yet did all he
could to help his rival. It is imaginable, of course, that
Norris, living fifteen years longer, might have over-
taken Dreiser, and even surpassed him; one finds an
arrow pointing that way in "Vandover and the Brute**
The American novelist, not Sir Winston. JLC.
S7
H. L. MENCKEN
(not printed until 1914). But it swings sharply around
in "The Epic of the Wheat* In the second volume of
that incomplete trilogy, "The Pit," there is an obvious
concession to the popular taste in. romance; the thing is
so frankly written down, indeed, that a play has been
made of it, and Broadway has applauded it. And in
"The Octopus,** despite some excellent writing, there
is a descent to a mysticism so fantastic and preposterous
that it quickly passes beyond serious consideration*
Norris, in his day, swung even lower for example, in
"A Man's Woman" and in some of his short stories. He
was a pioneer, perhaps only half sure of the way he
wanted to go, and the evil lures of popular success lay
all about him. It is no wonder that he sometimes
seemed to lose his direction.
mile Zola is another literary father whose paternity
grows dubious on examination. I once printed an article
exposing what seemed to me to be a Zolaesque attitude
of mind, and even some trace of the actual Zola manner,
in "Jennie Gerhardt"; there came from Dreiser the
news that he had never read a line of Zola, and knew
nothing about his novels. Not a complete answer, of
course; the influence might have been exerted at second
hand. But through whom? I confess that I am unable
to name a likely medium. The effects of Zola upon
Anglo-Saxon fiction have been almost nil-; his only
avowed disciple, George Moore, has long since re-
canted and reformed; he has scarcely rippled the pre-
vailing romanticism. . . . Thomas Hardy? Here, I
daresay, we strike a better scent. There are many obvi-
ous likenesses between "Tess of the DTTrbervilles" and
"Jennie Gerhardt" and again between "Jude the Ob-
scure'* and "Sister Carrie." All four stories deal pene-
tratingly and poignantly with the essential tragedy of
women; all disdain the petty, specious explanations of
popular fiction; in each one finds a poetical and mel-
ancholy beauty. Moreover, Dreiser himself confesses to
an enchanted discovery of Hardy in 1896, three years
S8
Theodore Dreiser
before "Sister Carrie" was begun. But it is easy to push
such a fact too hard, and to search for likenesses and
parallels that are really not there. The truth is that
Dreiser's points of contact with Hardy might be easily
matched by many striking points of difference, and
that the fundamental ideas in their novels, despite a
common sympathy, are anything but identical. Nor
does one apprehend any ponderable result of Dreiser's
youthful enthusiasm for Balzac, which antedated his
discovery of Hardy by two years. He got from both
men a sense of the scope and dignity of the novel; they
taught him that a story might be a good one, and yet
considerably more than a story; they showed him the
essential drama of the commonplace* But that they
had more influence in forming his point of view, or
even in shaping his technique, than any one of half a
dozen other gods of those young daysthis I scarcely
find. In the structure of his novels, and in their manner
of approach to life no less, they call up the work of
Dostoyevsky and Turgenev far more than the work of
either of these men but of all the Russians save Tol-
stoi (as of Flaubert) Dreiser himself tells us that he was
ignorant until ten years after "Sister Carrie." In his days
of preparation, indeed, his reading was so copious and
disorderly that antagonistic influences must have well-
nigh neutralized one another, and so left the curious
youngster to work out his own method and his own
philosophy. Stevenson went down with Balzac, Poc
with Hardy, Dumas fits with Tolstoi. There were even
months of delight in Sienkiewicz, Lew Wallace and E.
P. Roe! The whole repertory of the pedagogues had
been fought through in school and college: Dickens*
Thackeray, Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Kingsley,
Scott. Only Irving and Hawthorne seem to have made
deep impressions. "I used to lie under a tree, 1 * says Drei-
ser, "and read Twice Told Tales' by the hour. I
thought "The Alhambra" was a perfect creation, and I
still have a lingering affection for it** Add Bret Harte^
39
H. Iu MENCKEN
George Ebers, William Dean HoweHs, Oliver Wendefl
Holmes, and you have a literary stew indeed! . . . But
for all its bubbling I see a far more potent influence in
the chance discovery of Spencer and Huxley at twenty-
three the year of choosing! Who, indeed, will ever
measure the effect of those two giants upon the young
men of that era Spencer with his inordinate metio**
lousncss, his relentless pursuit of facts, his overpower-
ing syllogisms, and Huxley with his devastating agnos-
ticism, his insatiable questionings of the old axioms,
above all, his brilliant style? Huxley, it would appear,
has been condemned to the scientific hulks, along with
bores innumerable and unspeakable; one looks in vain
for any appreciation of Hm in treatises on beautiful
letters. 1 And yet the man was a superb artist in works,
a master-writer even more than a master-biologist, one
of the few truly great stylists that England has pro-
duced since the time of Anne. One can easily imagine
the effect of two such vigorous and intriguing minds
upon a youth groping about for self-understanding and
self-expression. They swept him clean, he tells us, of
the lingering faith of his boyhood a mediaeval,
Rhenish Catholicism; more^ they filled him with a
new and eager curiosity, an intense interest in the life
that lay about him, a desire to seek out its hidden work-
ings and underlying causes. A young man set afire by
Huxley might perhaps make a very bad novelist, but
it is a certainty that he could never make a sentimental
and superficial one. There is no need to go further than
this single moving adventure to find the genesis of
Dreiser's disdain of the current platitudes, his sense of
life as a complex biological phenomenon, only dimly
comprehended, and his tenacious way of thinking
*Fcc example, in The Cambridge History of English literature
which nuu to fourteen large volumes and a total of nearly 10,000
pages, Huxley receives but a page and a quarter of notice, and hit
remarkable mastery of English is barely mentioned in passing. His two
debates with Gladstone, in which he did some of the best writing of
the century, are not noticed at all,
40
Theodore Dreiser
things out, and of holding to what he finds good Ah,
that he had learned from Huxley, not only how to in-
quire, but also how to report! That he had picked up
a talent for that dazzling style, so sweet to the ear, so
damnably persuasive, so crystal-clear!
But the more one examines Dreiser, either as writer
or as theorist of man, the more his essential isolation
becomes apparent. He got a habit of mind from Hux-
ley, but he completely missed Huxley's habit of writ-
ing. He got a view of woman from Hardy, but he soon
changed it out of all resemblance- He got a certain fine
ambition and gusto out of Balzac, but all that was
French and characteristic he left behind. So with Zola,
Howells, Tolstoi and the rest. The tracing of likenesses
quickly becomes rabbinism, almost cabalism. The dif-
ferences are huge and sprout up in all directions. Nor
do I see anything save a flaming up of colonial passion
in the current efforts to fit him into a German frame^
and make him an agent of Prussian frightfulness in let-
ters. Such bosh one looks for in the Nation and the Bos-
ton Transcript, and there is where one actually finds it
Even the New Republic has stood clear of it; it if
important only as material for that treatise upon die pa-
trioteer and his bawling which remains to be written.
The name of the man, true enough, is obviously Ger-
manic, and he has told us himself, in "A Traveler at
Forty,** how he sought out and found the tombs of his
ancestors in some litde town of the Rhine country.
There are more of these genealogical revelations in "A
Hoosier Holiday,** but they show a Rhenish strain that
was already running thin in boyhood. No one, indeed,
who reads a Dreiser novel can fail to see the gap sep"
arating the author from these half-forgotten forebearsr
He shows even less of German influence than of Eng-
lish influence.
There is, as a matter of fact Ktde in modern German
fiction that is intelligibly comparable to "Jennie Ger*
hardt" and *The Titan,** cither as a study erf man or a*
41
H. L. MENCKEN
a work of art The naturalistic movement of the
eighties was launched by men whose eyes were upon
the theatre, and it is in that field that n*ft<H'f n *'h$ of its
force has been spent.
In his manner, as opposed to his matter, he is more
the Teuton, for he shows all of the racial patience and
pertinacity and all of the racial lack of humour. Writ-
ing a novel is as solemn a business to him as trimming
a beard is to a German barber. He blasts his way
through his interminable stories fay something not un-
like main strength; his writing, one feels, often takes on
the character of an actual siege operation, with tunnel-
lings, drum fire, assaults in close order and hand-to-
hand fighting. Once, seeking an analogy, I called him
the Hindenburg of the novel If it holds, then "The
'Genius* n is his Poland. The field of action bears the
aspect, at the end, of a hostile province meticulously
brought under the yoke, with every road and lane ex-
plored to its beginning, and every crossroads village
laboriously taken, inventoried and policed. Here is the
very negation of Gallic lightness and intuition, and of
all forms of impressionism as well. Here is no series of
illuminating flashes, but a gradual bathing of the whole
scene with white light, so that every detail stands out.
And many of those details, of course, are trivial;
even irritating. They do not help the picture; they
muddle and obscure it; one wonders impatiently whsi
their meaning is, and what the purpose may be of re-
vealing them with such a precise, portentous air.
. . . Turn to page 703 of "The 'Genius.' " By the time
one gets there, one has hewn and hacked one's way
through 702 large pages of fine print 97 long chap-
ters, more than 250,000 words. And yet, at this hurried
and impatient point, with the coda already begun,
Dreiser halts the whole narrative to explain the origin,
nature and inner meaning of Christian Science, and to
make us privy to a lot of chatty stuff about Mrs. Althea
Theodore Dreiser
Jones, a professional healer, and to supply us with de-
tailed plans and specifications of the apartment house
in which she lives, works her tawdry miracles, and has
her being. Here, in sober summary, are the particulars:
1. That the house is "of conventional design.**
2. That there is "a spacious areaway" between its
two wings.
3. That these wings are "of cream-coloured pressed
brick."
4. That the entrance between them is "protected by
a handsome wrought-iron door.* 5
5. That to either side of this door is "an electric
lamp support of handsome design. 5 *
6. That in each of these lamp supports there are
"lovely cream-coloured globes, shedding a soft lustre."
7. That inside is "the usual lobby."
8 That in the lobby is "the usual elevator.**
9. That in the elevator is the usual "uniformed
negro elevator man.'*
10. That this negro elevator man (name not given)
is "indifferent and impertinent.**
n. That a telephone switchboard is also in the
lobby.
12. That the building is seven stories in height
In "The Financier" there is the same exasperating
rolling up of irrelevant facts. The court proceedings in
the trial of Cowperwood are given with all the exact-
ness of a parliamentary report in the London Times.
The speeches of the opposing counsel are set down
nearly in full, and with them die remarks of the judge,
and after that the opinion of the Appellate Court on
appeal, with the dissenting opinions as a sort of appen-
dix. In "Sister Carrie'* the thing is less savagely carried
out, but that is not Dreiser's fault, for the manuscript
was revised by some anonymous hand, and the printed
version is but little more than half die length of the
H. L. MENCKEN
original* In The Titan* and "Jennie Gerhardt** no
such brake upon exuberance is visible; both books are
crammed with details that serve no purpose, and are as
flat as ditch-water. Even in the two volumes of personal
record, "A Traveler at Forty** and **A Hoosier Hol-
iday," there is the same furious accumulation of triv-
ialities. Consider the former. It is without structure,
without selection, without reticence* One arises from it
as from a great babbling, half drunken* On the one
hand the author fills a long and gloomy chapter with
the story of the Borgias, apparently under the impres-
sion that it is news, and on the other hand he enters
into intimate and inconsequential confidences about all
the persons he meets en route, sparing neither the inno-
cent nor the obscure. Hie children of his English host
at Bridgely Level strike him as fantastic little creatures,
even as a bit uncanny and he duly sets it down. He
meets an KngHshman on a French train who pleases
him much, and the two become good friends and see
Rome together, but the fellow's wife is "obstreperous*
and "haughty in her manner" and so "loud-spoken in
her opinions'* that she is "really offensive" and down
it goes. He makes an impression on a Mile. Marcelle in
Paris, and she accompanies him from Monte Carlo to
Ventimiglia, and there gives him a parting kiss and
whispers, "Avril-Fontaincblcat? 9 --Q&A lo^ this sweet
one is duly spread upon the minutes. He permits him-
self to be arrested by a fair privateer in Piccadilly, and
goes with her to one of the dens of sin that suffragettes
see in their nightmares, and cross-examines her at
length regarding her ancestry, her professional ethics
and ideals, and her earnings at her dismal craft and
into the book goes a full report of the proceedings. He
is entertained by an eminent Dutch jurist in Amster-
dam^-and upon the pages of the chronicle it appears
that the gentleman is "waxy** and "a little pedantic,**
and that he is probably the sort of "thin, delicate, wdl
barbered" professor jt Ibsen had in miiyf when he
u
Theodore Dreiset
cast about for a husband for the daughter of General
Gabler.
Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands il
and practises it an endless piling up of minutiae^ an
almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and
molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it alL
One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man,
and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of
his readers. A Dreiser novel, at least of the later canon,
cannot be read as other novels are read on a winter
evening or summer afternoon, between meal and meal,
travelling from New York to Boston. It demands the
attention for almost a week, and uses up the faculties
for a month. I reading "The 'Genius,* ** one were to
become engrossed in the fabulous manner described in
the publishers 9 advertisement, and so find oneself un-
able to put it down and go to bed before the end, one
would get no sleep for three days and three nights.
Worse^ there are no charms of style to mitigate the
rigours of these vast steppes and pampas of narration.
Joseph Joubert*s saying that "words should stand out
well from the paper'* is quite incomprehensible to
Dreiser; he never imitates Flaubert by writing for u la
respiration ct foreille" There is no painful groping for
the inevitable weird, or for what Walter Pater called
"the gipsy phrase**; the common, even the common-
place, coin of speech is good enough. On the first page
of "Jennie Gerhardt** one encounters "frank, open coun-
tenance,** "diffident manner,** "helpless poor,** "untu-
tored mind," "honest necessity," and half a dozen other
stand-bys of the second-rate newspaper reporter. In
"Sister Carrie" one finds "high noon,** "hurrying
throng," "unassuming restaurant,** "dainty slippers,"
"high-strung nature," and "cool, calculating world**
all on a few pages. Carrie's sister, Minnie Hanson,
"gets" the supper. Hanson himself is "wrapped up" in
his child. Carrie decides to enter Storm and King's
office, "no matter what" In The Titan" the word
45
tt & MBNCKIK
*trig* is worked to death; it takes on, toward the end,
the character of a banal and preposterous refrain. In the
other books one encounters mates for it words made
to do duty in as many senses as the American verb "to
fix* or the journalistic "to secure.**
I often wonder if Dreiser gets anything properly de-
scribable as pleasure out of this dogged accumulation
of threadbare, undistinguished, uninspiring nouns, ad-
jectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, participles and con-
junctions* To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies
the man who searches painfully for the perfect word,
and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said
there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discov-
ery, of happy accident A phrase springs up full blown,
sweet and caressing. But what joy can there be in roll-
ing up sentences that have no more life and beauty
in them, intrinsically, than so many election bulletins?
Where is the thrill in the manufacture of such a para-
graph as that in which Mrs. Althea Jones 9 sordid habi-
tat is described with *uch inexorable particularity? Or
in the laborious confection of such stufi as this, from
Book I, Chapter IV, of "The 'Genius*"?:
The city of Chicago who shall portray it! This
vast nick of life that had sprung suddenly into exist-
ence upon the dank marshes of a lake shore!
Or this from the epilogue to The Financier*:
There is a certain fish whose scientific name is
Mycteroperca Bonaci, and whose common name is
Black Grouper, which is of considerable value as an
afterthought in this connection, and which deserves
much to be better known. It is a healthy creature,
growing quite regularly to a weight of two hundred
and fifty pounds, and living a comfortable, lengthy
existence because of its very remarkable ability to
adapt itself to conditions. . .
46
Theodore Dreiser
Or this from his pamphlet, "Life, Art and America"; 1
Alas, alas! for art in America. It has a hard stubby
row to hoe.
But I offer no more examples. Every reader of the
Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens of
awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes
spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so
many lumps of sodium hyposulphite. Here and there, as
in parts of "The Titan" and again in parts of "ArHoo-
sier Holiday,* an evil conscience seems to haunt Hm
and he gives hard striving to his manner, and more
than once there emerges something that is almost
graceful. But a backsliding always follows this phospho-
rescence of reform. "The 'Genius,' '* coming after "The
Titan," marks the high tide of his bad writing. There
are passages in it so clumsy, so inept, so irritating that
they seem almost unbelievable; nothing worse is to be
found in the newspapers. Nor is there any compensa-
tory deftness in structure, or solidity of design, to make
up for this carelessness in detail. The well-made novel,
of course, can be as hollow as the well-made play of
Scribe but let us at least have a beginning, a middle
and an end! Such a story as *Thc 'Genius' w is as gross
and shapeless as Brunnhilde. It billows and bulges out
like a cloud of smoke, and its internal organization is
almost as vague. There are episodes that, with a few
chapters added, would make very respectable novels.
There are chapters that need but a touch or two to
be excellent short stories. The thing rambles, staggers,
trips, heaves, pitches, struggles, totters, wavers, halts>
turns aside, trembles on the edge of collapse. More than
once it seems to be foundering, both in the equine and
in the maritime senses. The tale has been heard of a
tree so tall that it took two men to see to the top of it.
*Nev York, 1917; reprinted from The Seven Arts for Feb. 19x7.
H. L. MKNCKEK
Here is a novel so brobdingnagian that a single reader
can scarcely read his way through it ...
Of the general ideas which He at the bottom of all of
Dreiser's work it is impossible to be in ignorance, for he
has exposed them at length in "A Hoosier Holiday**
and summarized them in "Life, Art and America.** In
their main outlines they are not unlike the fundamen-
tal assumptions of Joseph Conrad. Both novelists see
human existence as a seeking without a finding; both
reject the prevailing interpretations of its meaning and
mechanism; both take refuge in "I do not know," Put
*A Hoosier Holiday** beside Conrad's "A Personal Rec-
ord,** and you will come upon parallels from end to
end. Or better still, put it beside Hugh Walpole's
"Joseph Conrad,** in which the Conradean metaphysic
is condensed from the novels even better than Conrad
lias done it himself: at once you will see how the two
novelists, each a worker in the elemental emotions,
each a rebel against the current assurance and superfi-
ciality, each an alien to his place and time, touch each
other in a hundred ways*
"Conrad," says Walpole, "is of the firm and resolute
conviction that life is too strong, too clever and too re-
morseless for the sons of men.** And then, in amplifica-
tion: "It is as though, from some high window, looking
down, he were able to watch some shore, from whose
security men were forever launching little cockleshell
boats upon a limitless and angry sea. ... From his
height he can follow their fortunes, their brave strug-
gles, their fortitude to the very end. He admires their
courage^ the simplicity of their faith, but his irony
springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end. . . .**
Substitute the name of Dreiser for that of Conrad,
and you will have to change scarcely a word. Perhaps
onc^ to wit, "clever.** I suspect that Dreiser, writing so
of his own creed, would be tempted to make it "stu-
pi4 w or, at all events, "unintelligible.* The struggle of
Theodore Dreiser
man, as he sees it, is more than impotent; it is gratui-
tous and purposeless. There is, to his eye, no grand in-
genuity* no skillful adaptation of means to end, no
moral (or even dramatic) plan in the order of the uni-
verse. He can get out of it only a sense of profound and
inexplicable disorder. The waves which batter the cock-
leshells change their direction at every instant. Their
navigation is a vast adventure, but intolerably fortui-
tous and inept a voyage without chart, compass, sua
or stars*
So at bottom. But to look into the blackness steadily,
of course, is almost beyond the endurance of man. la
the very moment that its impenetrability is grasped t&e
imagination begins attacking it with pale beams of false
light. All religions, I daresay, are thus projected from
the questioning soul of man, and not only all religions,
but also all great agnosticisms. Nietzsche, shrinking
from the horror of that abyss of negation, revived the
Pythagorean concept of der ewigen Wicder%unjtn
vain and blood-curdling sort of comfort. To it, after a
while, he added explanations almost Christian a whole
repertoire of whys and wherefores, aims and goals, as-
pirations and significances. The kte Mark Twain, in
an unpublished work, toyed with an equally daring
idea; that men are to some unimaginably vast and in-
comprehensible Being what the unicellular organisms
of his body arc to man, and so on ad infinitum. Dreiser
occasionally inclines to much the same hypothesis; he
likens the endless reactions going on in the world we
know, the myriadal creation, collision and destruction
of entities, to the slow accumulation and organizatioa
of cells in utcro. He would make us specks in the in-
sentient embryo of some gigantic Presence whose form
is still unimaginable and whose birth must wait for
Eons and Eons. Again, he turns to something not easily
distinguishable from philosophical idealism, whether
out of Berkeley or Fichte it is hard to make out~-that
is, he would interpret the whole phenomenon of life at
49
H. Ii. MENCKEN
no more than an appearance, a nightmare of some un-
seen sleeper or of men themselves, an "uncanny blur of
nothingness" in Euripides' phrase, "a song sung by an
Idiot, dancing down the wind." Yet again, he talks
vaguely of the intricate polyphony of a cosmic orches-
tra, cacophonous to our duU ears. Finally, he puts the
observed into the ordered, reading a purpose in the dis-
played event: "life was intended to sting and hurt. . . ?
But these are only gropings, and not to be read too crit-
ically. From speculations and explanations he always re-
turns, Conrad-like, to the bald fact: to "the spectacle
and stress of life/' All he can make out clearly is "a vast
compulsion which has nothing to do with the individ-
ual desires or tastes or impulses of individuals.** That
compulsion springs "from the settling processes of forces
which we do not in the least understand, over which we
have no control, and in whose grip we are as grains of
dust or sand, blown hither and thither, for what purpose
we cannot even suspect.** * Man is not only doomed to
defeat, but denied any glimpse or understanding of his
antagonist Here we come upon an agnosticism that has
almost got beyond curiosity. What good would it do us,
asks Dreiser, to know? In our ignorance and helpless-
ness, we may at least get a slave's consolation out of
cursing the unknown gods. Suppose we saw them striv-
ing blindly, top, and pitied them? . . .
But, as I say, this scepticism is often tempered by
guesses at a possibly hidden truth, and the confession
that this truth may exist reveals the practical unwork-
ableness of the unconditioned system, at least for Drei-
ser. Conrad is far more resolute, and it is easy to see
why. He is, by birth and training, an aristocrat. He has
the gift of emotional detachment. The lures of facile
doctrine do not move him. In his irony there is a dis-
dain which plays about even the ironist himself* Dreiser
is a product of far different forces and traditions, and is
capable of no such escapement Struggle as he may, and
1 Ii^ Art and Amnica, p. 5.
60
Theodore Dreiser
fume and protest as lie may, he can no more shake off
the chains of his intellectual and cultural heritage than
he can change the shape of his nose. What that heritage
is you may find out in detail by reading "A Hoosier
Holiday," or in summary by glancing at the first few
pages of "Life, Art and America." Briefly described, it is
the burden of a believing mind, a moral attitude, a lin-
gering superstition. One-half of the man's brain, so to
speak, wars with the other half. He is intelligent, he is
thoughtful, he is a sound artist but there come mo-
ments when a dead hand falls upon him, and he is once
more the Indiana peasant, snuffing absurdly over imbe-
cile sentimentalities, giving a grave ear to quackeries,
snorting and eye-rolling with the best of them. One
generation spans too short a time to free the soul of
man. Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a
Prussian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds a Puritan;
he erected his war upon holiness, toward die end, into
a sort of holy war. Kipling, the grandson of a Method-
ist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increas-
ing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he
falls back upon his fundamentals. And that other Eng-
lish novelist who springs from the servants* halt let us
not be surprised or blame him if he sometimes writes
like a bounder.
The truth about Dreiser is that he is still in the trait
sition stage between Christian Endeavour and civiliza-
tion, between Warsaw, Indiana and the Socratic grove,
between being a good American and being a free man,
and so he sometimes vacillates perilously between a
moral sentimentalism and a somewhat extravagant re-
volt. "The 'Genius,' " on the one hand, is almost a tract
for rectitude, a Warning to the Young; its motto might
be Scheut die Dirnenl And on the other hand, it is full
of a laborious truculence that can only be explained by
imagining the author as heroically determined to prove
that he is a plain-spoken fellow and his own man, let
the chips fall where they may. So, in spots, in "The
51
H. L. MENCKEN
Financier* and "The Than," both of them far better
books. There Is an almost moral frenzy to expose and
riddle what passes for morality among the stupid. The
isolation of irony is never reached; the man is still
evangelical; his ideas are still novelties to him; he is as
solemnly absurd in some of his floutings of the Code
Americain as he is in his respect for Bougucreau, or in
his flirtings with the New Thought, or in his naif be-
lief in the importance of novel-writing. Somewhere or
other I have called all this the Greenwich Village com-
plex. It is not genuine artists, serving beauty reverently
and proudly, who herd in those cockroachcd cellars and
bawl for art; it is a mob of half-educated yokels and
cockneys to whom the very idea of art is still novel, and
intoxicating and more than a little bawdy.
Not that Dreiser actually belongs to this ragamuffin
company. Far from it, indeed. There is in him, hidden
deep-down, a great instinctive artist, and hence the
makings of an aristocrat. In his muddled way, held
back by the manacles of his race and time, and his steps
made uncertain by a guiding theory which too often
eludes his own comprehension, he yet manages to pro-
duce works of art of unquestionable beauty and author-
ity, and to interpret life in a manner that is poignant
and illuminating. There is vastly more intuition in Him
than intellcctualism; his talent is essentially feminine,
as Conrad's is masculine; his ideas always seem to be
deduced from his feelings. The view of life that got
into "Sister Carrie,** his first book, was not the product
of a conscious thinking out of Carrie's problems. It
amply got itself there by the force of the artistic pas-
sion behind it; its coherent statement had to wait for
other and more reflective days. The thing began as a
vision, not as a syllogism. Here the name of Franz
Schubert inevitably comes up. Schubert was an ignora-
mus, even in music; he knew less about polyphony,
which is the mother of harmony, which is the mother
of music, than the average conservatory professor* But
62
Theodore Dreiser
nevertheless he had such a vast instinctive sensitiveness
to musical values, such a profound and accurate feeling
for beauty in tone, that he not only arrived at the truth
in tonal relations, but even went beyond what, in his
day, was known to be the truth, and so led an advance.
Likewise, Giorgione de Castelfranco and Masaccio
come to mind: painters of the first rank, but untu-
tored, unsophisticated, uncouth. Dreiser, within his
limits, belongs to this sabot-shod company of the elect.
One thinks of Conrad, not as artist first, but as savant.
There is something of the icy aloofness of the lab-
oratory in him, even when the images he conjures up
pulsate with the very glow of life. He is almost as
self-conscious as the Beethoven of the last quartets. In
Dreiser the thing is more intimate, more disorderly,
more a matter of pure feeling. He gets his effects, one
might almost say, not by designing them, but by living
them.
But whatever the process, the power of the image
evoked is not to be gainsaid. It is not only brilliant on
the surface, but mysterious and appealing in its depths.
One swiftly forgets his intolerable writing, his mirth-
less, sedulous, repellent manner, in the face of the
Athenian tragedy he instils into his seduced and soul-
sick servant girls, his barbaric pirates of finances, his
conquered and hamstrung supermen, his wives who sit
and wait. He has, like Conrad, a sure talent for depict-
ing the spirit in disintegration. Old Gerhardt, in "Jen-
nie Gerhardt," is alone worth all the dramatis fcrsonae
of popular American fiction since the days of "Rob o*
the Bowl"; Howells could no more have created him,
in his Rodinesque impudence of outline, than he could
have created Tartuffe or Gargantua. Such a novel as
"Sister Carrie" stands quite outside the brief traffic o
the customary stage. It leaves behind it an unescapable
impression of bigness, of epic sweep and dignity. It is
not a mere story, not a novel in the customary Ameri-
can meaning of the word; it is at once a psalm of life
63
H. I*. MENCKEN
and a criticism of life and that criticism loses nothing
by the fact that its burden is despair. Here, precisely, is
the point o Dreiser's departure from his fellows. He
puts into his novels a touch of the eternal Weltschmerz.
They get below the drama that is of the moment and
reveal the greater drama that is without end. They
arouse those deep and lasting emotions which grow out
of the recognition of elemental and universal tragedy.
His aim is not merely to tell a tale; his gitr* is to show
the vast ebb and flow of forces which sway and con-
dition human destiny. One cannot imagine bin? con-
senting to Conan Doyle's statement of die purpose of
fiction, quoted with characteristic approval by the New
York Times: "to amuse mankind, to help the sick and
the dull and the weary." Nor is his purpose to instruct;
if he is a pedagogue it is only incidentally and as a
weakness. The thing he seeks to do is to stir, to awaken,
to move. One does not arise from such a book as "Sister
Carrie" with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infi-
nitely touched.
^\
Dreiser, like Mark Twain and Emerson before him,
has been far more hospitably greeted in his first stage,
now drawing to a close, in England than in his own
country. The cause of this, I daresay, lies partly in the
fact that "Sister Carrie" was in general circulation over
there during the seven years that it remained suppressed
on this side. It was during these years that such men as
Arnold Bennett, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Frank Har-
ris and H. G. Wells, and such critical journals as the
Spectator, the Saturday Review and the Athenaeum be-
came aware of him, and so laid the foundations of a
sound appreciation of his subsequent work. Since the
beginning of the war, certain English newspapers have
echoed the alarmed American discovery that he is a
literary agent of the Wilhelmstrasse, but it is to the
honour of the English that this imbecility has got no
64
Theodore Dreiser
countenance from reputable authority and has not in-
jured his position.
At home, as I have shown, he is less fortunate* When
criticism is not merely an absurd effort to chase him
out of court because his ideas are not orthodox, as the
Victorians tried to chase out Darwin and Swinburne,
and their predecessors pursued Shelley and Byron, it is
too often designed to identify him with some branch or
other of "radical" poppycock, and so credit him with
purposes he has never imagined. Thus Chautauqua
pulls and Greenwich Village pushes. In the middle
ground there proceeds the pedantic effort to dispose of
him by labelling him, One faction maintains that he is
a realist; another calls him a naturalist; a third argues
that he is really a disguised romanticist. This debate is
all sound and fury, signifying nothing, but out of it has
come a valuation by Lawrence Oilman 1 which perhaps
strikes very close to the truth. He is, says Mr. Oilman,
**a sentimental mystic who employs the mimetic ges-
tures of the realist.'* This judgment is apt in particular
and sound in general. No such thing as a pure method
is possible in the novel. Plain realism, as in Gorky's
"Nachtasyl" and the war stories of Ambrose Bierce,
simply wearies us by its vacuity; plain romance, if we
ever get beyond our nonage, makes us laugh. It is their
artistic combination, as in life itself, that fetches us
the subtle projection of the concrete muddle that is liv-
ing against the ideal orderliness that we reach out for
the eternal war of experience and aspiration the con-
trast between the world as it is and the world as it
might be or ought to be. Dreiser describes the thing
that he sees, laboriously and relentlessly, but he never
forgets the dream that is behind it. "He gives you,"
continues Mr. Oilman, "a sense of actuality; but he
gives you more than tiat: out of the vast welter and
surge, the plethoric irrelevancies . . * emerges a sense
1 The North American Retrieto, February 1916.
65
H. L. MENCKEN
of the infinite sadness and mystery of human life. . . .* l
"To see truly," said Renan, "is to see dimly/* Dim-
ness or mystery, call it what you will: it is in all
these overgrown and formless, but profoundly mov-
ing books. Just what do they mean? Just what is Drei-
ser driving at? That such questions should be asked
is only a proof of the straits to which pedagogy has
brought criticism* The answer is simple: he is driving
at nothing, he is merely trying to represent what he sees
and feels. His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to
teach, to expound, to make simple; it is that "obscure
inner necessity" of which Conrad tells us, the irre-
sistible creative passion of a genuine artist, standing
spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life,
enamoured by the strange beauty that plays over its
sordidness, challenged to a wondering and half-terrified
sort of representation of what passes understanding.
And jenseits von Gut und Bose. "For myself," says
Dreiser, "I do not know what truth is, what beauty is,
what love is, what hope is. I do not believe anyone
absolutely and I do not doubt anyone absolutely. I
think people are both evil and well-intentioned." The
hatching of the Dreiser bugaboo is here; it is the flat
rejection of the rubber-stamp formulae that outrages
petty minds; not being "good,** he must be "evil" as
William Blake said of Milton, a true poet is always "of
the devil's party." But in that very groping toward a
light but dimly seen there is a measure, it seems to me,
of Dreiser's rank and consideration as an artist. "Now
comes the public," says Hermann Bahr, "and demands
that we explain what the poet is trying to say. The an-
swer is this: If we knew exactly he would not be a
poet . . "
1 Another competent valuation, by Randolph Bourne, ii in The Dut,
June 14, 1917.
GORE IN THE CARIBBEES [1917}
(EROM Heathen Days, 1943)
No reporter of my generation, whatever his
genius, ever really rated spats and a walking-stick un-
til he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
The first, by the ill-favor of the gods, I always missed,
usually by an inch. How often, alas, alas, did I strain
and puff my way to some Christian hamlet o the Ches-
apeake Bay littoral, by buggy, farm-wagon or pack-
mule, only to discover that an anti-social sheriff had
spirited the blackamoor away, leaving nothing but a
seething vacuum behind. Once, as I was on my trav-
els, the same thing happened in the charming town
of Springfield, Mo., the Paris and Gomorrah of the
Ozarks. I was at dinner at the time with the late Edsoa
K. Bixby, editor of the Springfield Leader, along with
Paul Patterson and Henry M. Hyde, my colleagues of
the Baltimore Sunpapers. When the alarm reached us
we abandoned our victuals instantly, and leaped and
galloped downtown to the jail. By the time we got
there, though it was in less than three minutes, the cops
had loaded the candidate he was a white man into
their hurry-wagon and made off for Kansas City, and
the lynching mob had been reduced to a hundred or so
half-grown youths, a couple of pedlars selling hot-dogs
and American flags, and a squawking herd of fasci-
nated but disappointed children.
I had rather better luck with revolutions, though I
covered only one, and that one I walked into by a sort
of accident. The year was 1917 and I was returning
from a whiff of World War I in a Spanish ship that had
sailed from La Coruna, Spain, ten days before and was
67
H. L. MENCKEN
hoping, eventually, to get to Havana. It was, at the mo-
ment, somewhat in the maze of the Bahamas, but a
wireless reached it nevertheless, and that wireless was
directed to me and came from the Sunpaper office in
Baltimore. It said, in brief, that a revolution had broken
out in Cuba, that both sides were doing such rough ly-
ing that no one north of the Straits of Florida could
make out what it was about, and that a series of suc-
cinct and illuminating dispatches describing its issues
and personalities would be appreciated. I wirelessed
back that the wishes of my superiors were commands,
and then sent another wireless to a friend in Havana,
Captain Asmus Leonhard, marine superintendent of the
Munson Line, saying that I itched to see him the instant
my ship made port. Captain Leonhard was a Dane of
enormous knowledge but parsimonious speech, and I
had a high opinion of his sagacity. He knew everyone
worth knowing in Latin America, and thousands who
were not, and his estimates of them seldom took more
than three words. "A burglar," he would say, charac-
terizing a general played up by all the North American
newspapers as the greatest trans-Rio Grande hero since
Bolivar, or "a goddam fraud,'* alluding to a new presi-
dent of Colombia, El Salvador or Santo Domingo, and
that was all. His reply to my wireless was in his usual
manner. It said: "Sure."
When the Spanish ship, after groping about for two
or three days in Exuma Sound, the North-East Provi-
dence Channel, the Tongue of Ocean and various other
strangely-named Bahaman waterways, finally made
Havana and passed the Morro, a smart young mulatto
in Captain Lombard's launch put out from shore, took
me aboard his craft, and whisked me through the cus-
toms. The captain himself was waiting in front of the
Pasaje Hotel in the Prado, eating a plate of Spanish
bean-soup and simultaneously smoking a Romeo y
Julieta cigar. "The issues in the revolution," he said,
tackling the business in hand at once, "are simple. Me-
58
Gore in the Caribbees
nocal, who calls himself a Conservative, is president, and
Josi Miguel Gomez, who used to be president and calls
himself a Liberal, wants to make a come-back. That is
the whole story. Jose Miguel says that when Menocal
was reelected last year the so-called Liberals were
chased away from the so-called polls by the so-called
army. On the other hand, Menocal says that Jose Miguel
is a porch-climber and ought to be chased out of the is-
land. Both are right."
It seemed clear enough, and I prepared to write a
dispatch at once, but Captain Leonhard suggested that
perhaps it might be a good idea for me to see Menocal
first, and hear the official version in full. We were at the
palace in three minutes, and found it swarming with
dignitaries. Half of them were army officers in uniform,
with swords, and the other half were functionaries of
the secretariat. They pranced and roared all over the
place, and at intervals of a few seconds more officers
would dash up in motor-cars and muscle and whoop
their way into the president's office. These last, ex-
plained Captain Leonhard, were couriers from the
front, for Jose Miguel, having taken to the bush, was
even now surrounded down in Santa Clara province,
and there were high hopes that he would be nabbed
anon. Despite all the hurly-burly it took only ten min-
utes for the captain to get me an audience with el presi-
dent?. I found His Excellency calm and amiable. He
spoke English fluently, and was far from reticent. Jose
Miguel, he said, was a fiend in human form who hoped
by his treasons to provoke American intervention, and
so upset the current freely-chosen and impeccably vir-
tuous government. This foul plot would fail. The gal-
lant Cuban army, which had never lost either a battle
or a war, had die traitor cornered, and within a few
days he would be chained up among the lizards in the
fortress of La Cabana, waiting for the firing-squad and
trying in vain to make his peace with God.
So saying, el presidente bowed me out, at the same
59
H. lb MENCKEN
time offering to put a motor-car and a secretary at my
disposal. It seemed a favorable time to write my dis-
patch, but Captain Leonhard stayed me. "First,** he said,
"you had better hear what the revolutionists have to
say.** "The revolutionists!" I exclaimed. "I thought they
were out in Santa Clara, surrounded by the army.**
"Some are,** said the captain, "but some ain't. Let us
take a hack*** So we took a hack and were presently
worming our way down the narrow street called
Obispo. The captain called a halt in front of a bank, and
we got out. 'Til wait here in the bank,'* he said, "and
you go upstairs to Room 309. Ask for Dr. * and he
whispered a name. "Who is this Dr. ?" I whispered
back. "He is the head of the revolutionary junta,** re-
plied the captain. "Mention my name, and he will tell
you all about it.**
I followed orders, and was soon closeted with the
doctor a very tall, very slim old man with a straggling
beard and skin the color of cement. While we gabbled
various persons rushed in and out of his office^ most of
them carrying papers which they slapped upon his desk.
In a corner a young Cuban girl of considerable sight-
liness banged away at a typewriter. The doctor, like d
presidents, spoke excellent English, and. appeared to
be in ebullient spirits. He had trustworthy agents, he
gave me to understand, in the palace, some of them in
high office. He knew what was going on in the Ameri-
can embassy. He got carbons of all official telegrams
from the front The progress of events there, he said,
was extremely favorable to the cause of reform. Jose
Miguel, though somewhat bulky for field service, was
a military genius comparable to Joffre or Hindenburg^
or even to Hannibal or Alexander, and would soon be
making monkeys of the generals of the army. As for
Menocal, he was a fiend in human form who hoped
to provoke American intervention, and thereby make
Iiis corrupt and abominable regime secure.
All this naturally struck me as somewhat
60
Gore in the Caribbees
though as a newspaper reporter I was supposed to be
incapable of surprise. Here, in the very heart and giz-
zard of Havana, within sight and hearing of thousands,
the revolutionists were maintaining what amounted to
open headquarters, and their boss wizard was talking
freely, and indeed in a loud voice, to a stranger whose
only introduction had been, so to speak, to ask for Joe.
I ventured to inquire of the doctor if there were not
some danger that his gold-fish globe of a hideaway
would be discovered. "Not much," he said. "The army
is hunting for us, but the army is so stupid as to be vir-
tually idiotic. The police know where we are, but they
believe we are going to win, and want to keep their jobs
afterward.** From this confidence the doctor proceeded
to boasting. "In ten days,'* he said, "we'll have Menocal
jugged in La Cabana. Shoot him? No; it would be too
expensive. The New York banks that run him have
plenty of money. If we let him live they will come
across.**
When I rejoined the captain downstairs I suggested
again that it was high time for me to begin composing
my dispatch, and this time he agreed. More, he hauled
me down to the cable office, only a block or two away,
and there left me. "If you get into trouble," he said,
"call me up at the Pasaje. I'll be taking my nap, but
the clerk will wake me if you need me." I found the
cable office very comfortable and even luxurious. There
were plenty of desks and typewriters, and when I an-
nounced myself I was invited to make myself free of
them. Moreover, as I sat down and began to unlimbcr
my prose a large brass spittoon was wheeled up beside
me, apparently as a friendly concession to my nation-
ality. At other desks a number of other gentlemen
were in labor, and I recognized them at once as col-
leagues, for a newspaper reporter can always spot an-
other, just as a Freemason can spot a Freemason, or a
detective a detective. But I didn't know any of them,
and fell to work without speaking to them* When my
61
H. It. MENCKEK
dispatch was finished I took it to the window, and was
informed politely that it would have to be submitted to
the censor, who occupied, it appeared, a room in the
rear.
The censor turned out to be a young Cuban whose
English was quite as good as MenocaPs or the doctor's,
but unhappily he had rules to follow, and I soon found
that they were very onerous. While I palavered with him
several of the colleagues came up with copy in their
hands, and in two minutes an enormous debate was in
progress. He was sworn, I soon gathered, to cut out
everything even remotely resembling a feet No names.
No dates. Worse^ no conjectures, prognostications,
divinations. The colleagues, thus robbed of their habit-
ual provender and full of outrage, put up a dreadful up-
roar, but the censor stood his ground, and presently I
slipped away and called up Captain Leonhard. My re-
spect for his influence was higher than ever now, and it
had occurred to me that the revolutionists up the street
might have a private cable, and that if they had he
would undoubtedly be free of it. But when, in response
to his order, I met him in front of the Pasaje, he said
nothing about a cable, but heaved me instead into a
hack. In ten minutes we were aboard an American ship
just about to cast off from a wharf down in the region
of the customs-house, and he was introducing me to
one of the mates. "Tell him what to do," he said,
"and he will do it." I told the mate to file my dispatch
the instant his ship docked at Key West, he nodded si-
lently and put the copy into an inside pocket, and that
was that. TTben the siren sounded and the captain and I
returned to the pier.
It all seemed so facile that I became somewhat un-
easy. Could the mate be trusted? The captain assured
me that he could. But what of the ship? Certainly it
did not look fit for wrestling with the notorious swells
of the Straits of Florida. Its lines suggested that it had
started out in life as an excursion boat on the Hudson,
Gore in the Caribbees
and it was plainly in die last stages of decrepitude* I
knew that the run to Key West was rather more than a
hundred miles, and my guess, imparted to the captain,
was that no such craft could make it in less than forty-
eight hours. But the captain only laughed. "That old
hulk," he said, "is the fastest ship in the Caribbean. If
it doesn't hit a log or break in two it will make Key
West in five and a half hours." He was right as usual,
for that night, just as I was turning in at the Pasaje I
received a ''able from the Sunpaper saying that my trea-
tise on the revolution had begun to run, and was very
illuminating and high-toned stuff.
Thereafter, I unloaded all my dissertations in the
same manner. Every afternoon I would divert attention
by waiting on the censor and filing a dispatch so full of
contraband that I knew he would never send it, and
then I would go down to the wharf and look up the
mate. On the fourth day he was non e& and I was in a
panic, for the captain had gone on a business trip into
Pinar del Rio and no one else could help me. But just
as the lines were being cast off I caught sight of a likely-
looking Americano standing at the gangway and de-
cided to throw myself upon his Christian charity. He
responded readily, and my dispatch went through as
usual. Thereafter, though the mate never showed up
again I heard later that he was sick in Key West I al-
ways managed to find an accommodating passenger*
Meanwhile, the censor's copy-hook accumulated a fine
crop of my rejected cablegrams, and mixed with them
were scores by the colleagues. Every time I went to the
cable office I found the whole corps raising hell, and
threatening all sorts of reprisals and revenges. But they
seldom got anything through save the official communi-
ques that issued from the palace at hourly intervals.
These communiques were prepared by a large staff
of press-agents, and were not only couched in extremely
florid words but ran to great lengths. I had just come
from Berlin, where all that the German General Staff
68
H. L. MENCKEN
had to say every day, though war was raging on two
fronts, was commonly put into no more than 300 words,
so this Latin exuberance rather astonished me. But the
stuff made gaudy reading, and I sent a lot of it to the
Sunpapcr by mail, for the entertainment and instruc-
tion of the gentlemen of the copy-desL The Cuban
mails, of course, were censored like the cable, but the
same Americano who carried my afternoon dispatch to
Key West was always willing to mail a few long
envelopes at the same place* Meanwhile, I hung about
the palace^ and picked up enough off-record gossip to
give my dispatches a pleasant air of verisimilitude,
soothing to editors if not to readers. Also, I made daily
visits to the headquarters of the revolutionists, and
there got a lot of information, some of it sound, to the
same end. In three days, such is the quick grasp of the
reportorial mind, I knew all the ins and outs of the rev-
olution,* and in a week I was fit to write a history of
Cuban politics from the days of Diego Velazquez. I
was, of course, younger then than I am now, and rev
porters today are not what they used to be, but into
that we need not go.
After a week it began to be plain, even on the evidence
supplied by the revolutionists, that the uprising was
making heavy weather of it, and when, a day or two
later, the palace press-agents announced, in a communi-
que running to 8,000 words, that Jose Miguel Gomez
was about to be taken, I joined the colleagues in believ-
ing it We all demanded, of course, to be let in on the
final scene, and after a long series of conferences, with
speeches by Menocal, half a dozen high army officers,
all the press-agents and most of the correspondents, it
was so ordered. According to both the palace and the
Like many of Mencken'* newspaper reports, this one reads like
m parody, or a carefree fantasia on the truth. It was often so, but not
n you were along with him on the same assignment. This apparently
wild account is shrewdly dose to the facts, as set down in hindsight
8 " * Th *
64
Gore in the Caribbean
revolutionists, the front \vas down at Placetas in Santa
Clara, 180 miles away, but even in those days there were
plenty of Fords in Havana, and it was arranged that a
fleet of them should start out the next morning, loaded
with correspondents, typewriters and bottled beer. Un-
happily, the trip was aever made, for at the precise
moment the order for it was being issued a dashing colo-
nel in Santa Clara was leading his men in a grand assault
upon Jos Miguel, and after ten minutes of terrific fire
and deafening yells the Cuban Hindenburg hoisted his
shirt upon the tip of his sword and surrendered. He did
not have to take his shirt off for the purpose: it was al-
ready hanging upon a guava bush, for he had been pre-
paring for a siesta in his hammock* Why he did not
know of the projected attack I could never find out, for
he was held incommunicado in La Cabana until I left
Cuba, and neither the palace nor the revolutionists
seemed willing to discuss the subject
The palace press-agents, you may be sure, spit on
their hands when they heard the news, and turned out
a series of communiques perhaps unsurpassed in the
history of war. Their hot, lascivious rhetoric was still
flowing three or four days later, long after poor Jos
Miguel was safely jugged among the lizards and scor-
pions. I recall one canto of five or six thousand words
that included a' minute autopsy on the strategy and tac-
tics of the final batde, written by a gifted military pa-
thologist on the staff of the victorious colonel He
described every move in the stealthy approach to Jos
Miguel in the minutest detail, and pitched his analysis in
highly graphic and even blood-curdling terms. More
than once, it appeared, the whole operation was in dire
peril, and a false step might have wrecked it, and
thereby delivered Cuba to the wolves. Indeed, it might
have been baffled at its very apex and apogee if only
Jos Miguel had had his shirt on. As it was, he could
not, according to Latin notions of decorum, lead his
men, and in consequence they skedaddled, and he him-
65
H. 14. MENCKEN
self was forced to yield his sword to the agents of the
New York banks.
The night of the victory was a great night in Havana,
and especially at the palace. President Menocal kept
open house in the most literal sense: his office door was
wide open and anyone was free to rush in and hug him.
Thousands did so, including scores of officers arriving
home from the front. Some of these officers were in-
dubitably Caucasians, but a great many were of darker
shades, including saddle-brown and coffin-black. As they
leaped out of their Fords in front of the palace the
bystanders fell upon them with patriotic gloats and gur-
gles, and kissed them on both cheeks* Then they strug-
gled up the grand staircase to el presidents* reception-
room, and were kissed again by the superior public
there assembled. Finally, they leaped into the inner
office, and fell to kissing His Excellency and to being
kissed by him. It was an exhilarating show, but full
of strangeness to a Nordic. I observed two things es-
pecially. The first was that, for all the uproar, no one
was drunk. The other was that the cops beat up no one.
Jose Miguel was brought to Havana the next morn-
ing, chained up in a hearse, and the palace press-agents
announced in a series of ten or fifteen communiques
that he would be tried during the afternoon, and shot
at sunrise the day following. The colleagues, robbed of
their chance to see his capture, now applied for permis-
sion to see him put to death, and somewhat to their sur-
prise it was granted readily. He was to be turned off, it
appeared, at 6 ajn. promptly, so they were asked to be
at the gate of La Cabana an hour earlier. Most of them
were on hand, but the sentry on watch refused to let
them in, and after half an hour's wrangle a young offi-
cer came out and said that the execution had been post-
poned until the next day. But the next day it was put
off again, and again the next, and after three or four
days no more colleagues showed up at the gate. It was
then flnnniin<yj by the palace literati that President
66
Gore in the Caribbee*
Menocal had commuted the sentence to solitary con-
finement for life in a dungeon on the Cayos de las Doce
Leguas ofi the south coast, where the mosquitoes were
as large as bullfrogs, along with confiscation of all the
culprit's property, whether real, personal or mixed, and
the perpetual loss of his civil rights, such as they were.
But even this turned out to be only tall talk, for
President Menocal was a very humane man, and pretty
soon he reduced Jose Miguel's sentence to fifty years,
and then to fifteen, and then to six, and then to two.
Soon after that he wiped out the jugging altogether,
and substituted a fine first of $1,000,000, then of $250,-
ooo, and then of $50,000. The common belief was that
Jose Miguel was enormously rich, but this was found
to be an exaggeration. When I left Cuba he was still
protesting that the last and lowest fine was far beyond
his means, and in the end, I believe, he was let off with
the confiscation of his yacht, a small craft then laid up
with engine trouble. When he died in 1921 he had re-
sumed his old place among the acknowledged heroes of
his country. Twenty years later Menocal joined him in
Valhalla.
PATER PATRLE
Damn! A Book of Calumny, 1918)
If George Washington were alive today,
what a shining mark he would be for the whole ca-
morra of upllfters, forward-lookers and professional
patriots! He was the Rockefeller of his time, the richest
man in the United States, a promoter of stock com-
panies, a land-grabber, an exploiter of mines and tim-
ber. He was a bitter opponent of foreign entangle-
ments* a nf l denounced their evils in harsh, specific
67
H. L. MENCKEN
terms. He had a liking for forthright and pugnacious
men, and a contempt for lawyers, schoolmasters and all
other such obscurantists. He was not pious. He drank
whiskey whenever he felt chilly, and kept a jug of it
handy. He knew far more profanity than Scripture,
and used and enjoyed it more. He had no belief in the
infallible wisdom of the common people, but regarded
them as inflammatory dolts, and tried to save the Re-
public from them. He advocated no sure cure for all the
sorrows of the world, and doubted that such a panacea
existed. He took no interest in the private morals of his
neighbors.
Inhabiting These States today, George would be in-
eligible for any office of honor or profit. The Senate
would never dare confirm him; the President would
not think of nominating him* He would be on trial in
the newspapers for belonging to the Money Power. The
Sherman Act would have him in its toils; he would
be under indictment by every grand jury south of the
Potomac; the Methodists of his native State would be
denouncing him (he had a still at Mount Vernon) as a
debaucher of youth, a recruiting officer tor insane asy-
lums, a poisoner of the home. And what a chance there
would be for that ambitious young district attorney
who thought to shadow him on his peregrinations
and grab him under the Mann Act!
QUID EST VERJTAS?
(FXCM Damn! A Boo% of Cdumny, 1918)
All great religions, in order to escape absurd-
ity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only
the savage, whether of the African bush or the Ameri-
can gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and in-
68
Quid Est Verttasf
tent of God exactly and completely. "For who hath
known the mind of the Lord?'* asked Paul of the Ro-
mans. "How unsearchable are His judgments, and His
ways past finding out!" "It is the glory of God," said
Solomon, "to conceal a thing." "Clouds and darkness,**
said David, "are around Him.** "No man," said the
Preacher, "can find out the work of God.** . . . The
difference between religions is a difference in their
relative content of agnosticism. The most satisfying
and ecstatic faith is -almost purely agnostic. It trusts ab-
solutely without professing to know at alL
THE ART ETERNAL
(FROM the New York Evening Ma3, 1918)
One of the laudable by-products of the
Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most
cases, is involuntary and inevitable that the liar can
no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes
when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off
behind him. At its worst, indeed, this necessity takes on
a downright pathological character, and is thus as in-
nocent as sciatica. It is part of the morbid baggage of
hysterics and neurasthenics: their lying is simply a
symptom of their convulsive effort to adjust themselves
to an environment which bears upon them too harshly
for endurance. The rest of us are not quite so hard
pushed, but pushed we all are. In us the thing works
through the inferiority complex, which no man can es-
cape. He who lacks it entirely is actually reckoned
insane by the fact: his satisfaction with his situation in
the world is indistinguishable from a delusion of gran-
deur. The great majority of us all, in brief, who are
normal pass through life in constant revolt against
69
H. L. MTENCKBK
our limitations, objective and subjective. Our conscious
thought is largely devoted to plans and specifications
for cutting a better figure in human society, and in our
unconscious the business goes on much more steadily
and powerfully. No healthy man, in his secret heart, is
content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and
images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state
of existence in which it would live in a candy-store and
have two stomachs.
Lying is the product of the unconscious yearning to
realize such visions, and if the policeman, conscience,
prevents the lie being put into plain words, then it is
at least put into more or less plausible acts. We all play
parts when we face our fellow-men, as even poets have
noticed. No man could bring himself to reveal his true
character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen
and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecili-
ties, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest auto-
biography is therefore a contradiction in terms: die
moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he
tries to gild and fresco himself* Thus a man's wife^
however realistic her view of him, always flatters him
in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably
better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually
there- What she sees, even at times of the most appall-
ing domestic revelation and confidence^ is not the au-
thentic man at all, but a compound made up in part of
the authentic man and in part of his projection of a
gaudy ideal. The man who is most respected by his wife
is the one who makes this projection most vivid that
Is, the one who is the most daring and ingratiating liar.
He can never, of course, deceive her utterly, but if he
is skillful he may at least deceive her enough to make
her happy.
Omnis homo mendax: thus the Psalmist So far the
Freudians merely parrot him. What is new in their gos-
pel is the doctrine that lying is instinctive, normal, and
unavoidable that a maa is forced into it by his very
70
The Art Eternal
will-to-live. This doctrine purges the business of cer-
tain ancient embarrassments, and restores innocence to
the heart. Think of a lie as a compulsion neurosis, and
you think of it more kindly. I need not add, I tope, that
this transfer of it from the department of free will to
that of determinism by no means disposes of the penalty
that traditionally pursues it, supposing it to be detected
and resented. The proponents of free will always make
the mistake of assuming that the determinists are sim-
ply evil fellows looking for a way to escape the just
consequences of their transgressing. No sense is in that
assumption. If I lie on the witness-stand and am
detected by the judge, I am jailed for perjury forthwith,
regardless of my helplessness under compulsion. Here
justice refuses absolutely to distinguish between a mis-
fortune and a tort: the overt act is all it is concerned
with. But as jurisprudence grows more intelligent and
more civilized it may change its tune, to the benefit of
liars, which is to say, to the benefit of humanity. Science
is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force
its determinism into morals. On some shining tomor-
row a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove
that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beat-
ing time with the foot at a concert or counting the
lampposts along the^highway.
However, I have but small faith in millenniums, and
do not formally predict this one. Nor do I pronounce
any moral judgment, pro or con: moral judgments, as
old Friedrich used to say, are foreign to my nature. But
let us not forget that lying, p er $c, is not forbidden by
the moral code of Christendom. Holy Writ dismisses it
cynically, and the statutes of all civilized states are si-
lent about it. Only the Chinese, indeed, make it a
penal offense. Perjury, of course, is prohibited every-
where, and also any mendacity which amounts to fraud
and deprives a fellow-man of his property. But that far
more common form of truth-stretching which has only
the lesser aim of augmenting the liar's personal dignity
71
H. L. MENCKEN
and consequence is looked upon with a very charitable
eye. So is that form which has the aim of helping an-
other person in the same way. In the latter direction
lying may even take on the stature of a positive virtue.
The late King Edward VII, when Prince of Wales, at-
tained to great popularity throughout Christendom by
venturing into downright perjury. Summoned into a
court of law to give expert testimony regarding some
act of adultery, he lied Uke a gentleman, as the phrase
goes, to protect a woman. The lie, to be sure, was
intrinsically useless; no one believed that the lady was
innocent Nevertheless, every decent Christian applauded
the perjurer for his good intentions, including even the
judge on the bench, sworn to combat false witness by
every resource of forcnsics. All of us, worms that we
are, occasionally face the alternatives that confronted
Edward. On the one hand, we may tell the truth, re-
gardless of consequences, and on die other hand we
may mellow it and sophisticate it to make it humane
and tolerable,
For the habitual truth-teller and truth-seeker, in-
deed, the world has very little liking. He is always
unpopular, and not infrequently his unpopularity is so
excessive that it endangers his life. Run your eye back
over the list of martyjrs, lay and clerical: nine-tenths of
them, you will find, stood accused of nothing worse
than honest efforts to find out and announce the truth*
Even today, with the scientific passion become familiar
in the world, the general view of such fellows is highly
unfavorable. The typical scientist, the typical critic of
institutions, the typical truth-seeker in every field is held
under suspicion by the great majority of men, and vari-
ously beset by posses of relentless foes. If he tries to find
out the truth about arteriosclerosis, or surgical shock,
or cancer, he is denounced as a scoundrel by the Chris-
tian Scientists, the osteopaths and the anti-viviscc-
tionists, If he tries to tell the truth about the govern-
ment, its agents seek to silence him and punish him. If
78
The Art Eternal
he turns to fiction and endeavors to depict his fellow
men accurately, he has the Comstocks on his hands. la
no field can he count upon a friendly audience, and
freedom from assault Especially in the United States is
his whole enterprise viewed with bilious eye. The men
the American people admire most extravagantly are
the most daring liars; the men they detest most vio-
lently are those who try to tdl them the truth* A Gali-
leo could no more be elected President of the United
States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both
high posts are reserved for men favored by God with
an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts
of life in bandages of soft illusion.
^%
THE SKEPTIC
(FROM the Smart Set, May 1919)
No man ever quite bdieves in any other man*
One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man*
In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of
doubt a feeling, half instinctive and haft logical, th#k
after all, the scoundrel may have something up his
sleeve. This doubt, it must be obvious, is always more
than justified, for no man is worthy of unlimited re-
liancehis treason, at best, only waits for sufficient
temptation. The trouble with the world is not that men
are too suspicious in th direction, but that they tend
to be too confiding that they still trust themselves too
far to other men, even after bitter experience. Vfomcd,
I believe, are measurably less sentimental, in this as in
other things. No married woman ever trusts her hus-
band absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust
73
H. L. MENCKEN
him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American
pickpocket's confidence that the policeman on the beat
will stay bought*
THE INCOMPARABLE BUZZ-SAW
(PXOM the Smart Set, May 1919)
The allurement that women hold out to men
is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out
to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence
enormously fascinating. To the average man, doomed
to some banal drudgery all his life long, they offer the
only grand hazard that he ever encounters. Take them
away and his existence would be as flat and secure as
that of a moo-cow. Even to the unusual man, the ad-
venturous man, the imaginative and romantic man,
they offer the adventure of adventures. Civilization
tends to dilute and cheapen all other hazards. Even war
has been largely reduced to caution and calculation; al-
ready, indeed, it employs almost as many press-agents,
letter-openers and generals as soldiers. But the duel of
sex continues to be fought in the Berserker manner.
Whoso approaches women still faces the immemorial
dangers. Civilization has not made them a bit more safe
than they were in Solomon's time; they are still inor-
dinately menacing, and hence inordinately provocative,
and hence inordinately charming.
The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who,
on grounds of decorum and morality, avoids the game
of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security
above the most laudable of philanthropies. Women
have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed
by man-made laws, man-made social customs, mascu-
line egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority.
u
The Incomparable Buzz-Saw
Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though
it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always
possible to enslave and torture a man. This feeling is
fostered when one makes love to them. One need not
be a great beau, a seductive catch, to do it effectively.
Any man is better than none. To shrink from giving so
much happiness at such small expense, to evade the
business on the ground that it has hazards fbis is the
act of a puling and tacky fellow.
A BLIND SPOT
(FROM the Smart Set, April 1920)
No doubt my distaste for democracy as a
political theory is, like every other human prejudice,
due to an inner lack to a defect that is a good deal less
in the theory than in myself. In this case it is very prob-
ably my incapacity for envy. That emotion, or weak-
ness, or whatever you choose to call it, is quite absent
from my make-up; where it ought to be there is a vac-
uum. In the face of another man's good fortune I am as
inert as a curb broker before Johann Sebastian Back
It gives me neither pleasure nor distress. The fact, for
example, that John D. Rockefeller had more money
than I have is as uninteresting to me as the fact that he
believed in total immersion and wore detachable cufis.
And the fact that some half-anonymous ass or other has
been elected President of the United States, or ap-
pointed a professor at Harvard, or married to a rich
wife, or even to a beautiful and amiable one: this fact
is as meaningless to me as the latest piece of bogus
news from eastern Europe.
The reason for all this does not lie in any native no-
75
H. Ii. MENCKEN
bility or acquired virtue. Far from it^ indeed It lies in
the accidental circumstance that the business I pursue
in the world seldom brings me into very active compe-
tition with other men. I have, of course, rivals, but they
do not rival me directly and exactly, as one delicatessen
dealer or clergyman or lawyer or politician rivals an-
other. It is only rarely that their success costs me any-
thing, and even then the fact is usually concealed. I
have always had enough money to meet my modest
needs, and have always found it easy to get more than I
actually want. A skeptic as to all ideas, including espe-
cially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the
ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
Thus I am never envious, and so it is impossible for
me to fed any sympathy for men who are. Per corol*
lory, it is impossible for me to get any glow out of
such hallucinations as democracy and Puritanism, for if
you pump envy out of them you empty them of their
very life blood: they are all immovably grounded upon
the inferior man's hatred of the man who is having a
better time. One often hears them accounted for, of
course, in other ways. Puritanism is represented as a
lofty sort of obedience to God's law. Democracy is de-
picted as brotherhood, even as altruism. All such no
tions are in error. There is only one honest impulse at
the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to
punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness
to bring him down to the miserable level of "good**
men *>., of stupid, cowardly and chronically unhappy
men. And there is only one sound argument for democ-
racy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any
man to hold himself out as better than other men, and,
above all, a most heinous offense for hi to prove it.
What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a
steady freedom from moral indignation, an all-embrac-
ing tolerance in bric what is commonly called good
sportsmanship. Such a man is not to be mistaken for
one who shirks the hard knocks of life. On the con-
76
A Blind Spot
trary, he is frequently an eager gladiator, vastly enjoy-
ing opposition. But when he fights he fights in the
manner of a gentleman fighting a duel, not in that of a
longshoreman cleaning out a waterfront saloon. That is
to say, he carefully guards his amour froprc by agnnu
ing that his opponent is as decent a man as he is, and
just as honest and perhaps, after all, right Such an
attitude is palpably impossible to a democrat. His dis-
tinguishing mark is the fact that he always attacks his
opponents, not only with all arms, but also with snorts
and objurgations that he is always filled with moral
indignation that he is incapable of imagining honor in
an antagonist, and hence incapable of honor himself.
Such fellows I do not like, I do not share their emotion*
I can't understand their indignation, their choler. In
particular, I can't fathom their envy. And so I am
against them.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
(FROM the Smart Set, May 1920)
Some time ago a publisher told me that there
are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money
in the United States first, murder stories; secondly,
novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the
hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and
other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln*
But despite all the vast mass of Lincolniana and the
constant discussion of old Abe in other ways, even so
elemental a problem as that of his religious ideas
surely an important matter in any competent biography
is yet but half solved. Was he a Christian? Did he
believe in the Divinity of Jesus? I am left in doubt. He
was very polite about it, and very cautious, as befitted a
77
H. L, MENCKEN
politician in need of Christian votes, but how much
genuine conviction was in that politeness? And if his
occasional references to Jesus were thus open to ques-
tion, what of his rather vague avowals of belief in a
personal God and in the immortality of the soul?
Herndon and some of his other early friends always
maintained that he was an atheist^ but the Rev, William
* Barton, one of the best of the later Lincolnologists,
argues that this atheism was simply disbelief in the id-
iotic Methodist and Baptist dogmas of his time that
nine Christian churches out of ten, if he were alive to-
day, would admit him to their high privileges and pre-
rogatives without anything worse than a few warning
coughs. As for me, I still wonder.
Lincoln becomes the American solar myth, the chief
butt of American credulity and sentimentality. Wash-
ington, of late years, has been perceptibly humanized;
every schoolboy now knows that he used to swear a
good deal, and was a sharp trader, and had a quick eye
for a pretty ankle. But meanwhile the varnishers and
veneerers have been busily converting Abe into a plas-
ter saint, thus making him fit for adoration in the
Y.M.CA.*s. All the popular pictures of him show him in
his robes of state:, and wearing an expression fit for a
man about to be hanged. There is, so far as I know, not
a single portrait of him, showing him smiling and yet
he must have cackled a good deal, first and last: who
ever heard of a storyteller who didn't? Worse, there is
an obvious effort to pump all his human weaknesses
out of him, and so leave him a mere moral apparition,
a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy
Ghost What could be more absurd? Lincoln, in point
of fact, was a practical politician of long experience and
high talents, and by no means cursed with idealistic su-
perstitions. Until he emerged from Illinois they always
put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got
a few gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of un-
escapable record that his career in the State Legisla-
78
Abraham Lincoln
ture was indistinguishable from that of a Tammany
Nietzsche. Even his handling of the slavery question
was that of a politician, not that of a messiah. Nothing
alarmed him more than the suspicion that he was an
Abolitionist, and Barton tells of an occasion when he
actually fled town to avoid meeting the issue squarely.
An Abolitionist would have published the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation the day after the first battle of Bull
Run. But Lincoln waited until the time was more fa-
vorable until Lee had been hurled out of Pennsylvania,
and more important still, until the political currents
were safely running his way. Even so, he freed the
slaves in only a part of the country: all the rest con-
tinued to clank their chaing until he himself was an
angel in Heaven.
Like William Jennings Bryan, he was a dark horse
made suddenly formidable by fortunate rhetoric. The
Douglas debate launched him, and the Cooper Union
speech got him the Presidency. His talent for emotional
utterance was an accomplishment of late growth. His
early speeches were mere empty fireworks the hollow
rhodomontades of the era. But in middle life he purged
his style of ornament and it became almost baldly sim-
ple and it is for that simplicity that he is remembered
today. The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest
and the most famous oration in American history. Put
beside it, all the whoopings of the Websters, Sumners
and Everetts seem gaudy and silly. It is eloquence
brought to a pellucid and almost gem-like perfection
the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases.
Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the
whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even re-
motely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.
But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic;
beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it
into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply
this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg
sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination
79
K. Xb MENCKEN
"that government of the people^ ^7 && people^ for
the people,** should not perish from the earth. It is dif-
ficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union
soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-deter-
mination; it was the Confederates who fought for the
right of their people to govern themselves. What was
the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What
else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the
States, &, of the people of the States? Tie Confed-
erates went into battle free; they came out with their
freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest
of the country and for nearly twenty years that veto
was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty,
in the political sense, than so many convicts in the peni-
tentiary.
LODGE
(ntott the Baltimore Evening Sun, June 15, 1920* Written on my
fF-fvr 1 * from the Republican National Convention in Chicago, which
nominated Warren G. Harding for the Presidency. Henry Cabot Lodge,
then Senator from Massachusetts and one of the leaders of the Re-
publican party, was permanent chaimna*? of the convention. I came
back from Chicago on the same train that carried him, and in fact
had the compartment next to his. The weather was very hot and there
was no air-conditioning. In the morning coming into Washington he
ntfmnAt*] humanity by appearing in the corridor in his shirt-sleeves.
Harding died on August a, 1923, and Lodge on November 9, 1924*)
What Lodge thinks of it^ viewing all that
ghastly combat of mountebanks in ironical retrospect,
would make an interesting story perhaps the most in-
teresting about the convention that could be told, or
even imagined. He presided over the sessions from a
ort of aloof intellectual balcony, far above the swarm-
ing and bawling of the common herd. He was there in
the flesh, but his soul was in some remote and esoteric
fin
Lodge
Cathay. Perhaps even the presence of the flesh was no
more than an optical delusion, a mirage due to the
heat. At moments when the whole infernal hall
seemed bathed in a steam produced by frying delegates
and alternates alive, he was as cool as an undertaker
at a hanging. He did not sweat like the general. He did
not pufi. He did not fume. If he put on a fresh collar
every morning it was mere habit and foppishness a
sentimental concession to the Harvard tradition. He
might have worn the same one all week.
It was delightful to observe the sardonic glitter in
his eye, his occasional ill-concealed snort, his general air
of detachment from the business before him. For a
while he would watch the show idly, letting it get
more and more passionate, vociferous and preposterous.
Then, as if suddenly awakened, he would stalk into it
with his club and knock it into decorum in half a min-
ute. I call the thing a club; it was certainly nothing
properly describable as a gavel. The head of it was sim-
ply a large globe of hard wood, as big as an ordinary
cantaloupe. The handle was perhaps two feet long.
The weight of it I can't estimate. It must have been,
light, else so frail a man would have found it too much
for him. But it made a noise like the breaking in a
door, and before that crash whole delegations went
down*
Supporting it was the Lodge voice, and behind the
voice the Lodge sneer. That voice seemed quite extraor-
dinary in so slim and ancient a man. It had volume^
resonance, even a touch of music: it was pleasant to
hear, and it penetrated that fog of vaporized humanity
to great depth. No man who spoke from the platform
spoke more clearly, more simply or more effectively.
Lodge's keynote speech, of course, was bosh, but it
was bosh delivered with an air bosh somehow digni-
fied by the manner of its emission. The same stu^
shoveled into the atmosphere by any other statesman
on the platform, would have simply driven the crowd
81
H. Xi. MENCKEN
out of the hall, and perhaps blown up the convention
then and there. But Lodge got away with it because he
was Lodge because there was behind it his unescap-
able confidence in himself^ his disarming disdain of
discontent below, his unapologeric superiority*
This superiority was and is quite real. Lodge is above
the common level of his party, his country and his race,
and he knows it very well, and is not disposed toward
the puerile hypocrisy of denying it. He has learning.
He has traditions behind him* He is absolutely sure of
himself in all conceivable American societies. There
was a profound irony in the role that he had to play at
Chicago, and it certainly did not escape him. One often
detected him snickering into his beard as the obscene
farce unrolled itself before him. He was a nurse observ-
ing sucklings at their clumsy play, a philosopher shoo-
ing chickens out of the com. His delight in the business
visibly increased as the climax was approached. It cul-
minated in a colossal chuckle as the mob got out of
hand, and the witches of crowd folly began to ride, and
the burlesque deliberations of five intolerable days
came to flower in the half-frightened, half-defiant nom-
ination of Harding a tin-horn politician with the man-
ner of a rural corn doctor and die mien of a ham actor.
I often wonder what such a man as Lodge thinks
secretly of the democracy he professes to cherish. It
must interest him enormously, at all events as spectacle,
else he would not waste his time upon it He might
have given over his days to the writing of bad history
an avocation both amusing and respectable, with a
safe eminence as its final reward. He might have
gone in for diplomacy and drunk out of the same jug
with kings. He might have set up general practise as
a Boston intellectual, groaning and sniffing an easy
way through life in die lofty style of the Adams
brothers. Instead he dedicated himself to politics, and
spent years mastering its complex and yet fundamen-
tally childifb technique.
Lodge
Well, what reward has it brought inm? At 73 he is a
boss in the Senate, holding domination over a herd of
miscellaneous mediocrities by a loose and precarious
tenure. He has power, but men who are far beneath
him have more power. At the great quadrennial pow-
wow of his party he plays the part of bellwether and
chief of police. Led by him, the rabble complains bit-
terly of lack of leadership. And when the glittering
prize is fought for, he is shouldered aside to make way
for a gladiator so bogus and so preposterous that the
very thought of him must reduce a scion of die Cabots
to sour and sickly mirth.
A superior feflow? Even so. But superior enough
to disdain even the Presidency, so fought for by fugi*
rives from the sewers? I rather doubt it. My guess is
that the gaudy glamor of the White House has in-
trigued even Henry Cabot that he would leap for the
bauble with the best of them if it were not clearly be-
yond his reach. The blinding rays, reflected from the
brazen front of Roosevelt, bathed him for a while; he
had his day on the steps of the throne, and I suspect
that he was not insensitive to the thrill of it. On what
other theory can one account for his sober acceptance
of the whole Roosevelt hocus-pocus save on this theory
of bedazzlement? Imagine the prince of cynics actually
bamboozled by the emperor of mountebanks! Think
of Swift reading Nick Carter, Edward Bok and Harold
Bell Wright!
He came back from Chicago on the same train that
carried Harding. Harding traveled in one car and
Lodge in another. So far as I could observe their
communications were confined to a few politenesses.
Lodge sat in a compartment all alone, gazing out of
the window with his inscrutable ghost of a smile. He
breakfasted alone. He lunched alone. He dined alone.
His job was done, and he was once more serenely out
of it.
83
H. L. MENCKEN
CAVIA COBAYA
(PKQU the Smart Set, August 1920)
I find the following in Theodore Dreiser's
"Hey-Rub-a-Dub-Dub":
Does the average strong, successful man confine
himself to one woman? Has he ever?
The first question sets an insoluble problem. How are
we, in such intimate matters, to say what is the average
and what is not the average? But the second question is
easily answered, and the answer is, He has. Here Drei-
ser's curious sexual obsession simply led him into ab-
surdity- His view of the traffic of the sexes remained
the naive one of an ex-Baptist nymph in Greenwich
Village. Did he argue that Otto von Bismarck was not
a "strong, successful man"? If not, then he should have
known that Bismarck was a strict monogamist a jnan
full of sin, but always faithful to his Johanna. Again,
there was Thomas Henry Huxley. Again, there was
William Ewart Gladstone. Yet again, there were Rob-
ert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Johann Sebastian
Bach, Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Jackson, Louis Pas-
teur, Martin Luther, Helmuth von Moltke, Stone-
wall Jackson, Robert Browning, William T. Sherman,
Sam Adams, . * . I could extend the list to pages. . .
Perhaps I am unfair to Dreiser. His notion of a
"strong, successful man** may have been, not such a
genuinely superior fellow as Bismarck or Bach, but
such a mere brigand as Yerkes or Jim Fisk. If so, he
was still wrong. If so, he ran aground on John D.
Rockefeller.
84
The National Letters
THE NATIONAL LETTERS
(FROM Prejudices: Second Series, 1920)
It is convenient to begin, like the gentlemen
of God, with a glance at a text or two. The first, a short
one, is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's celebrated ora-
tion, "The American Scholar," delivered before the Phi
Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge on August 3ist, 1837.
Emerson was then thirty-four years old and almost un-
known in his own country, though he had already
published "Nature" and established his first contacts
with Landor and Carlyle. But "The American Scholar**
brought him into instant notice at home, partly as man
of letters but more importantly as seer and prophet,
and the fame thus founded has endured without much
diminution, at all events in New England, to this day*
Oliver Wendell Holmes, giving words to what was
undoubtedly the common feeling, hailed the address
as the intellectual declaration of independence of the
American people, and that judgment, amiably passed
on by three generations of pedagogues, still survives in
the literature books. I quote from the first paragraph:
Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship
to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. . . .
Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will
sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will re-
vive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constel-
lation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astron-
omers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a
thousand years?
This, as I say, was in 1837. Thirty-three years later,
in 1870, Walt Whitman echoed the prophecy in his
85
H. Ii. MENCKEN
even more famous "Democratic Vistas.** What he saw
in his vision and put into his gnarled and gasping prose
was
a class of native authors, literatuses, far different, far
higher in grade, than any yet known, sacerdotal, mod-
ern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeat-
ing the whole mass of American morality, taste, be-
lief, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it
decision, affecting politics far more than the popular
superficial suffrage, with results inside and under-
neath the elections of Presidents or Congress ra-
diating, begetting appropriate teachers, schools, man-
ners, and, as its grandest result, accomplishing, (what
neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy
have hitherto accomplished, and without which this
nation will no more stand, permanently, soundly,
than a house will stand without a substratum,) a
religious and moral character beneath the political
and productive and intellectual bases of the States.
The promulgation and belief in such a class or or-
dera new and greater literatus order its possibil-
ity, (nay, certainly,) underlies these entire specula-
tions. . . . Above all previous lands, a great original
literature is sure to become the justification and re-
liance, (in some respects the sole reliance^) of Amer-
ican democracy.
Thus Whitman in 1870, the time of the first draft of
"Democratic Vistas." He was of the same mind, and
said so, in 1888, four years before his death. I could
bring up texts of like tenor in great number, from the
years before 1837, from those after 1888, and from
every decade between. The dream of Emerson, though
the eloquence of its statement was new and arrest-
ing, embodied no novel projection of the fancy; it
merely gave a sonorous Waldhom tone to what had
been dreamed and said before. You will find almost the
same high hope^ the same exuberant confidence in the
86
The National Letters
essays of the elder Channing and in the "Lectures on
American Literature'* of Samuel Lorenzo Knapp,
L.LJD., the first native critic of beautiful letters the
primordial tadpole of all our later Mores, Brownells,
Phelpses, Mabies, Brander Matthewses and other such
grave and glittering fish. Knapp believed, like Whit-
man long after him, that the sheer physical grandeur of
the New World would inflame a race of bards to unprec-
edented utterance. "What are the Tibers and Sca-
manders," he demanded, "measured by the Missouri
and the Amazon? Or what the loveliness of Ulysus or
Avon by the Connecticut or the Potomack? Whenever
a nation wills it, prodigies are born." That is to say,
prodigies literary and ineffable as well as purely ma-
terialprodigies aimed, in his own words, at "the olym-
pick crown" as well as at mere railroads, ships, wheat-
fields, droves of hogs, factories and money. Nor were
Channing and Knapp the first of the haruspices. Noah
Webster, the lexicographer, who "taught millions to
spell but not one to sin," had seen the early starlight
of the same Golden Age so early as 1789, as the curi-
ous will find by examining his "Dissertations on the
English Language," a work fallen long since into un-
deserved oblivion. Nor was Whitman, taking sober sec-
ond thought exactly a century later, the last of them.
Out of many brethren of our own day, extravagantly
articulate in print and among the chautauquas, I
choose one not because his hope is of purest water,
but precisely because, like Emerson, he dilutes it with
various discreet whereases. He is Van Wyck Brooks, a
young man far more intelligent, penetrating and hos-
pitable to fact than any of the reigning professors a
critic who is sharply differentiated from them, indeed,
by the simple circumstance that he has information
and sense. Yet this extraordinary Mr. Brooks, in his
"Letters and Leadership," published in 1918, rewrites
"The American Scholar" in terms borrowed almost
bodily from "Democratic Vistas" that is to say, he
87
H. L. MENCKEN
prophesies with Emerson and exults with Whitman.
First there is the Emersonian doctrine of the soaring
individual made articulate by freedom and realizing
"the responsibility that lies upon us, each in the meas-
ure of his own gift* 1 ' And then there is Whitman's vi-
sion of a self-interpretative democracy, forced into high
literary adventures by Joseph Conrad's "obscure inner
necessity," and so achieving a "new synthesis adaptable
to the unique conditions of our life." And finally there
is the specific prediction, the grandiose, Adam Fore-
paugh mirage: "We shall become a luminous people^
dwelling in the light and sharing our light . . ."
As I say, the roll of such soothsayers might be al-
most endlessly lengthened. There is, in truth, scarcely a
formal discourse upon the national letters (forget-
ting, perhaps, Barrett Wendell's sour threnody upon
the New England Aufflarung) that is without some
touch of this previsional exultation, this confident
hymning of glories to come, this fine assurance that
American literature, in some future always ready to
dawn, will burst into so grand a flowering that history
will cherish its loveliest blooms even above such salient
American gifts to culture as the moving-picture, the
phonograph, the New Thought and the bichloride tab-
let If there was ever a dissenter from the national op-
timism, in this as in other departments, it was surely
Edgar Allan Poc without question the bravest and
most original, if perhaps also the least orderly and ju-
dicious, of all the critics that we have produced. And
yet even Poe, despite his general habit of disgust and
dismay, caught a flash or two of that engaging picture
even Po^ for an instant, in 1846, thought that he saw
the beginnings of a solid and autonomous native litera-
ture, its roots deep in the soil of the republic as you
will discover by turning to his forgotten essay on J. G.
C Brainard, a thrice-forgotten doggereleer of Jackson's
time. Poc, of course, was too cautious to let his imagi-
nation proceed to details; one feels that a certain
The National Letters
doubt, a saving peradvcnture or two, played about the
unaccustomed vision as he beheld it. But, nevertheless,
he unquestionably beheld it . . *
*
Now for the answering fact How has the issue re-
plied to these visionaries? It has replied in a way that
is manifestly to the discomfiture of Emerson as a
prophet, to the dismay of Poe as a pessimist disarmed by
transient optimism, and to the utter collapse of Whit-
man. We have, as everyone knows, produced no such
"new and greater literatus order 1 * as that announced
by old Walt. We have given a gaping world no books
that "radiate,* 1 and surely none intelligibly comparable
to stars and constellations. We have achieved no prod-
igies of the first class, and very few of the second class,
and not many of the third and fourth classes. Our lit-
erature, despite several false starts that promised much,
is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable
mediocrity* Its typical great man, in our own time, has
been Howelk, as its typical great man a generation ago
was Lowell, and two generations ago, Irving. Viewed
largely, its salient character appears as a sort of timor-
ous flaccidity, an amiable hollowness. In bulk it grows
more and more formidable, i^ ease and decorum it
makes undoubted progress, and on the side of mere
technic, of the bald capacity to write, it shows an ever-
widening competence. But when one proceeds from
such agencies and externals to the intrinsic substance^
to the creative passion within, that substance quickly
reveals itself as thin and watery, and that passion fades
to something almost puerile. In all that mass of suave
and often highly diverting writing there is no visible
movement toward a distinguished and singular cxcdr
fences a signal national quality, a ripe and stimulating
flavor, or, indeed, toward any other describable goaL
What one sees is simply a general irresolution, a per-
vasive superficiality. There is no sober grappling with
fundamentals, but only a shy sporting on. the surface}
H. ft. MENCKEN
there is not even any serious approach, such as Whit-
man dreamed of, to the special experiences and emer-
gencies of the American people. When one turns to any
other national literature to Russian literature, say,
or French, or German or Scandinavian one is con-
scious immediately of a definite attitude toward the
primary mysteries of existence, the unsolved and ever-
fascinating problems at the bottom of human life, and
of a definite preoccupation with some of them, and a
definite way of translating their challenge into drama.
These attitudes and preoccupations raise a literature
above mere poetizing and tale-telling; they give it dig-
nity and importance; above all, they give it national
character. But it is precisely here that the literature of
America, and especially the later literature, is most
colorless and inconsequential. As if paralyzed by the
national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of what-
ever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades
all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all,
must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in
it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spirit-
ual adventure, of no organized determination to think
things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and
insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability, a sub-
mergence of matter in manner in brief, what is there
is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting
and English music.
It was so in the great days and it is so today. There
has always been hope and there has always been failure.
Even the most optimistic prophets of future glories have
been united, at all times, in their discontent with the
here and now. The mind of this country," said Emer-
son, speaking of what was currently visible in 1837, "is
taught to aim at low objects. . . . There is no work
for any but the decorous and the complaisant. . . .
Books are written ... by men of talent . . . who start
wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from
90
The National Letters
their own sight of principles.* And then, turning to the
way out: The office of the scholar (i*, of Whitman**
'literatus') is to cheer, to raise and to guide men by
showing them facts amid appearances? Whitman him-
self, a full generation later, found that office still un-
filled. "Our fundamental want to-day in the United
States,** he said, "with closest, amplest reference to pres-
ent conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the
clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatuses, far
different, far higher in grade, than any yet known**
and so on, as I have already quoted Him. And finally,
to make an end of the prophets, there is Brooks, with
nine-tenths of his book given over, not to his prophecy
it is crowded, indeed, into the last few pages but to
a somewhat heavy mourning over the actual scene be-
fore him. On the side of letters, the aesthetic side, the
side of ideas, we present to the world at large, he says,
a the spectacle of a vast, undififerentiated herd of good-
humored animals 1 * Knights of Pythias, Presbyterians,
standard model PhD's, readers of the Saturday Eve-
ning Post, admirers of Richard Harding Davis and O.
Henry, devotees of Hamilton Wright Mabie's "white
list*' of books, members of the YJM.C A. or the Drama
League, weepers at chautauquas, wearers of badges,
100 per cent, patriots, children of God. Poe I pass over;
I shall turn to him again later on. Nor shall I repeat
the parrotings of Emerson and Whitman in the jere-
miads of their innumerable heirs and assigns. What they
all establish is what is already obvious: that American
thinking, when it concerns itself with beautiful letters
as when it concerns itself with religious dogma or po-
litical theory, is extraordinarily timid and superficial
that it evades the genuinely serious problems of life
and art as if they were stringently taboo that the out-
ward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always the vir-
tues, not of profundity, not of courage, not of original-
ity, but merely those of an emasculated and often very
trashy dilettantism.
91
H. L. MENCKEN
*
The current scene is surely depressing enough. What
one observes is a literature in three layers, and each in-
ordinately doughy and uninspiring each almost with-
out flavor or savor. It is hard to say, with much critical
plausibility, which layer deserves to be called the upper,
but for decorum's sake the choice may be fixed upon
that which meets with the approval of the reigning
Lessings. This is the layer of the novels of the late
Howells, Judge Grant, Alice Brown and the rest of the
dwindling survivors of New England Kultur, of the
brittle, academic poetry of Woodberry and the elder
Johnson, of the tea-party essays of Crothers, Miss Rep-
plier and company, and of the solemn, highly judicial,
coroner's inquest criticism of More, BrowneU, Bab-
bitt and their imitators. Here we have manner, un-
doubtedly. The thing is correctly done; it is never crude
or gross; there is in it a faint perfume of college-town
society. But when this highly refined and attenuated
manner is allowed for what remains is next to nothing.
One never remembers a character in the novels of these
aloof and de-Americanized Americans; one never en-
counters an idea in their essays; one never carries away
a line out of their poetry. It is literature as an academic
exercise for talented grammarians, almost as a genteel
recreation for ladies and gentlemen of fashion the
exact equivalent, in the field of letters, of eighteenth-
century painting and German Augcnmusil^
What ails it, intrinsically, is a dearth of intellectual
audacity and of aesthetic passion. Running through it,
and characterizing the work of almost every man and
woman producing it, there is an unescapablc sugges-
tion of tb old Puritan suspicion of the fine arts as
suchof the doctrine that they offer fit asylum for
good citizens only when some ulterior and superior
purpose is carried into them* This purpose, naturally
enough, most commonly shows a moral tinge* The aim
of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty
The National Letters
thoughts not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and
somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon
against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel,
properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its
aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity
of man in man. The Puritan, of course, is not entirely
devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good
form; he responds to style; he is even capable of some-
thing approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he
fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distrac-
tion from his chief business in life: the sober considera-
tion of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a
temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man
may safely have traffic with it only when it is broken
to moral uses in other words, when its innocence is
pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto. It is pre-
cisely this gusto that one misses in all the work of the
New England school, and in all the work of the formal
schools that derive from it* One observes in such a fel-
low as Dr. Henry Van Dyke an excellent specimen of
the whole clan. He is, in his way, a genuine artist*
He has a hand for pretty verses. He wields a facile
rhetoric. He shows, in indiscreet moments, a touch of
imagination. But all the while he remains a sound
Presbyterian, with one eye on the devil. He is a Pres-
byterian first and an artist second, which is just as
comfortable as trying to be a Presbyterian first and a
chorus girl second. To such a man it must inevitably
appear that a Moliere, a Wagner, a Goethe or a Shake-
speare was more than a little bawdy.
The criticism that supports this decaying caste o
Eterary Brahmins is grounded almost entirely upon
ethical criteria. You will spend a long while going
through the works of such typical professors as More,
Phelps, Boynton, Burton, Perry, Brownell and Babbitt
before ever you encounter a purely aesthetic judgment
upon an aesthetic question. It is almost as if a man esti-
mating daffodils should do k in terms of artichokes*
93
H. li. MENCKEK
Phelps* whole body of *we church-goers* criticism
the most catholic and tolerant, it may be said in pass-
ing, that the faculty can show consists chiefly of a
plea for correctness, and particularly for moral correct-
ness; he never gets very far from "the axiom of the
moral law." Brownell argues eloquently for standards
that would bind an imaginative author as tightly as
a Sunday-school superintendent is bound by the Ten
Commandments and the Mann Act. Sherman tries to
save Shakespeare for the right-thinking by proving
that he was an Iowa Methodist -a member of his local
Chamber of Commerce, a contemner of Reds, an advo-
cate of democracy and the League of Nations, a patri-
otic dollar-a-year-man during the Armada scare. Elmer
More devotes himself, year in and year out, to de-
nouncing the Romantic movement, *>., the effort to
emancipate the artist from formulae and categories,
and so make him free to dance with arms and legs*
And Babbitt, to make an end, gives over his days and
his nights to deploring Rousseau's anarchistic abroga-
tion of "the veto power'* over the imagination, leading
to such "wrongness" in both art and life that it threat-
ens "to wreck civilization." In brief, the alarms of
schoolmasters. Not many of them deal specifically with
die literature that is in being. It is too near to be quite
nice. To More or Babbitt only death can atone for the
primary offense of the artist But what they preach
nevertheless has its echoes contemporaneously, and
those echoes, in the main, are woefully falsetto. I often
wonder what sort of picture of These States is conjured
op by foreigners who read, say, Crothers, Van Dyke^
Babbitt, the later Winston Churchill, and the old maids
of the Freudian suppression school How can such a
foreigner, moving in those damp, asthmatic mists,
imagine such phenomena as Roosevelt, Billy Sunday,
Bryan, the Becker case, the I.W.W., Newport, Palm
Beach, the University of Chicago, Chicago itself the
whole, gross, glittering, excessively dynamic, infinitely
The National Letter*
grotesque, incredibly stupendous drama of American,
life?
As I have said, it is not often that the ordentlichen
Professoren deign to notice contemporary writers, even
of their own austere kidney. In all the Shelburne Essays
there is none on Howells, or on Churchill, or on Mrs.
Wharton; More seems to think of American literature
as expiring with Longfellow and Donald G. Mitchell.
He has himself hinted that in the department of criti-
cism of criticism there enters into the matter some*
thing beyond mere aloof ignorance. "I soon learned (as
editor of the pre-Bolshevik Nation)? he says, "that it
was virtually impossible to get fair consideration for a
book written by a scholar not connected with a univer-
sity from a reviewer so connected.'* This class-con-
sciousness, however, should not apply to artists, who
are admittedly inferior to professors, and it surely does
not show itself in such men as Phelps and Spingarn,
who seem to be very eager to prove that they are not
professorial. Yet Phelps, in the course of a long work
on the novel, pointedly omits all mention of such men
as Dreiser, and Spingarn, as the aforesaid Brooks has
said, "appears to be less inclined even than the critics
with whom he is theoretically at war to play an active,
public part in the secular conflict of darkness and
light." When one comes to the PrivatDozentcn there
is less remoteness, but what takes the place of it is
almost as saddening. To Sherman and Percy Boynton
the one aim of criticism seems to be the enforcement
of correctness in Emerson's phrase, the upholding o
"some great decorum, some fetish of a government,
some ephemeral trade, or war, or man" ** Puritan-
ism, democracy, monogamy, the League of Nations, the
Wilsonian piffle. Even among the critics who escape the
worst of this schoolmastering frenzy there is some
touch of the heavy "culture* 5 of the provincial school-
ma'm. For example, consider Clayton Hamilton, MA
vice-president of the National Institute of Arts and Let-
95
K. L. MENCKEN
ten* Here arc the tests he proposes for dramatic critics,
., for gentlemen chiefly employed in reviewing such
characteristic American compositions as the Ziegfeld
Follies, "Up in Mabel's Room," "Ben-Hur" and "The
Witching Hour":
x. Have you ever stood bareheaded in the nave of
Ainicns?
2. Have you ever climbed to the Acropolis by
moonlight?
3. Have you ever walked with whispers into the
hushed presence of the Fran Madonna of Bellini?
What could more brilliantly evoke an image of the
eternal Miss Birch, blue veil flying and Baedeker in
handy plodding along faithfully through the intermina-
ble corridors and catacombs of the Louvre, the while
bands are playing across the river, and young bucks in
three-gallon hats are sparking the gals, and the Jews
and harlots uphold the traditions of French hig leef at
Longchamps, and American deacons are frisked and
debauched up on martyrs' hill? The banality of it is
really too exquisite to be borne; the lack of humor is
almost that of a Fifth Avenue divine. One seldom finds
in the pronunciamentoes of these dogged professors, in-
deed, any trace of either Attic or Gallic salt. When they
essay to be jocose, the result is usually simply an ele-
phantine whimsicality, by the chautauqua out of the
Atlantic Monthly. Their satire is mere ill-nature. One
finds it difficult to believe that they have ever read
Lewes, or Hazlitt, or, above all, Saintsbury. I often
wonder, in fact, how Saintsbury would fare, an un-
known man, at the hands of, say, Brownell or More.
What of his iconoclastic gaycty, his boyish weakness
for tweaking noses and pulling whiskeis, his obscene
delight in slang? . .
So far, the disease. As to tie causey I have delivered a
few hint*. I now describe k particularly. It is, in brie
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The National Letter*
a defect in the general culture of the country one re-
flected, not only in the national literature, but also in
the national political theory, the national attitude to*
ward religion and morals, the national habit in all
departments of thinking. It is the lack of a civilized
aristocracy, secure in its position, animated by an intel-
ligent curiosity, skeptical of all facile generalizations,
superior to the sentimentality of the mob, and delight-
ing in the battle of ideas for its own sake.
The word I use, despite the qualifying adjective, has
got itself meanings, of course, that I by no means in-
tend to convey. Any mention of an aristocracy, to a
public fed upon democratic fustian, is bound to bring
up images of stockbrokers' wives lolling obscenely in
opera boxes, or of haughty Englishmen slaughtering
whole generations of grouse in an inordinate and
incomprehensible manner, or of Junkers with tight
waists elbowing American schoolmarms off the side-
walks of German beer towns, or of perfumed Italians
coming over to work their abominable magic upon the
daughters of breakfast-food and bathtub kings. Part oi
this misconception, I suppose, has its roots in the gaudy
imbecilities of the yellow press, but there is also a part
that belongs to the general American tradition, along
with the oppression of minorities and the belief in
political panaceas. Its depth and extent are constantly
revealed by the naive assumption that the so-called
fashionable folk of the large cities chiefly wealthy
industrials in the interior-decorator and country-club
stage of culture constitute an aristocracy, and by the
scarcely less remarkable assumption that the peerage of
England is identical with the gentry that is, that such
men as Lord Northdiff e, Lord Ivcagh and even Lord
Reading arc English gentlemen, and of the ancient line
of the Percys.
Here, as always, the worshiper is the father of the
gods, and no less when they are evil than when they
are benign* The inferior man must find himself supc-
97
H. L MENCKEN
riors, that he may marvel at his political equality with
them, and in the absence of recognizable superiors de
facto he creates superiors de jure. The sublime prin-
ciple of one man, one vote must be translated into
terms of dollars, diamonds, fashionable intelligence;
the equality of all men before the law must have clear
and dramatic proofs. Sometimes, perhaps, the thing
goes further and is more subtle. The inferior mgp
needs an aristocracy to demonstrate not only his mere
equaEty, but also his actual superiority. The society
columns in the newspapers may have some such origin:
they may visualize once more the accomplished jour-
nalist's understanding of the mob mind that he plays
upon so skillfully, as upon some immense and cacoph-
onous organ, always going fortissimo. What the infe-
rior man and his wife sec in the sinister revels of those
amazing first families, I suspect, is often a massive wit-
ness to their own higher rectitude^-to their relative
innocence of cigarette-smoking, poodle-coddling, child-
farming and the more abstruse branches of adultery
in brief, to their firmer grasp upon the immutable
axioms of Christian virtue, the one sound boast of the
nether nine-tenths of humanity in every land under the
cross*
But this bugaboo aristocracy, as I hint, is actually
bogus, and the evidence of its bogusness lies in the fact
that it is insecure. One gets into it only onerously, but
out of it very easily. Entrance is effected by dint of a
long and bitter struggle, and the chief incidents of that
struggle are almost intolerable humiliations. The aspir-
ant must school and steel himself to sniffs and sneers;
he must see the door slammed upon him a hundred
times before ever it is thrown open to him. To get in
at all he must show a talent for abasement and abase-
ment makes him timorous. Worse, that amorousness
is not cured when he succeeds at last. On the contrary,
it is made even more tremulous, for what he faces
within the gates is a scheme of things made up almost
98
The National Letter*
wholly of harsh and often unintelligible taboos, and the
penalty for violating even the least of them is swift and
disastrous. He must exhibit exactly the right social
habits, appetites and prejudices, public and private. He
must harbor exactly die right political enthusiasms and
indignations. He must have a hearty taste for exacdy
the right sports. His attitude toward the fine arts must
be properly tolerant and yet not a shade too eager. He
must read and like exacdy the right books, pamphlets
and public journals. He must put up at the right hotels
when he travels. His wife must patronize the right mil-
liners. He himself must stick to the right haberdashery.
He must live in the right neighborhood. He must even
embrace the right dodtrines of religion. It would ruin
him, for all opera box and society column purposes, to
set up a plea for justice to the Bolsheviki, or even for
ordinary decency* It would ruin him equally to wear
celluloid collars, or to move to Union Hill, N.J., or to
serve ham and cabbage at his table. And it would ruin
him, too, to drink coffee from his saucer, or to marry a
chambermaid with a gold tooth, or to join the Seventh
Day Adventists. Within the boundaries of his curious
order he is worse fettered than a monk in a celL Its
obscure conception of propriety, its nebulous notion
that this or that is honorable, hampers him in every di-
rection, and very narrowly. What he resigns when he
enters, even when he makes his first deprecating knock
at the door, is every right to attack the ideas that hap-
pen to prevail within. Such as they are, he must accept
them without question. And as they shift and change
in response to great instinctive movements (or perhaps,
now and then, to the punished but not to be forgot-
ten revolts of extraordinary rebels) he must shift and
change with them, silendy and quickly. To hang back,
to challenge and dispute, to preach reforms and revolu-
tions these are crimes against the brummagem Holy
Ghost of the order.
Obviously, that order cannot constitute a genuine
39
H. L. MENCKEN
aristocracy, in any rational sense. A genuine aristocracy
is grounded upon very much different principles. Its
first and most salient character is its interior security,
and the chief visible evidence of that security is the
freedom that goes with itnot only freedom in act, the
divine right of the aristocrat to do what he jolly well
pleases, so long as he does not violate the primary guar-
antees and obligations of his class, but also and more
importantly freedom in thought, the liberty to try and
err, the right to be his own man. It is the instinct of
a true aristocracy, not to punish eccentricity by expul-
sion, but to throw a mantle of protection about it to
safeguard it from the suspicions and resentments of the
lower orders. Those lower orders are inert, timid, in-
hospitable to ideas, hostile to changes, faithful to a
few maudlin superstitions. All progress goes on on
the higher levels. It is there that salient personalities,
made secure by artificial immunities, may oscillate most
widely from the normal track. It is within that en-
trenched fold, out of reach of the immemorial certain-
ties of the mob, that extraordinary men of the lower
orders may find their city of refuge, and breathe a clear
air. This, indeed, is at once the hall-mark and the justi-
fication of an aristocracy that it is beyond responsibil*
ity to the general masses of men, and hence superior
to both their degraded longings and their no less de-
graded aversions. It is nothing if it is not autonomous,
curious, venturesome, courageous, and everything if it
is. It is the custodian of the qualities that make for
change and experiment; it is the class that organizes
danger to the service of the race; it pays for its high
prerogatives by standing in the forefront of the fray.
No such aristocracy, it must be plain, is now on view
in the United States. The makings of one were visible
in the Virginia of the later eighteenth century, but
with Jefferson and Washington the promise died. In
New England, it seems to me, there was never any
aristocracy, either in being or in nascency: there was
100
The National Letters
only a theocracy that degenerated very quickly into
a plutocracy on the one hand and a caste of sterile
Gdehrten on the other the passion for God splitting
into a lust for dollars and a weakness for mere words.
Despite the common notion to the contrary a no-
tion generated by confusing literacy with intelligence
New England has never shown the slightest sign o
a genuine enthusiasm for ideas. It began its history as
a slaughter-house of ideas, and it is to-day not easily
distinguishable from a cold-storage plant. Its celebrated
adventures in mysticism, once apparently so bold and
significant, are now seen to have been little more
than an elaborate hocus-pocus respectable Unitarians
shocking the peasantry and scaring the horned cattle
in the fields by masquerading in the robes of Rosicru-
tians. The ideas that it embraced in those austere and
far-off days were stale, and when it had finished with
them they were dead: to-day one hears of Jakob Bohmc
almost as rarely as one hears of Allen G. Thurman.
So in politics. Its glory is Abolition an English inven-
tion, long under die interdict of the native plutocracy.
Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer
political ideas, as political ideas run in the Republic^
than any average county in Kansas or Nebraska. Appo-
mattox seemed to be a victory for New England ideal-
ism. It was actually a victory for the New England
plutocracy, and that plutocracy has dominated thought
above the Housatonic ever since. The sect of profes-
sional idealists has so far dwindled that it has ceased to
be of any importance, even as an opposition. When the
plutocracy is challenged now, it is challenged by the
proletariat.
Well, what is on view in New England is on view ia
all other parts of the nation, sometimes with ameliora-
tions, but usually with the colors merely exaggerated.
What one beholds, sweeping the eye over the land, is a
culture that, like the national literature^ is in three
layers the plutocracy on top, a vast mass of undifierenr
101
H. L. MENCKEN
dated human blanks at the bottom, and a forlorn intel-
ligentsia gasping out a precarious life between. I need
not set out at any lengdh, I hope, the intellectual defi-
ciencies of the plutocracy its utter failure to show any-
thing even remotely resembling the makings of an
aristocracy. It is badly educated, it is stupid, it is full of
low-caste superstitions and indignations, it is without
decent traditions or informing vision; above all, it is
extraordinarily lacking in the most elemental independ-
ence and courage. Out of this dass comes the grotesque
fashionable society of our big towns, already described*
Imagine a horde of peasants incredibly enriched and
with almost infinite power thrust into their hands, and
you will have a fair picture of its habitual state of
mind. It shows all the stigmata of inferiority moral
certainty, cruelty, suspicion of ideas, fear. Never did it
function more revealingly than in the late pogrom
against the so-called Reds, LA, against humorless ideal-
ists who, like Andrew Jackson, took the platitudes of
democracy quite seriously. The machinery brought to
bear upon these feeble and scattered fanatics would
have almost sufficed to repel an invasion by the united
powers of Europe. They were hunted out of their
sweat-shops and coffee-houses as if they were so many
Carranzas or Ludendorffs, dragged to jail to the toot-
ing of horns, arraigned before quaking judges on un-
intelligible charges, condemned to deportation without
the slightest chance to defend themselves, torn from
their dependent families, herded into prison-ships, and
then finally dumped in a snow waste, to be rescued and
fed by the BolshevikL And what was the theory at the
bottom of all these astounding proceedings? So far as
it can be reduced to comprehensible terms it was much
less a theory than a fear a shivering, idiotic, discredit-
able fear of a mere banshee an overpowering, para-
lyzing dread that some extra-eloquent Red, permitted
to emit his balderdash unwhipped, might eventually
convert a couple of courageous men, and that the cou-
108
The National Letter*
rageous men, filled with indignation against the plu-
tocracy, might take to the highroad, burn down a
nail-factory or two, and slit the throat of some virtu-
ous profiteer. In order to lay this fear, in order to ease
the jangled nerves of the American successors to the
Hapsburgs and Hohenzolleras, all the constitutional
guarantees of the citizen were suspended, the statute-
books were burdened with kws that surpass anything
heard of in the Austria of Maria Theresa, the coun-
try was handed over to a frenzied mob of detectives,
informers and agents provocateurs and the Reds de-
parted laughing loudly, and were hailed by the Bol-
sheviki as innocents escaped from an asylum for the
criminally insane.
Obviously, it is out of reason to look for any hospi-
tality to ideas in a class so extravagantly fearful of even
the most palpably absurd of them. Its philosophy is
firmly grounded upon the thesis that the existing order
must stand forever free from attack, and not only from
attack, but also from mere academic criticism, and its
ethics are as firmly grounded upon the thesis that every
attempt at any such criticism is a proof of moral turpi-
tude. Within its own ranks, protected by what may be
regarded as the privilege of die order, there is nothing
to take the place of this criticism. A few feeble plati-
tudes by Andrew Carnegie and a book of moderate
merit by John D. Rockefeller's press-agent constitute
almost the whole of the interior literature of ideas. In
other countries the plutocracy has often produced mea
of reflective and analytical habit, eager to rationalize its
instincts and to bring it into some sort of relationship
to the main streams of human thought The case o
David Ricardo at once comes to mind. There have beea
many others: John Bright, Richard Cobden, George
Grote, and, in our own time, Walther von Rathenau.
But in the United States no such phenomenon has beea
visible. There was a day, not long ago, when ccrtam
young men of wealth gave signs of an unaccustomed
10S
H* L. MENCKEN
interest in ideas on the political side, but the most they
managed to achieve was a banal sort of Socialism, and
even this was abandoned in sudden terror when the
war came, and Socialism fell under suspicion of being
genuinely international in brief, of being honest under
the skin. Nor has the plutocracy of the country ever
fostered an inquiring spirit among its intellectual valets
and footmen, which is to say, among the gentlemen
who compose headlines and leading articles for its
newspapers. What chiefly distinguishes the daily press
of the United States from the press of all other coun-
tries pretending to culture is not its lack of truthfulness
or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficien-
cies arc common to die newspapers everywhere, but its
incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the
discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into
a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all re-
flection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never
well-informed. It is seldom intelligent, save in the arts
of the mob-master. It is never courageously honest.
Held harshly to a rigid correctness of opinion by the
plutocracy that controls it with less and less attempt at
disguise, and menaced on all sides by censorships that
it dare not flout, it sinks rapidly into formalism and
feebleness. Its yellow section is perhaps its most re-
spectable section for there the only vestige of the old
free journalist survives. In the more conservative papers
one finds only a timid and petulant animosity to all
questioning of the existing order, however urbane and
sincere a pervasive and ill-concealed dread that the
mob now heated up against the orthodox hobgoblins
may suddenly begin to unearth hobgoblins of its own,
and so run amok. For it is upon the emotions of the
mob, of course, that the whole comedy is played. Theo-
retically the mob is the repository of all political wis-
dom and virtue; actually k is the ultimate source of all
political power. Even the plutocracy cannot make war
upon k openly, or forget the least of its weaknesses.
101
The National Letters
The business of keeping it in order must be done dis-
creetly, warily, with delicate technique. In the main
that business consists of keeping alive its deep-seated
fears of strange faces, of unfamiliar ideas, of unhack-
neyed gestures, of untested liberties and responsibilities.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man, as o
all the simpler mammals, is fearfear of the unknown,
the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond
everything else is safety. His instincts incline him to-
ward a society so organized that it will protect him at
all hazards, and not only against perils to his hide but
also against assaults upon his mind against the need
to grapple with unaccustomed problems, to weigh,
ideas, to think things out for himself to scrutinize the
platitudes upon which his everyday thinking is based.
Content under kaiserism so long as it functions effi-
ciently, he turns, when kaiserism falls, to some other
and perhaps worse form of paternalism, bringing to its
benign tyranny only the docile tribute of his pathetic
allegiance. In America it is the newspaper that is his
boss. From it he gets support for his elemental illu-
sions. In it he sees a visible embodiment of his own
wisdom and consequence. Out of it he draws fuel for
his simple moral passion, his congenital suspicion of
heresy, his dread of the unknown. And behind the
newspaper stands the plutocracy, ignorant, unimagina-
tive and timorous.
Thus at the top and at the bottom. Obviously, there
is no aristocracy here. One finds only one of the neces-
sary elements, and that only in the plutocracy, to wit^
a truculent egoism. But where is intelligence? Where
are case and surety of manner? Where are enterprise
and curiosity? Where, above all, is courage, and in
particular, moral courage the capacity for independent
thinking, for difficult problems, for what Nietzsche
called the joys of the labyrinth? As well look for these
things in a society of half-wits. Democracy, obliterat-
ing the old aristocracy, has left only a vacuum in its
105
H. L. MENCKEN
place; in a century and a half it has failed either to lift
up the mob to intellectual autonomy and dignity or to
purge the plutocracy of its inherent stupidity and swin-
ishness. It is precisely here, the first and favorite scene
of the Great Experiment, that the culture of the indi-
vidual has been reduced to the most rigid and absurd
regimentation. It is precisely here, of all civilized coun-
tries, that eccentricity in demeanor and opinion has
come to bear the heaviest penalties. The whole drift of
our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas
that diverge in the slightest from the accepted plati-
tudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more
potent force of growing custom, and under that custom
there is a national philosophy which erects conformity
into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of
personality into a capital crime against society.
STAK-SPANGLED MEN
aoM the New Republic, September 1920. This piece belongs to my pri-
vate archeology. It is dated beyond repair, but I print it because it it
fall of my view of the issues and leaders of World War I. In World
War n I took a similar line, but by that tim^ I had ceased to write on
public matters and so not much indication of it got on paper. In World
War I, as I indicate, there were no gauds for civilians, but fo a * lade
was rrrmrdiffd in a wholesale manner in World War H.)
I open the memoirs of General Grant, Vol-
ume n, at the place where he is describing the surrender
of General Lee^ and find the following:
I was without a sword, as I usually was when on
horseback on the field, and wore a soldier's blouse for
a coat, with the shoulder straps of my rank to indi-
cate to the army who I was.
106
Star-spangled Men
Anno 1865. 1 look out of my window and observe an
officer of the United States Army passing down the
street. Anno 1922. Like General Grant, he is without a
sword Lake General Grant, he wears a sort of soldier's
blouse for a coat Like General Grant, he employs
shoulder straps to indicate to the Army who he is. But
there is something more. On the left breast of this offi-
cer, apparently a major, there blazes so brilliant a mass
of color that, as the sun strikes it and the flash bangs
my eyes, I wink, catch my breath and sneeze. There are
two long strips, each starting at the sternum and disap-
pearing into the shadows of the axilla every hue in
the rainbow, the spectroscope, the kaleidoscope impe-
rial purples, sforzando reds, wild Irish greens, romantic
blues, loud yellows and oranges, rich maroons, senti-
mental pinks, all the half-tones from ultra-violet to in-
frared, all the vibrations from the impalpable to the
unendurable. A gallant Soldat indeed! How he would
shame a circus ticket-wagon if he wore all the medals
and badges, the stars and crosses, the pendants and
lavallieres, that go with those ribbons! . . . I glance at
his sleeves. A simple golden stripe on the one six
months beyond the raging main. None on the other
the Kaiser's cannon missed him*
Just what all these ribbons signify I am sure I don't
know; probably they belong to campaign medals and
tell the tale of butcheries in foreign and domestic
parts mountains of dead Filipinos, Mexicans, Hai-
tians, Dominicans, West Virginia miners, perhaps even
Prussians. But in addition to campaign medals and the
Distinguished Service Medal there are now certainly
enough foreign orders in the United States to give
a distinct brilliance to the national scene, viewed, say,
from Mars. The Frederician tradition, borrowed by the
ragged Continentals and embodied in Article I, Sec-
tion 9, of the Constitution, lasted until 1918, and then
suddenly blew up; to mention it today is a sort of in-
decorum, and tomorrow, no doubt, will be a species
107
H. L. MENCKEN
of treason. Down with Frederick; up with John Philip
Sousa! Imagine what Sir John Pershing would look
like at a state banquet of his favorite American order,
the Benevolent and Protective one of Elks, in all the
Byzantine splendor of his casket of ribbons, badges,
stars, garters, sunbursts and cockades the lordly Bath
of die grateful motherland, with its somewhat dis-
concerting K Ich dien"; the gorgeous tricolor baldrics,
sashes and festoons of the Legion d'Honneur; the
grand cross of SS. Maurizio c Lazzaro of Italy; the
Danilo of Montenegro, with its cabalistic monogram of
Danilo I and its sinister hieroglyphics; the breastplate
of the Paulownia of Japan, with its rising sun of thirty-
two white rays, its blood-red heart, its background of
green leaves and its white ribbon edged with red; the
mystical St. Saviour of Greece, with its Greek motto
and its brilliantly enameled figure of Christ; above all,
the Croix de Guerre of Czechoslovakia, a new one
and hence not listed in the books, but surely no shrink-
ing violet
Alas, Pershing was on the wrong side that is, for
one with a fancy for gauds of that sort The most
blinding of all known orders is the Medijie of Turkey,
which not only entities the holder to four wives, but
also requires him to wear a red fez and a frozen star
covering his whole facade. I was offered this order by
Turkish spies during the war, and it wobbled me a
good deal. The Alexander of Bulgaria is almost as se-
ductive. The badge consists of an eight-pointed white
cross, with crossed swords between the arms and a red
Bulgarian lion over the swords. The motto is "Za
Chrabrostl" Then there arc the Prussian orders -the
Red and Black Eagles, the Pour le Merite, the Prussian
Crown, the Hohenzollern and the rest And the Golden
Fleece of Austria the noblest of them all. Think of
the Golden Fleece on a man born in Linn County, Mis-
souri . . . I begin to doubt that the General would
have got it, even supposing him to have taken the other
108
Star-Spangled Men
side. The Japs, I note, gave him only the grand cordon
of the Paulownia, and the Belgians and Montenegrins
were similarly cautious. There are higher classes. The
highest of the Paulownia is only for princes, which is
to say, only for non-Missourians.
Pershing is the champion, with General March a bad
second March is a K.C.M.G., and entitled to wear a
large cross of white enamel bearing a lithograph of the
Archangel Michael and the motto, "Auspicium Melioris
Aevi," but he is not a K.C.B. 1 Admirals Benson and
Sims are also grand crosses of Michael and George, and
like most other respectable Americans, members of the
Legion of Honor, but they seem to have been forgottca
by the Greeks and Montenegrins. 2 British-born and ex-
tremely Anglomaniacal Sims 8 refused the Distinguished
Service Medal of his adopted country, but is careful
to mention in "Who's Who in America" that his grand
cross of Michael and George was conferred upon him,
not by some servile gold-stick, but by "King George o
England"; 4 Benson omits mention of His Majesty, as
do Pershing and March. It would be hard to fhint of
any other American officers, real or bogus, who would
refuse the D.S.M., or, failing it, the grand decoration of
chivalry of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. I
once saw the latter hung, with ceremonies of the utmost
1 March went to the Philippines as commander of the forgotten Aster
Battery and saw long and hard service here. He was a commander o
the artillery in the AJJ?. and later its chief of staff. He retired from
the Army in 1921. He had many decorations besides the grand cross
of the order of St. Michael and St. George, including the grand cordon
of the Chia Ho of China and that of Polonia Restituta.
* Benson was chief of naval operations in World War I. He had the
order of the Rising Sun of Japan, the order of St. Gregory the Great;
conferred by the Pope, and a gold medal struck in his honor by New
Mexico. He died in 1932.
* Sims was born in Canada. He was commander of the naval forces
in European waters throughout World War I. He had Japanese,
Belgian and Italian orders, and was a LUX of Yak, Harvard, Tufts,
Pennsylvania, Columbia, Williams, Juniata, Stevens, McGill, Queen's,
California, Union, Wesleyan, and Cambridge (England)* He died in
Z9|6.
'From 1922 onward he struck this out.
109
H. L.
magnificence, upon a bald-headed tinner who had served
the fraternity long and faithfully; as he marched down
the hall toward the throne of the Supreme Exalted
Pishposh a score of scared little girls, the issue of other
tinners, strewed his pathway with roses, and around
the stem of each rose was a piece of glittering tinfoil*
The band meanwhile played The Rosary," and, at
the conclusion of the spectacle, as fried oysters were
served, "Wicn Blcibt Wien."
It was, I suspect, by way of the Odd Fellows and
other such gaudy heirs to die Deutsche Rittcr and the
Rosicrucians that the lust to gleam and jingle got into
the arteries of the American people. For years the aus-
tere tradition of Washington's day served to keep the
military bosom bare of spangles, but all the while a
weakness for them was growing in the civil popular
tion. Rank by rank, they became Knights of Pythias,
Odd Fellows, Red Men, Nobles of the Mystic Shrine^
Knights Templar, Patriarchs Militant, Elks, Moose,
Woodmen of the World, Foresters, HooHops, Ku
Kluxers and in every new order there were thirty-two
degrees, and for every degree there was a badge, and for
every badge there was a yard of ribbon. The Nobles o
the Mystic Shrine, chiefly paunchy wholesalers of the
Rotary Club species, are not content with swords, bal-
drics, stars, garters, jewels; they also wear red fezzes*
The Elks run to rubies. The Red Men array themselves
like Sitting BulL The patriotic ice-wagon drivers and
Methodist deacons of the Ku Klux Klan carry crosses
set with incandescent lights. An American who is
forced by his profession to belong to many such orders
*ay a life insurance solicitor, an undertaker or a
dealer in oil stock accumulates a trunk full of dec-
orations, many of them weighing a pound. There is a
mortician in Hagerstown, MA, who has been initiated
eighteen times. When he robes himself to plant a fellow
joiner he weighs three hundred pounds and sparkles
and flashes like the mouth of Hdl itself. He is entitled
110
Star-Spangled Men
to bear seven swords, aH jeweled, and to hang his watch
chain with the golden busts of nine wild animals, all
with precious stones for eyes. Put beside this lowly
washer of the dead, Pershing newly polished would
seem almost like a Trappist
But even so the civil arm is robbed of its just dues in
the department of gauds and radioactivity, no doubt by
the direct operation of military vanity and jealousy.
Despite a million proofs (and perhaps a billion elo-
quent arguments) to the contrary, it is still the theory
at the official ribbon counter that the only man who
serves in a war is the man who serves in uniform. This
is soft for the Bevo officer, 5 who at least has his service
stripes and the spurs that gnawed into his desk, but it
is hard upon his brother Elmer, the dollar-a-year tr^n,
who worked twenty hours a day for fourteen months
buying soap-powder, canned asparagus and raincoats
for the army of God. Elmer not only labored with in-
conceivable diligence; he also faced hazards of no mean
order, for on the one hand was his natural prejudice in
favor of a very liberal rewarding of commercial enter-
prise^ and on the other hand were his patriotism and his
fear of Atlanta Penitentiary. I daresay that many and
many a time, after working his twenty hours, he found
it difficult to sleep the remaining four hours. I know,
in feet, survivors of that obscure service who are far
worse wrecks today than Pershing is. Their reward is
what? Winks, sniffs, innuendoes. If they would in-
dulge themselves in the now almost univesal Ameri-
can yearning to go adorned, they must join the Knights
of Pythias. Even the American Legion fails them, for
though it certainly does not bar non-combatants, it in-
sists that they sh?11 have done their non-combating in
uniform.
What I propose is a variety of the Distinguished
"A Bevo officer was one who fought die wicked Hun from a desk
in Washington. The "arr^ derived from *ha of a near-beer of the
111
K. I*. MEKCKEN
Service Medal for civilians perhaps, better still, a dis-
tinct order for civilians, closed to the military and with
badges ot different colors and areas, to mark off vary-
ing services to democracy. Let it run, like the Japanese
Paulownia, from high to low the lowest class for the
patriot who sacrificed only rime, money and a few
nights* sleep; the highest for the great martyr who
hung his country's altar with his dignity, his decency
and his sacred honor* For Elmer and his nervous ior
fomnia, a simple rosette, with an iron badge bearing
the national motto, "Safety First"; for the university
president who prohibited the teaching of the enemy
language in his learned grove, heaved the works of
Goethe out of the university library, cashiered every
professor unwilling to support Wbodrow for the first
vacancy in the Trinity, took to the stump for the
National Security League,* and made two hundred
speeches in moving picture theaters for this giant of
loyal endeavor let no 100 per cent American speak of
anything less than the grand cross of the order, with a
gold badge in stained glass, a baldric of the national
colors, a violet plug hat with a sunburst on the side,
the privilege of the floor of Congress, and a pension of
$io/xx> a year. After all, the cost would not be exces-
sive; there are not many of them. Such prodigies of
patriotism are possible only to rare and gifted men. For
die grand cordons of the order, c.g^ college professors
who spied upon and reported the seditions of their as-
sociate, state presidents of the American Protective
League,* alien property custodians, judges whose sea-
*A band of patriots which made i deafening uproar in the 1914-
1918 era. Its front* were Elihu Root and Alton 8. Parker.
T An organization of amateur detectives working under the aegis of
die Department of Justice. In 1917 its operatives reported that I was
an intimate associate and agent of ^the German monster, Nietzsky/*
ad I was solemnly investigated. But I was a canning fellow in those
days and full of a malicious humor, so I not only managed to throw
off die charge bat even to write the report upon myself. I need not
s*y that it gave me a dean bill of health and I still have a carbon
to prove it. As a general rule the AirM-n^n Protective League confined
itsetf to easier victims. Its specialty was harassing German waiters.
112
Star-Spangled Men
tcnccs o conscientious objectors mounted to more than
50,000 years, members of George Creel's herd of 2,000
American historians, the authors of the Sisson docu-
ments,* etc. pensions of $10 a day would be enough,
with silver badges and no plug hats. For the lower
ranks, bronze badges and the legal right to the title of
*Thc Hon.," already every true American's by courtesy.
Not, of course, that I am insensitive to the services
of the gentlemen of those lower ranks, but in such mat-
ters one must go by rarity rather than by intrinsic
value. If the grand cordon or even the nickel-plated
eagle of the third class were given to every patriot who
bored a hole through the floor of his flat to get evi-
dence against his neighbors, the Krausmeyers, and to
everyone who visited the Hofbrauhaus nightly, de-
nounced the Kaiser in searing terms, and demanded
assent from Emil and Otto, the waiters, and to every-
one who notified the catchpolls of the Department of
Justice when the wireless plant was open in the garret
of the Arion Liedertafd, and to all who took a brave
and forward part in slacker raids, and to all who lent
their stenographers funds at 6 per cent, to buy Liberty
bonds at 4% per cent, and to all who sold out at 99 and
then bought in again at 83.56, and to all who served as
jurors or perjurers in cases against members and ex-
members of the LW.W^ and to the German-American
members of the League for German Democracy, and
to all the Irish who snitched upon the Irisfc if dec*
orations were thrown about with any such lavishness,
then there would be no nickel left for our bathrooms.
On the civilian side as on the military side the great re-
'Creel serred as chairman of what was called die Committee on
Public Information from 1917 to 1919. Its chief business was to propa-
gate the official doctrine as to the causes and issues of the war. To that
end Creel recruited his horde of college historians and they solemnly
certified to the truth of everything that emanated from Washington and
London. The Sisson documents were supposed to show a sintorr con-
spiracy of the Russian Communists, bat what the specifications were
I forget. Creel's committee was also in charge of newspaper censorship
daring the war.
113
H. I*. MENCKEN
wards of war go, not to mere dogged industry and
fidelity, but to originality to the unprecedented, the
arresting, the bizarre. The New York Tribune liar
who invented the story about the German plant for
converting the corpses of the slain into soap did more
for democracy and the Wilsonian idealism, and hence
deserves a more brilliant recognition, than a thousand
uninspired hawkers of atrocity stories supplied by Vis-
count Bryce and his associates. For that great servant of
righteousness the grand cordon, with two silver badges
and the chair of history at Columbia, would be scarcely
enough; for the ordinary hawkers any precious metal
would be too much.
Whether or not the Y.M.CA. has decorated its choc-
olate peddlers and soul-snatchers I do not know; since
the chief Y.M.CA. lamasery in my town of Baltimore
became the scene of a homosexual scandal I have ceased
to frequent evangelical society. If not, then there should
be some governmental recognition of these highly char-
acteristic heroes of the war for democracy. The vet-
erans of the line, true enough, dislike them excessively,
and have a habit of denouncing them obscenely when
the corn-juice flows. They charged too much for ciga-
rettes; they tried to discourage the amiability of the
ladies of France; they had a habit of being absent when
the shells burst in air* Well, some say this and some say
that. A few, at least, of the pale and oleaginous breth-
ren must have gone into the Master's work because they
thirsted to save souls, and not simply because they de-
sired to escape the trenches. And a few, I am told, were
anything but unpleasantly righteous, as a round of
Wassermanns would show. If, as may be plausibly ar-
gued, these Soldiers of the Double Cross deserve to live
at all, then they surely deserve to be hung with white
enameled stars of the third class, with gilt dollar marks
superimposed Motto: "Glory, glory, hallelujah!"
But what of the vaudeville actors, the cheer leaders,
the doughnut fryers, the camp librarians, the press
Star-Spongled Men
agents? I am not forgetting them. Let them be distrib-
uted among all the classes from the seventh to the
eighth, according to their sufferings for the holy cause.
And the agitators against Beethoven, Bach, Brahms,
Wagner, Richard Strauss, all the rest of the cacopho-
nous Huns? And the specialists in the crimes of the
German professors? And the collectors for the Bel-
gians, with their generous renunciation of all commis-
sions above 80 per cent. And the pathologists who
denounced Johannes Muller as a fraud, Karl Ludwig as
an imbecile, and Paul Ehrlich as a thief? And the pa-
triotic chemists who discovered arsenic in dill pickles,
ground glass in pumpernickel, bichloride tablets in Bis-
marck herring, pathogenic organisms in aniline dyes?
And the inspired editorial writers of the New York
Times and Tribune, the Boston Transcript, the Phila-
delphia Ledger, the Mobile Register, the Jones Corners
Eagle? And the headline writers? And die Columbia,
Yale and Princeton professors? And the authors of
books describing how the Kaiser told them the whole
plot in 1913, while they were pulling his teeth or shin-
ing his shoes? And the ex-ambassadors? And the
Nietzschefresser? And the chautauqua orators? And the
four-minute men? 9 And the Methodist pulpit pornog-
raphers who switched so facilely from vice-crusading
to German atrocities? And Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis?
And Dr. Henry van Dyke? 10 And the Vigilantes? u Let
'These were bores who visited me movie parlors of die time and
broke in upon The Perils of Pauline with brief bat rousing speeches.
How many were in practise first and last I do not know, but there
must have been hundreds of thousands. They were chiefly recruited
from the ranks of Rotarians, Kiwanians, <Jw foftqwi* "s evangelical
clergymen, and mmnr political aspirants.
10 Hillis was a Presbyterian clergyman, but went over to the Con*
gregationafists a n d spent most of his life in the old pulpit of Henry
Ward Beecher in Brooklyn. He brought out a book called German
Atrocities in 1918, in which all of the most fantastic inventions of the
English propaganda bureau were treated gravely. Such horrors ap-
parently fascinated him, and he wallowed in them in a really obscene
*. He died in 1929. Van Dyke, another Presbyterian, took the
though ]<M^ violently. He fed been pastor of the
us
H. L. MENCXBN
no grateful heart forget themi
Palmer and Burleson I leave for special legislation. 12
If mere university presidents, such as Nicholas Murray
Butler, are to have the grand cross, then Palmer de-
serves to be rolled in malleable gold from head to foot^
and polished until he blinds the cosmos then Burlesoa
must be hung with diamonds like Mrs. Warren and
bathed in spotlights like Gaby Deslys. . . * Finally, I re-
serve a special decoration, to be conferred in camera
and worn only in secret chapter, for husbands who
took chances and refused to read anonymous letters
from Paris: the somber badge of the Ordrc de la Cucu-
lus Canorus, first and only class.
THE ARCHANGEL WOODROW
(FROM the Smart Set, January 1921)
Wilson was a typical Puritan of the better
sort, perhaps, for he at least toyed with the ambition to
appear as a gentleman, but nevertheless a true Puritan*
Magnanimity was simply beyond him. Confronted* on
his death-bed, with the case of poor Debs, all his in-
stincts compelled him to keep Debs in jail I daresay
Presbyterian Clmreh in New York, bat in the war era was professor
of English literature at Princeton. He was taken gravely as a poet and
essayist in his day, and rose to be president of the National Institute
of Arts and Letters, but his writings were hollow and he is now pretty
well forgotten. He died in 1933.
n An organization of professional patriots analogous to the Ameri-
can Protective League, but even worse. Its heroic members specialized
In daubing yellow paint on the houses of persons suspected of having
doubts about the Wilson idealism. In some regions they also resorted
to assault, always at odds of at least xo to I.
"A. Mitchell Palmer, a Quaker, was Attorney-General under Wilson.
He was the superintendent of many ferocious spy-hunts. He died in
1936. Albert Sidney Burleson was Wilson's Postmaster GeneraL He
specialized in the crnsorihip of the mails. He died in 2937.
116
The Archangel Woodrow
that as a purely logical matter, he saw clearly that the
old fellow ought to be turned loose; certainly he must
have known that Washington would not have hesitated,
or Lincoln. But Calvinism triumphed as his intellectual
faculties decayed. In the full bloom of health, with a
plug hat on his head, he aped the gentry of his wistful
adoration very cleverly, but lying in bed, stripped like
Thackeray's Louis XIV, he reverted to his congenital
Puritanism, which is to say, bounderisrn.
There is a truly devastating picture of him in "The
Story of a Style," by Dr. William Bayard Hale. Hale
was peculiarly equipped for the business, for he was at
one time high in the literary and philosophical confi-
dence of the late Messiah, and learned to imitate his
gaudy rhetoric with great skill so perfectly, indeed,
that he was delegated to write one of the Woodroviaa
books, to wit, "The New Freedom/* once a favorite
text of New Republic Liberals, deserving Democrats,
and the tender-minded in general. But in the end he
revolted against both the new Euphuism and its emi-
nent pa, and when he wrote his book he tackled both
with considerable ferocity, and, it must be added, vast
effect. His analysis of the whole Wilsonian buncombe^
in fact, is appallingly cruel. He shows its ideational hoi-
lowness, its ludicrous strutting and bombast, its heavy
dependence upon greasy and meaningless words, its
frequent descents to mere sound and fury, signifying
nothing. In particular, he devotes himself to a merci-
less study of what, after all, must remain the deceased
Moses's chief contribution to both history and beauti-
ful letters, war-, his biography of Washington. This in-
credible work is an almost inexhaustible mine of bad
writing, faulty generalizing, childish pussyfooting, lu-
dicrous posturing, and naive stupidity. To find a match
for it one must try to imagine a biography of the Duke
of Wellington by his barber. Well, Hale spreads it out
on his operating table, sharpens his snickersnee upon
his bootleg, and proceeds to so harsh an anatomizing
117
H. L. MENCKEN
that it nearly makes me sympathize with the author.
Not many of us writers, and hence vain and artificial
fellows could undergo so relentless an examination
without damage. But not many of us, I believe, would
suffer quite so horribly as Woodrow. The book is a
mass of puerile affectations, and as Hale unveils one
after the other he performs a sound service for Ameri-
can scholarship and American letters.
I say that his book is cruel, but I must add that his
laparotomics are carried on with every decorumr-that
he by no means rants and rages against his victim. On
the contrary, he keeps his temper even when there is
strong temptation to lose it, and his inquiry
itself upon the literary level as much as possible, with-
out needless descents to political and personal matters*
More than once, in fact, he says very kind things about
Woodrow a man probably quite as mellow and likable
within as the next man, despite his strange incapacity
for keeping his friends. The Woodrovian style, at the
height of the Wilson hallucination, was much praised
by cornfcd connoisseurs* I read editorials, in those days,
comparing it to the style of the Biblical prophets, and
arguing that it vastly exceeded the manner of any Hving
literatus. Looking backward, it is not difficult to see
how that doctrine arose. Its chief sponsors, first and
last, were not men who actually knew anything about
writing English, but simply editorial writers on party
newspapers, U^ men who related themselves to literary
artists in much the same way that an Episcopal bishop
relates himself to Paul of Tarsus. What intrigued such
gendcmen was the plain fact that Wilson was their su-
perior in their own special field that he accomplished
with a great deal more skill than they did themselves
the great task of reducing all the difficulties of the hour
to a few sonorous and unintelligible phrases, often
with theological overtones that he knew better that)
they did how to arrest and enchant the boobery with
118
The Archangel Woodrow
words that were simply words, and nothing else. The
vulgar like and respect that sort of balderdash. A dis-
course packed with valid ideas, accurately expressed, is
quite incomprehensible to them. What they want is the
sough of vague and comforting words words cast into
phrases made familiar to them by the whooping of their
customary political and ecclesiastical rabble-rousers, and
by the highfalutin style of the newspapers that they
read. Woodrow knew how to conjure up such words.
He knew how to make them glow, and weep. He
wasted no time upon the heads of his dupes, but aimed
directly at their ears, diaphragms and hearts.
But reading his speeches in cold blood offers a curi-
ous experience. It is difficult to believe that even idiots
ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to
such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so
vast and obvious a nonsensicality. Hale produces sen-
tence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all
stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of Warren Gama-
liel Harding. When Wilson got upon his legs in those
days he seems to have gone into a sort of trance, with
all the peculiar illusions and delusions that belong to
a pedagogue gone mashugga. He heard words giving
three cheers; he saw them race across a blackboard like
Marxians pursued by the Polizei; he felt them rush up
and kiss him. The result was the grand series of moral,
political, sociological and theological ma-rims which
now lodges imperishably in the cultural heritage of the
American people, along with Lincoln's "government of
the people, by the people,** etc^ Perry's "We have met
the enemy, and they are ours," and Vanderbilt's "The
public be damned." The important thing is not that a
popular orator should have uttered such vaporous and
preposterous phrases, but that they should have been
gravely received, for weary years, by a whole race of
men, some of them intelligent Here is a matter that
deserves the sober inquiry of competent psychologists.
119
H* L. MENCKEN
The boobs took fire first, but after a while even college
presidents who certainly ought to be cynical men, if
ladies of joy are cynical women were sending up
sparks, and for a long while anyone who laughed was
in danger of the calaboose*
THE LIBERTINE
(KEQU In Defense of Women, 1923)
*
The average man of our time and race is far
more virtuous than his wife's imaginings make him
out far less schooled in sin, far less enterprising in
amour. I do not say, of course, that he is pure in heart*
for the chances are that he isn f t; what I do say is that,
in the overwhelming majority of cases, he is pure in
act, even in the face of temptation. And why? For sev-
eral main reasons, not to go into minor ones. One is
that he lacks the courage. Another is that he lacks the
money. Another is that he is fundamentally moral, and
has a conscience* It takes more sinful initiative than he
has to plunge into any affair save the most casual and
sordid; it takes more ingenuity and intrepidity than he
has to carry it off; it takes more money than he can
conceal from his consort to finance it. A man may force
his actual wife to share the direst poverty, but even die
least vampirish woman of the third part demands to be
courted in what, considering his station in life, is the
grand manner, and the expenses of that grand manner
scare off all save a small minority of specialists in decep*
don. So long, indeed, as a wife knows her husband's in-
come accurately, she has a sure means of holding him
to his oaths.
The Libertine
Even more effective than the fiscal barrier is die
barrier of poltroonery* The one character that distin-
guishes man from the other higher vertebrata is his
excessive timorousness, his easy yielding to alarms, his
incapacity for adventure without a crowd behind him.
The moment a concrete Temptress rises before him,
her nose talced, her lips scarlet, her eyelashes dropping
provokingly the moment such an abandoned wench
has at him, and his lack of ready funds begins to coa-
spire with his lack of courage to assault and wobble
him at that precise moment his conscience flares into
function, and so finishes his business. First he sees dif-
ficulty, dien he sees danger, then he sees wrong. The
result? The result is that he slinks off in trepidation,
and another vampire is baffled of her prey. It is, indeed,
the secret scandal of Christendom, at least in the Prot-
estant regions, that most men are faithful to their
wives. You will travel a long way before you find a
married man who will admit that he is, but the facts
are the facts. For one American husband who main-
tains a chorus girl in levantine luxury around the cor-
ner, there are hundreds who are as true to their oaths,
year in and year out, as so many convicts in the death-
house, and would be no more capable of any such
loathsome malpractice, even in the face of free oppor-
tunity, than they would be of cutting off the ears of
their young. 1
X I see nothing in the Kinsey Report to change my conclusions bete.
All that humorless document really proves k (a) that aH men lie when
they are asked about their adventures in amour, and (b) that peda-
gogue* are singularly naive and credulous creatures.
H, L.
THE LITRE OF BEAUTY
la Defense cf Women, 1933)
*
Save on tie stage, the handsome fellow has
no appreciable advantage in amour over his more
Gcthic brother. la real life, indeed, he is viewed with
the utmost suspicion by all women save the most stu-
pid. A ten-cent-store girl, perhaps, may plausibly fall in
IOTC with a movie actor, and a half-idiotic old widow
may succumb to a gigolo with shoulders like the Par-
thenon, but no woman of poise and self-respect, even
supposing her to be transiently flustered by a lovely
buck, would yield to that madness for an instant, or
confess it to her dearest friend.
This disdain of the pretty fellow is often accounted
for by amateur psychologists on the ground that
women are anesthetic to beauty that they kck the
quick and delicate responsiveness of man. Nothing
could be more absurd. Women, in point of fact, com-
monly have a far keener esthetic sense than men*
Beauty is more important to them; they give more
thought to it; they crave more o it in their immediate
surroundings. The average man, at least in England
and America, takes a bovine pride in his indifference
to the arts; he can think of them only as sources of
somewhat discreditable amusement; one seldom hears
of ^ him showing half the enthusiasm for any beautiful
thing that his wife displays in the presence of a finf>
fabric, an effective color, or a graceful form. Women are
resistant to so-called beauty in men for the simple and
ntffirirnt reason that such beauty is chiefly imaginary.
The Lure of Beauty
A truly beautiful man, indeed, is as rare as a truly
beautiful piece of jewelry.
What men mistake for beauty in themselves is usually
nothing save a certain hollow gaudiness, a revolting
flashiness, the superficial splendor of a prancing animaL
The most lovely movie actor, considered in the light of
genuine esthetic values, is no more than a study in vul-
garity; his like is to be found, not in the Uffizi gallery
or among the harmonies of Brahms, but among the
plush sofas, rococo clocks and hand-painted oil-paint-
ings of a third-rate auction-room. All women, save the
least intelligent, penetrate this imposture with sharp
eyes. They know that the human body, accept for a
brief time in childhood, is not a beautiful thing, but a
hideous thing. Their own bodies give them no delight;
it is their constant effort to disguise and conceal them;
they never expose them esthetically, but only as an act
of the grossest sexual provocation. If it were advertised
that a troupe of men of easy virtue were to do a strip-
tease act upon a public stage, the only women who
would go to the entertainment would be a few delayed
adolescents, a psychopathic old maid or two, and a
guard of indignant members of the parish Ladies Aid
Society.
Men show no such sagacious apprehension of the
relatively feeble loveliness of the human frame. The
most effective lure that a woman can hold out to a
man is the lure of what he fatuously conceives to be
her beauty. This so-called beauty, of course, is almost
always a pure illusion. The female body, even at its
best, is very defective in form; it has harsh curves and
very clumsily distributed masses; compared to it the av-
erage milk-jug, or even cuspidor, is a thing of intel-
ligent and gratifying design in brief, an objet fart.
Below the neck by the bow and below the waist astern
there are two masses that simply refuse to fit into a
balanced composition. Viewed from the side, a woman
presents an exaggerated S bisected by an imperfect
m
H. fc. MENCKEN
straight linc^ and so she inevitably suggests a drunKca
dollar-mark.
Moreover, it is extremely rare to find a woman who
shows even the modest sightliness that her sex is theo-
retically capable of; it is only the rare beauty who is
even tolerable. The average woman, until art comes
to her aid, is ungraceful, misshapen, badly calved and
crudely articulated, even for a woman. If she has a
good torso, she is almost sure to be bow-legged. If she
has good legs, she is almost sure to have bad hair. If she
has good hair, she is almost sure to have scrawny hands,
or muddy eyes, or no chin. A woman who meets fair
tests all round is so uncommon that she becomes a sort
of marvel, and usually gains a livelihood by exhibiting
herself as such, either on the stage, in the half-world, or
as the private jewel of some wealthy connoisseur.
But this lack of genuine beauty in women kys on
them no practical disadvantage in the primary business
of their sex, for its effects are more than overborne by
the emotional suggestibility, the herculean capacity for
illusion, the almost total absence of critical sense in
men. Men do not demand genuine beauty, even in the
most modest doses; they are quite content with the
mere appearance of beauty. That is to say, they show
no talent whatever for differentiating between the arti-
ficial and the reaL A film of face powder, skillfully ap-
plied, is as satisfying to them as an epidermis of damask*
The hair of a dead f^inamfln^ artfully dressed ? nr t
dyed, gives them as much delight as the authentic
tresses of Venus* False bosoms intrigue them as effec-
tively as the soundest of living fascia. A pretty frock
fetches them quite as surely and securely as lovely legs,
shoulders, hands or eyes.
In brief, they estimate women, and hence acquire
their wives, by reckoning up purely superficial aspects,
which is just as intelligent as estimating an egg by
purely superficial aspects. They never go behind die re*
turns; it never occurs to them to analyze the impres-
m
The Lure oj Beauty
sions they receive. The result is that many a man,
deceived by such paltry sophistications, never really sees
his wife that is, as our Heavenly Father is supposed to
see her, and as the embalmer will see her until they
have been married for years. All the tricks may be in-
fantile and obvious, but in the face of so naive a spec-
tator the temptation to continue practising them is
irresistible* A trained nurse tells me that even when
undergoing the extreme discomfort of parturition the
great majority of women continue to modify their com-
plexions with pulverized magnesium silicate, and to
give thought to the arrangement of their hair. Such
transparent devices reduce the psychologist to a sour
sort of mirth, yet it must be plain that they suffice to
entrap and make fools of men, even the most discreet.
And what esthetic deafness, dumbness and blindness
thus open the way for, vanity instantly reinforces. That
is to say, once a normal man has succumbed to the
meretricious charms of a definite fair one (or, more
accurately, once a definite fair one has marked him out
and grabbed him by the nose), he defends his choice
with all the heat and steadfastness appertaining to the
defense of a point of honor. To tell a man flatly that his
wife is not beautiful is so harsh and intolerable an in-
sult that even an enemy seldom ventures upon it. One
would offend him far less by arguing that his wife is an
idiot* One would, relatively speaking, almost caress him
by spitting into his eye. The ego of the male is simply
unable to stomach such an affront. It is a weapon as
discreditable as the poison of the Borgias.
Thus, on humane grounds, a conspiracy of silence
surrounds the delusion of female beauty, and its victim
is permitted to get quite as much delight out of it as i
if were sound. The baits he swallows most are not edi-
ble and nourishing ones, but simply bright and gaudy
ones. He succumbs to a pair of well-managed eyes, a
graceful twist of the body, a synthetic complexion or
a skillful display of legs without giving the slightest
125
H. L. MENCKEK
thought to the fact that a whole woman is there, and
that within the cranial cavity of the woman lies a brain,
and that the idiosyncrasies of that brain are of vastly
more importance than all imaginable physical stigmata
combined But not many men, lost in the emotional
maze preceding, are capable of any very clear examina-
tion of such facts. They dodge those facts, even when
they are favorable, and lay all stress upon the surround-
ing and concealing superficialities. The average stupid
and jEfirirnefttal man, if he fr?$ a noticeably sensible
wife, is almost apologetic about it The ideal of his sex
is always a pretty wife, and the vanity and coquetry
that so often go with prettiness are erected into charms.
THE GOOD MAN
(utoc tbe Smart Set, 1923)
Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged
animal, never completely rounded and perfect, as a
cockroach, say, is perfect. If he shows one valuable
quality, it is almost unheard of for him to show any
other. Give him a head, and he lacks a heart Give King
a heart of a gallon capacity, and his head holds scarcely
a pint The artist, nine times out of ten, is a dead-beat
and given to the debauching of virgins, so-called. The
patriot is a bigot, and, more often than not, a bounder
and a poltroon. The man of physical bravery is often
on a level, intellectually, with a Baptist clergyman* The
intellectual giant has bad kidneys and cannot thread a
needle. In all my years of search in this world, from the
Golden Gate in the West to the Vistula in the East^ and
The Good Man
from the Orkney Islands in the North to the Spanish
Main in the South, I have never met a thoroughly
moral man who was honorable.
THE ANGLO-SAXON
(ntou the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 1933)
When I speak of Anglo-Saxons, of course^
I speak inexactly and in the common phrase. Even
within the bounds of that phrase the American of
the dominant stock is Anglo-Saxon only partially, for
there is probably just as much Celtic blood in his veins
as Germanic, and his norm is to be found, not south of
the Tyne and west of the Severn, but on the two sides
of the northern border. Among the first English colo-
nists there were many men of almost pure Teutonic
stock from the east and south of England, and their in-
fluence is yet visible in many characteristic American
folkways, in certain traditional American ideas some
of them now surviving only in national hypocrisies
and, above all, in the fundamental peculiarities of the
American dialect of English. But their Teutonic blood
was early diluted by Celtic strains from Scotland, from
die north of Ireland, from Wales, and from the west of
England, and today those Americans who are regarded
as being most thoroughly Anglo-Saxons for example,
the mountaineers of the Appalachian slopes from Penn-
sylvania to Georgia are obviously far more Celtic than
Teutonic, not only physically but also mentally. They
are leaner and taller thgfl the true English, and far
more given to moral obsessions and religious fanati-
cism. A. Methodist revival is not an English phenome*
m
B. L. MENCKEN"
non; it is Welsh. So is the American tendency, marked
fay every foreign student of our history, to turn all po-
litical combats into moral crusades. The English them-
selves, of course, have been greatly polluted by Scotch,
Irish and Welsh blood during the past three centuries,
and for years past their government has been largely in
the hands of Celts, but though thi* fact, by making
them more like Americans, has tended to conceal the
difference that I am discussing, it has certainly not suf-
ficed to obliterate it altogether. The English notion of
humor remains different from the American notion,
and so docs the English view of personal liberty, and
on the same level of primary ideas there are many other
obvious differences.
But though I am thus convinced that the American
Anglo-Saxon wears a false label, and grossly libels both
of the great races from which he claims descent, I can
imagine no good in trying to change it. Let him call
himself whatever he pleases. Whatever he calls himself,
it must be plain that the term he uses designates a gen-
uinely distinct and differentiated race that he is sep-
arated definitely, in character and habits of thought,
from the men of all other recognizable strains -that he
represents, among the peoples of the earth, almost a
special species, and that he runs true to type. The traits
that he developed when the first mixture of races took
place in colonial days are the traits that he still shows;
despite the vast changes in his material environment, he
is almost precisely the same^ in the way he thinks and
acts, as his forefathers were. Some of the other great
races of men, during the past two centuries, have
changed very noticeably, but the American Anglo-
Saxon has stuck to his hereditary guns. Moreover, he
tends to show much less variation than other races be-
tween man and man. No other race, save it be the Chi-
nese, is so thoroughly regimented*
The good qualities of this so-called Anglo-Saxon are
many, and I am certainly not disposed to question
is*
The Anglo-Saxon
them, but I here pass them over without apology, for
he devotes practically the whole of his literature and
fully a half of his oral discourse to celebrating them
himself, and so there is no danger that they will ever be
disregarded. No other known man, indeed, is so vio-
lently the blowhard, save it be his English kinsman- In
this fact lies the first cause of the ridiculous figure he
commonly cuts in the eyes of other people: he brags
and blusters so incessantly that, if he actually had the
combined virtues of Socrates, the Cid and the Twelve
Apostles, he would still go beyond the facts, and so
appear a mere Bombastes Furioso, This habit, I believe^
is fundamentally English, but it has been exaggerated
in the Americano by his larger admixture of Celtic
blood In late years in America it has taken on an
almost pathological character, and is to be explained,
perhaps, only in terms of the Freudian necromancy.
Braggadocio, in the loo^fc American- "we won the
war,** "it is our duty to lead the world,** and so on i$
probably no more than a protective mechanism erected
to conceal an inescapable sense of inferiority,
That this inferiority is real must be obvious to
any impartial observer. Whenever the Anglo-Saxon,
whether of the English or of the American variety>
comes into sharp conflict with men of other stocks, he
tends to be worsted, or, at best, to be forced back upon
extraneous and irrelevant aids to assist him in the
struggle* Here in the United States his defeat is so
palpable that it has filled him with vast alarms, and
reduced him to seeking succor in grotesque and ex*
travagant devices. In the fine arts, in the sciences and
even in the more complex sorts of business the children
of the later immigrants are running away from the de-
scendants of the early settlers* To call the roll of Amer-
icans eminent in almost any field of human endeavor
above the most elemental is to call a list of strange and
often outlandish names; even the panel of Congress
presents a startling example. Of the Americans who
H. L. MBNCKBH
have come into notice during the past fifty years as
poets, as novelists, as critics, as painters, as sculptors
and in the minor arts, less than half bear Anglo-Saxon
names, and in this minority there are few of pure
Anglo-Saxon blood. So in the sciences. So in the higher
reaches of engineering and technology. So in philoso-
phy and its branches. So even in industry and agricul-
ture. In those areas where the competition between the
new and the old bloodstreams is most sharp and clear-
cut, say in New York, in seaboard New England and
in the farming States of the upper Middle West, the
defeat of the so-called Anglo-Saxon is overwhelming
and unmistakable. Once his predominance every where
was actual and undisputed; today, even where he re-
mains superior numerically, it is largely tt^nfirng^tal
and illusory.
The descendants of the later immigrants tend gener-
ally to move upward; the descendants of the first
settlers, I believe, tend plainly to move downward^
mentally, spiritually and even physically. Civilization is
at its lowest mark in the United States precisely in
those areas where the Anglo-Saxon still presumes to
rule. He runs the whole South and in the whole
South there arc not as many first-rate men as in many
a single city of the mongrel North. Wherever he is still
firmly in the saddle, there we look for such patholpg-
kal phenomena as Fundamentalism, Prohibition and
Ku Kluxery, and there they flourish. It is not in the
northern cities, with their miwl population, that the
death-rate b highest, and politics most corrupt, and re*
ligion nearest to voodooism, and every decent human
aspiration suspect; it is in the areas that the recent
immigrations have not penetrated, where "the purest
Anglo-Saxon blood in the world" still flows, I could
pie up evidences, but they are not necessary. The fact
is too plain to be challenged. One testimony will be
sufficient: it comes from two inquirers who made an
exhaustive survey o a region in southeastern
ISO
The Anglo-Saxon
where "the people are more purely Amm-trang than in
the rest of the State":
Here gross superstition exercises strong control
over the thought and action of a large proportion of
the people. Syphilitic and other venereal diseases are
common and increasing over whole counties, while
in some communities nearly every family is afflicted
with inherited or infectious disease* Many cases of in-
cest are known; inbreeding is rife. Imbeciles, feeble*
minded, and delinquents are numerous, politics is
corrupt, and selling of votes is common, petty crimes
abound, the schools have been badly managed and
poorly attended. Cases of rape, assault, and robbery
are of almost weekly occurrence within five minutes*
walk of the corporation limits of one of the county
seats, while in another county political control is held
by a self-confessed criminal. Alcoholic intemperance
is excessive. Gross immorality and its evil results are
by no means confined to the hill districts, but are
extreme also in the towns. 1
As I say, the American of the old stock is not tin-
aware of this steady, and, of late, somewhat rapid dete-
riorationthis gradual loss of his old mastery in the
land his ancestors helped to wring from the Indian and
the wildcat. He senses it, indeed, very painfully, and,
as if in despair of arresting it in fact, makes desperate
efforts to dispose of it by denial and concealment.
These efforts often take grotesque and extravagant
forms. Laws arc passed to hobble and cage the citizen
of newer stocks in a hundred fantastic ways. It is made
difficult and socially dangerous for Him to teach his
children the speech of his fathers, or to maintain the
cultural attitudes that he has inherited from them.
Every divergence from the norm of the low-cast Anglo-
1 Since the above was written there has been unqualified confirmation
of it by a distinguished English authority, to wit, Arnold J. Toynbee.
See his Study of History, VoL I, pp. 466-67, and VoL n, pp. 3"-**
181
H. L. MENCKEN
Saxon is treated as an attentat against die common-
wealth, and punished with eager ferocity.
It so happens that I am myself an Anglo-Saxon-
one of far purer blood, indeed, than most of the half-
bleached Celts who pass under the name in the United
States and England. I am in part Angle and in part
Saxon, and what else I am is safely white, Nordic, Prot-
estant and blond. Thus I feel free, without risk of ven-
turing into bad taste, to regard frankly the soi-disant
Anglo-Saxon of this incomparable Republic and his
rather less dubious cousin of the Motherland. How do
the two appear to me, after years spent largely in accu-
mulating their disfavor? What are the characters that I
discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type
of man? I may answer at once that two stick out above
all others- One is his curious and apparently incurable
incompetence his congenital inability to do any diffi-
cult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a ba-
cillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding
susceptibility to fears and alarms in short, his heredi-
tary cowardice.
To accuse so enterprising and successful a race of
cowardice, of course, is to risk immediate derision;
nevertheless, I believe that a fair-minded examination
of its history will bear me out. Nine-tenths of the great
feats of derring-do that its sucklings are taught to ven-
erate in school that is, its feats as a race, not the iso-
lated exploits of its extraordinary individuals, most of
them at least partly of other stocks have been wholly
lacking in even the most elementary gallantry* Con-
sider, for example, the events attending the extension
of the two great empires, English and American* Did
cither movement evoke any genuine courage and reso-
lution? The answer is plainly no. Both empires were
built up primarily by swindling and butchering un-
armed savages, and after that by robbing weak and
friendless nations. Neither produced a hero above the
average run of those in the movies; neither exposed
1S2
The Anglo-Saxon
the folks at tome to any serious danger of reprisal.
Almost always, indeed, mercenaries have done the
Anglo-Saxon's fighting for hima high testimony to
his common sense, but scarcely flattering, I fear, to the
truculence he boasts of. The British empire was won
mainly by Irishmen, Scotchmen and native allies, and
the American empire, at least in large part, by French-
men and Spaniards. Moreover, neither great enterprise
cost any appreciable amount of blood; neither pre-
sented grave and dreadful risks; neither exposed the
conqueror to the slightest danger o being made the
conquered* The British won most of their vast domin-
ions without having to stand up in a single battle
against a civilized and formidable foe^ and the Amer-
icanos won their continent at the expense of a few
dozen puerile skirmishes with savages. The total cost
of conquering the whole area from Plymouth Rock to
the Golden Gate and from Lake George to the Ever-
glades, including even the cost of driving out the
French, Dutch, English and Spaniards, was less than
the cost of defending Verdun,
So far as I can make out there is no record in history
of any Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great
war without allies. The French have done it, the
Dutch have done it, the Germans have done it, the
Japs have done it, and even such inferior nations as
the Danes, the Spaniards, the Boers and the Greeks
have done it, but never the English or Americans, Can
you imagine the United States resolutely facing a war
in which the odds against it were as huge as they were
against Spain in 1898? The facts of history are wholly
against any such fancy. The Anglo-Saxon always tries
to take a gang with him when he goes into battle, and even
when he has it behind him he is very uneasy, and prone
to fall into panic at the first threat of genuine danger.
Here I put an unimpeachably Anglo-Saxon witness on
the stand, to wit, the late Charles W. Eliot I find him
saying, in an article quoted with approbation by the
1SS
H. L. MENCKEN
Congressional Record, that during the Revolutionary
War the colonists now hymned so eloquently in the
school-books "fell into a condition of despondency
from which nothing but the steadfastness of Washing-
ton and the Continental army and the aid from France
saved them," and that "when the War of 1812 brought
grave losses a considerable portion of the population
experienced a moral collapse, from which they were
rescued only by the exertions of a few thoroughly pa-
triotic statesmen and the exploits of three or four
American frigates on the seas" to say nothing of an
enterprising Corsican gentleman, Bonaparte by name.
In both these wars the Americans had enormous and
obvious advantages, in terrain, in allies and in men;
nevertheless, they fought, in the main, very badly, and
from the first shot to the last a majority of them stood
in favor of making peace on almost any terms. The
Mexican and Spanish Wars I pass over as perhaps too
obscenely ungaUant to be discussed at all; of the for-
mer, U. S. Grant, who fought in it, said that it was
"the most unjust war ever waged by a stronger against
a weaker nation.** Who remembers that, during the
Spanish War, the whole Atlantic Coast trembled in fear
of the Spaniards* feeble fleet that all New England
had hysterics every time a strange coal-barge was
sighted on the sky-line, that the safe-deposit boxes of
Boston were emptied and their contents transferred to
Worcester, and that the Navy had to organize a patrol
to save the coast towns from depopulation? Perhaps
those Reds, atheists and pro-Germans remember it who
also remember that during World War I the entire
country went wild with fear of an enemy who, withr
out the aid of divine intervention, obviously could not
strike it a blow at all and that the great moral victory
was gained at last with the assistance of twenty-one
gl|fe$ and at odds of eight to one. 2
'The case of World War n was even more striking. The two enemies
thai die United States *aAi^ fra/3 f^^p frffcprd by yean of a hard
134.
The Anglo-Saxon
But the American Civil War remains? Does it, in-
deed? The almost unanimous opinion of the North, in
1861, was that it would be over after a few small bat-
tles; the first soldiers were actually enlisted for but
three months. When, later on, it turned unexpectedly
into a severe struggle, recruits had to be driven to the
front by force, and the only Northerners remaining in
favor of going on were Abraham Lincoln, a few ambi-
tious generals and the profiteers. I turn to Dr. Eliot
again. **In the closing year of the war," he says, "large
portions of the Democratic party in the North and of
the Republican forty, advocated surrender to the Con-
federacy, so downhearted were iheyr Downhearted at
odds of three to one! The South was plainly more gal-
lant, but even the gallantry of the South was largely
illusory. The Confederate leaders, when the war began,
adopted at once the traditional Anglo-Saxon device of
seeking allies. They tried and expected to get the aid of
England, and they actually came very near succeeding.
When hopes in that direction began to fade (i>, when
England concluded that tackling the North would be
dangerous), the common people of the Confederacy
threw up the sponge, and so the catastrophe, when it
came at last, was mainly internal. The South failed to
bring the quaking North to a standstill because, to bor-
row a phrase that Dr. Eliot uses in another connec-
tion, it "experienced a moral collapse of unprecedented
depth and duration." The folks at home failed to sup-
port the troops in the field, and the troops in the field
began to desert Even so early as Shiloh, indeed, many
Confederate regiments were already refusing to fight
This reluctance for desperate chances and hard odds,
so obvious in the military record of the English-speak-
ing nations, is also conspicuous in times of peace. What
struggle with desperate foes, and those foes continued to fight on.
Neither enemy could muster even a. tenth of the materials that the
American forces had the use of. And at the end both were outnumbered
in men by odds truly enormous.
135
H. L. MENCKEN
a man of another and superior stock almost always no*
tices, living among so-called Anglo-Saxons, is (a) their
incapacity for prevailing in fair rivalry, either in trade,
in the fine arts or in what is called learning in brie
their general incompetence, and (b) their invariable
effort to make up for this incapacity by putting some
inequitable burden upon their rivals, usually by force.
The Frenchman, I believe, is the worst of chauvinists,
but once he admits a foreigner to his country he at least
treats that foreigner fairly, and does not try to penalize
him absurdly for his mere foreignness. The Anglo-
Saxon American is always trying to do it; his history
is a history of recurrent outbreaks of blind rage against
peoples who have begun to worst him. Such move-
ments would be inconceivable in an efficient and gen-
uinely self-confident people^ wholly assured of their
superiority, and they would be equally inconceivable in
a truly gallant and courageous people, disdaining un-
fair advantages and overwhelming odds. Theoretically
launched against some imaginary inferiority in the nont-
Anglo-Saxon man, cither as patriot, as democrat or as
Christian, they are actually launched at his general su-
periority, his greater fitness to survive in the national
environment. The effort is always to penalize him for
winning in fair fight, to handicap him in such a maa-
ner that he will sink to the general level of the Anglo-
Saxon population, and, if possible, even below it. Such
devices, of course, never have the countenance of the
Anglo-Saxon minority that is authentically superior,
and hence self-confident and tolerant. But that minor-
ity is pathetically small, and it tends steadily to grow
smaller and feebler. The communal laws and the com-
munal mores are made by the folk, and they offer all
the proof that is necessary, not only of its general infe-
riority, but also of its alarmed awareness of that in-
feriority. The normal American of the "pure-blooded**
majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feet
136
The Anglo-Saxon
ing that there is a burglar under the bed, and he gets
up every morning with a sickening fear that his under-
wear has been stolen.
This Anglo-Saxon of the great herd is, in many im-
portant respects, the least civilized of white men and
the least capable of true civilization. His political ideas
are crude and shallow. He is almost wholly devoid of
esthetic feeling. The most elementary facts about the
visible universe alarm him, and incite him to put them
down. Educate him, make a professor of him, teach
him how to express his soul, and he still remains pair
pably third-rate. He fears ideas almost more cravenly
than he fears men. His blood, I believe, is running thin;
perhaps it was not much to boast of at the start; in
order that he may exercise any functions above those of
a trader, a pedagogue or a mob orator, it needs the
stimulus of other and less exhausted strains. The fact
that they increase is the best hope of civilization in
America. They shake the old race out of its spiritual
lethargy, and introduce it to disquiet and experiment.
They make for a free pky of ideas. In opposing the
process, whether in politics, in letters or in the ages-
long struggle toward the truth, the prophets of Anglo-
Saxon purity and tradition only make themselves ridic-
ulous,
*
HOLY WRIT
(fxcac the Smart Set, October 1923)
Whoever it was who translated the Bible into
excellent French prose is chiefly responsible for the col-
kpse of Christianity in France. Contrariwise, the men
137
H. It MENCKEN
who put the Bible into archaic, sonorous and often un-
intelligible English gave Christianity a new lease of life
wherever English is spoken. They did their work at
a time of great theological blather and turmoil, when
men of all sorts, even the least intelligent, were begin-
ning to take a vast and unhealthy interest in exegetics
and apologetics. They were far too shrewd to feed this
disconcerting thirst for ideas with a Bible in plain Eng-
lish; the language they used was deliberately artificial
even when it was new. They thus dispersed the mob by
appealing to its emotions, as a mother quiets a baby by
crooning to it The Bible that they produced was so
beautiful that the great majority of men, in the face of
it, could not fix their minds upon the ideas in it. To
this day it has enchanted the English-speaking peoples
so effectively that, in the main, they remain Christians,
at least sentimentally. Paine has assaulted them, Dar-
win and Huxley have assaulted them, and a multitude
of other merchants of facts have assaulted them, but
they still remember the twenty-third Psalm when the
doctor begins to shake his head, they are still moved
beyond compare (though not, alas, to acts!) by the
Sermon on the Mount, and they still turn once a year
from their sordid and degrading labors to immerse
themselves unashamed in the story of the manger. It is
not much, but it is something. I do not admire the
general run of American Bible-searchers Methodists,
United Brethren, Baptists, and such vermin. But try
to imagine what the average low-browed Methodist
would be if he were not a Methodist but an atheist!
The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself
admiring 1 , despite its frequent astounding imbecilities,
has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is
not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant
dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people* To
some extent this is true; to the same extent the church
is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous* Its
138
Hdy Writ
toying with ideas, in the main, have been confined to
its clergy, and they have commonly reduced the busi-
ness to a harmless play of technicalities the awful con-
cepts of Heaven and Hell brought down to the level of
a dispute of doctors in long gowns, eager only to dazzle
other doctors. Its greatest theologians remain unknown
to 99 9& of its adherents* Rome, indeed, has not only pre*
served the original poetry in Christianity; it has also
tn?(fc capital additions to that poetry for example, the
poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself.
A solemn high mass must be a thousand times as im-
pressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in
him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under
die big-top by a Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the
face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary
to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better con-
vinced by letting them alone.
Preaching is not an essential part of the TatJn cere-
monial. It was very little employed in the early church,
and I am convinced that good effects would Sow from
abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a
few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States
the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example
of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of
worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of
approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants
settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to
an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian
than the Pope. This folly the Romans now slide into.
Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire,
ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his
part in the solemn ceremonial of the mass, is a digni-
fied spectacle, even though he may sweat freely; the
same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour
later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a
bald head, the son. of a respectable saloon-keeper in
South Bend, Lid. Let the reverend fathers go back to
189
H. I*. MENCKEff
Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting
ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic
deacon will astound humanity and insult God by pro-
posing to translate the liturgy into American^ that all
the faithful may be convinced by it.
1J0
AFTERTHOUGHTS
MASTERS OF TONE
(moot the Smart Set, May
WagnerThe rape of die Sabines . . . a
in Olympus.
Beethoven The glory that was Greece ... the
grandeur that was Rome . . . a laugh.
Haydn A seidel on the table . . . a girl on your
knee . . . another and different girl in your heart.
Chopin Two embalmers at work upon a minor poet
. . . the scent of tuberoses . . . Autumn rain.
Richard Strauss Old Home Week in Gomorrah.
Johann Strauss Forty couples dancing . . one by
one they slip from the hall . . . sounds of kisses . . .
the lights go out.
Puccini Silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.
Debussy A pretty girl with one blue eye and one
brown one.
Bach Genesis i, i.
K. L. MENCKEN
THE NOBLE EXPERIMENT [1920-SS}
(EROM Heathen Days, 1943)
*
I once came so near going dry in Pennsyl-
vania, and in the very midst of a huge fleet of illicit
breweries, that the memory o it still makes me shiver.
This was at Bethlehem in the Lehigh Valley, in 1924. 1
had gone to the place with my publisher, Alfred Knop
to hear the celebrated Bach Choir, and we were as-
tounded after the first day's sessions to discover that
not a drop of malt liquor was to be had in the local
pubs. This seemed strange and unfriendly, for it is well
known to every musicologist that the divine music of
old Johann Sebastian cannot be digested without the
aid of its natural solvent* But so far as we could make
out there was absolutely none on tap in the Lehigh
Valley, though we searched high and low, and threw
ourselves upon the mercy of cops, taxi-drivers, hotel
clerks, the Elks, the rev. clergy, and half the tenors and
basses of the choir. All reported that Prohibition agents
had been sighted in the mountains a few days before,
and that as a result hundreds of kegs had been buried
and every bartender was on the alert. How we got
through the second day's sessions I don't know; the
music was magnificent, but our tonsils became so
parched that we could barely join in the final Amen.
Half an hour before our train was scheduled to leave
for New York we decided to go down to the Lehigh
station and telegraph to a booucian in the big city, de-
siring him to start westward at once and meet us at
Paterson, N J. On the way to the station we discussed
this madcap scheme dismally, and the taxi-driver over-
The Noble Experiment
heard us. He was a compassionate man, and his heart
bled for us.
"Gents," he said, "I hate to horn in on what ain't
none of my business, but i you feel that bad about it I
think I know where some stuff is to be had. The point
is, can you get it?"
We at once offered him money to introduce us, but
he waived us off.
"It wouldn't do you no good,** he said. "These Penn-
sylvania Dutch never trust a hackman."
"But where is the place? 9 * we breathed.
*Tm taking you to it," he replied, and in a moment
we were there.
It was a huge, blank building that looked like a for-
saken warehouse^ but over a door that appeared to be
tightly locked there was the telltale sign, "Sea Food"
the universal euphemism for beerhouse in Maryland
and Pennsylvania throughout the thirteen awful years.
We rapped on the door and presently it opened about
half an inch, revealing an eye and part of a mouth. The
ensuing dialogue was sotto voce but staccato and appas-
sionata. The eye saw that we were famished, but the
mouth hesitated.
"How do I know,** it asked, "that you ain't two of
them agents?"
The insinuation ma^ us boil, but we had to be
polite.
"Agentsl" hissed Knopf. "What an idea! Can*t you
see us? Take a good look at us."
The eye looked, but the mouth made no reply.
"Can't you tell musicians when you see them?** I
broke in. "Where did you ever see a Prohibition agent
who looked so innocent, so moony, so dumb? We are
actually fanatics. We came here to hear Bach. Is this
the way Bethlehem treats its guests? We &rn? a thou-
sand miles, and now"
"Three thousand miles,** corrected Knopt
"Five thousand," I added, making it round numbers.
us
H. 1*. MENCKEN
Suddenly I bethought me that the piano score of the
B minor mass had been under my arm all the while,
What better introduction? What more persuasive proof
of our bona fide$? I held up the score and pointed to
the title on the cover. The eye read:
J. S. Bach
Mass in B Minor
The eye flicked for an instant or two, and then the
mouth spoke. "Come in, gents," it said. As the door
opened our natural momentum carried us into the bar
in one leap, and there we were presently immersed in
two immense Humpen. The quality we did not pause
to observe; what we mainly recalled later was the as-
tounding modesty of the bill, which was sixty-five cents
for five Hurnpen Knopf had two and I had three
and two sandwiches. We made our train just as it was
pulling out
It was a narrow escape from death in the desert, and
we do not forget all these years afterward that we owed
it to Johann Sebastian Bach, that highly talented and
entirely respectable man, and especially to his mass in
B minor. In the great city of Cleveland, Ohio, a few
months later, I had much worse luck. I went there, in
my capacity of newspaper reporter, to help cover the
Republican national convention which nominated Cal-
vin Coolidge, and I assumed like everyone else that the
Prohibition agents would lay off while the job was put
through, if only as a mark of respect to their com*
mander-in-chief. This assumption turned out to be
erroneous. The agents actually clamped down on Cleve-
land with the utmost ferocity, and produced a drought
that was virtually complete. Even the local cops and
newspaper reporters were dry, and many of the latter
spent a large part of their time touring the quarters
of the out-of-town correspondents, begging for succor.
But the supplies brought in by the correspondents were
gone in a few days, and by the time the convention
The Noble Experiment
actually opened a glass of malt liquor was as hard to
come by in Cleveland as an honest politician.
The news of this horror quickly got about, and one
morning I received a dispatch in cipher from a Chris-
tian friend in Detroit, saying that he was loading a
motor-launch with ten cases of bottled beer and alc^
and sending it down the Detroit river and across Lake
Erie in charge of two of his goons. They were in-
structed, he said, to notify me the instant they arrived
off the Cleveland breakwater. Their notice reached me
the next afternoon, but by that time the boys were
nominating Cal, so I could not keep the rendezvous
myself, but had to send an agent. This agent was Paul
de Kruif, then a young man of thirty-four, studying the
literary art under my counsel. Paul was a fellow of high
principles and worthy of every confidence; moreover,
he was dying of thirst himself. I started him out in a
rowboat, and he was gone three hours. When he got
back he was pale and trembling, and I could see at a
glance that some calamity had befallen. When he got
his breath he gasped out die story.
The two goons, it appeared, had broken into their
cargo on the way down from Detroit, for the weather
was extremely hot By the time they anchored off the
Cleveland breakwater they had got down three cases,
and while they were waiting for de Kruif they knocked
off two more. This left but five and they figured that
it was just enough to get them back to Detroit, for the
way was uphill all the way, as a glance at a map will
show. De Kruif, who was a huge and sturdy Dutchman
with a neck like John L. Sullivan, protested violently
and even undertook to throw them overboard and pi*
rate the launch and cargo, but they pulled firearms on
him, and the best he could do was to get six bottles.
These he drank on his return in the rowboat, for the
heat, as I have said, was extreme. As a result, I got
nothing whatsoever; indeed, not a drop of malt touched
my throat until the next night at 11.57, when the ex*
145
H. L. MENCKEN
press for Washington and points East crossed the
tier of the Maryland Free State.
This was my worst adventure during Prohibition,
and in many ways it remains the worst adventure of my
whole life, though I have been shot at four times and
my travels have taken me to Albania, Trans-Jordan and
Arkansas.
THE ARTIST
(ntoic the Baltimore Evening Sua, April 7, 1924)
It is almost as safe to assume that an artist
of any dignity is against his country, *., against die
environment in which God hath placed him, as k is to
assume that his country is against the artist. The special
quality which makes an artist of bin* might almost be
defined, indeed, as an extraordinary capacity for irri-
tation, a pathological sensitiveness to environmental
pricks and stings. He differs from the rest of us mainly
because he reacts sharply and in an uncommon manner
to phenomena which leave the rest of us unmoved, or,
at most> merely annoy us vaguely. He is, in brief, a
more delicate fellow than we are, and hence less fitted
to prosper and enjoy himself under the conditions of
life which he and we must face alike. Therefore, he
takes to artistic endeavor, which is at once a criticism
of life and an attempt to escape from life.
So much for the theory of it. The more the facts are
studied, the more they bear it out. In those fields of art^
at all events, which concern themselves with ideas as
well as with sensations it is almost impossible to find
any trace of an artist who was not actively hostile to
his environment, and thus an indifferent patriot* From
us
The Artist
Dante to Tolstoy and from Shakespeare to Mark
Twain the story is ever the same. Names suggest
themselves instantly: Goethe, Heine^ Shelley, Byron,
Thackeray, Balzac^ Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Dostoev-
sky, Carlyle, Moli&re, Pope all bitter critics of their
time and nation, most of them piously hated by the
contemporary 100 percenters, some of them actually
fugitives from rage and reprisal*
Dante put all of the patriotic Italians of his day into
Hell, and showed them boiling, roasting and writhing
on hooks. Cervantes drew such a devastating picture of
the Spain that he lived in that it ruined the Spaniards.
Shakespeare made his heroes foreigners and his downs
Englishmen. Goethe was in favor of Napoleon. Rabe-
lais, a citizen of Christendom rather than of France^
raised a cackle against it that Christendom is still try-
ing in vain to suppress. Swift, having finished the Irish
and then the English, proceeded to finish the whole hu-
man race. The exceptions are few and far between, and
not many of them will bear examination. So far as I
know, the only eminent writer in English history who
was also a 100% Englishman, absolutely beyond suspi-
cion, was Samuel Johnson. The Ku Klux of his day
gave him a dean bill of health; he was the Roosevelt
of the Eighteenth Century. But was Johnson actually
an artist? If he was, then a coraet-pkyer is a musician*
He employed the materials of one of the arts, to wit,
words, but his use of them was hortatory, not artistic,
Johnson was the first Rotarian: living today, he would
be a United States Senator, or a university president
He left such wounds updb English prose that k was a
century recovering from them.
147
E. L. MENCKEN
CHIROPRACTIC
(TBOM the Baltimore Evening Sun, December 2924)
This preposterous quackery flourishes lushly
in die back readies of the Republic* and begins to con-
quer the less civilized folk of the big cities. As the old-
time family doctor dies out in the country towns, with
no competent successor willing to take over his dismal
business, he is followed by some hearty blacksmith or
ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six
months, often by correspondence. In Los Angeles the
Damned there are probably more chiropractors than
actual physicians, and they are far more generally es-
teemed. Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to
the heart of the town, along Wilshirc boulevard, one
passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are even many
chiropractic "hospitals." The mormons who pour in from
the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize
these "hospitals" copiously, and give to the chiropractic
pathology the same high respect that they accord to
the theology of the town sorcerers. That pathology is
grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are
caused by the pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the
nerves which come out of the spinal cord in other
words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This,
plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic thera-
peutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid
of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit
to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover. Thi%
obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.
Both doctrines were launched upon the world by an
old quack named Andrew T. Still, the father of osteop-
athy. For years the osteopaths merchanted them, and
148
Chiropractic
made money at the trade. But as they grew opulent
they grew ambitious, i^ they began to study anatomy
and physiology. The result was a gradual abandonment
of Papa Still's ideas. The high-toned osteopath of today
is a sort of eclectic. He tries anything that promises to
work, from tonsillectomy to the X-rays. With four years*
training behind him, he probably knows more anatomy
than the average graduate of the Johns Hopkins Med-
ical School, or at all events, more osteology. Thus en-
lightened, he seldom has much to say about pinched
nerves in the back. But as he abandoned the Still revela^
tion it was seized by the chiropractors, led by another
quack, one Palmer. This Palmer grabbed the pinched
nerve nonsense and began teaching it to ambitious
farm-hands and out-at-elbow Baptist preachers in a few
easy lessons. Today the backwoods swarm with chiro-
practors, and in most States they have been able to
exert enough pressure on the rural politicians to get
themselves licensed. 1 Any lout with strong hands and
arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor.
No education beyond the elements is necessary. The
takings are often high, and so the profession has at-
tracted thousands of recruitsretired baseball pkyera^
work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen,
bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school SIP
perintendents. Now and then a quack of some other
school say homeopathy plunges into it. Hundreds of
promising students come from the intellectual ranks of
hospital orderlies.
Such quackeries suck in the botched, and help them
on to bliss eternal. When these botched fall into the
hands of competent medical men they are very likely
to be patched up and turned loose upon the world, to
beget their kind. But massaged along the backbone to
cure their lues, they quickly pass into the last stages,
*It is not altogether a matter of pressure. Large numbers of rustic
legislators are themselves believers in chiropractic. So are many members
oc Congress.
14$
H. L. MENCKEN
and so their pathogenic heritage perishes with them.
What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously in-
tends the botched to die, and that every interference
with that benign process is full of dangers. That the
labors of quacks tend to propagate epidemics and so
menace the lives of all of us, as is alleged by their med-
ical opponents this I doubt. The feet is that most
infectious diseases of any seriousness throw out such
alarming symptoms and so quickly that no sane chiro-
practor is likely to monkey with them. Seeing his pa-
tient breaking out in pustules, or choking, or falling
into a stupor, he takes to the woods at once, and leaves
the business to the nearest medical man. His trade is
mainly with ambulant patients; they must come to his
studio for treatment. Most of them have lingering dis-
eases; they tour all the neighborhood doctors before
they reach him. His treatment, being nonsensical, is in
accord with the divine plan. It is seldom, perhaps, that
he actually kills a patient, but at all events he keeps
many a worthy soul from getting well.
The osteopaths, I fear, are finding this new competi-
tion serious and unpleasant. As I have said, it was their
Hippocrates, the late Dr. Still, who invented all of
the thrusts, lunges, yanks, hooks and bounces that the
lowly chiropractors now employ with such vast effect,
and for years the osteopaths had a monopoly of them.
But when they began to grow scientific and ambitious
their course of training was lengthened until it took in
all sorts of tricks and dodges borrowed from the regu-
lar doctors, or resurrection men, including the pluck*
ing of tonsils, adenoids and appendices, the use of the
stomach-pump, and even some of the legerdemain of
psychiatry. They now harry their students furiously,
and turn them out ready for anything from growing
hair on a bald head to frying a patient with the x-rays.
All this new striving, of course, quickly brought its
inevitable penalties. The osteopathic graduate, having
sweated so long, was no longer willing to take a case of
160
Chiropractic
delirium tremens for $2, and in consequence he lost
patients. Worse, very few aspirants could make the
long grade* The essence of osteopathy itself could be
grasped by any lively farm-hand or night watchman in
a few weeks, but the borrowed magic baffled him. Con-
fronted by the phenomenon of gastrulation, or by the
curious behavior of heart muscle, or by any of the cur-
rent theories of immunity, he commonly took refuge^
like his brother of the orthodox faculty, in a gulp of
laboratory alcohol, or fled the premises altogether. Thus
he was lost to osteopathic science, and the chiroprac-
tors took him in; nay, they welcomed him. He was
their meat Borrowing that primitive part of osteopa-
thy which was comprehensible to the meanest under-
standing, they threw the rest overboard, at the same
time denouncing it as a sorcery invented by the Medi-
cal Trust. Thus they gathered in the garage mechanic^
ash-men and decayed welter-weights, and the land be-
gan to fill with their graduates. Now there is a chiro-
practor at every cross-roads.
I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so
prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the
so-called science of public hygiene, which now seeks to
make imbeciles immortal. If a man, being ill of a pus
appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshore-
man to have it disposed o and submits willingly to a
treatment involving balancing him on McBurney's spot
and playing on his vertebra as on a concertina, then I
am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted
in Heaven. And if that same man, having achieved
lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith to cure its
diphtheria by pulling its neck, then I do not resist the
divine will that there shall be one less radio fan later
on. In such matters, I am convinced, the kws of nature
are far better guides than the fiats and machinations of
medical busybodies. If the latter gentlemen had their
way, death, save at the hands of hangmen, policemen
and other such legalized assassin^ would be abolished
161
H. L, MENCKEK
altogether, and the present differential in favor of the
enlightened would disappear. I can't convince myself
that that would work any good to the world. On the
contrary, it seems to me that the current coddling of
the half-witted should be stopped before it goes too far
if, indeed, it has not gone too far already. To that end
nothing operates more cheaply and effectively than the
prosperity of quacks. Every time a bottle of cancer oil
goes through the mails Homo americanus is improved
to that extent. And every time a chiropractor spits on
his hands and proceeds to treat a gastric ulcer by
stretching the backbone the same high end is achieved
But chiropractic, of course, is not perfect It has su*
perb potentialities, but only too often they are not coa-
verted into concrete cadavers. The hygienists rescue
many of its foreordained customers, and, turning them
over to agents of the Medical Trust, maintained at the
public expense, get them cured. Moreover, chiropractic
itself is not certainly fetal: even an lowan with diabetes
may survive its embraces. Yet worse, I have a suspicion
that it sometimes actually cures. For all I know (or any
orthodox pathologist seems to know) it may be true
that certain malaises are caused by the pressure of va-
grom vertebrae upon the spinal nerves* And it may be
true that a hearty ex-boilermaker, by a vigorous yank-
ing and kneading, may be able to relieve that pressure.
What is needed is a scientific inquiry into the matter,
under rigid test conditions, by a committee of men
learned in the architecture and plumbing of the body,
and of a high and incorruptible sagacity. Let a thou-
sand patients be selected, let a gang of selected chiro-
practors examine their backbones and determine what
is the matter with them, and then let these diagnoses be
checked up by the exact methods of scientific medicine;
Then let the same chiropractors essay to cure the par-
tients whose maladies have been determined. My guess
is that the chiropractors* errors in diagnosis will pip to
158
Chiropractic
at least 95% and that their failures in treatment will
push 99$>- But I am willing to be convinced
Where is such a committee to be found? I undertake
to nominate it at ten minutes* notice. The land swams
with men competent in anatomy and pathology, and
yet not engaged as doctors. There are thousands of hos-
pitals, with endless clinical material I offer to supply
the committee with cigars and music during the test I
offer, further, to supply both the committee and the
chiropractors with sound wet goods. I offer, finally, to
give a bawdy banquet to the whole Medical Trust at
the conclusion of the proceedings. 2
THE HILLS OF ZION
(FRO&C Prejudices: Fifth Series. In its first form tins was t dispatch to
tibe Baltimore Evening Sun, in July 1925. 1 wrote it on a roaring hot
Sunday afternoon in a Chattanooga hotel room, naked above the waist
and with only * pair of BVDs below.)
It was hot weather when they tried die infi-
del Scopes at Dayton, Tenru, but I went down there
very willingly, for I was eager to see something oi
evangelical Christianity as a going concern. In the big
cities of the Republic, despite the endless efforts of con-
secrated men, it is laid up with a wasting disease* The
very Sunday-school superintendents, taking jazz from
the stealthy radio, shake their fireproof legs; their
This offer was made in 1927. There were no takers. After World
War n the jobholders at Washington, many of them patrons of chiro-
practic themselves, decided that any veteran who longed to study die
science was eligible to receive assistance under the GJ. Bill of Right*.
Thus a multitude of fly-by-night chiropractic schools sprang op, and
their students were ranked, officially, precisely on all loon wkh those
who studied at Harvard.
153
H. L. MENCKEN
pupils, moving into adolescence, no longer respond to
the proliferating hormones by enlisting for missionary
service in Africa, but resort to necking instead. Even in
Dayton, I found, though the mob was up to do execu-
tion upon Scopes, there was a strong smell of antinomi-
anism. The nine churches of the village were all half
empty on Sunday, and weeds choked their yards. Only
two or three of the resident pastors managed to sustain
themselves by their ghostly science; the rest had to take
orders for mail-order pantaloons or work in the adja-
cent strawberry fields; one, I heard, was a barber. On
the courthouse green a score of sweating theologians
debated the darker passages of Holy Writ day and
night, but I soon found that they were all volunteers,
and that the local ntbfn1 3 while interested in their
exegesis as an intellectual exercise, did not permit it
to impede the indigenous debaucheries. Exactly twelve
minutes after I readied the village I was taken in tow
by a Christian man and introduced to the favorite tip-
ple of the Cumberland Range: half corn liquor and
half Coca-Cola. It seemed a dreadful dose to me, but I
found that the Dayton illuminati got it down with
gusto, rubbing their tummies and rolling their eyes. I
include among them the chief local proponents of the
Mosaic cosmogony. They were all hot for Genesis, but
their faces were far too florid to belong to teetotaler^
and when a pretty girl came tripping down the main
street^ which was very often, they readied for the places
where their neckties should have been with all the am-
orous enterprise of movie actors. It seemed somehow
strange.
An amiable newspaper woman of Chattanooga, fa-
miliar with those uplands, presently enlightened me.
Dayton, she explained, was simply a great capital like
any other. That is to say, it was to Rhea county what
Atlanta was to Georgia or Paris to France. That is to
say, it was predominantly epicurean and sinfuL A coun-
try girl from some remote valley of the county, coming
164
The HiUs of Zion
into town for her semi-annual bottle of Lydia Pink-
ham's Vegetable Compound, shivered on approaching
Robinson's drug-store quite as a country girl from up-
State New York might shiver on approaching the
Metropolitan Opera House. In every village lout she
saw a potential white-slaver. The hard sidewalks hurt
her feet. Temptations of the flesh bristled to all sides
of her, luring her to HelL This newspaper woman told
me of a session with just such a visitor, holden a few
days before. The latter waited outside one of the town
hot-dog and Coca-Cola shops while her husband nego-
tiated with a hardware merchant across the street The
newspaper woman, idling along and observing that the
stranger was badly used by the heat, invited her to step
into the shop for a glass of Coca-Cola. The invitation
brought forth only a gurgle of terror. Coca-Cola, it
quickly appeared, was prohibited by the country lad/s
pastor, as a levantine and Hell-sent narcotic. He also
prohibited coffee and tea and pies! He had his doubts
about white bread and boughten meat. The newspaper
woman, interested, inquired about ice-cream. It was,
she found, not specifically prohibited, but going into a
Coca-Cola shop to get it would be clearly sinfuL So she
offered to get a saucer of it, and bring it out to the side-
walk. The visitor vacillatedand came near being lost.
But God saved her in the nick of time. When the news-
paper woman emerged from the place she was in fiitt
flight up the street Later on her husband, mounted on
a mule, overtook her four miles out the mountain pike.
This newspaper woman, whose kindness covered city
infidels as well as Alpine Christians, offered to take me
back in the hills to a place where the old-time religion
was genuinely on tap. The Scopes jury, she explained!,
was composed mainly of its customers, with a few Day-
ton sophisticates added to leaven the mass. It would
thus be instructive to climb the heights and observe the
former at their ceremonies. The trip, fortunately, might
be made by automobile* There was a road running out
155
S. L.
of Dayton to Morgantown, in the mountains to the
westward, and thence beyond. But foreigners, it ap-
peared, would have to approach the sacred grove cau-
tiously, for the upland worshipers were very shy, and at
the first sight of a strange face they would adjourn their
orgy and slink into the forest. They were not to be
feared, for God had long since forbidden them to prao-
rise assassination, or even assault, but if they were
alarmed a rough trip would go for naught. So, after
dreadful bumpings up a long and narrow road, we
parked our car in a little woodpath a mile or two bo-
yond the tiny village of Morgantown, and made the rest
of the approach on foot, deployed like skirmishers. Far
off in a dark, romantic glade a flickering light was vis-
ible, and out of the silence came the rumble of exhorta-
tion. We could distinguish the figure of the preacher
only as a moving mote in the light: it was like looking
down the tube of a dark-field microscope. Slowly and
cautiously we crossed what seemed to be a pasture, and
then we stealthily edged further and further* The light
now grew larger and we could begin to make out what
was going on* We went ahead on all fours, like snakes
in the grass.
From the great limb of a mighty oak hung a couple
of crude torches of the sort that car inspectors thrust
under Pullman cars when a train pulls in at night. In
the guttering glare was the preacher, and for a while we
could see no one else. He was an immensely tall and
thin mountaineer in blue jeans, his collarless shirt open
at the neck and his hair a tousled mop. As he preached
he paced up and down under the smoking flambeaux,
and at ra<*h turn he thrust his arms into the air and
yelled "Glory to God!" We crept nearer in the shadow
of the cornfield, and began to hear more of his dis-
course. He was preaching on the Day of Judgment.
The high kings of the earth, he roared, would all fall
down and die; only fhe sanctified would stand up to
receive the Lord God of Hosts* One of these kings
156
The Hflt* of Ztoi
he mentioned by name^ the king of what he called
Greece-y. 1 The king of Greece-y, he said, was doomed
to Hell. We crawled forward a few more yards and
began to see the audience* It was seated on benches
ranged round the preacher in a circle. Behind him sat
a row of elders, men and women. In front were the
younger folk. We crept on cautiously, and individuals
rose out of the ghostly gloom. A young mother sat
suckling her baby, rocking as the preacher paced up
and down. Two scared little girls hugged each other,
their pigtails down their backs. An immensely huge
mountain woman, in a gingham dress, cut in one piece*
rolled on her heels at every "Glory to Godl" To one
side, and but half visible, was what appeared to be a
bed. We found afterward that half a dozen babies were
asleep upon iL
The preacher stopped at last, and there arose out of
the darkness a woman with her hair pulled back into a
little tight knot. She began so quietly that we couldn't
hear what she said, but soon her voice rose resonantly
and we could follow her. She was denouncing the read-
ing of books. Some wandering book agent, it appeared,
had come to her cabin and tried to seU her a specimen
of his wares. She refused to touch it. Why, indeed, read
a book? If what was in it was true, then everything in
it was already in the Bible. If it was fals^ then reading
it would imperil the soul. This syllogism from the
Caliph Omar complete^ she sat down. TTierc followed a
hymn, led by a somewhat fat brother wearing silver-
rimmed country spectacles. It droned on for half a
dozen stanzas, and then the first speaker resumed the
floor. He argued that the gift of tongues was real and
that education was a snare. Once his children could
read the Bible, he said, they had enough. Beyond lay only
infidelity and damnation. Sin stalked the cities. Dayton,
itself was a Sodom. Even Morgantown had begun to
forget God. He sat down, and a female aurochs in
*Grccia? Cf. Daniel via, 21*
157
H. L. MENCKEN
gingham got up. She began quietly, but was soon leap-
ing and roaring, and it was hard to follow her. Under
cover of the turmoil we sneaked a bit closer.
A couple of other discourses followed, and there were
two or three hymns. Suddenly a change of mood began
to make itself felt. The last hymn ran longer than the
others, and dropped gradually into a monotonous, un-
intelligible chant* The leader beat time with his book
The faithful broke out with exultations. When the
singing ended there was a brief palaver that we could
not hear, and two of the men moved a bench into the
circle of light directly under the flambeaux. Then a
half-grown girl emerged from the darkness and threw
herself upon it We noticed with astonishment that she
had bobbed hair. "This sister,** said the leader, "has
asked for prayers." We moved a bit closer. We could
now see faces plainly, and hear every word. At a signal
all the faithful crowded up to the bench and began to
pray not in unison, but each for himself* At another
they all fell on their knees, their arms over the peni-
tent- The leader kneeled facing us, his head alternately
thrown back dramatically or buried in his hands.
Words spouted from his lips like bullets from a ma-
chine-gun appeals to God to pull the penitent back
out of Hell, defiances of the demons of die air, a vast
impassioned jargon of apocalyptic texts. Suddenly he
rose to his feet, threw back his head and began to speak
in the tongues 3 blub-blub-blub, gurgle-gurgle-gurgle.
His voice rose to a higher register. The climax was a
shrill, inarticulate squawk, like that of a man throttled.
He fell headlong across the pyramid of supplicants*
From the squirming and jabbering mass a young
woman gradually detached herselfa woman not un-
comely, with a pathetic homemade cap on her head.
Her head jerked back, the veins of her neck swelled,
and her fists went to her throat as if she were fighting
for breath* She bent backward until she was like h?1f a
Markiri,!?.
158
The HiOs of Zion
hoop. Then she suddenly snapped forward. We caught
a flash of the whites of her eyes. Presently her whole
body began to be convulsed great throes that began at
the shoulders and ended at the hips* She would leap to
her feet, thrust her arms in air, and then hurl herself
upon the heap. Her praying flattened out into a mere
delirious caterwauling. I describe the thing discreetly,
and as a strict behaviorist The lady's subjective sensa-
tions I leave to infidel pathologists, privy to the works
of Ellis, Freud and Moll. Whatever they were, they were
obviously not painful, for they were accompanied by
vast heavings and gurglings of a joyful and even ec-
static nature. And they seemed to be contagious, too,
for soon a second penitent, also female, joined the first,
and then came a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. The
last one had an extraordinary violent attack. She began
with mild enough jerks of the head, but in a moment
she was bounding all over the place, like a chicken
with its head cut off. Every time her head came up a
stream of hosannas would issue out of it Once she
collided with a dark, undersized brother, hitherto silent
and stolid. Contact with her set him off as if he had
been kicked by a mule. He leaped into the air, threw
back his head, and began to gargle as if with a mouth-
ful of BB shot. Then he loosed one tremendous, stento-
rian sentence in the tongues, and collapsed.
By this time the performers were quite oblivious to
the profane universe and so it was safe to go still closer.
We left our hiding and came up to the little circle of
light. We slipped into the vacant seats on one of the
rickety benches. The heap of mourners was directly be-
fore us. They bounced into us as they cavorted The
smell that they radiated, sweating there in that obscene
heap, half suffocated us. Not all of them, of course, did
the thing in the grand manner. Some merely moaned
and rolled their eyes. The female ox in gingham flung
her great bulk on the ground and jabbered an unintelli-
gible prayer. One of the mm, in the intervals between
159
H. L. MENCKEN
fits, put on his spectacles and read bis Bible. Beside me
on the bench sat the young mother and her baby. She
suckled it through the whole orgy, obviously fascinated
by what was going on, but never venturing to take any
hand in it On the bed just outside the light the half
a dozen other babies slept peacefully. In the shadows,
suddenly appearing and as suddenly going away, were
vague figures, whether of believers or of scoffers I do
not know. They seemed to come and go in couples.
Now and then a couple at the ringside would step out
and vanish into the black night After a while some
came back, the males looking somewhat sheepish.
There was whispering outside the circle of vision. A
couple of Model T Fords lurched up the road, cutting
holes in the darkness with their lights. Once someone
out of right loosed a bray of laughter.
All this went on for an hour or so. The original pen-
itent, by this time, was buried three deep beneath the
heap. One caught a glimpse, now and then, of her yel-
low bobbed hair, but then she would vanish again.
How she breathed down there I don't know; it was
hard enough six feet away, with a strong five-cent cigar
to help. When the praying brothers would rise up for a
bout with the tongues their faces were streaming with
perspiration. The fat harridan in gingham sweated like
a longshoreman. Her hair got loose and fell down over
her face. She fanned herself with her skirt. A powerful
old gal she was, plainly equal in her day to a bout with
obstetrics and a week's washing on the same morning,
but this was worse than a week's washing. Finally, she
fell into a heap, breathing in great, convulsive gasps.
Finally, we got tired of the show and returned to
Dayton. It was nearly eleven o'clock an immensely
late hour for those latitudes but the whole town was
still gathered in the courthouse yard, listening to the
disputes of theologians. The Scopes trial had brought
than in from all directions. There was a friar wearing
A sandwich sign announcing th^t he was the Bible
160
The H$U of Zion
champion o the world. There was a Seventh Day
Adventist arguing that Clarence Darrow was the beast
with seven heads and ten horns described in Revela-
tion xm, and that the end of the world was at hand.
There was an evangelist made up like Andy Gump,
with the news that atheists in Cincinnati were prepar-
ing to descend upon Dayton, hang the eminent Judge
Raulston, and burn the town. There was an ancient
who maintained that no Catholic could be a Christian*
There was the eloquent Dr. T. T. Martin, of Blue
Mountain, Miss., come to town with a truck-load of
torches and hymn-books to put Darwin in his place.
There was a singing brother bellowing apocalyptic
hymns. There was William Jennings Bryan, followed
everywhere by a gaping crowd. Dayton was having a
roaring time. It was better than the circus. But the
note of devotion was simply not there; the Daytonians,
after listening a while, would dip away to Robinson's
drug-store to regale themselves with Coca-Cola, or to
the lobby of the Aqua Hotel, where the learned Raul-
ston ^sat in state, judicially picking his teeth* The real
religion was not present. It began at the bridge over
the town creek, where the road makes off for the hills.
IN MEMORIAM: W. J. B.
(now Prejudices: fifth Strict* In its fint form tins was primed in the
Baltimore Evening Sun, July 27, 1925, the day after Bryan'a death at
Dayton, Tenn. I reworked it for the America* Mercury, Oct, 1925.
My adrentures as a newspaper correspondent at die Scopes trial are
told in my Heathen Days.)
Has it been duly marked by historians that
William Jennings Bryan's last secular act on this globe
of sin was to catch flies? A curious detail, and not
161
H. L, MENCKEN
without its sardonic overtones. He was the most sedu-
lous fly-catcher in American history, and in many ways
the most successful. His quarry, of course, was not
Musca domestica but Homo neandertdensis. For forty
years he tracked it with coo and bellow, up and down
the rustic backways of the Republic. Wherever the flam-
beaux of Chautauqua smoked and guttered, and the
bilge of idealism ran in the veins, and Baptist pastors
dammed the brooks with the sanctified, and men gath-
ered who were weary and heavy laden, and their wives
who were full of Penina and as fecund as the shad
(AJoset sapulissima), there the indefatigable Jennings
set up his traps and spread his bait. He knew every
country town in the South and West, and he could
crowd the most remote of them to suffocation by sim-
ply winding his horn. The city proletariat, transiently
flustered by him in 1896, quickly penetrated his bun-
combe and would have no more of him; the cockney
gallery jeered him at every Democratic national con-
vention for twenty-five years. But out where the grass
grows high, and the horned cattle dream away the lazy
afternoons, and men still fear the powers and principal-
ities of the air out there between the corn-rows he
held his old puissance to the end. There was no need
of beaters to drive in his game. The news that he was
coming was enough. For miles the flivver dust would
choke the roads. And when he rose at the end of the
day to discharge his Message there would be such
breathless attention, such a rapt and enchanted ecstasy,
such a sweet rustle of amrns as the world had not
known since Johann fell to Herod's ax.
There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact
that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee
village, beating off the flies and gnats, and that death
found him there. The man felt at home in such simple
and Christian scenes. He liked people who sweated
freely, and were not debauched by the refinements o
the toilet- Making his progress up and down the Main
16S
In Memoriam: W. f. B.
street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates
from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range, his
coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest shining
damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust so accou-
tred and on display, he was obviously happy* He liked
getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks
crowing on the dunghilL He liked the heavy, greasy
victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country
lawyers, country pastors, all country people. He liked
country sounds and country smells.
I believe that this liking was sincere perhaps the
only sincere thing in the man. His nose showed no un-
easiness when a hillman in faded overalls and hickory
shirt accosted him on the street, and besought him for
light upon some mystery of Holy Writ. The simian
gabble of the cross-roads was not gabble to him, but
wisdom of an occult and superior sort In the presence
of city folks he was palpably uneasy. Their clothes, I
suspect, annoyed Htm., and he was suspicious of their
too delicate manners. He knew all the while that they
were laughing at him if not at his baroque theol-
ogy, then at least at his alpaca pantaloons. But the
yokels never laughed at him. To them he was not the
huntsman but the prophet, and toward the end, as he
gradually forsook mundane politics for more ghostly
concerns, they began to elevate him in their hierarchy.
When he died he was the peer of Abraham. His old
enemy, Wilson, aspiring to the same white and shining
robe, came down with a thump. But Bryan made the
grade. His place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If
the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is cur-
ing gall-stones down there today.
But what label will he bear in more urbane regions?
One, I fear, of a far less flattering kind. Bryan lived too
long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be
taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of
the kind who write schoolbooks* There was a scatter-
ing of sweet words in his funeral notices, but it was
no more than a response to conventional sentimental-
168
H. L. MENCKEN
ity. The best verdict the most romantic editorial writer
could dredge up, save in the humorless South, was to
the general effect that his imbecilities were excused by
his earnestness that under his clowning, as under that
of the juggler of Notre Dame, there was the zeal of a
steadfast soul. But this was apology, not praise; pre-
cisely the same thing might be said of Mary Baker G.
Eddy. The truth is that even Bryan's sincerity will
probably yield to what is called, in other fields, defini-
tive criticism. Was he sincere when he opposed im-
perialism in the Philippines, or when he fed it with
deserving Democrats in Santo Domingo? Was he sin-
cere when he tried to shove the Prohibitionists under
the table, or when he seized their banner and began to
lead them with loud whoops? Was he sincere when he
bellowed against war, or when he dreamed of himself
as a tin-soldier in uniform, with a grave reserved at
Arlington among the generals? Was he -sincere when
he fawned over Champ Clark, or when he betrayed
dark? Was he sincere when he pleaded for tolerance in
New York, or when he bawled for the faggot and the
stake in Tennessee?
This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the
fellow was sincere, then so was P. T. Barnum. The
word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was,
in. fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without
sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact
with the first men of his time; he preferred the com-
pany of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe,
watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he
had been received in civilized societies, that he had been
a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like
those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full
of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all hu-
man dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He
was a peasant come home to the barnyard. Imagine a
gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he
was not. What animated him from end to end of his
164
In Memoriam: W. J. B.
grotesque career was simply ambition the ambition of
a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his
superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their
eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had
the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was
devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters,
that he himself might shine.
His last battle will be grossly misunderstood if it is
thought of as a mere exercise in fanaticism that is, if
Bryan the Fundamentalist Pope is mistaken for one of
the bucolic Fundamentalists. There was much more in
it than that, as everyone knows who saw him on the
field. What moved him, at bottom, was simply hatred
of the city men who had laughed at him so long, and
brought him at last to so tatterdemalion an estate. He
lusted for revenge upon them. He yearned to lead the
anthropoid rabble against them, to punish them for
their execution upon him by attacking the very vitals of
their civilization. He went far beyond the bounds of
any merely religious frenzy, however inordinate. When
he began denouncing the notion that man is a mammal
even some of the hinds at Dayton were agape. And
when, brought upon Clarence Darrow's cruel hook, he
writhed and tossed in a very fury of malignancy, bawl-
ing against the veriest elements of sense and decency
like a man frantic when he came to that tragic climax
of his striving there were snickers among the hinds as
well as hosannas.
Upon that hook, in truth, Bryan committed suicide^
as a legend as well as in the body. He staggered from
the rustic court ready to dic^ and he staggered from it
ready to be forgotten, save as a character in a third-rate
farce, witless and in poor taste. It was plain to everyone
who knew him, when he came to Dayton, that his great
days were behind himthat, for all the fury of his
hatred, he was now definitely an old man, and headed
at last for silence. There was a vague, unpleasant maa-
giness about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty,
165
H. & MENCKEN
though a close glance showed him as carefully shaven
as an actor, and clad in immaculate linen. All the hair
was gone from the dome of his head, and it had begun
to fall out, too, behind his ears, in the obscene manner
of Samuel Gompers. The resonance had departed from
his voice; what was once a bugle blast had become
reedy and quavering. Who knows that, like Demosthe-
nes, he had a lisp? In the old days, under the magic of
his eloquence, no one noticed it. But when he spoke at
Dayton it was always audible.
When I first encountered him, on the sidewalk in
front of the office of the rustic lawyers who were his
associates in the Scopes case, the trial was yet to begin,
and so he was still expansive and amiable. I had printed
in the Nation, a week or so before, an article arguing
that the Tennessee anti-evolution law, whatever its wis-
dom, was at least constitutional-Htat the yahoos of the
State had a clear right to have their progeny taught
whatever they chose, and kept secure from whatever
knowledge violated their superstitions. The old boy
professed to be delighted with the argument, and gave
the gaping bystanders to understand that I was a publi-
cist of parts. Not to be outdone, I admired the prepos-
terous country shirt that he wore sleeveless and with
the neck cut very low. We parted in the manner of two
ambassadors.
But that was the last touch of amiability that I was
destined to see in Bryan. The next day the battle joined
and his face became hard. By the end of the week he
was simply a walking fever. Hour by hour he grew
more bitter. What the Christian Scientists call malicious
animal magnetism seemed to radiate from him like heat
from a stove. From my place in the courtroom, stand-
ing upon a table, I looked directly down upon him,
sweating horribly and pumping his palm-leaf fan. His
eyes fascinated me; I watched them all day long. They
were blazing points of hatred. They glittered like oc-
cult and sinister gems. Now and then they wandered to
166
In Memoriam: W. J. B.
me, and I got my stare, for my reports of the trial bad
come back to Dayton, and he had read them. It was like
coming under fire.
Thus he fought his last fight, thirsting savagely for
blood. All sense departed from him. He bit right and
left, like a dog with rabies. He descended to demagogy
so dreadful that his very associates at the trial table
blushed. His one yearning was to keep his yokels
heated up to lead his forlorn mob of imbeciles against
the foe. That foe, alas, refused to be alarmed* It insisted
upon seeing the whole battle as a comedy. Even Dar-
row, who knew better, occasionally yielded to the
prevailing spirit. One day he lured poor Bryan into
the folly I have mentioned: his astounding argument
against the notion that man is a mammal I am glad I
heard it, for otherwise Fd never believe it There stood
die man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presi-
dency of the Republic there he stood in the glare of
the world, uttering stuff that a boy of eight would
laugh at The artful Darrow led him on: he repeated
it, ranted for it, bellowed it in his cracked voice. So he
was prepared for the final slaughter. He came into life
a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. He was
passing out a poor mountebank.
THE AUTHOR AT WORK
(nou Prejudices: Sixtk Series, 1926)
*
If authors could work in large^ weH-venti-
lated factories, like cigarmakers or garment-workers,
with plenty of their mates about and a flow of lively
professional gossip to entertain thcT 1 ; their labor would
167
H. L. MENCKEN
be immensely lighten But it is essential to their craft
that they perform its tedious and vexatious operation*
a cappella, and so the horrors of loneliness are added
to stenosis and their other professional infirmities. An
author at work is continuously and inescapably in the
presence of himself.- There is nothing to divert and
soothe him. Every time a vagrant regret or sorrow
assails him, it has him instantly by the ear, and every
time a wandering ache runs down his leg it shakes him
like the bite of a tiger. I have yet to meet an author
who was not a hypochondriac. Saving only medical
men, who are always ill and in fear of death, the literati
are perhaps the most lavish consumers of pills and phil-
tres in this world, and the most assiduous customers of
surgeons. I can scarcely think of one, known to me per-
sonally, who is not constantly dosing himself with med-
icines, or regularly resorting to the knife.
It must be obvious that other men, even among the
intelligentsia, are not beset so cruelly. A judge on ,the
bench, entertaining a ringing in the ears, can do his
work quite as well as if he heard only the voluptuous
rhetoric of the lawyers. A clergyman, carrying on
bis mummery, is not appreciably crippled by a sour
stomach: what he says has been said before, and only
scoundrels question it* And a surgeon, plying his
exhilarating art and mystery, suffers no professional
damage from the wild thought that the attending
nurse is more sightly than his wife. But I defy anyone
to write a competent sonnet with a ringing in his ears,
or to compose sound criticism with a sour stomach, or
to do a plausible love scene with a head full of private
amorous fancies. These things are sheer impossibilities.
The poor literatus encounters them and their like
every time he enters his work-room and spits on his
hands. The moment the door bangs he begins a de-
pressing, losing struggle with his body and his mind.
Why then, do rational men and women engage in so
barbarous and exhausting a vocation -for there arc ret
168
The Author at Work
atively intelligent and enlightened authors, remember,
just as there are relatively honest politicians, and cvca
bishops. What keeps them from deserting it for trades
that are less onerous, and, in the eyes of their fellow
creatures, more respectable? One reason, I believe, is
that an author, like any other so-called artist, is a man
in whom the normal vanity o all men is so vastly ex-
aggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold
it in. His overpowering impulse is to gyrate before his
fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant
yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized
countries, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper*
Such is the thing called self-expression.
In the confidences of the literati, of course, it is al-
ways depicted as something much more mellow and
virtuous. Ether they argue that they are moved by
a yearning to spread the enlightenment and save the
world, or they allege that what steams them and makes
them leap is a passion for beauty. Both theories are
quickly disposed of by an appeal to the facts. The stuff
written by nine authors out of ten, it must be plain at a
glance, has as little to do with spreading the enlighten-
ment as the state papers of the late Chester A. Arthur*
And there is no more beauty in it, and no more sign of
a feeling of beauty, than you will find in the decor of a
night-club. The impulse to create beauty, indeed, is
rather rare in literary men, and almost completely ab-
sent from the younger ones. If it shows itself at all, it
comes as a sort of afterthought. Far ahead of it comes
the yearning to make money. And after the yearning to
make money comes the yearning to make a noise. The
impulse to create beauty lingers far behind. Authors, as
a class, are extraordinarily insensitive to it, and the fact
reveals itself in their customary (and often incredibly
extensive) ignorance of the other arts. Td have a hard
job timing six American novelists who could be de-
pended upon to recognize a fugue without prompting^
or six poets who could give a rational account of the
169
H. Xu MENCKEN
difference between a Gothic cathedral and a Standard
Oil filling-station.
The thing goes even further. Most novelists, in my
experience, know nothing of poetry, and very few poets
have any feeling for the beauties of prose. As for the
dramatists, three-fourths of them are unaware that such
things as prose and poetry exist at all. It pains me to set
down such inconvenient and blushful facts. If they
ought to be concealed, then blame my babbling upon
scientific passion. That passion, today, has me by the
car.
VALENTINO
(FKOU Prejudices: Sixth Series. Valentino dkd August 23, 1926. Thit
piece first appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sua t August 30, 1926.)
By one of the chances that relieve the dutt-
ness of life and make it instructive, I had the honor of
dining with this celebrated gentleman in New York, a
week or so before his fatal illness. I had never met him
before, nor seen him on the screen; the meeting was at
his instance, and, when it was proposed, vaguely puz-
zled me. But soon its purpose became clear enough*
Valentino was in trouble and wanted advice. More, he
wanted advice from an elder and disinterested man,
wholly removed from the movies and all their works.
Something that I had written, falling under his eye, had
given him the notion that I was a judicious fellow. So
he requested one of his colleagues, a lady of the films,
to ask me to dinner at her hoteL
The night being infernally warm, we stripped off our
coats, and came to terms at once. I recall that he wore
suspenders of extraordinary width and thickness. On so
slim a young man they seemed somehow absurd, cspc-
170
Valentino
daily on a hot Summer night We perspired horribly
for an hour, mopping our faces with our handkerchiefs,
the table napkins, the corners of the tablecloth, and a
couple of towels brought in by the humane waiter. Then
there came a thunderstorm, and we began to breathe.
The hostess, a woman as tactful as she is charming, dis-
appeared mysteriously and left us to commune.
The trouble that was agitating Valentino turned out
to be very simple. The ribald New York papers were
full of it, and that was what was agitating Him. Some
time before, out in Chicago, a wandering reporter had
discovered, in the men's wash-room of a gaudy hotel, a
dot-machine selling talcum-powder. That, of course^
was not unusual, but the color of the talcum-powder
was. It was pink. The news made the town giggle for
a day, and inspired an editorial writer on the Chicago
tribune to compose a hot weather editorial. In it he
protested humorously against the effeminization of the
American man, and laid it lightheartedly to the influ-
ence of Valentino and his sheik movies. Well, it so hap-
pened that Valentino, passing through Chicago that
day on his way east from the Coast, ran full tilt into the
editorial, and into a gang of reporters who wanted to
know what he had to say about it. What he had to say
was full of fire. Throwing off his icx>9& Americanism
and reverting to the mores of his fatherland, he chat
lenged the editorial writer to a duel, and, when no
answer came, to a fist fight His masculine honor, it ap-
peared, had been outraged. To the hint that he was less
than he, even to the extent of one half of one per cent,
there could be no answer save a bath of blood.
Unluckily, all this took place in the United States,
where the word honor, save when it is applied to the
structural integrity of women, has only a comic signifi-
cance. When one hears of the honor of politicians, of
bankers, of lawyers, of the United States itself, everyone
naturally laughs. So New York laughed at Valentino.
it ascribed hfc high dudgeon to mere publicity
171
H. L. MENCKEN
seeking: he seemed a vulgar movie ham seeking space.
The poor fellow, thus doubly beset, rose to dudgeons
higher still. His Italian mind was simply unequal to
the situation. So he sought counsel from the neutral,
aloof and seasoned* Unluckily, I could only name the
disease, and confess frankly that there was no remedy^
none, that is, known to any therapeutics within my ken.
He should have passed over the gibe of the Chicago
journalist, I suggested, with a lofty snort perhaps, bet*
ter still, with a counter gibe. He should have kept away
from the reporters in New York. But now, alas, the
mischief was done* He was both insulted and ridic-
ulous, but there was nothing to do about it. I advised
him to let the dreadful farce roll along to exhaustion.
He protested that it was infamous. Infamous? Nothing
I argued, is infamous that is not true. A man still has
his inner integrity. Can he still look into the shaving-
glass of a morning? Then he is still on his two legs in
this world, and ready even for the Devil We sweated a
great deal, discussing these lofty matters. We seemed to
get nowhere.
Suddenly it dawned upon me-I was too dull or it
was too hot for me to see k sooner that what we were
talking about was really sot what we were talking
about at all. I began to observe Valentino more dosdy.
A curiously naive and boyish young fellow, certainly
not much beyond thirty, and with a disarming air of
inexperience. To my eye, at feast, not handsome, but
neverthdess rather attractive. There was some obvious
fineness in him; even his clothes were not precisdy
those of his horrible trade. He began talking of his
home, his people, his early youth. Has words were sim-
ple and yet somehow very eloquent. I could still see the
mime before mc^ but now and then, briefly and darkly,
there was a flash of something else. That something
else, I conduded, was what is commonly called, for
want of a better namc^ a gentleman. In brief, Valen-
tino's agony was the agony of a man of rdativdy civi
in
Valentino
lized feelings thrown into a situation of intolerable vul-
garity, destructive alike to his peace and to his dignity
nay, into a whole series of such situations.
It was not that trifling Chicago episode that was rid-
ing him; it was the whole grotesque futility of his life-
Had he achieved, out of nothing, a vast and dizzy suc-
cess? Then that success was hollow as well as vast a
colossal and preposterous nothing. Was he acclaimed by
yelling multitudes? Then every time the multitudes
yelled he felt himself blushing inside. The old story of
Diego Valdez once more, but with a new poignancy in
it. Valdez, at all events, was High Admiral of Spain.
But Valentino, with his touch of fineness in him he
had his commonness, too, but there was that touch of
fineness Valentino was only the hero of the rabble.
Imbeciles surrounded him in a dense herd. He was pur-
sued by women but what women! (Consider the sor-
did comedy of his two marriages-Hie brummagem,
star-spangled passion that invaded his very death-
bed!) The thing, at the start, must have only bewildered
him. But in those last days, unless I am a worse psy-
chologist than even the professors of psychology, it was
revolting him. Worse, it was making him afraid.
I incline to think that the inscrutable gods, in taking
him off so soon and at a moment of fiery revolt, were
very kind to him. Living, he would have tried inevi-
tably to change his fame if such it is to be called^
into something closer to his heart's desire* That is to
lay, he would have gone the way of many another ac-
torthe way of increasing pretension, of solemn arti-
ness, of hollow hocus-pocus, deceptive only to himselt
I believe he would have failed, for there was litde sign
of the genuine artist in him. He was essentially a highly
respectable young man, which is the sort that never
metamorphoses into an artist But suppose he had suc-
ceeded? Then his tragedy, I believe, would have only
become the more acrid and intolerable. For he would
have discovered, after vast heavings and yearnings, that
17$
H. lb MENCKEN
what he had come to was indistinguishable from what he
had left. Was the fame of Beethoven any more caressing
and splendid than the fame of Valentino? To you and
me, of course, the question seems to answer itself. But
what of Beethoven? He was heard upon the subject, viva
vocc, while he lived, and his answer survives, in all the
freshness of its profane eloquence, in his music. Bee-
thoven, too, knew what it meant to be applauded. Walk-
ing with Goethe, he heard something that was not
unlike the murmur that reached Valentino through his
hospital window. Beethoven walked away briskly. Val-
entino turned his face to the wall
Here was a young man who was living daily the
dream of millions of other young men. Here was one
who was catnip to women. Here was one who had
wealth and fame. And here was one who was very un-
happy.
A GLANCE AHEAD
(FROM Notes on Democracy* 1926)
*
For all I know, democracy may be a self-
limiting disease, as civilization itself seems to be. There
are thumping paradoxes in its philosophy, and some of
them have a suicidal smack. It offers John Doe a means
to rise above his place beside Richard Roe, and then,
by making Roe his equal, it takes away the chief usu-
fructs of the rising* I here attempt no pretty logical
gymnastics: the history of democratic states is a history
of disingenuous efforts to get rid of the second half of
that tJiWriirtfl- There is not only the natural yearning
of Doe to use and enjoy the superiority that he has
woo; there is also the natural tendency of Roe, as an
171
A Glance Ahead
inferior man, to acknowledge it. Democracy, in
is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theo-
retical abhorrence of them. The baron has departed,
but in his place stand the grand goblin, the supreme
worthy archon, the sovereign grand commander. Dem-
ocratic man is quite unable to think of himself as a free
individual; he must belong to a group, or shake with
fear and loneliness and the group, of course, must
have its leaders. It would be hard to find a country in
which such brummagem serene highnesses are revered
with more passionate devotion than they get in the
United States. The distinction that goes with mere office
runs far ahead of the distinction that goes with actual
achievement. A Harding is regarded as superior to a
Halsted, no doubt because his doings are better tinder*
stood.
But there is a form of human striving that is under*
stood by democratic man even better than Harding's,
and that is the striving for money. Thus the plutocracy,
in a democratic state, tends inevitably, despite its theo-
retical infamy, to take the place of the missing aristoc-
racy, and even to be mistaken for it. It is, of course,
something quite different. It lacks all the essential char-
acters of a true aristocracy: a dean tradition, culture,
public spirit, honesty, honor, courage above all, cour-
age. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state;
it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goaL
Its most puissant dignitaries of today came out of the
mob only yesterday and from the mob they bring all
its peculiar ignobiUties* As practically encountered, the
plutocracy stands quite as far from the honnfa homme
as it stands from the holy saints. Its main character is
its incurable timorousness; it is for ever grasping at
the straws held out by demagogues. Half a dozen
gabby Jewish youths, meeting in a back room to plan a
revolutionin other words, half a dozen kittens pre-
paring to upset the Matterhorn are enough to scare it
half to death. Its dreams are of banshees, hobgoblins,
175
H. I*. MENCKEN
bugaboos. The honest, untroubled snores of a Percy or
a Hohenstaufen are quite beyond it
The plutocracy is comprehensible to the mob because
its aspirations are essentially those of inferior men: it
is not by accident that Christianity, a mob religion,
paves heaven with gold and precious stones, *>., with
money. There are, of course, reactions against this ig-
noble ideal among men of more civilized tastes, even
in democratic states, and sometimes they arouse the
mob to a transieat distrust of certain of the plutocratic
pretensions. But that distrust seldom arises above mere
envy, and the polemic which engenders it is seldom
sound in logic or impeccable in motive. What it lacks
is aristocratic disinterestedness, born of aristocratic se-
curity. There is no body of opinion behind it that is,
in the strictest sense, a free opinion. Its chief exponents,
by some divine irony, are pedagogues of one sort or
another which is to say, men chiefly marked by their
haunting fear of losing their jobs. Living under such
terror^ with the plutocracy policing them harshly on
one side and the mob congenitaUy suspicious of diem
on the other, it is no wonder that their revolt usually
peters out in metaphysics, and that they tend to aban-
don it as their families grow up, and the costs of heresy
become prohibitive. The pedagogue, in the long run,
shows the virtues of the Congressman, the newspaper
editorial writer or the butler, not those of the aristo-
crat. When, by any chance^ he persists in contumacy
beyond thirty, it is only too commonly a sign, not that
he is heroic, but simply that he is pathological. So with
most of his brethren of the Utopian Fife and Drum
Corps, whether they issue out of his own seminary or
out of the wilderness. They are fanatics; not states-
men. Thus politics, under democracy, resolves itself
into impossible alternatives. Whatever the label on the
parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues
who lead them, the practical choice is between the plu-
tocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous
176
A Glance Ahead
impossibilists on the other. It is a pity that this is so.
For what democracy needs most of all is a party that
will separate the good that is in it theoretically from
the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect
that good into a workable system. What it needs beyond
everything is a party of liberty* It produces, true enough,
occasional libertarians, just as despotism produces oc-
casional regicides, but it treats them in the same drum-
head way. It will never have a party of them until
it invents and installs a genuine aristocracy, to breed
them and secure them.
*
THE LIBIDO FOR THE UGLY
(noM Prejudices: Sixth Scries, 1927)
On a Winter day some years ago, coming out
of Pittsburgh on one of the expresses of the Pennsyl-
vania Railroad, I rolled eastward for an hour through
the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland county. It
was familiar ground; boy and man, I had been through
k often before. But somehow I had never quite sensed
its appalling desolation* Here was the very heart of in-
dustrial America, the center of its most lucrative and
characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest
and grandest nation ever seen on earth and here was
a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and
forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to
a macabre and depressing joke* Here was wealth be-
yond computation, almost beyond imagination and
here were human habitations so abominable that they
would have disgraced a race of alley cats.
I am not speaking of mere filth. One expects steel
towns to be dirty. What I allude to is the unbroken and
177
H. Ii. MENCKEN
agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness,
of every house in sight. From East Liberty to Greens-
burg, a distance of twenty-five miles, there was not one
in sight from the train that did not insult and lacerate
the eye. Some were so bad, and they were among the
most pretentious churches, stores, warehouses, and the
like that they were downright startling; one blinked
before them as one blinks before a man with his face
shot away. A few linger in memory, horrible even
there: a crazy little church just west of Jeannette, set
like a dormer-window on the side of a bare, leprous
hill; the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars
at another forlorn town, a steel stadium like a huge
rat-trap somewhere further down the line* But most of
all I recall the general effect- of hid&usness without a
break. There was not a single decent house within eye-
range from the Pittsburgh suburbs to the Greensburg
yards. There was not one that was not misshapen, and
there was not one that was not shabby*
The country itself is not uncomely, despite the grime
of the endless mills. It is, in form, a narrow river valley,
with deep gullies running up into the hills. It is thickly
settled, but not noticeably overcrowded. There is still
plenty of room for building, even in the larger towns,
and there are very few solid blocks. Nearly every house^
big and little, has space on all four sides* Obviously, if
there were architects of any professional sense or dig-
nity in the region, they would have perfected a chalet
to hug the hillsides a chalet with a high-pitched roo
to throw off the heavy Winter snows, but still essen-
tially a low and clinging building, wider than it was
tall But what have they done? They have taken as
their model a brick set on end. This they have con-
verted into a thing of dingy clapboards, with a narrow,
low-pitched roof. And the whole they have set upon
thin, preposterous brick piers. By the hundreds and
thousands these abominable houses cover the bare hill-
sides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying
178
The Libido far the Ugly
cemetery* On their deep sides they are three, four and
even five stories high; on their low sides they bury
themselves swinishly in the mud. Not a fifth of them
are perpendicular. They lean this way and that, hanging
on to their bases precariously. And one and all they are
streaked in grime, with dead and eczematous patches of
paint peeping through the streaks.
Now and then there is a house of brick. But what
brick! When it is new it is the color of a fried egg.
When it has taken on the patina of the mills it is the
color of an egg long past all hope or caring. Was it nco-
essary to adopt that shocking color? No more than it
was necessary to set all of the houses on end. Red brick,
even in a steel town, ages with some dignity. Let it be-
come downright black, and it is still sightly, especially
if its trimmings are of white stone, with soot in the
depths and the high spots washed by the rain. But in
Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so
they have the most loathsome towns and villages ever
seen by mortal eye.
I award this championship only after laborious re-
search and incessant prayer. I have seen, I believe, all
of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all
to be found in the United States. I have seen the mill
towns of decomposing New England and the desert
towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas. I am familiar with
die back streets of Newark, Brooklyn and Chicago, and
have made scientific explorations to C^n^Am, NJ. and
Newport News, Va. Safe in a Pullman, I have whirled
through the gloomy, God-forsaken villages of Iowa and
Kansas, and the malarious tide-water hamlets of Geor-
gia. I have been to Bridgeport, Conn., and to Los
Angeles. But nowhere on this earth, at home or abroad,
have I seen anything to compare to the villages that
huddle along the line of the Pennsylvania from the
Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg. They are incomparable
in color, and they are incomparable in design. It is as
if some titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly
179
H. L. MENCKEN
inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of HcD
to the making of them. They show grotcsqueries of
ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical.
One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting
such dreadful things, and one can scarcely imagine hu-
man beings bearing life in them.
Are they so frightful because the valley is full of for-
eigners dull, insensate brutes, with no love of beauty
in them? Then why didn't these foreigners set up simi-
lar abominations in the countries that they came
from? You will, in fact, find nothing of the sort in
Europe save perhaps in the more putrid parts of Eng-
land. There is scarcely an ugly village on the whole
Continent. The peasants, however poor, somehow man-
age to make themselves graceful and charming habita-
tions, even in Spain. But in the American village and
small town the pull is always toward ugliness, and in
that Westmoreland valley it has been yielded to with an
eagerness bordering upon passion. It is incredible that
mere ignorance should have achieved such masterpieces
of horror.
On certain levels of the American race, indeed, there
seems to be a positive libido for the ugly, as on other
and less Christian levels there is a libido for the beauti-
ful. It is impossible to put down the wallpaper that
defaces the average American home of the lower middle
class to mere inadvertence, or to the obscene humor
of the manufacturers. Such ghasdy designs, it must be
obvious, give a genuine delight to a certain type of
mind. They meet, in some unfathomable way, its ob-
scure and unintelligible demands. They caress it as
**The Palms" caresses it, or the art of the movie, or
jazz, The taste for them is as enigmatical and yet as
common as the taste for dogmatic theology and the
poetry of Edgar A. Guest.
Thus I suspect (though confessedly without knowing)
that the vast majority of the honest folk of Westmore-
land county, and especially the 100% Americans among
180
The Libido for the Ugly
them, actually admire the houses they live in, and are
proud of them. For the same money they could get
vastly better ones, but they prefer what they have got.
Certainly there was no pressure upon the Veterans of
Foreign Wars to choose the dreadful edifice that bears
their banner, for there are plenty of vacant buildings
along the track-side, and some of them are appreciably
better. They might, indeed, have built a better one of
their own. But they chose that clapboarded horror with
their eyes open, and having chosen it, they let it mellow
into its present shocking depravity. They like it as it
is: beside it, the Parthenon would no doubt offend
them. In precisely the same way the authors of the rat-
trap stadium that I have mentioned made a deliberate
choice. After painfully designing and erecting it, they
made it perfect in their own sight by putting a com-
pletely impossible pent-house, painted a staring yellow,
on top of it. The effect is that of a fat woman with a
black eye. It is that of a Presbyterian grinning. But they
like it.
Here is something that the psychologists have so far
neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust
to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United
States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which
hates beauty as it hates truth. The etiology of this mad-
ness deserves a great deal more study than it has got.
There must be causes behind it; it arises and flourishes
in obedience to biological laws, and not as a mere act
of God. What, precisely, arc the terms of those laws?
And why do they run stronger in America than else-
where? Let some honest Privat Doxent in pathological
sociology apply himself to the problem.
181
H. L. MENCKEN
TEAVAIL
(HLOM the Baltimore Evening Sun, October 8, 1928)
It always makes me melancholy to see die
boys going to school During the half hour before 9
o'clock they stagger through the square in front of my
house in Baltimore with the despondent air of New
Yorkers coming up from the ferries to work. It happens
to be uphill, but I believe they'd kg as much if they
were going down. Shakespeare, in fact, hints as much
in the Seven Ages. In the afternoon, coming home, they
leap and spring like gazelles. They are tired, but they
are happy, and happiness in the young always takes the
form of sharp and repeated contractions of the striped
muscles, especially in die legs, arms and larynx.
The notion that schoolboys are generally content with
their lot seems to me to be a sad delusion. They arc, in
the main, able to bear it, but they like it no more than
a soldier enjoys life in a foxhole. The need to endure it
makes actors of them; they learn how to lie perhaps
the most valuable thing, to a citizen of Christendom,
that they learn in school No boy genuinely loves and
admires his teacher; the farthest he can go, assuming
him to have all of his wits, is to tolerate her as he tol-
erates castor oil. She may be the loveliest flower in the
whole pedagogical garden, but the most he can ever see
in her is a jailer who might conceivably be worse.
School days, I believe^ are the unhappiest in the whole
span of human existence. They are full of dull, unin-
telligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal
violations of common sense and common decency. It
doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover
most of what is rammed into hi*** is nonsense, and
m
Travail
that no one really cares very much whether he learns
it or not. His parents, unless they are infantile in mind,
tend to be bored by his lessons and labors, and are un-
able to conceal the fact from his sharp eyes. His first
teachers he views simply as disagreeable policemen. His
later ones he usually sets down quite accurately as asses.
It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth
and youth is the time of real tragedy that the young
are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite re-
spect The average boy of my time, if he had had his
free choice, would have put in his days with Amos
Rusie or Jim Corbett; a bit later he would have chosen
Roosevelt. But a boy sees such heroes only from afar*
His actual companions, forced upon him by the inexo-
rable decrees of a soulless and irrational state, are school*
ma'ams, male and female, which is to say, persons of
trivial and unromantic achievement, and no more ca-
pable of inspiring emulation in a healthy boy than so
many midwives or dog-catchers.
It is no wonder that schoolboys so often turn for
stimulus from their teachers to their fellows. The fact,
I believe, is largely to blame for the juvenile lawlessness
that prevails in America, for it is the relatively daring
and lawless boys who stand out from the mass, and so
attract their weaker brethren. But whatever the conse-
quences, the thing itself is quite natural, for a boy with
superabundant energy flogging him yearns for experi-
ment and adventure. What he gets out of his teachers
is mainly the opposite. On the female side they have the
instincts of duennas, and on die male side they seldom
rise above the level of scoutmasters and Y.M.CA. sec-
retaries. It would be hard enough for a grown man,
with alcohol and cynicism aiding him, to endure such
society. To a growing boy it is torture.
I believe that things were better in the days before
maudlin harridans, searching the world for atrocities to
put down, alarmed the school boards into abolishing
corporal punishment. The notion that it was degrading
188
H. L. MENCKEN
to boys is silly. In the main, their public opinion in-
dorsed it as both just and humane. I went to a school
where rattanning was resorted to when needed. Its ef-
fects, I am convinced, were excellent. It preserved the
self-respect of the teachers, and so tended to make the
boys respect them. Given command, they actually ex*
crcised it I never heard of a boy complaining, after the
smarting in his glutcus maximus had passed ofi, that
he had been used cruelly or unjustly. He sometimes
bawled during the operation, but he was content after*
ward. The teachers in that school were not only re-
spected by the boys, but more or less liked. The males
among them seemed to be men, not milksops.
But even so, attendance upon their seances was a duU
business far more often than it was exhilarating, and
every boy in their classes began thinking of the dosing
bell the instant the opening bell clanged. Keeping up
with the pace they set was cruel to the stupid boys, and
holding back to it was even more cruel to the intelli-
gent ones. The things that they regarded as important
were not, as a rule, interesting to the boys, and the
things that the boys liked they only too often appeared
to regard as low. I incline to believe, looking backward,
that the boys were right far oftener than they were
wrong.
Today the old pedagogy has gone out, and a new and
complicated science has taken its place. Unluckily, it
is largely the confection of imbeciles, and so die unhap-
piness of the young continues* In die whole realm of
human learning there is no faculty more fantastically
incompetent than that of pedagogy. If you doubt it, go
read the pedagogical journals. Better still, send for an
armful of the theses that Kandidaten write and publish
when they go up for their PhD.'s. Nothing worse is
to be found in the literature of astrology, scientific
salesmanship, or Christian Science. But the poor schook
ma'ams, in order to get on in their trade, must make
shift to study it, and even to master it. No wonder their
184
Travail
dreams are of lawful domestic love* even with the cone
of cooking thrown in*
^
I suggest hanging all the professors of pedagogy, arnv
ing the ma'am with a rattan, and turning her loose.
Back to Bach! The new pedagogy has got so compli-
cated that it often forgets the pupil altogether, just as
the new medicine often forgets the patient It is driving
the poor ma'ams crazy, and converting the children into
laboratory animals. I believe that the old sing-song sys-
tem, with an occasional fanning of the posterior, was
better. At all events, k was simpler. One could grasp it
without graphs.
A GOOD MAN GONE WRONG
OPICM the American Mercury, February 1929. Henry fodd Gray, S
in art editor, on March ao, 1927. They confeged and were executed
at Sing Slug, January 10, 1928. JUG.)
Mr. Gray went to the electric chair in Sing
Sing on January n, 1928, for his share in the butchery
of Mrs. Ruth Snyder's husband The present book was
composed in his last days, and appears with the irnprt*
matur of his devoted sister. From end to end of k he
protests pathetically that he was, at heart, a good man*
I believe him. The fact, indeed, is spread all over his
singularly naive and touching record. He emerges from
it as the almost perfect model of the Y .M.OA. alum-
nus, the conscientious husband and father, the Christian
business man^ the virtuous and God-fearing Americano,
It was his very virtue, festering within him, that
brought him to his appalling doom. Another and more
wicked man, caught in the net of La Snyder, would
185
H. Ii. KENCKEN
have wriggled out and gone on his way, scarcely paus-
ing to thank God for the fun and the escape. But once
poor Judd had yielded to her brummagem seductions,
he was done for and he knew it Touched by sin, he
shriveled like a worm on a hot stove. From the first
exchange of wayward glances to the final agony in the
chair the way was straight and inevitable.
All this sounds like paradox, but I offer it seriously,
and as a psychologist of high gifts. What finished the
man was not his banal adultery with his suburban
sweetie, but his swift and overwhelming conviction
that it was mortal sin. The adultery itself was simply
in bad taste: it was, perhaps, something to be ashamed
of, as stealing a poor taxi<lriver*s false teeth would be
something to be ashamed of, but it was no more. Elks
and Shriners do worse every day, and suffer only tran-
sient qualms. But to Gray, with his Presbyterian up-
bringing and his idealistic view of the corset business,
the slip was a catastrophe, a calamity. He left his tawdry
partner in a daze, marveling that there could be so
much wickedness in the world, and no belch of fire
from Hell to stop it. Thereafter his demoralization pro-
ceeded from step to step as inexorably and as beautifully
as a case of Bright's disease. The woman horrified him,
but his very horror became a kind of fascination. He
resorted to her as a Christian dipsomaniac resorts to the
jug, protestingly, tremblingly and helplessly. In his
blinking eyes she became an amalgam of all the Lore-
Iris, with the Rum Demon peeping over her shoulder.
Whatever she ordered him to do he did at once, like a
man stupefied by some diabolical drug. When, in the
end, she ordered him to butcher her oaf of a husband,
lie proceeded to the business almost automatically, won-
dering to the last instant why he obeyed and yet no
more able to resist than he was able, on the day of
retribution, to resist his 2,000 volts.
In his narrative he makes much o this helplessness,
and speculates somewhat heavily upon its cause. That
186
A Good Man Gone Wrong
cause, as I tint, is dear enough: he was a sincere Pres-
byterian, a good man. What is the chief mark of such
a good man? That he cannot differentiate rationally
between sin and sin that a gnat gags him as badly as
a cameL So with poor Gray. His initial peccadillo
shocked him so vastly that he could think of himself
thereafter only as a sinner unspeakable and incorrigible.
In his eyes the step from adultery to murder was as
natural and inevitable as the step from the cocktail-
shaker to the gutter in the eyes of a Methodist bishop.
He was rather astonished, indeed, that he didn't beat his
wife and embezzle his employers" funds. Once the con-
viction of sin had seized him he was ready to go the
whole hog. He went, as a matter of record, somewhat
beyond it. His crime was of the peculiarly brutal and
atrocious kind that only good men commit. An F,1k or
a Shriner, persuaded to murder Snyder, would have
done it with a certain decency. More6ver, he would have
demanded a plausible provocation. But Gray, being a
good man, performed the job with sickening ferocity,
and without asking for any provocation at alL It was
sufficient for him that he was full of sin, that God had
it in for him, that he was hopelessly damned. His crime,
in fact, was a sort of public ratification of his damna-
tion. It was his way of confessing. If he had any logical
motive, it was his yearning to get into Hell as soon as
possible. In his book, to be sure, he speaks of Hell under
the name of Heaven. But that is mere blarney, set down
for the comfort of his family. He was too good a Pres-
byterian, to have any illusions on the point: he was, in
fact^ an amateur theologian of very respectable attain-
ments. He went to die chair fully expecting to be in
Hell in twenty seconds.
It seems to me that his story is a human document of
immense interest and value, and that it deserves a great
deal more serious study than it will probably get. Its
moral is plain. Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of
die virtuous* It should be left to the congenitally sinful,
187
K. I*. MENCKEN
who know when to play with it and when to let it
done. Run a boy through a Presbyterian Sunday-school
and you must police him carefully all the rest of his life,
for once he slips he is ready for anything.
THECX)MEDIAN
(nu*f Ac Baltimore Evtmng Sun, November 18, 1939)
The acting that one sees upon the stage does
not show how human beings actually comport them-
selves in crises, but simply how actors think they ought
to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for glad-
doling the heart with what is palpably not true. But it
is lower than either of those arts, f or k is forced to
make its gaudy not-true absurd by putting k alongside
die true. There stands Richard Occur de Lion and the
plainly enough, also stands a poor ham. Relatively few
reflective persons seem to get any pleasure out of act-
ing. They often, to be sure, delight in comedians but a
comedian is not an actor: he is a sort of reductio ad
absurdum of an actor. His work bears the same relation
to acting properly so called as that of a hangman, a mid-
wife or a divorce lawyer bears to poetry, or that of a
bishop to religion.
188
H. L. MENCKEN
tion after he is out of office on the ground that he had
no reasonable ground for his belief .* And in Weaver vs.
Palmer Bros. Co. there is the plain inference that in
order to punish a theoretical man, A, who is suspected
of wrong-doing, a State Legislature may lay heavy and
intolerable burdens upon a real man, B, who has admit*
tedly done no wrong at all.
I find it hard to reconcile such notions with any
plausible concept of Liberalism. They may be good law,
but it is impossible to see how they can conceivably
promote liberty. My suspicion is that the hopeful Lib-
erals of the 20$, frantically eager to find at least one
judge who was not violently and implacably against
them, seized upon certain of Mr. Justice Hohnes's opin-
ions without examining the rest, and read into them an
attitude that was actually as foreign to his ways of
thinking as it was to those of Mr. Chief Justice Hughes.
Finding him, now and then, defending eloquently a new
and uplifting law which his colleagues proposed to
strike off the books, they concluded that he was a sworn
advocate of the rights of man. But all the while, if I
do not misread his plain words, he was actually no
more than an advocate of the rights of lawmakers.
There, indeed, is the clue to his whole jurisprudence.
He believed that the law-making bodies should be free
to experiment almost ad libitum, that the courts should
not call a halt upon them until they dearly passed the
uttermost bounds of reason, that everything should be
sacrificed to their autonomy, including, apparently, even
the Bill of Rights. If this is Liberalism, then all I rag
say is that Liberalism is not what it was when I was
young.
In those remote days, sucking wisdom from the pri-
meval springs, I was taught that the very aim of the
Constitution was to keep law-makers from running
amok, and that it was the highest duty of the Supreme
Court, following Marbury vs. Madison, to safeguard it
against their forays. It was not sufficient, so my instruo
190
Mr. Justice Holmes
tors maintained, for Congress or a State Legislature to
give assurance that its intentions were noble; noble or
not, it had to keep squarely within the limits of the
Bill of Rights, and the moment it went beyond them its
most virtuous acts were null and void. But Mr. Justice
Holmes apparently thought otherwise. He held, it
would seem, that violating the Bill of Rights is a rare
and difficult business, possible only by summoning up
deliberate malice, and that it is the chief business of the
Supreme Court to keep the Constitution loose and elas-
tic, so that blasting holes through it may not be too
onerous. Bear this doctrine in mind, and you will have
an adequate explanation, on the one hand, of those for-
ward-looking opinions which console the Liberals for
example, in Lochncr vs. New Yor% (the bakery case),
in the child labor case, and in the Virginia case involv-
ing the compulsory sterilization of imbeciles and on
the other hand, of the reactionary opinions which they
so politely overlook for example, in the Debs case, in
Bartels vs. Iowa (a war-time case, involving the prohi-
bition of foreign-language teaching), in the Mann Act
case (in which Dr. Holmes concurred with the major-
ity of the court, and thereby helped pave the way for
the wholesale blackmail which Mr. Justice McKenna,
who dissented, warned against), and finally in the long
line of Volstead Act cases.
Like any other man, of course, a judge sometimes
permits himself the luxury of inconsistency. Mr. Justice
Holmes, it seems to me, did so in the wiretapping case
and again in the Abrams case, in which his dissent-
ing opinion was clearly at variance with the prevailing
opinion in the Debs case, written by him. But I think it
is quite fair to say that his fundamental attitude was
precisely as I have stated it. Over and over again, in
these opinions, he advocated giving the legislature full
head-room, and over and over again he protested
against using the Fourteenth Amendment to upset
novel and oppressive laws, aimed frankly at helpless mi-
191
H. L. MENCKEN
noritics. If what he said in some of those opinions were
accepted literally there would be scarcely any brake at
all upon lawmaking, and the Bill of Rights would have
no more significance than the Code of Manu*
The weak spot in his reasoning, if I may presume to
suggest such a thing, was his tacit assumption that the
voice of the legislature was the voice of the people.
There is, in fact, no reason for confusing the people
and the legislature: the two, in these later years, are
quite distinct The legislature, like the executive, has
ceased, save indirectly, to be even the creature of the
people: it is the creature, in the main, of pressure
groups, and most of them, it must be manifest are of
dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty. Laws
are no longer made by a rational process of public dis-
cussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and
intimidation, and they are executed in the same man-
ner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly
devoid of principle a mere counter in a grotesque and
knavish game. If the right pressure could be, applied
to him he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy,
astrology or cannibalism.
It is the aim of the Bill of Rights, if it has any re-
maining aim at all, to curb such prehensile gentry. Its
function is to set a limitation upon their power to
harry and oppress us to their own private profit The
Fathers, in framing it, did not have powerful minor-
ities in mind; what they sought to hobble was simply
the majority. But that is a detail. The important thing
is that the Bill of Rights sets forth, in the plainest of
plain language, the limits beyond which even legisla-
tures may not go. The Supreme Court, in Marbury w.
Madison, decided that it was bound to execute that in-
tent, and for a hundred years that doctrine remained
the corner-stone of American constitutional law. But
in late years the court has taken the opposite line,
and public opinion seems to support it Certainly Dr.
Holmes did not go as far in that direction as some of
Mr. Justice Holme*
his brother judges, but equally certainly he went far
enough. To call him a Liberal is to make the word
meaningless.
Let us, for a moment, stop thinking of hi as one,
and let us also stop thinking of him as a litterateur, a
reformer, a sociologist, a prophet, an evangelist, a meta-
physician; instead, let us think of him as something
that he undoubtedy was in his Pleistocene youth and
probably remained ever after, to wit, a soldier. Let us
tfrink of him, further, as a soldier extraordinarily mini-
native and articulate in fact, so ruminative and articu-
late as to be, in the military caste, almost miraculous.
And let us think of him still further as a soldier whose
natural distaste and contempt for civilians, and corol-
lary yearning to heave them all into Hell, was cooled
and eased by a stream of blood that once flowed
through the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table in brief,
as a soldier beset by occasional doubts, hesitations,
flashes of humor, bursts of affability, moments o
meaking pity. Observe that I insert the wary word,
"occasional"; it surely belongs there. On at least three
days out of four, during his long years on the bench,
the learned justice remained the soldier precise, pe-
dantic, unimaginative, even harsh. But on the fourth
day a strange amiability overcame him, and a strange
impulse to play with heresy, and it was on that fourth
day that he acquired his singular repute as a sage.
There is no evidence in Dr. Holmes'* decisions that
he ever gave any really profound thought to the great
battle of ideas which raged in his time. He was inter-
ested in those ideas more or less, and now and then his
high office forced him to take a hand in the battle, but
he never did so with anything properly describable at
passionate conviction. The whole uproar, one gathers,
seemed fundamentally foolish to him. Did he have any
genuine belief in democracy? Apparently the answer
must be no. It amused him as a spectacle, and there
were times when he was in the mood to let that spec-
193
K. L. MENCKEN
tacle run on, and even to help it on, but there were
other times when he was moved to haul it up with a
sharp command. That, no doubt, is why his decisions
show so wide a spread and so beautiful an inconsist-
ency, baffling to those who would get him into a bottle.
He could, on occasion, state the case for the widest
freedom, whether of the individual citizen or of the
representative lawmaker, with a magnificent clarity,
but he could also on occasion give his vote to the most
brutal sort of repression. It seems to me that the latter
occasions were rather more numerous than the former.
And it seems to me again, after a very attentive read-
ing of his decisions, that what moved him when he
was disposed to be complacent was far less a positive
love of liberty than an amiable and half contemptuous
feeling that those who longed for it ought to get a
horse-doctor's dose of it, and thereby suffer a really
first-rate belly-ache.
This easy-going cynicism of his is what gave his de-
cisions their peculiar salacity, and made them interest*
Ing as literature* It separated them sharply from the
writings of his fellow judges, most of whom were
frankly dull dogs. He had a considerable talent for
epigram, and like any other man who possesses it was
not shy about exercising it. I do not go so far as to
allege that it colored and conditioned his judgment,
that the apt phrase actually seduced Km, but certainly
it must be plain that once his mood had brought Him to
this or that judgment the announcement of it was
sometimes more thayi a little affected by purely literary
impulses. Now and then, alas, the result was far more
literature than law* I point, for example, to one of his
most celebrated epigrams: "Three generations of mo*
orable
zoos are enough.** It is a memorable saying, and its
essential soundness need not be questioned, but is it
really judicial, or even legal, in form and content; does
it offer that plain guidance which the higher courts
axe supposed to provide? What of the two generations:
194
Mr. Justice Holme*
are they too little? I should not want to be a nisi prius
fudge if all the pronunciamentocs of the Supreme
Court were so charmingly succinct and memorable
and so vague.
The average American judge, as everyone knows, is a
mere rabbinical automaton, with no more give and take
in his mind than you will find in the mind of a terrier
watching a rathole. He converts the law into a series
of rubber-stamps, and brings them down upon the
scalped skulls of the just and unjust alike. Hie alterna-
tive to him, as commonly conceived, is quite as bad
an uplifter in a black robe, eagerly gulping every new
brand of Peruna that comes out, and converting his
pulpit into a sort of soap-box. Mr. Justice Holmes was
neither, and he was better than either. He was under
no illusions about the law. He knew very well that its
aim was not to bring in the mtTlcnninm, but simply to
keep the peace. But he believed that keeping the peace
was an art that could be practised in various ways, and
that if one of them was by using a dub then another
was by employing a feather. Thus the Liberals, who
long for tickling with a great and tragic longing, were
occasionally lifted to the heights of ecstasy by the
learned judge's operations, and in fact soared so high
that they were out of earshot of next day's thwack of
die dub. I suspect that Dr. Holmes himself, when he
heard of their enthusiasm, was quite as much amused
as flattered. Such misunderstandings are naturally grate-
ful to a skeptic, and they are doubly grateful to a skep-
tic of the military order, with his professional doubt
of all persons who AiiA that they think. I can imag-
ine this skepticism or, if you choose, cynicism? giving
great aid and comfort to htm on January i, 1932, when
he entered the chamber of the Supreme Court for the
last time, and read his last opinion.
The case was that of one James Dunne, an humble
bootician of Eureka, Calif., and the retiring justice de-
livered the majority opinion. Dunne had been tried in
195
H. L. MENCKEN
California on an indictment embracing three counts.
The first charged him with keeping liquor for sale,
the second with possessing it unlawfully, and the third
with selling it. The jury acquitted him on the second
and third counts, but found him guilty on the first.
His counsel thereupon appealed* The evidence as to all
three offenses, it was shown, was precisely the same. If
the prisoner was innocent of two of them, then how
could he be guilty of the third? Mr. Justice Holmes:,
speaking for himself and all his fellow justices save one^
swept away this question in the following words:
Consistency in the verdict is not necessary. Each
count in an indictment is regarded as if it was a sep-
arate offense. If separate indictments had been pro*
seated against the defendant for possession and for
maintenance of a nuisance, and had been separately
tried, the same evidence being offered in support of
each, an acquittal on one could not be pleaded as res
judicata of the other. Where the offenses are sepa-
rately charged in the counts of a single indictment
the same rule must hold*
I am not learned in the law, but the special gifts of a
lawyer are surely not necessary to see that this judg-
ment disposed completely of the prohibition of double
jeopardy in Article I of the Bill of Rights. What it said,
in plain English, is that a man may be tried over an ^
over again for what is essentially the same offense, and
that if one, two, three or n juries acquit him he may yet
be kept in the dock, and so on ad infinitum until a jury
is found that will convict him. And what such a series
of juries may do may be done by one single jury -by
the simple device of splitting his one offense into two,
three, four or n offenses, and then trying him for all
of them. In order to go free he must win verdicts of
cot guilty on every count But in order to jail him all
the prosecuting attorney needs is a verdict of guilty on
one.
196
Mr. Justice Holmes
I commend this decision to Liberals who still cherish
the delusion that Dr. Holmes belonged to their lodge.
Let them paste it in their Sunday go-to-meeting hats.
And I commend to them also the astounding but
charming fact that the one judge who dissented was
Mr. Justice Pierce Butler, for many years the chief
demon in their menagerie. This is what he said:
Excluding the possession negatived by the finding
under the second count, there is nothing of substance
left in the first count, for its specifications were lim-
ited to the keeping for sale of the identical drinks
alleged in the second count to have been unlawfully
possessed. . . . The evidence having been found in-
sufficient to establish such possession, it cannot be held
adequate to warrant conviction under the first count.
The finding of not guilty is a final determination that
possession, the gravamen of both counts, was not
proved*
THE CALAMITY OF APPOMATTOX
(VBOM the America* Mercury, September 1930)
No American historian, so far as I know, has
ever tried to work out the probable consequences i
Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appo-
mattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy
have endured? Could it have surmounted the difficul-
ties inherent in the doctrine of States' Rights, so often
inconvenient and even paralyzing to it during the war?
Could it have remedied its plain economic deficiencies,
and become a self-sustaining nation? How would it
have protected itself against such war heroes as Beau*
regard and Longstrect, Joe Wheeler and Nathan B
197
H. L. MENCKEN
Forrest? And what would have been its relations to
the United States, socially, economically, spiritually and
politically?
I am inclined, on all these counts, to be optimistic.
The chief evils in the Federal victory lay in the fact,
from which we still suffer abominably, that it was a
victory of what we now call Babbitts over what used to
be called gentlemen. I am not arguing here, of course^
that the whole Confederate army was composed of gen-
tlemen; on the contrary, it was chiefly made up, like
the Federal army, of innocent and unwashed peasants,
and not a few of them got into its corps of officers. But
the impulse behind it, as everyone knows, was essen-
tially aristocratic, and that aristocratic impulse would
have fashioned the Confederacy if the fortunes of war
had run the other way. Whatever the defects of the new
commonwealth below the Potomac, it would have at
least been a commonwealth founded upon a concept of
human inequality, and with a superior minority at the
helm. It might not have produced any more Washing-
tons, Madisons, Jeffersons, Calhouns and Randolphs of
Roanokc, but it would certainly not have yielded itself
to the Heflins, Caraways, Bilbos and Tillmans.
The rise of such bounders was a natural and inevitsh
ble consequence of the military disaster. That disaster
left the Southern gentry deflated and almost helpless.
Thousands of the best young men among them had
been killed, and thousands of those who survived came
North. They commonly did well in the North, and
were good citizens. My own native town of Baltimore
was greatly enriched by their immigration, both cultur-
ally and materially; if it is less corrupt today than most
other large American cities, then the credit belongs
largely to Virginians, many of whom arrived with no
baggage save good manners and empty bellies. Back
home they were sorely missed. First the carpetbaggers
ravaged the land, and then it fell into the hands of the
native white trash, already so poor ffrat war and Recon-
198
The Calamity of Appomattox
sanction could not make them any poorer. When
things began to improve they seized whatever was
seizable, and their heirs and assigns, now poor no
longer, hold it to this day. A raw plutocracy owns and
operates the New South, with no challenge save from
a proletariat, white and black, that is still three-fourths
peasant, and hence too stupid to be dangerous. The
aristocracy is almost extinct, at least as a force in gov-
ernment It may survive in backwaters and on puerile
levels, but of the- men who run the South today, and
represent it at Washington, not 5?&, by any Southern
standard, are gentlemen.
If the war had gone with the Confederates no such
vermin would be in the saddle, nor would there by any
sign below the Potomac of their chief contributions to
American K#ltur--Ta Kluxry, political ecdesiastidsm,
nigger-baiting, and the more homicidal variety of wow-
serism. Such things might have arisen in America, but
they would not have arisen in the South. The old aris-
tocracy, however degenerate it might have become^
would have at least retained sufficient decency to see
to that. New Orleans, today, would still be a highly
charming and civilized (if perhaps somewhat zymotic)
city, with a touch of Paris and another of Port
Said* Charleston, which even now sprouts lady au-
thors, would also sprout political philosophers. The
University of Virginia would be what Jefferson in-
tended it to be, and no shouting Methodist would
haunt its campus. Richmond would be, not the dull
suburb of nothing that it is now, but a beautiful and
consoling second-rate capital, comparable to Budapest;
Brussels, Stockholm or The Hague. And all of us, with
die Middle West pumping its revolting silo juices into
the East and West alike, would be making frequent
leaps over the Potomac, to drink the sound red wine
there and breathe the free air.
My guess is that the two Republics would be getting
on pretty .amicably. Perhaps they'd have come to terms
199
H. L. MENCKEN
as early as 1898, and fought the Spanish-American War
together. In 1917 the confiding North might have gone
out to save the world for democracy, but the South,
vaccinated against both Wall Street and the Liberal
whim-wham, would have kept aloof and maybe rolled
up a couple of billions of profit from the holy crusade*
It would probably be far richer today, independent^
than it is with the clutch of the Yankee mortgage-
shark still on its collar. It would be getting and using
his money just the same, but his toll would be less. As
things stand, he not only exploits the South economi-
cally; he also pollutes and debases it spiritually. It suf-
fers damnably from low wages, but it suffers even
more from the Chamber of Commerce metaphysic
No doubt the Confederates, victorious, would have
abolished slavery by the middle 8os. They were headed
that way before the war, and the more sagacious of
them were all in favor of it But they were in favor of
it on sound economic grounds, and not on the brum-
magem moral grounds which persuaded the North,
The difference here is immense. In human history a
moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and
degrades both the victor and the vanquished. The tri-
umph of sin in 1865 would have stimulated and helped
to civilize both sides.
Today the way out looks painful and hazardous*
Civilization in the United States survives only in the
big cities, and many of them notably Boston and Phil-
adelphia seem to be sliding down to the cow country
leveL No doubt this standardization will go on until a
few of the more resolute towns, headed by New York,
take to open revolt, and try to break out of the Union.
Already, indeed, it is talked of. But it will be hard to
accomplish, for the tradition that the Union is indissol-
uble is now firmly established. If it had been broken in
1865 life would be far pleasanter today for every Ameri-
can of any noticeable decency. There arc, to be sure,
advantages in Union for everyone, but it must be man-
800
The Calamity of Appomattox
ifest that they are greatest for the worst kinds of peo-
ple. All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out o
Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Sas-
katchewan, the Argentine pampas, or Siberia. But New
York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get
drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it
is also a place where he may enforce his AmghiH ideas
upon his betters*
THE NEW ARCHITECTURE
(FROM die American Mercury* February 1931)
The New Architecture seems to be making
little progress in the United States. The traces of it that
are visible in the current hotels, apartment-houses and
office buildings are slight, and there are so few signs
of it in domestic architecture and ecclesiastical archi-
tecture that when they appear they look merely freak-
ish. A new suburb built according to the plans of,
say, Le Corbusier would provoke a great deal more
mirth than admiration, and the realtor who projected
it would probably be badly stuck. The advocates of the
new style are full of earnestness, and some of them
carry on in the shrill, pedagogical manner of believers
in the Single Tax or the New Humanism, but save on
the level of factory design they do not seem to be mak-
ing many converts. In other directions precious few per-
sons seem to have been persuaded that their harsh and
melodramatic designs are either logical or beautiful, or
that the conventions they <fenoni?cf are necessarily mean-
ingless and ugly*
Those conventions, in point of fact, are often in-
formed by an indubitable beauty, as even the most
frantic Modernist i^5t jnfaifo when he contemplates
SOI
H. L. MENCKEN
the Lincoln Memorial at Washington or St. Thomas's
Church in New York; and there is not the slightest
reason for holding that they make war upon anything
essential to the modern spirit We live in a Machine
Age, but there are still plenty of us who have but little
to do with machines, and find in that little no answer
to our aspirations. Why should a man who hates auto-
mobiles build a house designed upon the principles
which went into the Ford Model T? He may prefer,
and quite honestly, the principles which went into the
English dwelling-house of the Eighteenth Century, and
so borrow them with a clear conscience.
I can sympathize with that man, for in many ways he
is I and I am he. If I were building a house tomorrow
it would certainly not follow the lines of a dynamo
or a steam shovel; it would be, with a few obvious
changes, a replica of the houses that were built in the
days when human existence, according to my notion,
was pleasanter and more spacious than ever before or
since. The Eighteenth Century, of course, had its de-
fects, but they were vastly overshadowed by its merits.
It got rid of religion. It lifted music to first place
among the arts. It introduced urbanity into manners,
and made even war relatively gracious and decent. It
took eating and drinking out of the stable and put
them into the parlor. It found the sciences childish cur-
riosities, and bent them to the service of man, and ele-
vated them above metaphysics for all time. Lastly and
best, it invented the first really comfortable human hab-
itations ever seen on earth, and filled them with charm-
ing fittings. When it dawned even kings lived like hogs,
but as it dosed even colonial planters on the banks of
the Potomac were housed in a fashion fit for gentle-
men*
The Eighteenth Century dwelling-house has count-
less rivals today, but it is as far superior to any of them
as the music of Mozart is superior to Broadway jazz. It
is not only, with its red brick and white trim, a pattern
SOS
The New Architecture
of simple beauty; it is also durable, relatively inexpen*
sive, and pleasant to live in. No other sort of house
better meets the exigencies of housekeeping, and none
other absorbs modern conveniences more naturally and
gracefully. Why should a man of today abandon it for a
house of harsh masses, hideous outlines, and bald me-
tallic surfaces? And why should he abandon its noble
and charming furniture for the ghastly imitations of
the electric chair that the Modernists make of gas-
pipe? I can find no reason in either faith or morals.
The Eighteenth Century house fits a civilized nr^n al-
most perf ectly. He is completely at ease in it. In every
detail it accords with his ideas. To say that the florid
chicken-coops of Le Corbusier and company are closer
to his nature is as absurd as to say that the tar-paper
shacks behind the railroad tracks are closer to his na-
ture.
Nor is there any sense in the common contention
that Gothic has gone out, and is now falsetto. The
truth is that St. Thomas's Church not only represents
accurately the Christian mysticism of Ralph Adams
Cram, who designed it, but also the uneasy consciences
of the rich Babbitts who paid for it It is a plain and
highly intelligible signal to the world that, at least
on Sundays, those Babbitts search their hearts and give
thought to Hell. It is, in its sordid surroundings, dis-
tinctly otherworldly, just as Bishop Fulberfs cathedral
was otherworldly when it began to rise above the medi-
eval squalor of Chartres. The otherworldliness is of the
very essence of ecclesiastical architecture. The moment
it is lost we have tie dreadful "plants* that barbaric
Baptists and Methodists erect in the Pellagra and Goi-
tre Belts. Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it
seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and
the most beautiful It reaches up magnificently and a
half of it is palpably useless. When men really
i to build churches like the Bush Terminal there
be no religion any more, but only Rotary. And
$03
E. L, MENCKEN
when they begin to five in houses as coldly structural
as step-ladders they will cease to be men, and become
mere rats in cages*
THE NOMINATION OF F.DJL
(ROM the Baltimore E*fm*g Sim, July x and a, 1932)
Chicago, July I
The plan of the Roosevelt managers to rush
the convention and put over their candidate with a
bang failed this morning, and after a turbulent all-
night session and two roltcalls the anti-Roosevelt men
fought off a motion to adjourn until this afternoon and
the delegates proceeded to a third test of strength.
A few minutes before the first roll-call began, at 4
o'clock this morning, Arthur F. Mullen, of Nebraska,
Farley's chief of staff, told me that Roosevelt would re-
ceive 675 votes on the first ballot and 763 on the second,
and that the third would bring him the twothirds
needed for his nomination. But the first ballot actually
brought him only 666% and the second only 677%, and
the third had not gone halfway down the roll of States
before it was plainly evident that a hard fight was
ahead of him, with his chances much slimmer than
they seemed to be the time the voting began. In brief,
the Roosevelt runaway was stopped.
The first two ballots were taken amid the utmost
confusion and to the tune of loud and raucous chal-
lenges from unhappy minorities of various delegations.
On the first ballot Minnesota demanded to be polled,
with the result that its 24 votes under the unit rule
went to Roosevelt New York, which was also polled!,
split unequally, with 28% votes going to Roosevelt and
5% to Al Smith. This was a somewhat unpleasant sur-
The Nomination of F. D. R.
prise for tie Roosevelt men and they got little consola-
tion out of the second ballot, for on it Roosevelt made
a gain of but a single vote. Their total gain of ii%
came mainly from Missouri, where the 12 Roosevelt
votes of the first ballot increased to 18, with a corre-
sponding loss to former Senator James A. Reed
By this time it was clear that the Roosevelt assault
had been hurled back, and the allies, who had been
apparently trying all night to manufacture as many
delays as possible, suddenly demanded action on their
own account. This demand was sufficient to block an
effort that the Roosevelt men made at 8.05 to adjourn
until 4 pjn. It was opposed violently by New York,
speaking through the clarion voice of Dudley Field
Malone, and a standing vote showed such a formidable
party against the adjournment that the proposal was
withdrawn*
The second ballot probably took more time than any
ever heard of before, even in a Democratic national
convention. The roll-call was begun at 5.17 am and it
was not until 8.05 that the result was announced. Thus
the running time was nearly three hours. Two large
States, Ohio and Pennsylvania, demanded to be polled,
and there was a battle in the District of Columbia dele-
gation that consumed a full hour. Two of the District
delegates were Ritchie men, and they fought hard to
throw off the unit rule and have their choice recorded,
but Chairman Walsh decided that the rule bound them,
and their votes were thus credited to Roosevelt. The
same fate befell six Ritchie votes in the Michigan dele-
gation on the third ballot
Governor Ritchie polled 21 votes on the first ballot-
Maryland's 16, 4 from Indiana and i from Pennsylvania.
On the second ballot he gained 2% in Pennsylvania,
making his total 23%. Meanwhile Al Smith, who
rtarted off with 201%, dropped to 194%, and slight lossei
were also shown by Traylor, White, Byrd and Baker,
fix of former Senator Reed's Missourians departed
05
H. lb MENCKEN
for the Roosevelt camp. Altogether the allies polled
487%. On the first ballot, a few minutes before the rolt
call began, Howard Bruce of Maryland estimated that
they would poll 484 and that their irreducible mini-
mum of shock troops, good for fifty ballots if necessary,
was 42540 more than would be needed to prevent
Roosevelt from ever polling a two-thirds majority.
The all-night session was a horrible affair and by the
time the light of dawn began to dim the spotlights, a
great many delegates had gone back to their hotels or
escaped to the neighboring speakeasies. When the bal-
loting began shortly after 5 a.m. scores of them were
missing and the fact explained the worst delays in the
voting and especially some of the quarrels over the
lights and dignities of alternates. When New York was
called Jimmy Walker could not be found, but by the
time the dreadful business of polling the immense State
delegation, with its ninety regular members and eight
membcrs-at-large, neared an end, he somehow turned
up and was presently saying something for the micro-
phone and getting a round of applause for it
The third ballot showed plainly that Roosevelt was
not going to run the convention amuck, but the same
evidence proved that the allies had likewise failed to
knock him out. He was holding all his principal dele-
gations, and in addition he was making some small
gains in the territory of the enemy. His total vote was
682 79/100, which showed an increase of five and a frac-
tion over the second ballot and of sixteen over the first
This was surely not disaster. Nevertheless, it was still
sufficient to fill the allies with hope and courage, for
they had been in fear that the first Roosevelt rush
would shake and break their lines, and that had cer-
tainly not happened.
The way the tide of batde was going was revealed
dramatically by the attitude of the leaders on the two
rides. All during the infernal night session the Roose-
velt men had been trying to wear out and beat down
06
The Nomination of F. D. R.
the opposition, and to push on to a showdown. They
opposed every motion to adjourn, and refused every
other sort of truce. They wanted to get through with
the speeches as soon as possible, but they were confi-
dent enough to be still willing to match speech with
speech, and they did so until daylight But after the first
ballot they began to play for time, and after the second
all of their early bellicosity had gone out of them.
The allies, meanwhile, were gaining in assurance.
They knew that Al Smith was ready to talk of deliver-
ing his vote to one or another erf them after the third
ballot, and they were eager to reach it. But the Roose-
velt men, by that stage, saw clearly that a hard fight
was ahead, and so took their turn at playing for time.
The combat of rhetoricians and rooters during the long,
hot and weary hours of the night was depressingly typ-
ical of a Democratic national convention. The show
was almost completely idiotic, with now and then a
more or less rational speech to relieve it. Senator Tyd-
ings made one such speech, putting Governor Ritchie
in nomination, and another was made by Richard F*
Cleveland, son of Grover Cleveland, seconding him. A
third came from William G. McAdoo in the interest of
Garner. But the average was as low as one might look
for at a ward dub in a mean street and few of die dele-
gates and fewer of the visitors seemed to pay any atten-
tion to what was said.
All sorts of grotesque female politicians, most of
them with brassy voices and hard faces, popped up to
talk to the radio audience back home. The evening ses-
sion, in fact, had been postponed to nine o'clock to get
a radio hookup and every fourth-rate local leader in the
hall, male or female, tried for a crack at the micro-
phone. More than once weary delegates objected that
the Niagara of bilge was Trilling them and along toward
four in the morning Josephus Daniels went to the plat-
form and protested against it formally. But all of the
candidates had to be put in nomination, and when
tar
H. U MBNCKBN
they had been put in nomination all of them had to be
seconded, not once, but two, four, six or a dozen times.
Worse, their customers had to parade obscenely every
time one of them was launched and some of the parades
ran to nearly an hour*
Here one gang helped another. The Texans, who
had a band, lent it to every other outfit that had a can-
didate, and it brayed and boomed for Ritchie, Byrd,
Reed and AI Smith quite as cruelly as it performed for
Garner, This politeness, of course, had to be repaid by
its beneficiaries, and with interest. The Byrd band, dad
in uniforms fit far Arctic exploration, did not let up for
hours on end And while it played one tune, the band
of the Texans played another, and the official band in
the gallery a third, and the elephantine pipe-organ a
fourth. At one stage in the uproar a male chorus also
appeared, but what it sang I can't tell you, nor which
candidate it whooped and gargled for.
It was hard on the spectators in the galleries, but
it was even harder on the delegates, for they had to
march in a good many of the parades and they were
hoofed and hustled when they kept their seats. Most of
them, as is usual at a national convention, are beyond
middle life, and a good many of them show obvious
marks of oxidation. Two have died since the conven-
tion began, a matter of only five days. Scores had to
dear out of the hall during the night and seek relief in
die corridors.
Toward three o'clock, a thunderstorm came up, and
the extreme heat of the early evening began to lessen*
By that time, a full half of the spectators had gone
home, so the cops were able to open the great doors of
the hall without running any risk of being rushed off
their feet, and by dawn the place had become relatively
comfortable. But then the sun began to shine down
through the gallery windows, and presently the floor
was a furnace again* and the delegates got out their
SOS
The Nomination of F. D. B.
foul handkerchiefs and resumed their weary mopping
and panting.
Under such circumstances, there is always plenty of
ill-humor. There is more of it than usual when Den*-
ocrats meet, for they are divided into implacable fac-
tions, and each hates all the others. Many of the more
wearisome maneuvers of the three roll-calls were appar-
ently suggested by mere malignancy. The Pcnnsylva-
nians, I was told, demanded to be polled simply to
bring back to the hall some of their own delegates who
had deserted the battlefield and gone home to bed. The
row in the District of Columbia delegation was appar-
ently two-thirds personal and only one-third political.
And the Smith men carried on their relentless cam-
paign of motions, protests and parliamentary inquiries
mafnly to annoy the Roosevelt men.
Toward the end the thing became a mere endurance
match. It was plain after the second ballot that neither
side was going to break, but the allies by now were
hungry to punish the Roosevelt outfit, and they did so
by opposing adjournment and by raising all sorts of
nonsensical difficulties, some of which could be resolved
only after long conferences on the platform and a copi-
ous consultation of precedent books and parliamentary
lawyers*
Old Tom Walsh, the chairman, held out pretty well
until eight o'clock, but then he began to cave in, and
during the last hour the temporary chairman of the
convention, the wet bridegroom, Senator Alben W*
Barkley, of Kentucky, operated the bungstarter and
struggled with the riddles that were thrown at him
from the floor.
*
Chicago, July a
The great combat is ending this afternoon in the
classical Democratic manner. That is to say, die vk-
tocs are full of ifflfflgfafss ?n<| the van^pii^f^ are foil
f09
H. L. MENCKEN
of bile. It would be hard to find a delegate who be-
lieves seriously that Roosevelt can cany New York in
November, or Massachusetts, or New Jersey, or even
Illinois. All of the crucial wet States of the Northeast
held out against him to the last ditch, and their repre-
sentatives are damning him up frill and down dale
today. Meanwhile the Southern and Middle Western
delegates are going home with a tattered Bible on one
shoulder and a new and shiny beer seidcl on the other,
and what they will have to listen to from their pastors
and the ladies of the W.CT.U. is making their hearts
miss every other beat.
The row ended quietly enough last night, but with-
out the slightest sign of genuine enthusiasm. The gal-
leries kept on howling for Al Smith to the finish, but
Al himself sulked in his hotel, and placards in the lob*
bies this morning announced that most of his true
friends would leave for Manhattan at noon* When, at
10.32 last night, Chairman Walsh announced the final
vote, there was only the ghost of a cheer, and in less
than a minute even the Roosevelt stalwarts were back
in their seats and eager only for adjournment and a
decent night's rest. The convention was worn out, but
that was only part of the story. It was also torn by ran-
cors that could not be put down. The Smith men all
knew very well that the result was a good deal less
a triumph for Roosevelt, who actually seemed to have
few genuine friends in the house, than a defeat and
rebuke for Smith. As for the Roosevelt men, they found
themselves on their repeal honeymoon wondering dis-
mally if the bride were really as lovely as she had
seemed last Wednesday. Both sides had won and both
had lost, but what each thought of was only the loss.
In all probability the Marylanders, though they lost
their fight for Governor Ritchie, came out of the Strug*
gle with fewer wounds tfc*" any other delegation that
played a part of any actual importance in the ceremo-
nies. They had been bratm^ but they
The Nomination of F. D. B.
enemies. They were on the bandwagon, but the Smith
bloc had no cause to complain of them. They owed this
comfortable result to the fine skill of Governor Ritchie
himself. He was his own manager here, just as he had
been his own manager in the preliminary campaign,
and his coolness resisted a dozen temptations to run
amuck and get into trouble. He took the whole thing
calmly and good-naturedly, and showed not the slight-
est sign, at any stage, of the appalling buck fever which
so often demoralizes candidates. He kept on good
terms with the Smith outfit without getting any of its
sulphurous smell upon him, and he submitted to the
inevitable in the end in a dignified manner, and with-
out any obscene embracing of Roosevelt. If Roosevelt is
elected in November there is a swell place in the Cabi-
net waiting for him that is, assuming that he wants
it. And if Roosevelt is butchered by the implacable
Smith men, then he will have another chance in 1936,
and a far better one than he had this week, with die
corpse of Al incommoding him.
As you all know by now, the final break to Roosevelt
was brought on by the Garner men 5;nni California.
Garner's friends from Texas were prepared to stick to
him until Hell froze over, but in California he was only
a false face for McAdoo and Hearst, and McAdoo was
far more bent upon punishing Smith for the events of
1924 than he was for nominating Texas Jack, just as
Hearst was more eager to block his pet abomination,
Newton D. Baker, than to name any other candidate.
Hearst was quite willing on Thursday to turn to
Ritchie, who was satisfactory to him on all the major
issues, including especially die League of Nations. In
fact, negotiations with him were in full blast Thursday
afternoon, with Arthur Brisbane as the intermediary.
But McAdoo had other ideas, chiefly relating to his own
fortunes, and he pulled Hearst along. For one thing,
McAdoo had a palpable itch for the Vice-Presidency.
But above all he yearned to give Smith a beating and
ill
H. L. MENCKEN
he saw after the third ballot that Roosevelt would be the
handiest stick for the job*
The actual nomination, of Roosevelt after the tur-
moils of the all-night session went off very quietly. The
delegates appeared in the hall all washed up, with clean
collars, pressed suits and palpable auras of witch hazel
and bay rum. The scavengers of the stadium had swept
up the place, the weather had turned cool and there was
the general letting down that always follows a hard
battle. No one had had quite enough sleep, but every-
one had had at least some. Chairman Walsh, who had
been wilting visibly in the horrible early hours of the
morning, was himself again by night, and carried on his
operations with the bungstarter in his usual fair, firm
and competent manner. He is a good presiding officer
and he had got through the perils of the night session
without disaster. Now he was prepared for the final
scene and every spectator in the packed galleries knew
where it would lead the plot and who would be its hero.
California comes early on the roll, so there was no
long suspense. McAdoo went up to the platform to
deliver the State delegation in person. He must be close
to seventy by now, if not beyond it, but he is still slim,
erect and graceful, and as he made his little speech and
let his eye rove toward the New York delegation he
looked every inch the barnstorming lago of the old
school Eight years ago at New York he led the hosts
of the Invisible Empire against the Pope, the rum de-
mon and all the other Beelzebubs of the Hookworm
Belt, and came so close to getting the nomination that
the memory of its loss must still shiver him. The man
who blocked him was Al Smith, and now he was pay-
ing Al back*
If revenge is really sweet he was sucking a colossal
sugar teat, but all the same there was a beery flavor
about it that must have somewhat disquieted him. For
he is Georgia cracker by birth and has always followed
his native pastors docilely, and k must have taken a lot
12
The Nomination of F. D. R.
of temptation to make him accept the ribald and saloon-
ish platform. Here, indeed, revenge was working both
ways, and if Al were a man of more humor he would
have been smiling, too.
The other rebellious States fell into line without
much ceremony, always excepting, of course, those
which held out for Al to the end. Illinois was delivered
by Mayor Cermak of Chicago, a Czech brought up on
roast goose and Pilsner, and showing the virtues of
that diet in his tremendous shoulders and sturdy legs.
He spoke also for Indiana, which had been split badly
on the first three ballots. When Maryland's turn came
Governor Ritchie spoke for it from the floor, releasing
its delegates and casting their votes for the winner, and
a bit later on former Governor Byrd did the business
for Virginia. In the same way Missouri was delivered by
former Senator James A. Reed, who somewhat later
came up to the platform and made a little speech, de-
nouncing Samuel Insull and Lord Hoover in blister-
ing terms and calling upon the Smith men to "fall in
line likfc good soldiers and face the common enemy.*
Senator Reed spoke of the time as "this afternoon,**
though it was actually nearly ten o'clock at night. But
no one noticed, for the ail-night session had blown up
all reckoning of time and space.
The whole proceedings, in fact, showed a curiously
fantastic quality. Here was a great party convention,
after almost a week of cruel labor, nominating the
weakest candidate before it. How many of the delegates
were honestly for him I don't know, but certainly it
could not have been more than a third. There was ab-
solutely nothing in his record to make them eager for
him. He was not only a man of relatively small expo-
rience and achievement in national affairs; he was also
one whose competence was plainly in doubt, and
whose good faith was far from clear. His only really
valuable asset was his name, and even that was asso-
ciated with the triumphs and glories of the common
H. L. MENCKEN
enemy. To add to the unpleasantness there was grave
uneasiness about his physical capacity for the job they
were trusting to him.
Yet here they were giving it to him, and among the
parties to the business were a dozen who were pat-
ently his superior and of very much larger experience.
For example, Tom Walsh, the chairman, one of the
most diligent and useful Senators ever seen in Wash-
ington and a man whose integrity is unquestioned by
anyone. For example, Carter Glass of Virginia, an iras-
cible and almost fanatical fellow, but still a very able
man and an immensely valuable public servant. For
example, Reed of Missouri, the very picture and model
of a Roman senator, whose departure from the Senate
cost it most of its dramatic effectiveness and a good
half of its power. Even McAdoo is certainly worth a
dozen Franklin D. Roosevelts. As for Al Smith, though
he is now going down hill fast, he was once worth a
hundred. But the man who got the great prize was
Roosevelt, and most of the others are now too old
to hope for it hereafter.
The failure of the opposition was the failure of Al
Smith. From the moment he arrived on the ground it
was apparent that he had no plan, and was animated
only by his fierce hatred of Roosevelt, the cuckoo who
had seized his nest. That hatred may have had logic
in it, but it was impotent to organize the allies and they
were knocked off in detail by the extraordinarily astute
Messrs. Farley and Mullen. The first two ballots gave
them some hope, but it was lost on the third, for the
tide by then was plainly going Roosevelt's way. Per-
haps the Al of eight or ten years ago, or even of four
years ago, might have achieved the miracle that the cri-
sis called for, but it was far beyond the technique of the
golf-pkying Al of today. He has ceased to be the won-
der and glory of the East Side and becomes simply a
minor figure of Park Avenue.
But in the midst of the debacle he could at least steal
114
The Nomination o/ F. D. R.
some consolation from the fact that his foes were fac-
ing a very difficult and perhaps almost impossible cam-
paign before the people. His sardonic legacy to his
party is the platform, and especially the Prohibition
plank. It will harass Roosevelt abominably until the
vote is counted, and after that it may take first place
among his permanent regrets. If his managers had
had their way, there would have been a straddle com-
parable to the one made by the Republicans. But the
allies rushed them so savagely that they were taken off
their feet. That rush required little leadership. It was
spontaneous and irresistible. The big cities poured out
their shock troops for it
The delegates went back to their hotels last night to
the tune of "Onward, Christian Soldiers.** It was the
first time that the tune had been heard in the conven-
tion, and probably the first time it had been heard in
the hall. But playing it was only a kind of whistling in
the dark. For five days .the bands had been laboring far
different hymns, and their echoes still sounded along
the rafters.
A GOOD MAN IN A BAD TRADE
(FROM the American Mercury, January 1933. A review of Grower
Cltvdend: a Study in Courage, by Allan Kevins; New York, 1932.)
We have had more brilliant Presidents than
Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more
profound, but we have never had one, at least since
Washington, whose fundamental character was solider
and more admirable. There was never any string tied to
old Groven He got on in politics, not by knuckling to
politicians, but by scorning and defying them, and when
he found himself opposed in what he conceived to be
16
H* L. MENCKEN
sound and honest courses, not only by politicians, but by
the sovereign people, he treated them to a massive dose
of the same medicine. No more self-sufficient man is
recorded in modern history. There were times, o
course, when he had his doubts like the rest of us, but
once he had made up his mind he stood immovable. No
conceivable seduction could weaken him. There was
something almost inhuman about his fortitude, and to
millions of his contemporaries it seemed more satanic
than godlike. No President since Lincoln, not even the
melancholy Hoover, has been more bitterly hated, or
by more people. But Cleveland, though he certainly
did not enjoy it he was, indeed, singularly lacking in
the shallower and more comforting sort of egoism-
yet did not let it daunt him. He came into office his own
man, and he went out without yielding anything of
that character for an instant.
In his time it was common to ascribe a good part of
this vast steadfastness to his mere bulk. He had a huge
girth, shoulders like the Parthenon, a round, compact
head, and the slow movements of any large animal. He
was not very tall, but he looked, somehow, like an enor-
mous natural object say, the Jungfrau or Cape Horn.
This aspect of die stupendous, almost of the terrific,
was tempting to the primeval psychologists of that in-
nocent day, and they succumbed to it easily. But in the
years that have come and gone since then we have
learned a great deal about fat men* It was proved, for
example^ by W. H. Taft that they could be knocked
about and made to dance with great facility, and it was
proved by Hoover that their texture may be, not that
of Alps, but that of chocolate eclairs, Cleveland, though
lie was also fat, was the complete antithesis of these gen-
tlemen. There was far more to hi than beam and ton-
nage. When enemies had at him they quickly found
that his weight was the least of their difficulties; what
ically sent them sprawling was the fact that his whole
huge carcass seemed to be made of iron* There was no
S16
A Qood Man m a Bad Trade
give In him, no bounce, no softness. He sailed through
American history like a steel ship loaded with mono
liths of granite.
He came of an excellent family, but his youth had
been a hard one, and his cultural advantages were not
of the best. He learned a great deal about human nature
by sitting with pleasant fellows in the Buffalo saloons,
but he seems to have made but little contact with the
finer and more elusive parts of the spiritual heritage of
man, and in consequence his imagination was not
awakened, and he remained all his days a somewhat
stodgy and pedantic fellow. There is no sign in his
writings of the wide and fruitful reading of Roosevelt
I, and they show none of the sleek, shiny graces of Wil-
son. His English, apparently based upon Eighteenth
Century models, was a horrible example to the young.
It did not even roar; it simply heaved, panted and
grunted. He made, in his day, some phrases, and a few
of them are still remembered, but they are all etudes in
ponderosity innocuous desuetude, communism of pelf,
and so on. The men he admired were all solid men like
himself. He lived through the Gilded Age, the Mauve
Decade and the Purple Nineties without being aware
of them. His heroes were largely lawyers of the bow-
wow type, and it is significant that he seems to have
had little acquaintance with Mark Twain, though
Mark edited a paper in Buffalo during his terms as
mayor there. His favorite American author was Rich-
ard Watson Gilder.
The one man who seems to have had any genuine in-
fluence upon him was Richard Olney, first his Attorney-
General and then his Secretary of State. He had such
great respect for Olncy's professional skill as a lawyer
that he was not infrequently blind to the man's defects
as a statesman. It was Olney who induced him to send
troops to Chicago to put down the Pullman strike, and
Olney who chiefly inspired the celebrated Venezuela
message. Cleveland, at the start, seems to have been re-
17
K. L. MENCKEN
luctant to intervene in Chicago, but Olney convinced
him that it was both legal and necessary. In the Ven-
ezuelan matter something of the same sort appears to
have occurred. It was characteristic of Cleveland that^
once he had made up bis mind, he stuck to his course
without the slightest regard for consequences. Doubts
never beset him. He banged along like a locomotive. I
man or devil got upon the track, then so much the worse
for man or devil. "God," he once wrote to Gilder, "has
never failed to make known to me the path of duty."
Any man thus obsessed by a concept of duty is bound
to seek support for it somewhere outside himself. He
must rest it on something which seems to him to be
higher than mere private inclination or advantage,
Cleveland, never having heard of Kant's categorical
imperatives and being almost as innocent of political
theory, naturally turned to the Calvinism of his child-
hood. His father had been a Presbyterian clergyman,
and he remained a communicant of the family faith to
the end. But the Calvinism that he subscribed to was
a variety purged of all the original horrors. He trans-
lated predestination, with its sharp cocksureness and
its hordes of damned, into a sort of benign fatalism, not
unmixed with a stealthy self-reliance. God, he believed,
ordained the order of the world, and His decrees must
ever remain inscrutable, but there was nevertheless a
good deal to be said for hard work, a reasonable op-
timism, and a sturdy fidelity to what seemed to be the
right. Duty, in its essence, might be transcendental,
but its mandates were issued in plain English, and no
honest man could escape them. Tliere is no record that
Cleveland ever tried to escape them. He was not averse
to popularity, but he put it far below the approval of
conscience. In hi"* aU the imaginary virtues of the
Puritans became real
It is not likely that we shall see his like again, at least
in the present age. The Presidency is now dosed to
the kind of character that he had so abundantly. It is
18
A Good Man in a Bad Trade
going, in these days, to more politic and pliant men.
They get it by yielding prudently, by changing their
minds at the right instant, by keeping silent when
speech is dangerous. Frankness and courage are luxu-
ries confined to the more comic varieties of runners-up
at national conventions. Thus it is pleasant to remem-
ber Cleveland, and to speak of him from time to tfr^gr
He was the last of the Romans. If pedagogy were any-
thing save the puerile racket that it is he would loom
large in the schoolbooks. As it is, he is subordinated
to Lincoln, Roosevelt I and Wilson. This is one of the
things that are the matter with the United States*
COOLIDGE
(ntoM the American Mercury, April 1933. First printed, in part, in die
Baltimore Evening Sun, January 30, 1933. Coolidgc died January 5,
1933-)
The editorial writers who had the job of con*
coding mortuary tributes to the late Calvin Coolidgc,
LLD., made heavy weather of it, and no wonder. Ordi-
narily, an American public tram dies by inches, and
there is thus plenty of time to think up beautiful non-
sense about him. More often than not, indeed, he threat-
ens to die three or four times before he actually does so,
and each threat gives the elegists a chance to mellow
and adorn their effusions. But Dr. Coolidge slipped
out of life almost as quietly and as unexpectedly as he
had originally slipped into public notice, and in conse-
quence the brethren were caught napping and had to
do their poetical embalming under desperate pressure.
The common legend is that such pressure inflames and
inspires a true journalist, and maketh him to sweat
masterpieces, but it is not so in fact. Like any other
19
H. L MENCKEN
literary man, he functions best when he is at leisure, and
can turn from his tablets now and then to run down a
quotation, to eat a plate of ham and eggs, or to look
out of the window.
The general burden of the Coolidge memoirs was that
the right hon. gentleman was a typical American, and
some hinted that he was the most typical since Lincoln*
As the English say, I find myself quite unable to asso-
ciate myself with that thesis. He was, in truth, almost
as unlike the average of his countrymen as if he had
been born green. The Americano is an expansive fel-
low, a back-slapper, full of amiability; Coolidge was re-
served and even muriatic. The Americano has a stupen-
dous capacity for believing, and especially for believing
in what is palpably not true; Coolidge was, in his
fundamental metaphysics, an agnostic* The Americano
dreams vast dreams, and is hag-ridden by a demon;
Coolidge was not mount but rider, and his steed was a
mechanical horse. The Americano, in his normal incar-
nation, challenges fate at every step and his whole life
is a struggle; Coolidge took things as they came.
Some of the more romantic of the funeral bards tried
to convert the farmhouse at Plymouth into a log-cabin,
but the attempt was as vain as their effort to make a
Lincoln of good Cal. His early days, in fact, were any*
thing but pinched. His father was a man of substance,
and he was well fed and well schooled. He went to a
good college, had the clothes to cut a figure there, and
made useful friends. There is no record that he was bril-
liant, but he took his degree with a respectable mark,
proceeded to the law, and entered a prosperous law firm
on the day of his admission to the bar. Almost at once
he got into politics, and by the time he was twenty-
seven he was already on the public payroll There he
remained without a break for exactly thirty years, al-
ways moving up. Not once in all those years did he lose
an election. When he retired in the end, it was at his
Coolidge
own motion, and with three or four hundred thou-
sand dollars of tax money in his tight jeans.
In brief, a darling of the gods. No other American
has ever been so fortunate, or even half so fortunate.
His career first amazed observers, and then dazzled
them. Well do I remember the hot Saturday in Chicago
when he was nominated for the Vice-Presidency on the
ticket with Harding. Half a dozen other statesmen had
to commit political suicide in order to make way for
him, but all of them stepped up docilely and bumped
themselves off. The business completed, I left the press-
stand and went to the crypt below to hunt a drink.
There I found a group of colleagues listening to a Bos-
ton brother who knew Coolidge well, and had followed
him from the start of his career.
To my astonishment I found that this gentleman was
offering to lay a bet that Harding, if elected, would be
assassinated before he had served half his term. There
were murmurs, and someone protested uneasily that
such talk was injudicious, for A. Mitchell Palmer was
still Attorney-General and his spies were all about But
the speaker stuck to his wager.
**I am simply Ailing you," he roared, "what I fyoar.
I know Cal Coolidge inside and out He is the luckiest
goddam in the whole world.*
It seemed plausible then, and it is certain now. No
other President ever slipped into the White House so
easily, and none other ever had a softer time of it while
there. When, at Rapid City, SIX, on August 2, 1927, he
loosed the occult words, *1 do not choose to run in
1928,** was it prescience or only luck? For one, I am in-
clined to put it down to luck. Surely there was no pre-
science in his utterances and maneuvers otherwise. He
showed not the slightest sign that he smelt black clouds
ahead; on the contrary, he talked and lived only sun-
shine. There was a volcano boiling im^er him, but he
did not know it, and was not singed. When it burst
H. L. MENCKEN
forth at last, it was Hoover who got its blast, and was
fried, boiled, roasted and fricasseed. How Dr. Coolidge
must have chuckled in his retirement, for he was not
without humor of a sad, necrotic kind. He knew Hoo-
ver well, and could fathom the full depths of the joke.
In what manner he would have performed himself
if the holy angels had shoved the Depression forward a
couple of yearsthis we can only guess, and one man's
hazard is as good as another's. My own is that he would
have responded to bad times precisely as he responded
to good ones that is, by pulling down the blinds,
stretching his legs upon his desk, and snoozing away
the lazy afternoons. Here, indeed, was his one peculiar
Fetch, his one really notable talent He slept more than
any other President, whether by day or by nigjit Nero
fiddled, but Coolidge only snored. When the crash came
at last and Hoover began to smoke and bubble, good
Cal was safe in Northampton, and still in the hay.
There is sound reason for believing that this great gift
of his for self-induced narcolepsy was at the bottom of
such modest popularity as he enjoyed. I mean, of course,
popularity among the relatively enlightened. On lower
levels he was revered simply because he was so plainly
just folks because what little he said was precisely
what was heard in every garage and barbershop. He
gave the plain people the kind of esthetic pleasure
known as recognition, and in horse-doctor's doses. But
what got fom customers higher up the scale of human-
ity was something else, and something quite different.
It was the fact that he not only said little, and that lit-
tle of harmless platitudes all compact, but did even less.
The kind of government that he offered the country
was government stripped to the buff. It was govern-
ment that governed hardly at all Thus the ideal of Jef-
ferson was realized at last, and the Jeff ersonians were
delighted.
Well, there is surely something to say for that absti-
nence, and maybe a lot I can find no relation of cause
Coolidge
and effect between the Coolidge somnolence and the
Coolidge prosperity, but it is nevertheless reasonable to
argue that if the former had been less marked the latter
might have blown up sooner. We suffer most, not when
the White House is a peaceful dormitory, but when
it is a jitney Mars Hill, with a tin-pot Paul bawling
from the roof. Counting out Harding as a cipher only,
Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver and
followed by two more. What enlightened American,
having to choose between any of them and another
Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant? There were no
thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any
headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.
THE WALLACE PARANOIA
(The Progressive Party convention at Philadelphia at the end of July
1948 was Mencken's last reporting assignment This piece appeared in
the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1948. JLC.)
After another long and dismal day of path-
ological rhetoric relieved only by the neat and amusing
operations of the party-line steamroller, the delegates
to the founding convention of the third and maybe last
Progressive party began shuffling off for home tonight
On the whole, the show has been good as such things
go in the Republic* It has provided no sharp and gory
conflict of candidates like that which marked the Re-
publican Convention. It has offered no brutal slaughter
of a minority like that which pepped up the Demo-
cratic Convention, but it has at least brought together
a large gang of picturesque characters* and it has
given everyone a clear view of its candidates and its
platf orm. The former certainly do not emerge from it
with anything properly describable as an access of dig*
m
H. L- MENCEEN
nity. Wallace started oS by making a thumping ass of
himself in his preliminary press conference and did
nothing to redeem himself by his bumbling and bore-
some delivery of his speech of acceptance (otherwise
not a bad one) last night. As for Taylor, he has made it
plain to all that there is nothing to him whatever save
a third-rate mountebank from the great open spaces,
a good deal closer to Pappy OTDanicl than to Savo-
narola. Soak a radio clown for ten days and ten nights in
the rectified juices of all the cow-state Messiahs ever
heard of and you have him to the life. Save on die re-
motest fringes of the intellectually underprivileged it is
highly unlikely that he will add anything to the strength
of the new party.
Wallace's imbecile handling of the Guru matter re-
vealed a stupidity that is hard to fathom. He might
have got rid of it once and for all by simply answering
yes or no for no one really cares what foolishness he
fell for ten or twelve years ago. He is swallowing much
worse doses of hokum at this minute, and no complaint
is heard. But he tried disingenuously to brush off the
natural and proper questions of the journalists assem-
bled and when they began to pin him down and press
him he retreated into plain nonsense. Worse, he had be-
gun this sorry exhibition by a long and witless tirade
against the press. He went into the conference with
every assumption in his favor. He came out of it tat-
tered and torn.
The convention naturally attracted swarms of crack-
pots of all sorts and for three days and three nights they
did their stuff before the sweating platform committee
ostensibly headed by the cynical Rexford TugwelL
But the platform was actually drawn up by the Com-
munists and fellow-travelers on the committee, and
when it got to the floor this afternoon they protected
it waspishly and effectively against every raid from
more rational quarters. When an honest but humorless
Yankee from Vermont tried to get in a plank
The WcMace Paranoia
ing any intention to support the Russian assassins in
every eventuality, no matter how outrageous their do-
ings, it was first given a hard parliamentary squeeze by
the Moscow fuglemen on the platform, and then bawled
to death on the floor.
No one who has followed the proceedings can have
any doubt that the Communists have come out on top.
Wallace, a little while back, was declaring piously that
he didn't want their support, but certainly made no ef-
fort to brush it off during the convention. In any casc^
his effort to climb from under, like Eleanor Roosevelt's,
came far too late, and no person of any common sense
took it seriously. As for Taylor, he has been cultivating
the Kremlin, openly and without apology, all week, and
die comrades in attendance seem to have no doubt of his
fealty. When he got up in Shibe Park to make his so-
called speech of acceptance an effort worthy of a corn
doctor at a county fair he actually held it up long
enough to throw them a bucket of bones.
The delegates, taking them one with another, have
seemed to me to be of generally low intelligence, but it
is easy to overestimate the idiocy of the participants in
such mass paranoias. People of genuine sense set
dom come to them, and when they do come, they are
not much heard from. I believe that the percentage o
downright half-wits has been definitely lower than in*
say, the Democratic Convention of 1924, and not much
higher than in the Democratic Convention of this year*
This is not saying, of course, that there were not plenty
of psychopaths present. They rolled in from North,
East, South and West, and among them were all of the
types listed by Emerson in his description of the
Chandos street convention of reformers, in Boston
more than a century ago. Such types persist, and they
do not improve as year chases year. They were bom
with believing minds, and when they are cut off by
death from believing in a FJDJL, they turn inevitably
to such Roskrudans as poor Henry. The more extreme
H. Xi. MENCKEN
varieties, I have no doubt; would not have been sur-
prised if a flock of angels had swarmed down from
Heaven to help whoop him up, accompanied by the
red dragon with seven heads and ten horns described in
Revelation xii, 3. Alongside these feebleminded folk
were gangs of dubious labor leaders, slick Communists,
obfuscators, sore veterans, Bible-belt evangelists, mis-
chievous college students, and such-like old residents o
the Cave of Adullum.
But it would be unf air to forget the many quite hon-
est, and even reasonably intelligent folk, male and fe-
male, who served as raisins in the cake. Some of them I
recalled seeing years ago at other gatherings of those
born to hope. They were veterans of many and many
now-forgotten campaigns to solve the insoluble and
remedy the irremediable. They followed Bryan in their
day, then T JL and the elder LaFollette and all the other
roaring magicians of recent history. They are survi-
vors of Populism, the Emmanuel movement, the no-
more-scrub-bulls agitation, the ham-and-eggs crusade
of Upton Sinclair, the old-age pension frenzy of Dr.
Francis Townsend, the sharc-the-wealth gospel of Hucy
Long, and so on without end. They are grocery-store
economists, moony professors in one-building "uni-
versities," editors of papers with no visible circulation,
preachers of lost evangels, customers of a hundred
schemes to cure all the sorrows of the world.
Whether they will muster enough votes on Election
Day to make a splash remains to be seen* In the United
States new parties usually do pretty well at the start and
then fade away. Judging by the speeches they listen to
here in Philadelphia their principal current devil is the
embattled gents furnisher, Harry S. Truman* I heard
very little excoriation of Dewey, but they screamed
against Harry at every chance.
Mencken's Last Stand
MENCKEN'S LAST STAND
(Mencken ended his newspaper career where he bad began it: plagu-
ing the Baltimore city fathers. The piece explains itself. Bat this local
challenge to race relations was only one of many that harassed
American cities everywhere and would lead, so early as May of 1954*
to an historic change in the Supreme Court's working doctrine OB
segregation. This, so far as I can discover, was the last piece that
Mencken wrote and published* It appeared in the Baltimore Etrcmug
Sun on November 9, 1948. Two weeks later, to the day, he had a
cerebral thrombosis. He was despaired of for a time and rallied at
one point to say only, "Bring on die angels.** Bat he was tougher than
he felt and by Christmas his paralysis had vanished and he went home
again, where, ever since, he has been devotedly nursed by his brother
August. However, he did not recover from a semantic aphasia, which
left him able to focus images and words but not, alas, into any com-
municable sense. He has not been able to write or read since.
When, on July n last, a gang of so-called pro-
gressives, white and black, went to Druid Hill Park to
stage an inter-racial twinla combat, and were collared
and jugged by the cops, it became instantly impossible
for anyone to discuss tie matter in a newspaper, save, of
course^ to report impartially the proceedings in court*
The impediment lay in the rules of the Supreme
Bench, and the aim of the rules is to prevent the trial
of criminal cases by public outcry and fulmination* I
am, and have always been, in favor of the aim. I was in
favor of it, in fact, long before any of the judges now
extant arose to the bench from the underworld of the
bar, and I argued for it at great length in Ac columns
erf die Sunpapers. But four months is a long while fox
journalists to keep silent on an important public mat-
ter, and if I bust out now it is simply and solely because
I believe that the purpose of Ac rule has been suf-
ffl
H. L. MENCKEN
ficiently achieved. The accused have had their day in
court, and no public clamor, whether pro or con, has
corrupted the judicial process. Seven, it appears, have
been adjudged guilty of conspiring to assemble unlaw-
fully and fifteen others have been turned loose.
To be sure, the condemned have petitioned the Su-
preme Bench, sitting en bane, for new trials, but it is
not my understanding that the rule was designed to
protect the reviewing lucubrations of the Supreme
Bench. I simply can't imagine its members being
swayed by newspaper chitchat; as well think of them
being swayed by the whispers of politicians. Moreover,
I have no desire to sway diem, but am prepared to ac-
cept their decision, whatever it is, with loud hosannahs,
convinced in conscience that it is sound in both kw and
logic. As for the verdict of Judge Moser below, I ac-
cept it on the same terms precisely. But there remains
an underlying question, and it deserves to be considered
seriously and without any reference whatever to the
cases lately at bar. It is this: Has the Park Board any
right in law to forbid white and black citizens, if they
are so inclined, to join in harmless games together on
public playgrounds? Again: Is such a prohibition, even
supposing that it is lawful, supported by anything to be
found in common sense and common decency? I do not
undertake to answer the first question, for I am too ig-
norant of law, but my answer to the second is a loud
and unequivocal No. A free citizen in a free state^ it
seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with
whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the
general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spec-
tacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not
the tnan exercising his inalienable right, should be put
down by the police.
Certainly it is astounding to find so much of the
spirit of die Georgia Cracker surviving in the Mary-
land Free State, and under official auspices. The public
parks are supported by the taxpayer, including the cot
28
Mencken** Last Stand
orcd taxpayer, for the health, and pleasure of the whole
people. Why should cops be sent into them to separate
those people against their will into separate herds? Why
should the law set up distinctions and discriminations
which the persons directly affected themselves reject? If
the park tennis courts were free to all comers no white
person would be compelled to take on a colored op-
ponent if he didn't care to. There would be no such
vexatious and disingenuous pressure as is embodied,
for example, in the Hon. Mr. Truman's Fair Employ-
ment Practices Act. No one would be invaded in his
privacy. Any white player could say yes or no to a col-
ored challenger, and any colored player could say yes
or no to a white. But when both say ye% why on earth
should anyone else object?
It is high time that all such relics of Ku Kluxry be
wiped out in Maryland The position of the colored peo-
ple, since the political revolution of 1895, has been grad-
ually improving in the State, and it has already reached
a point surpassed by few other states. But there is still
plenty of room for further advances, and it is irritating
indeed to see one of them blocked by silly Dogbcrrys.
The Park Board rule is irrational and nefarious. It should
be got rid of forthwith.
Of equal, and maybe even worse, irrationality is the
rule regarding golf-playing on the public links, whereby
colored players can play on certain links only on cer-
tain days, and white players only on certain other days.
It would be hard to imagine anything more ridiculous.
Why should a man of one race, playing m forma pott*
peris at the taxpayers* expense, be permitted to exclude
men of another race? Why should beggars be turned
into such peculiarly obnoxious choosers? I speak of
playing in forma pauperis and that is precisely what I
mean. Golf is an expensive game, and should be played
only by persons who can afford it It is as absurd fen: a
poor man to deck himself in its togs and engage in its
witless gyrations as k would be for hfai to array him-
EC. Ii. MENCKEN
self as a general in the army. K he can't afford it he
should avoid it, as self-respecting people always avoid
what they can't afford. The doctrine that the taxpayer
should foot the bills which make a bogus prince of pelf
of him is New Dealism at its worst, I am really aston-
ished that the public golf links attract any appreciable
colored patronage. The colored people, despite the con-
tinued efforts of white frauds to make fools of them,
generally keep their heads and retain their sense of hu-
mor. If there are any appreciable number of them who
o*n actually afford golf, then they should buy some
convenient cow-pasture and set up grounds of their
own. And the whites who posture at the taxpayers' ex-
pense should do the same,
In answer to all the foregoing I expect confidently to
hear the argument that the late ynnrpd tennis matches
were not on the level, but were arranged by Commu-
nists to make trouble. So far as I am aware this may be
true but it seems to me to be irrelevant What gave the
Communists their chance was the existence of die Park
Board's rule. If it had carried on its business with more
sense they would have been baffled. The way to dispose
of their chicaneries is not to fight them when they are
right.
830
Sententia
SENTENTLE [1912-48]
(These maxims, epigrams and apothegms cover a long range in
time. The earliest were first printed in the Smart Set in 1912; the
latest come from note-books never printed at all. In 1916 I published
a collection under the title of A UuU Boo% in C Major. Four years
later it was taken, in part, into a revised edition of A Book of Bur-
lesques, and there survived until that book went out of print in the lace
30's.)
The Mind of Man
When a man laughs at his troubles he loses
a good many friends. They never forgive the loss of
their prerogative.
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives
in a world in which it is overestimated.
Never let your inferiors do you a favor. It will be ex-
tremely costly.
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his
country it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that
someone may be looking.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells
better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also makft
better soup.
The difference between a moral man and a man of
honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even
when it has worked and he has not been caught
Self-Respect The secure feeling that no one, as yet,
is suspicious.
Masctdum el Fcmnam Crcavit Eos.
At the end of one TniTlftnniiim and nine centuries o
Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of
$31
H. L. MENCKEN
the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judg-
ment of Christians everywhere that if a man and a
woman, entering a room together, dose the door be-
hind then}, the tram will come out sadder and the
woman wiser.
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize-
fighters shaking hands.
Alimony The ransom that the happy pay to the
deviL
A man always remembers his first love with special
tenderness. But after that he begins to bunch them.
Women have simple tastes. They can get pleasure out
of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
How little it takes to make life unbearable. ... A
pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a
woman's laugh.
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom
which comes from experience. To be a woman is in it-
self a terrible experience.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
The Citizen and the State
Syllogisms b la ModeH you are against labor rack-
eteers, then you are against the working man. If you
are against demagogues, then you arc against democ-
racy. If you are against Christianity, then you are
against God, If you are against trying a can of Old Dr.
Quack's Cancer Salve, then you arc in favor of letting
Uncle Julius die.
Democracy is the theory that the common people
know what they want, and deserve to get it good and
hard.
The believing mind reaches its perihelion in the so-
called Liberals. They believe in each and every quack
who sets up his booth on the fair-grounds, including the
Communists. The Communists have some talents
hit they always fall short of believing in the Liberals.
m
Sentential
Judge A law student who marks Bis own examina-
tion-papers*
Arcana Ccclcstia
Archbishop A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank su-
perior to that attained by Christ.
Puritanismr-The haunting fear tfrafr someone^ some-
where, may be happy.
This and Thai
To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of cap-
italism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind
that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
Psychotherapy The theory that the patient will prob-
ably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damned ijjit.
EXEUNT OMNES
(FJLQM the Smart Set, December 19x9)
*
Go to any public library and look under
"Death: Human" in the card index, and you will be
surprised to find how few books there are on the sub*
ject. Worse, nearly all the few are by psychical re-
searchers who regard death as a mere removal from
one world to another or by mystics who appear to be-
lieve that it is little more than a sort of illusion. Once,
seeking to find out what death was physiologically
that is, to find out just what happened when a man
died I put in a solid week without result. There
seemed to be nothing whatever on the subject, ^evcn
in the medical libraries. Finally, after much weariness
I found what I was looking for in Dr. George W.
53
H. L. MENCKEN"
Crile's "Man: An Adaptive Mechanism. 1 * 1 Crile said
that death was acidosis that it was caused by the fail-
ure of the organism to maintain the alkalinity necessary
to its normal functioning and in the absence of any
proofs or even argument to the contrary I accepted his
notion forthwith and have cherished it ever since. I
thus think of death as a sort of deleterious fermenta-
tion, like that which goes on in a bottle of Chateau
Margaux when it becomes corked. Life is a struggle,
not against sin, not against the Money Power, not
against malicious animal magnetism, but against hydro-
gen ions. The healthy man is one in whom those ions,
as they are dissociated by cellular activity, are immedi-
ately fixed by alkaline bases. The sick man is one in
whom the process has begun to lag, with the hydrogen
ions getting ahead. The dying man is one in whom it
is all over save the charges of fraud.
But here I get into chemical physics, and not only
run afoul of revelation but also reveal, perhaps, a degree
of ignorance verging upon the indecent. The thing I
started out to do was simply to call attention to the
only full-length and first-rate treatise on death that I
have ever encountered or heard of, to wit, "Aspects
of Death and Correlated Aspects of Life," by Dr. F.
Parkes Weber, 3 a fat, hefty and extremely interesting
tome, the fruit of truly stupendous erudition. What Dr.
Weber has attempted is to bring together in one vol-
ume all that has been said or thought about death since
the time of the first human records, not only by poets,
priests and philosophers, but also by painters, engravers,
soldiers, monarchs and the populace generally. One
traces, in chapter after chapter, the ebb and flow of
human ideas upon the subject, of the human attitude
to the last and greatest mystery of them all the notion
of it as a mere transition to a higher plane of life, the
*New York, 1916. Dr. Crile died in 1943.
New York, 1919.
SS4
Exeunt Omnes
action of it as a benign panacea for all human suffer-
ing, the notion of it as an incentive to this or that way
rf living, the notion of it as an impenetrable enigma^
inevitable and inexplicable. Few of us quite realize how
much the contemplation of death has colored human
thought throughout the ages, despite the paucity of
formal books on the subject There have been times
p?hen it almost shut out all other concerns; there has
never been a time when it has not bulked enormously
in the racial consciousness. Well, what Dr. Weber does
is to detach and set forth the salient ideas that have
merged from all that consideration and discussion
to isolate the chief theories of death, ancient and mod-
ern, pagan and Christian, scientific and mystical, sound
uid absurd.
The material thus accumulated and digested comes
from sources of great variety. The learned author, in
addition to written records, has canvassed prints, med-
als, paintings, engraved gems and monumental inscrip-
tions. His authorities range from St. John on what is
to happen at the Day of Judgment to Sir William Osier
XL what happens upon the normal human deathbed,
and from Socrates on the relation of death to philoso-
phy to Havelock FJlis on the effects of Christian ideas
rf death upon the medieval temperament. The one
5dd that Dr. Weber overlooked is that of music, a
somewhat serious omission* It is hard to think of a
great composer who never wrote a funeral march, or a
requiem, or at least a sad song to some departed love.
Even old Papa Haydn had moments when he ceased to
be merry, and let his thought turn stealthily upon the
doom ahead. To me, at all events, the slow movement
of the Military Symphony is the saddest of music an
elegy, I take it, on some young fellow who went out in
the incomprehensible wars of those times and got him-
jdf horribly killed in a far place. The trumpet blasts to-
ward the end fling themselves over his hasty grave in a
remote cabbage field; one hears, before and after them,
55
S. I*. MENCKEN
the honest weeping of his comrades into their wine-
pots. Beethoven, a generation later, growled at death
surlily, but Haydn faced it like a gentleman* The ro-
mantic movement brought a sentimentalization of the
tragedy; it became a sort of orgy. Whenever Wagner
dealt with death he treated it as if it were some sort
of gaudy tournament or potlatch a thing less dreadful
than ecstatic. Consider, for example, the Char-Freitag
music in "Parsifal* death music for the most memo-
rable death in the history of the world. Surely no one
hearing it for the first time, without previous warning^
would guess that it had to do with anything so grue-
some as a crucifixion. On the contrary, I have a notion
that the average auditor would guess that it was a mu-
sical setting for some lamentable fornication between a
baritone seven feet in height and a soprano weighing
three hundred pounds.
But if Dr. Weber thus neglects music, he at least
gives full measure in all other departments. His book,
in fact, is encyclopedic; he almost exhausts the subject.
One idea, however, I do not find in it: the conception
of death as the last and worst of all the practical jokes
played upon poor mortals by the gods. That idea ap-
parently never occurred to the Greeks, who thought of
almost everything else, but nevertheless it has an ingra-
tiating plausibility. The hardest thing about death is
not that men die tragically, but that most of them die
ridiculously. If it were possible for all of us to make our
exits at great moments* swiftly, cleanly, decorously, and
in fine attitudes;, then the experience would be some-
thing to face heroically and with high and beautiful
words. But we commonly go off in no such gorgeous,
poetical way. Instead, we died in raucous prose of ar-
teriosclerosis, of diabetes, of toxemia, of a noisome per-
foration in the ileocaecal region, of carcinoma of the
liver. The abominable acidosis of Dr. Crile sneaks upon
us, gradually paralyzing the adrenals, flabbergasting the
thyroid, crippling the poor old liver, and throwing its
836
Exeunt Omnes
fog upon the brain. Thus the ontogenetic process if
recapitulated in reverse order, and we pass into the
mental obscurity of infancy, and then into the blank
unconsciousness of the prenatal state, and finally into
the condition of undiSerentiated protoplasm. A man
does not die quickly and brilliantly, like a lightning
stroke; he passes out by inches, hesitatingly and, one
may almost add, gingerly.
It is hard to say just when he is fully dead. Long
after his heart has ceased to beat and his lungs have
ceased to swell him up with the vanity of his species,
there are remote and obscure parts of him that still live
on, quite unconcerned about the central catastrophe.
Dr. Alexis Carrel used to cut them out and keep them
alive for months. No doubt there are many parts of
the body, and perhaps even whole organs, which won-
der what it is all about when they find that they are on
the way to the crematory. Burn a man's mortal re-
mains, and you inevitably bum a good portion of Him
alive, and no doubt that portion sends alarmed mes-
sages to the unconscious brain, like dissected tissue
under anesthesia, and the resultant shock brings the
deceased before the hierarchy of Heaven in a state of
collapse, with his face white, sweat bespangling his
forehead and a great thirst upon him. It would not
be pulling the nose of reason to argue that many a
cremated pastor, thus confronting the ultimate in the
aspect of a man taken with the goods, has been put
down as suffering from an uneasy conscience when
what actually ailed him was simply surgical shock. The
cosmic process is not only incurably idiotic; it is also
indecently unjust.
Thus die human tendency to make death dramatic
and heroic has little excuse in the facts. No doubt you
remember the scene in the last act of "Hedda Gabkr/*
in which Dr* Brack comes in with the news of LOT*
borg^s suicide. Hedda immediately thinks of him put-
ting the pistol to his temple and dying instantly and
2S7
H. L. MENCKEN
magnificently. The picture fills her with romantic de-
light When Brack tells her that the shot was actually
through the breast she is disappointed, but soon begins
to romanticize even that. "The breast," she says, "is
also a good place. . . . There is something beautiful in
this!" A bit later she recurs to the charming theme, "In
the breast ah!" Then Brack tells her the plain truth
in the original, thus: "Nejfdet traj ham i under-
IwetF . . . Edmund Gosse, in his first English trans-
lation of the play, made the sentence: "No it struck
him in the abdomen." In the last edition William
Archer makes it "No in the bowels!'* Abdomen i$
nearer to underlivet than bowels, but belly would prob-
ably render the meaning better than either. What Brack
wants to convey to Hedda is the news that Lovborg's
death was not romantic in the least that he went to a
brothel, shot himself, not through the cerebrum or the
heart, but the duodenum or perhaps the jejunum, and
is at the moment of report awaiting autopsy at the
Christiania Allgemeinekrankenhaus. The shock floors
her, but it is a shock that all of us must learn to bear.
Men upon whom we lavish our veneration reduce it to
an absurdity at the end by dying of cystitis, or by chok-
ing on marshmallows or dill pickles. Women whom we
place upon pedestals worthy of the holy saints come
down at last with mastoid abscesses or die obscenely
of female weakness. And we ourselves? Let us not
have too much hope. The chances are that, if we go to
war, eager to leap superbly at the cannon's mouth, well
be finished on the way by being run over by an army
truck driven by a former bus-boy and loaded with imi-
tation Swiss cheeses made in Oneida, N.Y. And that if
we die in our beds, it will be of cholelithiasis.
The aforesaid Crile, in one of his other bocks, "A
Mechanistic View of War and Peace," 8 has a good deal
"New Yoik, 1915.
m
Exeunt Omnes
to say about death in war, and in particular, about the
disparity between the glorious and inspiring passing
imagined by the young soldier and the messy finish that
is normally in store for him. He shows two pictures,
the one ideal and the other real. The former is the fa*
miliar print, "The Spirit of '76," with the three patriots
springing grandly to the attack, one of them with a
neat and romantic bandage around his head appar-
ently, to judge by his liveliness, to cover a wound no
worse than a bee-sting. The latter picture is a dose-up
of a French soldier who was struck just below the
mouth by a German one-pounder shell--a soldier sud-
denly converted into the hideous simulacrum of a crul-
ler. What one notices especially is the curious expression
upon what remains of his face -an expression of the
utmost surprise and indignation. No doubt he marched
off to the front firmly convinced that, if he died at all,
it would be at the climax of some heroic charge, up
to his knees in blood and with his bayonet run clear
through a Bavarian at least four feet in diameter.
He imagined the clean bullet through the heart, the
stately last gesture, the final words: "Therese! Sophie!
Olympe! Marie! Suzette! Odette! D&iise! Julie! . . .
France!** Go to the book and see what he got
Alas, the finish of a civilian in a luxurious hospital,
with trained nurses fluttering over him and his pastor
whooping and heaving for him at the foot of his bed, is
often quite as unesthetic as any form of cxitus wit-
nessed in war. "No. 8," says the apprentice nurse in
faded pink, tripping down the corridor with a hooch
dE rye for the diabetic in No. 2, "has just passed out*
"Which is No. 8?" asks the new nurse. "The one whose
wife wore that awful hat this afternoon?* 1 ... But all
the authorities, it is pleasant to know, report that the
final scene, though it may be full of horror, is com-
monly devoid of terror. ITie dying man doesn't strug-
gle much an4 he isn*t much afraid. As his alfalfa give
39
H. L. MENCKEN
out he succumbs to a blest stupidity* His mind fogs.
His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He
scarcely gives a damn*
EPITAPH
(ntoM the Smart Set, December 1921)
K, after I depart this vale^ you ever remember
roe and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some
sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl
40
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN was born in Baltimore in
1880 and died there in 7956. Educated at Baltimore Poly-
technic, he began his long career of a journdist, critic,
and philologist on the Baltimore Morning Herald in 7899*
In 2906 he joined the staff of the Baltimore Sun and thus
began an association with the distinguished Sun papers
that lasted until a jew years before his death* He was
co-editor of The Smart Set with George Jean Nathan
from 1908 to 1923, and with Nathan he founded in 1924
The American Mercury, of which he was editor until
1933. Among his many booths are the three-volume The
American Language, six volumes of Prejudices, and three
autobiographical boo\s: Happy Days, Heathen Days,
and Newspaper Days. He also edited A New Dictionary
of Quotations.
VINTAGE HISTORY WORLD
V-286 ARIES, PHILIPPE / Centuries of Childhood
V-563 BEER, SAMUEL H. / British Politics in the Codectivist Age
V-620 BILLINGTON, JAMES H. / Icon and Axe: An Interpretive His-
tory of Russian Culture
V-44 BRINTON, CRANE / The Anatomy of Revolution
V-391 CARR, E. H. / What Is History?
V-628 CARTEY, WILFRED AND MARTIN KILSON (eds.) / Africa
Reader: Colonial Africa, Vol. I
V-629 CARTEY, WILFRED AND MARTIN KILSON (ed*.) / Africa
Reader: Independent Africa, Vol. I
V-522 CHINWEIZU / The West and the Rest of Us: White Preda-
tors, Black Slavers and the African Elite
V-888 CLARK, JOHN HENRIK (ed.) / Marcus Garvey and the Vision
of Africa
V-507 CLIVE, JOHN / Macauley
V-261 COHEN, STEPHEN F. / Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolu-
tion: A Political Biography
V-843 DAUBIER, JEAN / A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolu-
tion
V-227 DE BEAUVOIR, SIMONE / The Second Sex
V-726 DEBRAY, REGIS AND SALVADOR ALLENDE / The Chilean
Revolution
V-746 DEUTSCHER, ISAAC / The Prophet Armed
V-747 DEUTSCHER, ISAAC / The Prophet Outcast
V-748 DEUTSCHER, ISAAC / The Prophet Outcast
V-617 DEVLIN, BERNADETTE / The Price of My Soul
V-471 DUVEAU, GEORGES / 1848: The Making of A Revolution
V-702 EMBREE, AINSLIE (ed.) / The Hindu Tradition
V-2023 FEST, JOACHIM C. Hitler
V-225 FISCHER, LOUIS / The Essential Gandhi
V-827 FITZGERALD, FRANCES / Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese
& The Americans in Vietnam
V-914 FOUCAULT, MICHEL / Madness & Civilization: A History of
insanity in the Age of Reason
V-835 FOUCAULT, MICHEL / The Order of Things: An Archaeology
of the Human Sciences
V-97 FOUCAULT, MICHEL / The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology
of Medical Perception
V-152 GRAHAM, LOREN R. / Science & Philosophy in the Soviet
Union
V-529 HALLIDAY, FRED / Arabia Without Sultans
V-114 HAUSER, ARNOLD / The Social History of Art (four volumes-
through 117)
V-879 HERZEN, ALEXANDER / My Past and Thoughts (Abridged by
Dwight Macdonald)
V-465 HINTON, WILLIAM / Fanshen
V-328 HINTON, WILLIAM / Iron Oxen
V-2005 HOARE, QUINTiN (ed.) AND KARL MARX / Early Writings
V-878 HOLBORN, HAJO (ed.) / Republic to Reich: The Making of
the Nazi Revolution
V-201 HUGHES, H. STUART / Consciousness and Society
V-514 HUNTINGTON, SAMUEL P. / The Soldier and the State
V-790 KAPLAN, CAROL AND LAWRENCE / Revolutions: A Compara-
tive Study
V-7Q8 KESSLE, GUN AND JAN MYRDAL / China: The Revolution
Continued
V-628 KILSON, MARTIN AND WILFRED CARTEY (ds.) / Africa
Reader: Colonial Africa, Vol. I
V-629 KILSON, MARTIN AND WILFRED CARTEY (&) / Africa
Reader: independent Africa, Vol. H
V-723 KLYUCHEVSKY, V. / Peter the Great
V-246 KNOWLES, DAVID / Evolution of Medieval Thought
V-939 LEFEBVRE, GEORGES AND JOAN WHITE (trans.) / The Great
Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France
V-754 LIEBMAN, MARCEL / The Russian Revolution
V-533 LOCKWOOD, LEE / Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel
V-787 MALDONADO-DENIS, MANUEL / Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic
Interpretation
V-406 MARCUS, STEVEN / Engels, Manchester & The Working Class
V-430 MARCUSE, HERBERT / Soviet Marxism
V-2002 MARX, KARL AND DAVID FERNBACH (L) / Political Writ-
ings, Vol. I: The Revolutions of 1848
V-2003 MARX, KARL AND DAVID FERNBACH (ad) / Political Writ-
ings, Vol. It: Surveys from Exile
V-2004 MARX, KARL AND DAVID FERNBACH (ed.) / Political Writ-
ings, Vol. Ill: The First International and After
V-2005 MARX, KARL AND QUINTIN HOARE (ed.) / Early Writings
V-2QQ1 MARX, KARL AND MARTIN NICOLOUS (trans.) / Grundrisse:
Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
V-92 MATT1NGLY, GARRETT / Catherine of Aragon
V-923 MEDVEDEV, ROY A. / Let History Judge: The Origins &
Consequences of Stalinism
V-816 MEDVEDEV, ROY & ZHORES / A Question of Madness
V-112 MEDVEDEV, ZHORES / Ten Years After Ivan Denisovich
V-971 MILTON, DAVID & NANCY AND FRANZ SCHURMANN / The
China Reader IV: People's China:
V-905 MITCHELL, JULIET / Woman's Estate
V-730 MYRDAL, GUNNAR / Asian Drama: An inquiry into the Pov-
erty of Nations
V-793 MYRDAL, JAN / Report from a Chinese Village
V-708 MYRDAL, JAN AND GUN KESSLE / China: The Revolution
Continued
V-2001 NICOLOUS, MARTIN (trans.) AND KARL MARX / The Grun-
drisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
V-955 O'BRIEN, CONOR CRUISE / States of Ireland
V-689 OBSERVER, AN / Message From Moscow
V-525 PARES, SIR BERNARD / A History of Russia
V-719 REED, JOHN / Ten Days That Shook the World
V-677 RODINSON, MAXIME / Mohammed
V-954 ROWBOTHAM, SHEILA / Women, Resistance & Revolution:
A History of Women & Revolution in the Modern World
V-2067 SAKHAROV, ANDREI / My Country and The World
V-303 SANSOM, GEORGE B. / The Western World & Japan
V-745 SCHAPIRO, LEONARD / The Communist Party of the Soviet
Union
V-738 SCHNEIR, MIRIAM (ed.) / Feminism
V-375 SCHURMANN, F, AND 0. SCHELL (ids.) / The China Reader,
Vol. imperial China
V-376 SCHURMANN, F. AND 0. SCHELL (eds.) / The China Reader,
Vol. II: Republican China
Y-377 SCHURMANN, F. AND 0. SCHELL (eds.) / The China Reader,
Vol. Ill: Communist China
Y-S71 SCHURMANN, F. AND DAVID & NANCY MILTON / The China
Reader, Vol. IV: People's China
V-405 SERVICE, JOHN S. AND JOSEPH H. ESHERICK (ed.) / Lost
Chance in China: The World War il Despatches of John S.
Service
V-847 SNOW, EDGAR / Journey to the Beginning
V-930 SNOW, EDGAR / The Long Revolution
V-631 SNOW, EDGAR / Red China Today: The Other Side of the
River
V-220 SOBOUL, ALBERT / The French Revolution, 1787-1799: From
the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon
V-411 SPENCE, JONATHAN / Emperor of China: Self-Portatt of
K'ang-hsi
V-962 STERN, FRITZ / The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to
the Present
V-312 TANNENBAUM, FRANK / Ten Keys to Latin America
V-387 TAYLOR, A. J. P. / Bismark: The Man and the Statesman
V-322 THOMPSON, E. P. / The Making of the English Working Class
V-298 WATTS, ALAN / The Way of Zen
V-939 . WHITE, JOAN (trans.) AND GEORGES LEFEBVRE / The Great
Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France
V-627 WOMACK, John Jr. / Zapata and the Mexican Revolution
judgment, in an opuiem
-r degeneration of Ameri
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ily journalism in the
htis collection is meant thv
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