H. L. Mencken

The Evening Sun/October 2, 1926

The bawling against the Bolsheviki that still goes on in certain one hundred percent American journals, and especially in certain of the journals of Wall Street, is hard to understand. As matter of fact, it must be plain to even a Congressman or a cockroach that the Red peril is now as dead in this vast, sweating and Christian republic as the peril of Swedenborgianism or phrenology. And it must be equally plain that bolshevism killed it.

There was a ticklish time, just after the war, when a certain amount of Red blather undoubtedly circulated in the United States, and was listened to gravely by the more romantic variety of half-wits. One heard, in those days, that one big union was being formed and that presently the sawers of wood and drawers of water would leap out of the ditch and seize the Government. The parlor Socialists, throwing off the uniforms that they had hastily put on in 1917, rejoiced and were exceedingly glad, and there was a buzz of anticipation among the surviving liberals. Wall Street was frankly alarmed and yelled for help to its valets and crumb gobblers in the American Federation of Labor. 

But then came the famine in Russia and the collapse of Bolshevism—and after that even the parlor Socialists began to cough sadly behind their hands. Did the correspondents of the capitalistic press misrepresent and defame the Bolsheviki? Then not enough to conceal the bitter truth. That truth was presently brilliantly plain. Bolshevism was a colossal and ignominious failure. The poor of Russia were poorer than they ever had been before. The whole country was plunged into disorder, filth, misery and woe. And it kept on slambanging downhill, madly and dizzily, until the boss Bolsheviki’ themselves, convinced against their will, abandoned half of the chief tenets of Bolshevism and set up what is now to all intents and purposes, a capitalistic state—a fourth-rate one, perhaps, as Nicaragua and Portugal are fourth-rate ones, but still a capitalistic state. It is run today by Bolsheviki playing at banking. It will be run tomorrow by bankers playing at Bolshevism. And day after tomorrow it will be run by bankers in propria persona. 

II.

As I say, this lesson has not been lost the plain people of our incomparable federal union. They are, in the main, excessively stupid, but they are not so stupid that they cannot tell a hawk from a handsaw. If they ever had any belief in the millennium of the Reds, they have been cured of that belief. They no longer bellow for the American Legion when a stray Red arises on his soapbox and begins to denounce Henry Ford: they simply laugh at him.

All the chief radical organizations are in a state of demoralization and impotency. The I. W. W., once so formidable in the Far West, is now reduced to small news items on the inside pages; its old gaudy doings are so far abandoned that it can scarcely muster a quorum in any reputable jail. The Farmer-Labor party, if it survives at all, survives only on the bleak steppes along the Canadian border, where a man must be indignant or freeze to death. The Committee of Forty-Eight, poisoned by a too gluttonous gulping of issues, is no more. The miscellaneous followers of the late Dr. La Follette become more regular every day. 

Even the Socialists seem to be down and out. They are divided into half a dozen warring factions. and spend most of their time denouncing one another for treason. It is impossible to make out what they are after, or how they propose to get it. If, seeking light, one starts to read a Socialist paper one is sure to be warned by some alarmed comrade, soon or late, that it is run by scabs and is in the pay of Judge Elbert H. Gary, the Santa Claus of old Sam Gompers. Nine-tenths of the well-heeled parlor Socialists took to the sewers during the war and have never emerged since. The movement is thus short of money and hence running under low steam. Ten years ago it was in the drawing room and as respectable as birth control, Near East relief or the Junior League. Now it has gone back to the rear rooms of fourth rate saloons. 

III.

What amazes me is that a folly so palpably feeble should get so much discussion and inspire so much terror. In some of the great organs of right thinking, daily and weekly it is talked of as if it were in full blast among us and menacing everyone. There is always the hint that it has unnumbered dupes under cover, and that they are preparing, with the aid of Russian gold, to rise up some night, massacre the army and navy, heave poor Cal into the Potomac and put a Bolshevik in the White House. A great fear seems to underly all this nonsense, and it is difficult to rationalize it. Does a guilty conscience inspire it? Or are its springs to be found in the natural cowardice of capitalism? 

The second theory is probably better than the first. Industrial capitalism, as we now know it, is something relatively new in the world, and its power far from secure. The mob is restless under it, and at any moment may rise against it and do it vast damage or even destroy it. Worse, it is menaced by other forces, dimly seen but apparently of high potency. They appear in Italy under the guise of Fascism. Fascism, at the moment, defends capitalism against the workers and especially against the intelligentsia. But what is to prevent it, on some horrible tomorrow, switching to the other side? 

Whatever the cause, capitalism is skittish everywhere, and full of wild alarms whenever a noise is heard behind the door. Nowhere does it show the calm assurance that used to be so characteristic of the old aristocracy. Even when it is blatant, it is blatant in an artificial and unconvincing way. It seems to be somewhat doubtful, itself, about its place in civilization, and hence about its security. The baron, going to bed at night, snored peacefully and innocently. He simply could not imagine his own extinction, he refused to believe in it, even when it was upon him. But the traders and money lenders who now rule the world have no such confidence. They are always seeing burglars under the bed and the glint of steel and smelling their own blood. So they do a good deal of caterwauling and viewing with alarm. 

IV.

I believe that they concern themselves unduly. Capitalism is not only safe in the world today; it probably is safe in the United States for a century to come. For its deficiencies, however eloquently they are presented, are always seen, on fair inspection, to be less than its merits, and so the common sense of the American people runs in its favour. The Utopians who propose that it be abandoned for something else are all obviously balmy. The something else that even the most intelligent of them offers is ten times worse, and the something else that the rank and file dream of is plainly insane. 

The more rational objections to capitalism almost always turn out, when they are examined, to be objections not to the thing itself but to individuals who misuse it. This or that capitalist oppresses his employes; another one throws his wealth on the side of prohibition, or fundamentalism, or service, or some other such folly; yet another, having attained to political power, employs it corruptly. But saying all that is simply saying that no conceivable scheme for running the world can ever be perfect, or secure against rogues and fools. Suppose we had socialism? Is there any assurance that all of the boss Socialists be intelligent and honest? There is not. On the contrary, there is every assurance that a majority of them would be either idiots or scoundrels, and maybe both. 

The Russian adventure has surely rammed that capital fact home. I am convinced that most of the men who set up the Soviet government were wholly honest, and that many of them were of high intelligence. To dismiss Lenin as a mere maniac is nonsense; he was worth 10,000 Coolidges. But one man could not run a great state—not even a man with a touch of genius. He had to take in helpers—and when he took in helpers he took in self-seekers and exploiters. They quickly reduced Russia to chaos and the Russians to misery. They did it more rapidly and more thoroughly any imaginable posse of capitalists could have done it. That is the point to be remembered. That is the sufficient answer to the romantics who still admire them.