H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury/March, 1924

NO COUNTRY in the world, as everyone knows, is so fecund of political mountebanks as this, our great free Republic, the mentor and exemplar of Christendom. We not only produce the largest annual crop, known to faunal statisticians, relatively and absolutely; we also produce the most lush diversity of species and the most copious multiplicity of strange, unprecedented de Vriesian mutations. So rich is this variety, indeed, that descriptive zoology is bankrupted, and the same banal, almost anonymous label has to be stuck upon specimens of the utmost unlikeness. What pair of messiahs could differ more harshly than Hiram and Magnus, the one a pedantic little fellow with a chelonian paunch and gold eye-glasses and the other a rough, shaggy, carnivorous revivalist from the dreadful steppes? Yet both are Johnsons, and the same ancient name had to do service, in an era now closed, for two prophets even more diverse, Andrew and Tom L. One is hard put, indeed, to find points of similarity between individuals so at odds. A Roosevelt and a Tom Watson, a Jerry Simpson and a Charles Evans Hughes seem to belong to different genera, even to different solar systems. Yet the patient scientist, laboriously examining and classifying these variegated and precious paladins of democracy, is suddenly struck with a likeness that runs through the pack from end to end, binding even the most bizarre and inordinate specimens into a compact brotherhood; nay, more, he finds two likenesses. The first lies in the fact that all are born hot for jobs, and never cease to hunt them until dust returns to dust. The other lies in the fact that all share the same passionate tenderness for the humble husbandman, the lonely companion of Bos taurus, the sweating and persecuted farmer.

A reader for years of the Congressional Record—which, in accuracy, is to all other American journals as an autopsy is to an Elks’ lodge of sorrow—, I have encountered in its dense and pregnant columns denunciations of almost every human act or idea that is imaginable, from adultery to Zionism, and of all classes of men that the legislative mind is aware of, from Antinomians to Zoroastrians, but never once have I observed the slightest insolence, direct or indirect, to the farmer. He is, indeed, the pet above all other pets, the enchantment and delight, the saint and archangel of all the unearthly Sganarelles and Scaramouches who roar in the two houses of Congress. He is more to them, day in and day out, than whole herds of Honest Workingmen, Gallant Jack Tars and Heroic Miners; he is more, even, than a platoon of Unknown Soldiers. There are days when one or another of these totems of the statesman is bathed with such devotion that it would make the Gracchi blush, but there is never a day that the farmer doesn’t get his share, and there is many a day when he gets ten times his share—when, indeed, he is completely submerged in rhetorical vaseline, so that it is hard to tell which end of him is made in the image of God and which is mere hoof. No session ever begins without a grand assault at all arms upon his hereditary foes, from the boll-weevil and the San Jose scale to Wall Street and the Interstate Commerce Commission. And no session comes to an end without a huge grist of new laws to save him from them—laws embodying the most subtle statecraft of the most daring and ingenious body of lawmakers ever assembled under one roof on the habitable globe. One might almost argue that the chief, and perhaps even the only aim of legislation in These States is to succor and secure the farmer. If, while the bombs of goose-grease and rockets of pomade are going off in the two Chambers, certain evil men meet in the basement and hook banderillas into him—say by inserting jokers into the chemical schedule of a new tariff bill, or by getting the long-haul rules changed, or by manipulating the loans of the Federal Reserve Banks—, then the crime is not against him alone: it is against the whole American people, the common decency of Christendom, and the Holy Ghost. Horn a farmer, and you stand in contumacy to the platforms of all known parties, to the devout faith of all known statesmen, and to God. Laborantem agricolam oportet primun de fructihus percipere.

Paul wrote to the Bishop of Ephcsus, at the latest, in the year 65 A. D.; the doctrine that I have ascribed to the Mesmers and Grimaldis of our politics is thus not a novelty of their contrivance, any more than their quest for jobs is a novelty of their contrivance. Nor is it, indeed, their monopoly, for it seems to be shared by all Americans who are articulate and devote themselves to political metaphysics and good works. The farmer is praised by Judge Elbert Gary and by William Z. Foster, by Judge Ben B. Lindsey and by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and by the Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis; I have even seen kind words for him in the monthly circular of the National City Bank. Am I, indeed, the first to raise a murmur against him? If so, then let it be a murmur for ten thousand trombones fortissimo, with solid chords for bombardons and ophicleides in the bass clef. And let its text be the simple doctrine that the farmer is, for all his alleged woes, predominantly a fraud and an ignoramus, that he richly deserves nine-tenths of what he suffers under our economic system, and that any city man, not insane, who sheds tears for him is shedding tears of the crocodile.

II

No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed, is known to students of the Anthropoidea. When the going is good for him he robs the rest of us up to the extreme limit of our endurance; when the going is bad he comes bawling for help out of the public till. Has anyone ever heard of a farmer making any sacrifice of his own interest, however slight, to the common good? Has anyone ever heard of a farmer advocating any political idea that was not absolutely self-seeking—that was not, in fact, deliberately designed to loot the rest of us to his gain? Greenbackism, free silver, government guarantee of prices, bounties on exports of foodstuffs, all the complex fiscal imbecilities of the cow state John Baptists—these are the contributions of the virtuous husbandman to American political theory. There never has been a time, in good seasons or bad, when his hands were not itching for more; there has never been a time when he was not ready to support any charlatan, however grotesque, who promised to get it for him. Why, indeed, are politicians so polite to him—before election, so obscenely amorous? For the plain and simple reason that only one issue ever interests or fetches him, and that is the issue of his own profit. He must be promised something definite and valuable, to be paid to him alone, or he is off after some other mountebank. He simply cannot imagine himself as a citizen of a commonwealth, in duty bound to give as well as take; he can imagine himself only as getting it all and giving nothing.

Yet we are asked to venerate this prehensile moron as the Ur-burgher, the citizen par excellence, the foundation-stone of the state. And why? Because he produces something that all of us must have—that we must get somehow on penalty of death. And how do we get it from him? By submitting helplessly to his unconscionable blackmailing—by paying him, not under any rule of reason, but in proportion to his roguery and incompetence, and hence to the direness of our need. I doubt that the American people, as a whole, would submit to that sort of high-jacking, year in and year out, from any other necessary class of men. When the railroad workman attempted it, in 1916, there was instant indignation; when a certain small squad of the Polizei tried it, a few years later, there was such universal horror that a politician who put down the crime became President of the United States. But the farmers do it over and over again, without challenge or reprisal, and the only thing that keeps them from reducing us, at intervals, to actual famine is their own imbecile knavery. They are all willing and eager to pillage us by starving us, but they can’t do it because they can’t resist attempts to swindle each other. Recall, for example, the case of the cotton-growers in the South. They agreed among themselves to cut down the cotton acreage in order to inflate the price—and instantly every party to the agreement began planting more cotton in order to profit by the abstinence of his neighbors. That abstinence being wholly imaginary, the price of cotton fell instead of going up—and then the entire pack of scoundrels began demanding assistance from the national treasury—in other words, began demanding that the rest of us indemnify them for the failure of their plot to blackmail us!

The same demand is made almost annually by the wheat farmers of the Middle West. It is the theory of the zanies who perform at Washington that a grower of wheat devotes himself to that banal art in a philanthropic and patriotic spirit—that he plants and harvests his crop in order that the folks of the cities may not go without bread. It is the plain fact that he raises wheat because it takes less labor than any other crop—because it enables him, after working sixty days a year, to loaf the rest of the twelve months. If wheat-raising could be taken out of the hands of such lazy fellahin and organized as the production of iron or cement is organized, the price might be reduced by a half, and still leave a large profit for entrepreneurs. It vacillates dangerously today, not because speculators manipulate it, but because the crop is irregular and undependable—that is to say, because those who make it are incompetent. The worst speculators, as everyone knows, are the farmers themselves. They hold their wheat as long as they can, borrowing our money from the country banks and hoping prayerfully for a rise. If it goes up, then we pay them an extra and unearned profit. If it goes down, then they demand legislation to prevent it going down next time. Sixty days a year they work; the rest of the time they gamble with our bellies. It is probably the safest gambling ever heard of. Now and then, true enough, a yokel who plunges too heavily comes to grief, and is ingested by the county-town mortgage shark; now and then a whole county, or state or even larger area goes bankrupt, and the financial dominoes begin falling all along the line stretching from Saleratus Center to New York. But such catastrophes are rare, and they leave no scars. When a speculator goes broke in Wall Street it is a scandalous matter, and if he happens to have rooked anybody of importance he is railroaded to jail. But when a speculator goes broke in the great open spaces, there is a great rush of political leucocytes to the scene, and presently it is made known that the sin was not the speculator’s at all, but his projected victims’, and that it is the prime duty of the latter, by lawful order upon the Treasurer of the United States, to reimburse him his losses and set him up for another trial.

The notion that wheat would be much cheaper and the supply far more dependable if it were grown, not by a motley horde of such puerile loafers and gamblers, but by competent men intelligently organized is not mine; I borrow it from Henry Ford, a busted seer. Now that he has betrayed them to Dr. Coolidge for a mess of pottage, the poor Liberals, once so enamored of his sagacity, denounce him as an idiot and a villain. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Ford’s discussion of the wastefulness of our present system of wheat-growing, in the autobiography which he didn’t write, is full of a powerful plausibility. Ford was born and brought up on a farm—and it was a farm, as farms go, that was very competently managed. But he knows very well that even the most competent farmer is seldom more adept than a chimpanzee playing the violin. The Liberals, indeed, cannot controvert his judgment; they have been thrown back upon belaboring his political morals. What he proposes, they argue, is simply the enslavement of the present farmer, now so gloriously free; with capitalism gradually absorbing his fields, he would have to go to work as a wage-slave. Well, why not? For one, I surely offer no objection. All the rubber we use today is raised by slave labor; so is all the morphine consumed at Hollywood. Our children are taught in school by slaves; our newspapers are edited by slaves. Wheat raised by slave labor would be just as nutritious as wheat raised by men earning $10,000 a year, and a great deal cheaper. If the business showed a good profit, the political clowns at Washington would launch schemes to confiscate it, as they now launch schemes to make good the losses of the farmers. In any case, why bother about the fate of the farmer? If wheat went to $10 tomorrow, and all the workmen of the cities became slaves in name as well as in fact, no farmer in this grand land of freedom would consent voluntarily to a reduction of so much as one-eighth of a cent a bushel.

III

But the Bauer is more than a petty swindler; he is also the prince of political nuisances. I have said that the only political proposal he can grasp is one which offers him direct loot. It is not quite true: he can also imagine one which has only the effect of harassing and damaging his enemy, the city man. The same mountebanks who get to Washington by promising to augment his gains and make good his losses devote whatever time is left over from that enterprise to saddling the rest of us with oppressive and extortionate laws, all hatched on the farm. There, where the cows low through the still night, and the jug of Peruna stands behind the stove, and bathing begins, as at Biarritz, with the vernal equinox—there is the reservoir of all the nonsensical legislation which now makes the United States a buffoon among the great nations. It was among country Methodists, practitioners of a theology degraded almost to the level of voodooism, that Prohibition was invented, and it was by country Methodists, nine-tenths of them actual followers of the plow, that it was fastened upon the rest of us, to the damage of our bank accounts, our dignity and our ease. What lies under it, and under all the other crazy enactments of its category, is no more and no less than the yokel’s congenital and incurable hatred of the city man—his simian rage against everyone who, as he sees it, is having a better time than he is. Now he proceeds further. Not content with assaulting us with his degraded and abominable ethics, he begins trying to force upon us his still worse theology. In the cow states Methodism has already come to the estate and puissance of a state religion; it is a criminal offense to teach any doctrine in contempt of it. No civilized man, to be sure, is yet actually in jail for the crime; civilized men simply keep out of such bleak garages for human Fords, as they keep out of Congress and Franz Josef Land. But the long arm of the Wesleyan revelation begins to stretch forth toward Babylon. The mountebank, Bryan, after years of preying upon the rustics on the promise that he would show them how to loot the cities by wholesale and a outrance, now reverses his collar and proposes to lead them in a jihad against what remains of American intelligence, already beleaguered in a few walled towns. We are not only to abandon the social customs of civilization at the behest of a rabble of peasants who sleep in their underclothes; we are now to give up all the basic ideas of civilization and adopt the gross superstitions of the same mob. Is this fanciful? Is the menace remote, and to be disregarded? My apologies for suggesting that perhaps you are one of the multitude who thought that way about Prohibition, and only five years ago. Bryan is a protean harlequin, and more favored by fortune than is commonly assumed. He lost with free silver but he won with Prohibition. The chances, if my mathematics do not fail, are thus 1 to 1 that he will win, if he keeps his health, with Fundamentalism—in his own unctuous phrase, that God will be put into the Constitution. If he does, then Eoanthropus will triumph finally over Homo sapiens. If he does, then the humble swineherd will drive us all into his pen.

IV

Not much gift for Vision is needed to imagine the main outlines of the ensuing Kultur. The city man, as now, will bear nine-tenths of the tax burden (who ever heard of a farmer paying income tax?); the rural total immersionist will make all the laws. He makes most of them, indeed, even now; he is the reservoir from which issue Prohibition, Sunday Blue Laws, Comstockery, the whole insane complex of statutes against free speech and free thought. But with Genesis firmly lodged in the Testament of the Fathers he will be ten times as potent and a hundred times as assiduous. No constitutional impediment will remain to cripple and harass his moral fancy. The Wesleyan code of rural Kansas and Mississippi, Vermont and Minnesota will be forced upon all of us by the full military and naval power of the United States. Civilization will gradually become felonious.

What I sing, I suppose, is a sort of Utopia. But it is not the Utopia of bawdy poets and metaphysicians; it is not the familiar Utopia of the books. It is a Utopia dreamed by seven millions of Christian husbandmen, far-flung in forty-eight sovereign States. They dream it on their long journeys down the twelve billion furrows of their seven million farms, up hill and down dale in the heat of the day. They dream it behind the stove on Winter nights, their boots off and their socks scorching, Holy Writ in their hands. They dream it as they commune with Bos taurus, Sus scrofa. Mephitis mephitis, the Methodist pastor, the Ford agent. It floats before their eyes as they scan the Sears-Roebuck catalogue for horse liniment, porous plasters and Bordeaux mixture; it rises before them when they assemble in their Little Bethels to be instructed in the Word of God, the plots of the Pope, the crimes of the atheists and Jews; it transfigures the Chautauquan who looms before them with his Great Message. This Utopia haunts and tortures them; they long to make it real. They have tried prayer, and it has failed; they now turn to the secular arm. The dung-fork glitters in the sun as the host prepares to march. . . .

Well, these are the sweet-smelling and altruistic agronomists whose sorrows are the leit-motif of our politics, whose votes keep us supplied with Bryans, Bleases and Magnus Johnsons, whose welfare is alleged to be the chief end of democratic statecraft, whose patriotism is the so-called bulwark of the so-called Republic. H.L.M.