H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/January 10, 1921

I.

Nothing could better reveal the intellectual poverty of the United States than the sebaceous enthusiasm with which the native intelligentsia receive such English books as Mrs. Asquith’s autobiography and H. G. Wells’ “Outline of History.” A timorous and shallow people, we produce nothing of the sort, and are well aware of it in the privacy of our bosoms. Imagine an American woman of La Asquith’s position boasting of her amours in a book, and confessing that she smokes cigars! And think of an American historian, with his university board of trustees on his neck, laying about him in the Berserker manner of Wells! Our serious history, in particular, is chiefly idiotic. Lately I read a pretentious work by one Hazen, a pedagogue at the great Talmud Torah school of Columbia. The doctrine in it is indistinguishable from the journalistic piffle of Horatio Bottomley and G. K. Chesterton. Yet this Hazen, so I am told, is a high-toned professor, and much esteemed by the illuminati. Certainly no more intelligent. history than his is coming out of the Johns Hopkins, or out of Harvard. Maybe Rhodes does better, though his last book is so dull that I can’t read it. But Rhodes is a sort of marvel, a tired businessman turned historian, and too cunning to be a professor of the art he adorns.

The chief monument to American historical scholarship and academic self-respect is the indorsement of the so-called Sisson documents—a business managed with great humor by the Hon. George Creel. Creel mobilized all the university historians into one great, lowing herd, spread his balderdash before them and then retired into his ante-chamber to snicker. When he got back the honor of the learned men was pledged to a forgery so childish that its English authors were embarrassed by the imprimatur. They had aimed at the readers of the New York Tribune—and they had brought down the Sacred College.

II.

Compared to all such funereal blockheads, Wells is a man of information and sagacity, and so it is no wonder that his book is being devoured eagerly, and with not much attempt at criticism. It reveals a mind that is alert, penetrating and tenacious; Wells, in brief, has a head on him. He has apparently read more books than even Buckle, and applied to the reading of them a more active and discriminating intelligence. More, he has arranged his facts, such as they are, and his conclusions, such as they are, in an extremely neat and orderly manner, so that they unroll fluently and are easily grasped. I can think of many more penetrating stimulating histories; for example, Carlyle’s “Frederick” and Treitschke’s “Germany in the Nineteenth Century.” But I know of none so well-constructed, so crystal-clear, so deftly simplified. A bright boy of 15 or girl of 12 could read it and understand it. Even a Congressman, if sober, might be able to got through it.

Its defects are easily stated. Wells is an Englishmen, and hence prejudiced in favor of government by debate, propaganda and epidemic hysteria—in brief, parliamentarism. Secondly, he is an Englishman of a class that (by English standards) is low, and hence he is full of sentimentalities about brotherhood, equality, universal education, and so on. Such men as Julius Cæsar, Alexander the Great and Charlemagne violate his congenital prejudices, and he is grossly unjust to them, and greatly misrepresents them. So, too, with such political philosophers as Bismarck and Machiavelli; unable to summon up anything save loathing for their ideas, he sets them down, in the ready democratic manner, as immoral men. This bias runs through his history. It is history rouged and lip-sticked for democrats and by a democrat. But by a democrat who is also a shrewd, a disarmingly persuasive, and, on the whole, an honest and attractive man. If and when he is wrong, he is at least wrong within the limits of decency. There is in him nothing of the numskull smugness of our own historiographers.

III.

With the highest diffidence and respect, I venture to suggest that two fundamental errors corrupt his whole work. The first is the time-honored democratic error of assuming that the plain people, once they were educated and informed, would at once put an end to all of the curses which now harass the world—for example, war. I constantly marvel that experience has not long since laid this delusion. Is there, in point of fact, any evidence that a democratic state is less warlike than any other sort of state? I can see none in the history of the last century. On the contrary, it seems to me that a mob, however well groomed by schoolmasters and news-mongers, is quite as bellicose and reckless as the most insane despot ever heard of. Has Mr. Wells so soon forgotten the Khaki election in England? Or our own war with Mexico?

Moreover, he overlooks the capital fact that popular education, no matter what efforts are made to rationalize it, is bound to remain little more than a dull, stupid device for perpetuating the nonsense that happens to be official—in other words, the nonsense favored by the powers in control of the state. Imagine what the average American boy is taught in school today, say of history! Go through the orders to teachers issued by the New York School Board. Surely it is foolish to argue that the ingestion of such a stew of lies and imbecilities will make the boy of today a well-informed and intelligent citizen tomorrow, wary of propaganda and acutely critical of the powers that be. On the contrary, such an education is deliberately designed to make him subservient to those powers. Americans, when their education stopped with three R’s, were a self-reliant, liberty-loving and extremely rebellious lot. But now, with pedagogy perfected and a schoolhouse on every corner, they are a herd of sheep.

Wells’ second salient error consists in confusing the restless proletariat of today with the emerging peasantry of the late Middle Ages. The two are by no means identical. The latter stood in the position of a nation reclaiming its soil from alien invaders. The dispossessed aristocracy, as Wells himself shows, was seldom native; it rather represented the survivors of a successful raid by nomads upon a settled civilization—a civilization firmly rooted to the land. But the proletariat of today is really more nomadic than the old aristocracies. Here in America it is actually made up chiefly of foreign immigrants; everywhere it is marked by its mobility, its incapacity for taking root, its freedom from the constraints of fixed property. It is in the nation, but never quite of it; its whole politics, since it began to be self-conscious, consists of accentuating its intrinsic hostility to the actual occupiers of the land.

I doubt that the rise of such a faction to overlordship would promote civilization in the way that Mr. Wells fancies. In the long run, of course, it might do so, just as the invasion of the barbarians promoted civilization is Europe. Ruling castes tend to degenerate; they must be refertilized by catastrophe. But to say that invading barbarians are themselves civilized is stretching the facts. The most that one may hope for is that they will become civilized as they war upon civilization—that the conquerors will be conquered. This is a hope that certainly does not drip with unction. There is sand in it. It scratches.