H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury/November, 1928

Adolescence

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA, by Margaret Mead. New York: William Morrow & Company.

Miss MEAD, who is an assistant curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, went to Samoa on a fellowship of the National Research Council, and spent some time on the remote island of Tau, studying the people and especially the children and adolescents. She learned their language and got their confidence, and in her book she gives an extremely interesting account of their daily lives. The Samoans of Tau are nominally Christians, but missionary effort seems to have made very little impression upon their traditional mores. Their tribal organization is pretty much what it was before they ever saw a white man, with a hierarchy of chiefs who seem to be far more interested in questions of etiquette and ceremonial than in those matters of conduct which concern civilized governors. The young Samoan, male or female, has work to do, and much of it is arduous, but when it is done it is done: there are no scoutmasters to harass the boy and no schoolma’ams to badger the girl. Sex hygiene is unknown in the islands. Children of five or six are quite familiar, by ocular experience, with all the more melodramatic and embarrassing Facts of Life, and few of them get much beyond adolescence without proceeding to experiment. Marriage follows later; sometimes it is long delayed. Nevertheless, as Miss Mead shows, the Samoans are essentially a highly respectable people, and their general morals are at least as good as those of their American overlords. Moreover, they are notably good-humored, well-disposed and happy.

Miss Mead’s main concern, as I have said, is with adolescents. In Samoa, she reports, they seem to escape all the dreadful storms which afflict the young in more civilized places. There are very few neurotics among them, and they seldom show any sign of intractability. The reasons are not far to seek. The Samoan family, unlike our own, is not often purely biological. The head of the house may be the father of all the children in it, but it is not common; more frequently there are also uncles, widowed aunts, cousins and other adults, and they have children of their own. Thus every child grows up under the eye, not of a single pair of adults, but of four, six or even a dozen, and its affections are early dispersed. A parental fixation would be almost impossible in Samoa; such things as the Oedipus complex are quite unknown. Moreover, the sexual freedom which begins with adolescence—it is not formally approved, but there is little effort to restrict it—works against romantic love, and so prevents misery. A Samoan girl, when her beau deserts her, does not enter a nunnery or take to Greenwich Village. She simply gets another beau. So with the swain himself. If she gives him the mitten he consoles himself with her sister or her cousin. He seldom marries until relatively late in life, and by that time he is more interested in dynastic and material advantages than in romance. Meanwhile, he avoids repressions by devoting himself to light and transient loves. Thus he keeps out of the Freudian bog, and is under no temptation to take to good works, Socialism or drink.

A sweet story, but Miss Mead finds it somewhat difficult to apply its lessons to American life. There is at present a revolt among us against the Victorian scheme of policing the young, but it remains a revolt, and is hence immoral, even in the view of the rebels. Its psychic effects are thus almost as bad as those of the policing. The innocence of the Samoans is foreign to our civilization; we are essentially moral in our attitude toward sex, even when we are immoral. Moreover, the American youngster still dreams of romantic love; nay, demands it. Even the most violent revokes put great store by it; in fact, they commonly justify their revolt by appealing to it. So long as the taste for it survives among us it will be idle to talk of solving the sex question. Nor is there any pressing reason why it should be solved, despite all the alarmist gabble that goes round. Sex does more damage among us than it does in Samoa, but it also makes for a vastly greater joy. It offers most people their one genuine escape from the slavery of everyday life under civilization. True enough, it usually makes them, in the end, even worse slaves than they were before, but while the flight is on they are happy in a wild, poignant, overwhelming manner that is quite beyond the imagination of a dumb-bell Samoan.

I believe that Miss Mead’s book would have been better if she had avoided discussing the woes of American high-school girls and confined herself to an objective account of life in Samoa. After all, what she has to say on the former subject has been said before, and very often. But in her picture of work and play on a remote Pacific island there is much fresh observation, and hence much of solid interest. She went to a great deal of trouble to establish her facts, and she sets them forth in a clear and competent manner. The people of the South Seas live in her precise, scientific pages even more vividly than they live in the works of such romantic writers as Frederick O’Brien. Her book suggests that its methodology might be applied to an investigation of human existence nearer home. Why doesn’t some ethnologist go to a village in Tennessee (or Vermont, or Ohio, or Kansas), and describe its people as she describes her Samoans? There have been partial studies in this field, but no complete one. Its lack is sorely felt. All sorts of delusions and superstitions survive from a less critical day—for example, the belief that American yokels are more moral than city folk. Confronted by such palpable nonsense, one goes to the sources for light, and finds that there are none. We know far more about the daily life of the Pueblo Indians than we know about the life of Mississippi Baptists. Whenever, by some accident, light is let into the subject, there is gasping surprise, and even horror. This happened, typically, when a gang of slick city jakes descended upon the primitive mountain village of Dayton, Tenn., at the time of the Scopes trial, and found it full of Aurignacian men clad in dressy mail-order suits, with Bibles under their arms. But science is never horrified. It has no more moral scruples than a movie critic or a beauty doctor. It simply sets forth the facts. I herewith summons it to proceed to business.

A Glance Ahead

THE OPEN CONSPIRACY: Blue Prints for a World Revolution, by H. G. Wells. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Company.

IN THIS little book Mr. Wells achieves what is for him a somewhat unusual feat: he manages to be dull. In his 200 pages he says many sensible things, but he almost invariably says them badly. There is no flavor of charming phrases in his argument, and there is no impact of novel and arresting ideas. What he argues for is simply what every rational man is in favor of, to wit, a better organization of the world. And what he proposes to bring it about is what every rational man knows to be necessary, to wit, the liberation and internationalization of intelligence. Today too many good men waste themselves in being good Americans, good Englishmen, good Germans, good Frenchmen. If they could get away from that puerile folly and lay their heads together human progress would become something more than a sentimental illusion. It has been attempted in the sciences, but only half-heartedly: in 1914 all the English philologians were bawling that no German had ever contributed anything worthwhile to philology, and three years later all the American chemists were stealing the German chemists’ work and then denying loudly that it was worth anything. Patriotism is not only the last refuge of scoundrels; it is their nursery and breeding-pen. It makes more of them than any other human weakness. Here in the United States the fact must be manifest to everyone. Whenever an American begins talking about the flag, prudent men reach warily for their pocketbooks and steal away as fast as possible.

The scientists, as I have said, have tried to purge their society of such rogues, but without much success. However, they have at least made the attempt, and maybe they will succeed better later on. The artists and the engineers lag far behind, and the professors of government are out of sight in the rear. As everyone knows, the current tendency is not against nationalism and its attendant imbecilities, but in the other direction. The result is a colossal waste of human effort, with no one benefited save a few professional politicians, i.e., professional swindlers. In order that Padraic This or Eamon That may strut his brief hour the Irish peasants are loaded with taxes, taught to hate their fellow creatures, and bidden to study a dead language, as unhandy to them as Greek. In order that a moony professor, far gone in senility, may posture as a great liberator the charming and intelligent Czechs are condemned to the goose-step and put to annoying their neighbors. It will take centuries to get rid of this nonsense, if it is ever got rid of at all. The human mind cherishes it as it cherishes all other mean and blowsy things. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to protest against it, even in the dull and inept manner shown by Mr. Wells in the present book. He is not doing his damndest, for his damndest is very eloquent and moving, but he is at least doing something.

I suspect that half of his ineffectiveness is to be blamed on the fact that he starts off by arguing that what is needed to combat the game of dog-eat-dog is religion. It appears at once that what he means by religion is not the usual compound of maudlin superstitions and empty forms, but simply good will, fair play, common decency. A religious man, by his definition, is one who can imagine the good of others as well as his own, and is willing to further it. But why call such a man religious? Religion, as it is practically encountered in this world, commonly works the other way. Even more than patriotism it makes for division and disharmony. The vilest and most abiding hatreds that now rack the world are hatched and fostered at the altar of God. Two generations after the Civil War its surviving morons have forgotten their old patriotic bitterness, but they continue to damn the Pope to Hell. It is amazing that a man of Mr. Wells’ intelligence should give any countenance to the notion that religion makes men better, or that making them better is a kind of religion. Religion, it is conceivable, may save them from Hell; on that point I express no opinion. It may convert them into angels when they die. But while they are on earth it makes them bad neighbors. Here, however, I probably press Mr. Wells too hard. If he misuses words he does only what all the rest of us do. They are, in fact, very inaccurate tools, and often seduce even the most skillful workman into cutting his thumb. Wells has his defects as an artist in prose, as Carlyle had, and Macaulay and Darwin and Adam Smith, but he remains an extraordinarily arresting and important man. He has, in some ways, the best brains in England, and his influence upon his time has been profound. During the late war he succumbed to patriotism and made a dreadful spectacle of himself, but he recovered quickly, and he was not the worst. Taking one year with another, he has pumped more sound sense into the dull and apathetic English than any other, save only George Bernard Shaw. In one direction he has done better than Shaw, for he has got over the Socialism of his youth, and is now a political realist. At sixty-two he seems to be as lively as ever. Long may he wave! The world needs such fellows. If there were a hundred head of them in practise at once civilization would have a chance.

The Siege of Babel

AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE, by Otto Jespersen. London: George Allen & Unwin.

DR. JESPERSEN is one of the most eminent living philologists, and, though a Dane, is a high authority upon the English language. His “Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles,” of which three volumes have been issued (it is published, by the way, only in Germany), is so packed with original observations and so revolutionary in some of its ideas that many years must pass before the schoolma’ms of the United States rise to it. Some of his other works are quite as valuable, notably his “Philosophy of Grammar,” published in 1924, and his “Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin,” published in 1911. In them he reveals a colossal learning, a refreshing freedom from academic prejudices, and a somewhat curious mixture of scientific exactness and romantic imagination. Naturally enough, he is greatly interested in all the movements that flow out of his specialty—the simplified spelling movement in English, the projects for the reform of this or that language, and the attempts so often made to invent entirely new international languages. In the present book he presents plans and specifications for a new one of his own. He calls it Novial, from nov=new and ial=international auxiliary language.

Dr. Jespersen rehearses briefly the history of previous efforts in the same direction, and shows how and why they have failed. Volapuk was too harsh and arbitrary; moreover, its inflections were too complicated. Esperanto was full of uncouthness, and included needless complications. Ido was a broth spoiled by too many cooks. Latino Sine Flexione was simply a vile dog Latin. Occidental was a bit too scientific. And so on. Novial, it is plain at a glance, is superior to all of them, if only because it avoids the pitfalls that experience with them has revealed. Its vocabulary is natural, its grammatical structure is simple and logical, it employs no sounds that are not familiar to everyone, and it shows a considerable euphony. Such a sentence as “Kulture es ekonomio de energie in omni direktione” is not only instantly intelligible to every educated person; it also shows the grace that we look for in civilized speech.

In brief, Dr. Jespersen has made a good job, and every argument brought forward for the international auxiliary languages of the past applies to Novial with double force. Unfortunately, its very logicality is probably the chief obstacle to its acceptance. For there is something in the human mind which revolts almost instinctively against whatever is sensible. Men come into the world fortuitously and illogically, they are crammed with nonsense (for example, “civics,” “philosophy” and Greek) in school and college, they marry in defiance of reason, and they spend the rest of their lives immersed in gaudy and preposterous irrationalities. If they could bear sober thinking for more than a few minutes at a time they would have reformed all their existing languages long ago. German would have been purged of its barbaric grammar, French would have been rid of its redundancies, and English would have been reformed in spelling, if not in pronunciation. But the persons who speak these languages cling devotedly to their imbecilities. They love them as a mother loves a half-wit child. In order to get rid of such weaknesses the human mind must be completely overhauled, a task comparable to abolishing the moon or enforcing Prohibition. If that overhauling is ever achieved the peoples of the world will all speak, not merely an international auxiliary language, but a common language. I specifically refuse to advocate it. The dangers of the reform are too evident. The pornographic literature of the whole world would lie open to every American Sunday school scholar. The bars down, it would be too easy for Germans and Frenchmen, Greeks and Turks, Flemings and Walloons, to exchange their frank opinions of one another. American press agents would practise everywhere, taking the Kultur of Chicago to the ends of the earth. The radio would pollute Nicaragua, Siam and Albania with the wisdom of Coolidge and Hoover, S. Parkes Cadman and Stephen S. Wise. The end, I fear, would be universal war, pestilence and ruin. Let bad enough alone.

Meanwhile, Dr. Jespersen has written an extremely interesting little book.

The Technique of the Politician

POLITICAL BEHAVIOR, by Frank R. Kent. New York: William Morrow & Company.

THIS volume is seriously written, but it is full of rollicking humors. I defy anyone to read it without coming away with the feeling that, whatever the cost of being an American, it is at least enjoyable—that life in the United States is to life elsewhere as the art of Groucho Marx is to the art of the embalmer. Mr. Kent’s theme is politics—not the high politics that publicists talk of, but the lowly variety practised by practical men. It is the politics of Tammany in New York, of the Ohio Gang in Ohio, of the Vare-Mellon banditti in Pennsylvania, of Ma and Pa Ferguson in Texas, of Tom Heflin in Alabama, of the Anti-Saloon League up and down the land. For the first time its elementary principles are dissected out of the huge mass of clinical material, and exposed to the admiration of connoisseurs. Mr. Kent knows his politicians. He has consorted with them since the last century, and has an immense acquaintance among them, North, East, South and West. More, he enjoys their salty society, and knows how to get his enjoyment upon paper.

The result is a work of high interest and great charm. The author indulges himself in no pious snuffling. He does not deplore the extravagant tricks and dodges, the inordinate rogueries and impudences that he describes; he simply sets them forth in plain language, giving names and dates whenever possible—and usually it is possible. His store of material seems to be endless. He has a story to illustrate every step in his exposition. He does not merely tell how politicians hoodwink, bamboozle and prey upon the boobs; he shows precisely how concrete men have done it—many of them of eminence in the Republic. The heroes of his chronicle are not august statesmen, their heads in the clouds, but practical politicians, their hooves in the trough. His book is a superb treatise upon government under democracy. It is a sort of running footnote upon all the multitudinous histories of the United States.

I think so well of it that I am laying in a dozen copies for presentation to young friends, male and female, when they reach political nubility under the Constitution. It will teach them far more than all the “civics” lectures they have heard in school from servile pedagogues. It will show them exactly how the United States is run, and by whom. I believe that they will enjoy it as I have, but that it will make them eager for the service of their country, or hot to die for it in some unsanitary trench—in that direction I have some doubts.