H.L. Mencken

Sunday Record/October 2, 1927

As one who believed and maintained (and still believes and maintains) that the so-called trial of the late Sacco and Vanzetti was grossly unfair and that their execution was brutal and dishonest, perhaps I may be permitted, without suspicion of 100 per cent Americanism, to express my regret that their ideas could not perish with them. They were, it seems to me, singularly sentimental and credulous men. Heavy readers, like all other radicals, they had read mainly what was not true. The result was a compound of false assumptions and fallacious inferences, informed and made gaudy by a dream of human perfectability hard to distinguish from that of Dr. Frank Crane, the poet Guest of Detroit, and the Baptist evangelists of the boll weevil belt.  

In all radicals, indeed, one detects this primitive Christian fervor. The second coming to them is always imminent. Let the world but adopt overnight their sure cure for all its sorrows, and at once a golden age of peace and plenty will come in, with sin and poverty abolished, and everybody as happy as the boy who killed his father. The Babbitts and wowsers of decaying Boston, scared into a pathological state by what seemed to be a menace to their investments, depicted Sacco and Vanzetti as prowling robbers and assassins, with bombs in their hands. It was almost as absurd as depicting Andy Mellon as a gambler or the D.A.R. as Bolshevik. Sacco and Vanzetti were simply romantic mushheads.

True enough, such mushheads often show a certain febrile indignation. They denounce any one who presumes to laugh at their Utopia or to object to it on grounds of enlightened self-interest. But that indignation of there is as purely formal and rhetorical as the indignation of a Baptist evangelist against evolution. The evangelist always hopes to convert the evolutionists and to save their souls; that, indeed, is precisely why he has at them so furiously.

Radicalism is thus a favorite refuge for soft-headed men who, by some accident of life in a wicked world, have lost their religious faith. The movement swarms with so-called liberal clergymen, i.e., clergymen who no longer believe that Jonah swallowed the whale, but are unable to get rid of their congenital fear of hell. They are removed from downright evangelists by no more than the thickness of a hair. Both show the same appalling lust to save men who have no desire to be saved. Both believe that, by changing a few of its basic ideas, mankind could be converted instanter into a race of angels. Both shiver and shudder over its strange reluctance to adopt their panaceas.

The most sincere philanthropist that I know in this world is a radical professor, thrown out of his college as a dangerous man! He is actually no more dangerous than a nun is dangerous. On the contrary he is one whose whole life has been made miserable by contemplation of the woes of his fellowmen. Once, coming to see me, he robbed me of five nights’ sleep with his tales of economic atrocity among the Pennsylvania steel workers. (That was during the palmy days of the sainted Judge Gary, and the twelve-hour day still prevailed.) I had to beg him to desist; he was breaking my heart. Moreover, I had been in Pennsylvania and seen the steel workers—drunk, bawdy, and happy. But this eminent radical mourned over them as a mother mourns over the toothache of her first born.

All the rest are like him—that is, all the rest of the intellectuals. Far from being anti-social, they are unanimously altruists of the first chop. They suffer from elephantiasis of the bump of sympathy. Every time they see or hear of a poor man they put themselves in his place and assume fatuously that he is suffering as much as they would suffer. And in the same way again the Baptist evangelist puts himself in the place of those who seem doomed, by his theology, to go to hell. What he always forgets is that they may actually like it in hell.

To be sure, there are radicals of a different sort, and sometimes they throw bombs, but there are very few of them in the United States, and it is not hard to detect them. What distinguishes them is their freedom from Utopianism. They have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world. They are simply against the boss who seems to be getting an undue share of the usufruct of their toil, and their libido for reform is commonly satisfied when they have punctured the tires of his automobile or broken the windows of his plant.

The west is the habitat of most of these gay dogs, and some years ago they were gathered together in a highly enterprising and amusing organization, the so-called I.W.W. Every time a train ran off the track west of the Mississippi in those days it was blamed upon the I.W.W.—and not infrequently, I believe, the I.W.W. was really to blame. But there was little genuine radicalism in that movement; was far more ameliorative than revolutionary. The I.W.W.s had no vision of an economic New Jerusalem, with every one sinless and happy; they simply aspired to scare the boss into giving them more money at the end of the week. When they began to set it they subsided. It was prosperity that dispersed them, not the police.

Moreover, many of them were no more than rough young fellows on a lark. What animated them was far less a body of ideas issuing out of the slums of Europe than the last spark of the spirit of the old west. They were pioneers making their final ribald resistance to standardization and the Ford Kultur. Nine-tenths of their bombings and train wrecking showed no purpose beyond that of raising hell; they terrorized the just and the unjust alike. Even such leaders among them as Tom Mooney (if Tom was ever actually an I.W.W.) were far less revolutionists than mere rebels. They liked to throw dead cats, break windows, and scare the sheriff. The one philosopher among them, Big Bill Haywood, is now in Moscow, and no doubt far more comfortable than he ever was in a logging camp.

The eastern radicals in the overwhelming main belong to another school and are horrified by the rough ways of their brethren of the west. They are full of ideas borrowed from books and have an almost superstitious veneration for the printed word; even the dull nonsense of Karl Marx seems to them to be intelligent and profound. What they aim at is not the butchery of the capitalist, but his salvation. They believe that he would feel better if he gave away his money and took to honest labor. More, they believe that every one else would feel better—that it would promote happiness to take away the very aspiration, to wit, to wealth and ease, which now keeps nine men out of ten at work.

This belief, it seems to me, is erroneous. It is grounded upon a faith in human virtue which goes counter to practically all of the observed facts. Wherever and whenever it has been subjected to pragmatic tests, for example, in Russia, it has revealed weaknesses so serious as to verge upon the disastrous. To attack it is a pleasant enterprise and one making no great demands upon the higher cerebral centers. I have accordingly engaged in it in the past, to the extent of a multitude of flamboyant articles and two whole books. But it presents obvious difficulties when the radicals who cherish it are forbidden to voice it. I object to being sent into action against an opponent who is being pursued by the police. I know of no effective argument against one who is sitting in an electric chair.

Thus I am opposed to the hounding of radicals and herewith protest against it. Right or wrong, they have a clear right to be heard—a right as plain as that of Dr. Crane, or that of the poet Guest, or that of the Baptist evangelist. If, perchance, they are able to convert the booboisie of this great land to their nonsense, then the booboisie, by the fundamental democratic theory, has a right to be converted to it. To argue otherwise is to argue against the idea at the bottom of the American system of government—and not only against that idea, but also against justice, fairness, honesty, self-respect, and common decency.