H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/February 11, 1911

Tom Reed’s Poor Joke

“No gentleman,” said the late Tom Reed, “ever weighs more than 300 pounds.” Tom’s twin curses were his sense of humor and his modesty. He could never resist the temptation to make an epigram, however silly, and he could never bring himself to toot his own ophicleide. But, as a matter of fact, he must have been proud, deep down in his secret heart of hearts, and justly so, of his Gargantuan heft and bulk, for he was well aware, as an intelligent and observant man, that a reasonable approach to sphericality was, is, and ever must be, the sign of mental and moral merit. 

Nine-tenths of the truly great men of history nave been fat. Henry VIII, that most kingly of English Kings, grew so bulky in his old age that he had to be moved about, as the ancient chronicles quaintly tell us, “with machinery.” Shakespeare had the paunch of a well-fed and honest man. Moliere and his great patron, Louis XIV, were twins in genial rotundity. Rabelais rolled as he walked. Napoleon I was of greater circumference than height. Bismarck bulged comfortably with the metabolic accumulations of many a lordly rasher of sauerbraten and many a savory keg of Bismarck herring. Napoleon III, whom he walloped, was thin.

Sir John Falstaff, the archetype of the Elizabethan Englishman, remains the fattest man in human history, with Pantagruel, perhaps, as his only considerable rival. Sir John combined, in his own mind and person, all of the faults and virtues of the Anglo-Saxon race in its best days. He was more than a bit reluctant to fight; there was no Latin truculence in him, no savage lust for mere bloodshed; but when once he was dragged into battle, his sheer bulk scared his enemies to death. He loved good victuals, a rousing chorus, a pretty girl, a comfortable inn—all the things that Englishmen most loved in the time of England’s glory. He survives today in John Bull, the fat god of a race grown lean and paralytic. 

The Shadow of Puritanism

We Americans, unfortunately, derive from spare and sour-minded progenitors, the Puritans of the New England beach, and so Uncle Sam remains more osseous than oleaginous, despite the fact that the true American type—the racial norm, as it were—has been growing fatter and fatter as year has chased year. As the Puritan recedes into history, enshrouded in the smoke of his witch fires, Uncle Sam will take on flesh. His present thinness shows that his conscience still throbs like a hollow tooth. The memory of Cotton Mather, of the Quaker-baiters, of the Blue Laws, of other such scoundrels and barbarisms, yet sticks in his mind. Until he forgets completely, his ribs will continue to show through his hide.  

The only fat Puritan that ever lived was Oliver Cromwell, and in his case fatness was a mere accident, one of nature’s indecent jests, a pathological matter. Samuel Johnson, another professional moralist, was also somewhat stout, but in this case we know that dropsy was to blame. The practice of anthropophagous morality conduces to thinness, and extreme thinness, in its turn, seems to make a man hate his fellow-men and wish them in hell. Giordano Bruno, we may be sure, was burned at the stake by a mob of living skeletons. The doctrine of foreordained damnation was invented by some theological Cassius. Dante Alighieri, to whom the shrieks of the tortured were as sweet music, was so skinny that he might have crawled through a rat-trap.

The Lower Animals

Why is it that fat men are so humane, so genial, so tolerant, so well-poised, so generous, so happy? Let us seek the answer by inquiring into the meaning of happiness. What, then, is a happy man? Simply one who is in perfect accord with his environment, one upon whom the winds of the world blow softly, one who strikes no hard corners in his progress from infancy to the grave. Happiness, in brief, and from end to end of the animal kingdom, means adaptation, fitness. The protozoon in the sea ooze is perfectly happy. He fits that dark, damp environment of his as paper fits the wall. The hog is happy in his wallow, for nature made him a wallower; the lion is happy in the jungle, for there he is in tune with the music of the spheres. 

But put the lion in a cage, the hog in a lady’s boudoir, the protozoon in a jug of carbolic acid—and at once the happiness of each of these beings ceases. And why? Simply because they are not fitted to their new environment, and cannot adapt themselves to it. In the sea ooze the protozoon can survive. He is built for it and it for him. Furthermore, he is well aware of it—the fact, indeed, is the one all-pervasive, ineradicable fact of his existence—and so he is happy. But in the carbolic he cannot survive, and, knowing it, he mourns and beats his breast and longs sadly for the blue and balmy mud of his infancy. 

Thus we come, by a devious route, to the cause of the fat man’s notorious geniality. He is genial because he is happy, and he is happy because he fits his environment, because he is fitted to survive. Happiness can have no other origin. It is impossible to think of a living creature happy in an unfavorable environment, of happiness grounded upon unfitness. A salamander at the North Pole would infallibly lean toward pessimism; a polar bear, in Senegal, Texas or Gehenna, would be ripe for any treason. Happiness is radioactive. It sends out a grateful ray. A happy man cannot help wishing his fellows well. 

Survival of the Fattest

Fatness, then, is the hallmark of the higher man, of the man moat perfectly adapted to that environment which enshrouds and enmeshes a human being in this world. It is conceivable that in a different world the case might be different. In a world of austerity and privation, for example—a world of perpetual fogs, badly cooked victuals, teetotalism, ugly women, dyspepsia, sciatica, blue laws, bleating tenors, street pianos, carnage, puritanism and sick consciences—in such a world the human shadow, perhaps, would be better fitted to survive than the man of girth, resiliency and healthy appetites, and so he would be happier. But upon the earth as we find it today it is obvious that the man of reasonable and dignified obesity has every advantage, and so it is no wonder that he monopolises joy. 

Of the survival of the fittest the biologists have prated long and learnedly. Let us now preach the new and noble doctrine of the survival of the fattest.