Tag Archives: history

The Indian

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/May 3, 1910

We Americans have been warring upon the Indian for three centuries or more, but we have yet to penetrate his secret. What sort of man is he? What is his view of the world? What does he think of us, his conquerors?

We have come to understand the various races of white men well enough, including even the Slav and the Latin, and we have begun of late to get some insight into the mind of the black man, but the Indian is still a mystery. Grim, silent and immovable, he seems destined to remain a fantastic outlander forever. We have fought him; we have beaten him and we have reduced him to practical slavery, but we still search in vain for the soul within him.

This ignorance after all is not hard to explain. It is to be blamed, no doubt, upon the fact that those white men who have known the Indian best have been least able to write about him. The white renegade, living among the braves as one of them, is seldom a scrivener; the missionary, living among them, but not of them, gets the distorted view which always goes with enthusiasm, and the soldier, chasing them, can study them safely only as cadavers.

A Man Who Knows.

The result is an Indian literature which must give the red man himself a good deal of amusement. We have the sentimental rhapsodies of James Fenimore Cooper, who studied the Indian at Otsego Lake just as one might study the secretive Sicilian on Ellis Island; we have the stupendous Munchausen romances of the scouts; we have the dime novels and melodramas of the year before last, and we have, finally, the incredible tracts of the Lake Mohonk platitudinarians. In all that mass of printed paper there are very few plausible pictures of Indians. Sam Houston and his like were ignoramuses, and those self-constituted authorities who have actually seized their pens in hand have been gifted, as a rule, with far more assurance than knowledge.

But now, after many years, there comes a writer who really knows the Indian—at least the Indian of these degenerate times—and who is able to write about him clearly, entertainingly and convincingly. The name of that almost unprecedented man is James McLaughlin, and he has been one of Uncle Sam’s Indian agents for 39 years.

In 1871, when he opened his first office on the Dakota plains, the red man was still a roving savage. During the time since then Mr. McLaughlin has had a hand in practically all of the republic’s dealings with its disappearing charges. He has known all of the big chiefs and medicine men, from Sitting Bull and Spotted Tail to Chief Gall and Rain-In-the-Face. He has been alternately the scourge of the braves and their best friends: he has won their confidence and their respect, and so his book of reminiscences, “My Friend, the Indian,” is a book worth reading, a book revealing sound knowledge and shrewd reflection, a book that stands head and shoulders above the common run of Indian books.

The Real Indian.

As might be expected, Mr. McLaughlin points out many errors in the popular view of the Indian. It is commonly assumed, for example, that the red man’s one most prominent characteristic is his stoicism. He is placed in evidence time and time again as a human being entirely devoid of emotions. It is alleged that he has no fear, no heart, no nerves, no sense of humor. Mr. McLaughlin sweeps that theory into the rubbish heap.

“The stoicism of which so much is heard,” he says, “is no part of the Indian character. What has been described as stoicism, the trait that the Fenimore Coopers and other Indian romancers have been so fond of exploiting, is simply shyness. The Indian, as I have found him (and I have known the people under nearly all possible circumstances) is extremely shy with strangers, and this shyness takes the form of constitutional secretiveness in strenuous moments.

“The Indian child who appears savagely reticent to a stranger is very likely the most joyous romp with people he knows, be they white or red. He is shy as a wild thing is shy. The Indian man who suffers tortures without making a sign is not indifferent to pain, nor especially desirous that he should be regarded as indifferent. He is simply indulging his exaggerated tendency to secretiveness.

“An Indian in a crowd of whites will probably be wild with excitement over the strange things he sees, but he has too much regard for his own dignity to expose his sentiments. Let him understand that he is among friends or free from personal scrutiny and he is as joyously exuberant as though he had never possessed either dignity or secretiveness.

“I think that the most hilarious lot of men I ever saw was a crowd of Sioux, many of whom had been on the warpath against the whites, and all of whom regarded themselves as men of importance among their people—whom I took to see a musical comedy in Washington. They forgot the place, the people and their strange surroundings and whooped for very joy.”

Not Afraid Of Tears.

Mr. McLaughlin, going further, maintains that the Indian, like all other savages, is far more emotional than the civilized white man. Among his own people he is not afraid to weep. He is an ardent and romantic wooer, and when the tender passion overcomes him he lets everyone know it. Suicides for unrequited love are by no means rare among the Indians—even among the warlike Sioux. And the red man is always a sentimental and indulgent father and son. He delights in dandling his young upon his knee, and he delights in paying extravagant reverence to his mamma.

Mr. McLaughlin has a number of extremely interesting chapters upon the Indian wars of the last generation, in most of which he had a hand. He proves, by abundant evidence, that Sitting Bull, whom he knew very well, was far from a valiant warrior or wise chief. As a matter of fact, that unromantic rascal was an arrant coward, who fled in alarm from the battle of the Little Big Horn.

It was his great skill as a medicine man and not his military cunning that made him a man of influence. Sitting Bull, in a word, was a priest rather than a general. A shrewd guesser and an alert student of Indian character, he played upon the superstitions and credulity of his fellows. He was a master of ex post facto prophecy. Whenever a battle was won he found it easy to convince the Sioux that he had predicted a victory; whenever a battle was lost he found it equally easy to recall some lugubrious prognostication of disaster.

In the end it was Mr. McLaughlin that brought about the old scoundrel’s death. Sitting Bull, then a sort of prisoner of war, was quartered upon the Standing Rock agency reservation, of which Mr. McLaughlin was in charge. Toward the end of the eighties he had begun to take a hand in the ghost-dancing agitation, which owed its origin to a crazy Indian named Kicking Bear, and in the fall of 1890 there appeared reason to believe that he was planning an escape to the Bad Lands to join the braves at large and set them upon the warpath.

The End of Sitting Bull.

Mr. McLaughlin visited Sitting Bull and ordered him to leave his farm within a week and come in to the agency headquarters. Sitting Bull promised to do so, but that promise was not kept. Then Mr. McLaughlin sent Lieut. Bull Head, of the Indian police, after him—and what happened belongs to history.

Bull Head took 39 Indian police and four other friendly Indians volunteered to go along. They found Sitting Bull in his house in the midst of the village of admirers that had grown up about it. Bull Head gave him half an hour to array himself in his dress-parade raiment, and he expressed his willingness to come in peace, but when he came out and his followers began to taunt him for surrendering so ingloriously he suddenly shrieked a battle cry—and the fight began.

On the one side were 44 Indians from the agency and on the other side were 160 of Sitting Bull’s adherents, all armed and all frenzied fanatics. At the arrest first Bull Head and First Sergeant Shave Head fell, but from the ground Bull Head sent a bullet through Sitting Bull. An instant later Second Sergeant Red Tomahawk finished the old medicine man with a revolver shot through the head. On the side of the police six men were killed and a score wounded, and on the side of the hostiles twice as many more.

That was the last stand of the belligerent Sioux. Their fighting days were over. 

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Postwar Steps to Communism

Westbrook Pegler

Enid Morning News/January 1, 1943

NEW YORK. Dec. 31.-As the American people yield their liberties to their government, the better to fight the dictators and the sooner to win the war with the least possible loss of American lives, that government becomes daily more impatient toward the very freedom which the Fourth of July orators used to refer to as the sacred heritage. Henry Wallace, the vice-president, has spoken slightingly of the Bill of Rights and now he proposes that after this war, when Soviet dictatorship will overrun the European continent, the United States and her allies supervise or inspect the school systems of the enemy countries “to undo, as far as possible, the diabolical work of Hitler and the Japanese war lords in poisoning the minds of the young.”

Mr. Wallace, who detests dictatorship in the enemy nations, rather admires the Russian dictatorship, not merely as a military ally, but also as a method of government, and as he continues to call for cooperation and mutuality all over the world after the war, he offers no valid assurance that the realistic Stalin and his helpers will desist from spreading communism in Europe. Stalin, himself, has given no such commitment and it would be worthless, in the light of our own experience in the United States, if he should.

Although Soviet Russia gave solemn promise to quit interfering in the domestic affairs of this nation in the treaty of recognition negotiated early in the new deal, that interference has continued down to present hour under the auspices of, and through the members of the Communist party, which has been denounced as an alien, anti-American influence by Attorney General Biddle and whose subservience to the Kremlin was frankly if incautiously recognized a few weeks ago by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. Many tireless anti-Americans were present in the gathering before which Mr. Wallace disparaged the bill of rights.

This must mean only that the children of Europe, the next generation of fighters, will be taught Communism, including atheism, under the supervision or inspection of the guardian nations and that, as in Russia, and, indeed as in Germany and Italy today, the European people will exist for the state and the dictator’s purposes. That may be the inevitable next step but it is not necessary, nor is it assured that the people of the United States will agree to take a hand, even passively, in the inculcation of one poisonous philosophy to destroy another and, in effect, identical philosophy.

The alternative would seem to be for the United States to withdraw in isolation and armed preparedness to wait out the future. Mrs. Roosevelt recently expressed dissatisfaction with that freedom of Americans which permits a young man to become a doctor because he wants to, and to locate regardless of the community needs. This has the sound of something from the Communist arguments from Mein Kampf.

If Americans, through their government, are to supervise or inspect the teaching of the next generation of Europeans and of Japanese, and unpoison their minds, would Mr. Wallace do less than that for his own people? It seems very unlikely and unlike him and in considering this probability one must consider, too, that his idea of intellectual poison might conflict with the inherent American idea.

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For American Communists, What Victory Will Bring

Westbrook Pegler

Enid Morning News/January 24, 1943

NEW YORK, Jan. 22.—Memory is short and most Americans seem to forget the aggressive campaign of the communists and their fellow travelers to cripple the United States during the life of the so-called non-aggression pact between Russia and Nazi Germany, the document which touched off this war, which terminated on June 22, 1941, when Hitler attacked Russia. Like the Nazis in our midst, the communists insisted that war was not, and could not become, the legitimate business of the United States. The communists and the Nazis however, had a common purpose to prevent the creation of military strength here. The sincere American noninterventionists on the other hand wanted to arm the country and train armies but hoped to be able to sit this one out.

On August 31, 1939, V. M. Molotov, the Russian commissar of foreign affairs, in a speech to the supreme soviet, published in pamphlet form for American distribution by the workers library of New York, said: “The nonaggression pact marks a turning point in the history of Europe and not only of Europe. Only yesterday, the German fascists were pursuing a foreign policy hostile to us. Yes, only yesterday we were enemies in the sphere of foreign relations. Today, however, the situation has changed and we are enemies no longer.

“The pact puts an end to the enmity between Germany and the USSR. The fact that our outlooks and political systems differ must not and cannot be obstacles to the establishment of good political relations. Only enemies of Germany and the USSR can strive to create enmity between the peoples of these countries.”

It will be seen that the detestation of fascism per se, and the furious determination to stamp it out because it is evil, was lacking in those days. Russia was willing to live and let fascism live as good neighbors. It was only when Hitler repudiated the pact and attacked that fascism suddenly became an intolerable evil of itself.

On November 13, 1939, Earl Browder, the general secretary of the American communist party and leader of the enormous conspiracy against this nation’s rearmament and military training program, made a speech in Madison Square Garden in which he said: “We communists clearly and boldly denounce the present war as an imperialistic one, on both sides, from which the people have nothing to gain but misery, starvation, oppression and death. We warn that the peoples who suffer from this war will not be patient but will prepare to take the decision into their own hands if our present ‘statesmen’ do not stop the war. We point out that in Europe this means that the war can have only the effect of placing the socialist revolution on the order of business as a practical question.”

Browder was not then as strongly opposed to fascism as an evil as to approve a war to obliterate it. Some American editors and statesmen lately have flinched from the possibility that communism may succeed fascism, from which it is indistinguishable, on continental Europe and mention of this possibility is deplored and even suppressed.

Yet on the word of the boss communist of the United States, the socialist revolution is now on the order of business in Europe. In another document issued by the New York communist publishing house in February, 1940, entitled “I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier for Wall Street,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote: “The best insurance to keep off the toboggan slide into war is an ultimatum to our government: ‘stay neutral; not a dollar for war.’ Starve the war; feed America first! We must hurry. Already President Roosevelt has started along the road that led Woodrow Wilson to war.”

The rest of the pamphlet is in the same vein and if these and many other documents of the same kind were published then had any effect at all, it was to retard the arming and training of the American fighters from whom a great cry was sent be up by the communists last summer however, when they were demanding to a second front in Europe, and to impair the production of weapons, planes and machines which the same communists now demand in unlimited and miraculous abundance for Russia, The lesson taught by this literature is that Russia’s war is a nationalistic fight for life, not a gallant defense of the freedom which fascism, like communism, strives to annihilate; that Russia does contemplate a communistic revolution in Europe when it is won and that the relationship between the United States and Russia is not one of political comradeship but of military alliance in a war against a common enemy of two distinct nations.

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The Origin and Nature of Law

H.L. Mencken

Virginian-Pilot/November 14, 1929

I

Perhaps the most interesting enterprise now in progress at the Johns Hopkins University is the organization of the new institute of law. It is in its beginning pianissimo, but it promises to develop into something of the first value. For what it proposes to do is to get behind the statutes and precedents which judges and lawyers habitually deal with, pursuing their dull round from the law-school to the grave, and let some light into the ideas lying beneath. What do we mean, precisely, when we speak of laws? Why do we need them? How do we get them? Who frames them? What sort of men administer them? To what extent are they socially useful and to what extent are they evil?

These are some of the questions that the new institute will deal with—not in the narrow manner of lawsuit, but in the wider and freer way of men of science. The beginning faculty is small, but the four men composing it—Drs. Oliphant, Cook, Marshall and Yntema—are all scholars of sound achievements and liberal ideas, and as time passes others will join them. Already several interesting investigations are under way—one into the normal course and practical effect of lawsuits in the American civil courts. Others will be added at once, and yet others as the work of the Institute broadens. I hoped, in the end, to have a staff and composed of specialists in all fields which have any contact with that of the law, and to so integrate their work that the traditional isolation of legal studies will be broken down, and a beginning made toward delivering juridic science from the twilight in which it has lain so long in America.

The new institute will not be a law-school. It will not train lawyers, nor even professors of law. Its aim will be the quite different one of examining the fundamentals that they have no time for. Those fundamentals have got very little attention in this country. The structure of law is such that lawyers have all they can do to master the innumerable statutes and their endless interpretations; there is no energy left for legal philosophy. But even statutes, however idiotic they may look, yet have some kind of philosophy in them: they are based on ideas wider than they are. The gentlemen of the institute, if I understand their plan, will try to find out what those ideas are, and to improve them whenever it seems necessary and feasible.

II

The scheme looks immensely promising, for the field is almost virgin. For a century and a half we have been bowling along in the United States without giving the nature of law more than a passing thought. It has been accepted as a part of the immutable order of the cosmos, like the weather. But the fact is that it is almost as human as love. Even on its highest levels, it does not represent fixed forces: it represents only human desire. In one case what really lies behind it may be no more than the fact that a certain legislator, on a certain day, hoped to be re-elected, and was thus eager to please the Methodist preacher, or the town banker, or the owner of the cannery. In another it may be no more than a monument to some judge’s lumbago, or to his unrequited thirst.

Forced to deal habitually with such irrationalities, and to make elaborate show of respect for them, most lawyers end by losing all capacity to distinguish between the true and the false. The world they live in is a world of grotesque shadows, lacking all substantial reality. It is not that they are unintelligent—on the contrary, the law demands a high order of intelligence—it is simply that they are forced to concentrate their minds constantly upon propositions that are devoid of intrinsic sense. The net effect is visible in the pronouncements of some of the higher courts—all made up of lawyers who have grown gray and doddering in that bondage of nonsense. Here one encounters a kind of logic that is to the logic of Aristotle as chiropractic is to surgery.

No doubt it is an uncomfortable sense of all this that makes so many lawyers go into public life. Their own profession, in the last analysis, cannot satisfy them, as a medical man, say, is satisfied by his. It wars upon their intellectual integrity so savagely that they long for escape. But by the time they do escape they are usually ruined beyond repair, and so their chief occupation, as public servants, is adding to the stock of imbecile laws. 

III

Here the ground is somewhat shaky, and the institute, if it enters at all, will have to go warily. It will take 50 years to convince the American people that law is wholly man-made, and, none too respectable. A good many of them, perhaps, have been inoculated with suspicions in that direction by the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, but it must not be forgotten that many others, on the same evidence, have been confirmed in the belief that all laws come direct from God. Here we must be patient, for superstitions, as everyone knows, die very hard.

In other fields there is easier going. The inquiry into the normal history of a lawsuit I have mentioned. Why should such things drag out so long, and why should they be so expensive? Theoretically, the civil law is a device to protect the citizen in his rights—to give him justice, swiftly, impersonally and infallibly. But actually it is little more than a machine for bankrupting him, wearing him out, and making an anarchist of him. Who in the audience has ever had a real lawsuit? And who, having had one, believes that the courts really earn what they cost?

The causes behind their failure are not to be made out without long study. It may be that, in view of the general insanity of the law itself, they can never do any better. On the other hand, it may be that the judges are to blame. My own belief is that this last is the more probable. After all, there is no inescapable reason why a judge should not throw overboard at least four-fifths of his mumbo-jumbo. If he talked common sense it would, of course, cause a sensation, but the worst that could happen to him would be that he would lose his job. It seems to me that the gain would be well worth the loss, for he would go down into history as a revolutionist comparable to Martin Luther, Darwin or Copernicus.

How judges get to the bench is a question that deserves study. The theory is that they are eminent lawyers, drafted for higher service because of their legal genius. Yet I have known some who shinned up the pole simply because they could not make decent livings at the bar. And others who tired of the law and its futilities, and desired to sleep. And yet others who were elevated to keep them out of other and better offices. And a few, finally, who had ambitious wives. Today aspirants to the Federal bench have to be rubber-stamped by the Anti-Saloon League and the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals precisely as hot dogs are stamped in the abattoir. Why? To what end? On what theory?

IV

On more decorous levels there are vast opportunities for the new Institute of Law. It might look with profit to the matter of the declarative judgment—long on trial in some States, but still in dispute. And into the question of uniform State legislation: is it really advisable, or is it simply something to help lazy lawyers? And into the divorce laws—still corrupted almost everywhere by ideas that are not legal at all, but theological. And into the curious process whereby the Bill of Rights has been engulfed by the Eighteenth Amendment, so that all of its solemn guarantees have disappeared, save only the prohibition of quartering troops upon private citizens in time of peace.

A thousand other inquiries suggest themselves. The institute has plenty of work cut out for it. It begins with enough capital to launch its business, and soon it will move into a home of its own, provided by an anonymous donor—no doubt a lawyer with a conscience. But it will need more money to expand, and here a chance presents itself to other gentlemen of the bar, grown rich, more or less, at the law. Many of the projects in contemplation call for relatively modest endowments. A library could be set up for $50,000. Certain very useful inquiries might be carried on for even less. Here’s a good chance for lawyers who take their trade seriously, and want to see it increase in dignity. Even a few thousand dollars might keep a student for a year, or pay for printing a useful book.

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Best Strategy in Pinch is to Walk Babe Ruth

Damon Runyon

El Paso Times/October 10, 1923

NEW YORK, Oct. 9.—Our young friend, Mr. Arthur Robinson, enthusiastic authority on baseball, leans over and suggests that the world series will be McGraw vs. Babe Ruth—“the master mind against brute force.”

It is young Mr. Robinson’s idea that if McGraw, sitting on the bench of the Giants, can transmit to his pitchers certain strategy in pitching to Ruth, the big slugger of the Yankees, they will be helpless and the Giants will win.

It is an interesting thought.

But McGraw himself can not do the pitching to Ruth.

His baseball brain must be turned on Ruth second-hand. That makes McGraw’s task very difficult.

***

Intelligence—a “master mind”—can not always offset brute force.

Put a gorilla in a stout cage and an intelligent man standing outside the cage could easily devise a method of destroying the gorilla without harm to himself.

But if the man went inside the cage with the gorilla, all the intelligence in the world couldn’t save the man.

Of course, in this case the value of intelligence as opposed to brute force would be in the fact that intelligence would keep the man from going into the cage.

***

McGraw, sitting on the bench of the Giants, with Ruth at bat, may see some method of outwitting the slugger.

But McGraw can not personally execute the method.

He must explain it to his pitcher. If the pitcher doesn’t also have a “master mind,” what will happen?

That is on the knees of the baseball gods.

***

“Germany” Schmidt was a left-handed pitcher of the long ago, called eccentric, yet by no means lacking intelligence.

He had a small notebook in which he would enter the batting weaknesses of different ball players as he discovered them in his pitching.

At times he would hole up a game while he pulled out his little book and consulted it to refresh his memory on some man at the plate to see how to pitch to him.

One day John Honus Wagner, great old time slugger of the Pittsburgh Pirates, was at bat. “Germany” pondered a moment, then reached for his book. He had forgotten his notation on Wagner. IN the book he found he had made this entry:

“Wagner: Batting weakness—Base on balls.”

***

McGraw told the writer this story years ago.

Perhaps McGraw will recall the story when Ruth steps to the plate at a critical moment and the master mind is whirling in an effort to evolve strategy to overcome brute force.

At the race track they say, “When in doubt, play Sande.”

The meaning is, if a bettor is undecided what horse to bet on in a race, it is wisdom to select the horse on which Earl Sande, the king of the jockeys, has the mount.

When Babe Ruth as at the bat n a pinch, the best strategy is to give him the base on balls.

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The Woes of a Holy Man

H.L. Mencken

Dothan Eagle/June 28, 1929

I

All the pother about Monsignor James Cannon, Jr.’s, unfortunate venture into an outhouse of Wall Street seems to be founded upon a misunderstanding of Methodist canon law. It will be admitted by everyone, I take it, that playing the board, even when a sworn ambassador of Christ is the performer, is not prohibited by the ordinary or civil law. A bishop obviously has the same civil rights as any other man, and any other man, under what remains of American freedom, is free to buy and sell stocks as he pleases. That privilege, as we all know, is one of the many thousands Americans have sought and enjoyed during the past few years, and included among them, I have no doubt, have been multitudes who now hold His Grace up to contumely, and hint broadly that he ought to be deconsecrated and unfrocked.

What lies under this demand, when simple dislike of the man is not responsible for it, is apparently a feeling that a bishop is bound by tighter bonds than other men—in other words that he must not only obey the ordinary law with great scrupulosity, but also the canon law of his church, which is assumed to be far more rigorous. The doctrine here is sound, but there is a false assumption in the application of it. That is the assumption that the canon law of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, prohibits trading in the market. It prohibits nothing of the sort. On the contrary, a fair examination of it indicates that it actually encourages such trading, provided only that the successful speculator devotes a reasonable part of his gains to the uses of the church. 

Nowhere in the Book of Discipline of the Southern Methodists, the official lawbook of the denomination, is there any prohibition, either direct or indirect, of gambling. The Northern Methodists, to be sure, are forbidden to indulge in “such games of chance as are frequently associated with gambling,” but that is as far as it goes—and Northern Methodists are by no means to be confused with their Confederate brethren. The two churches are quite distinct, and their Books of Discipline differ radically. Many prohibitions in the Northern book are conspicuously missing in the Southern book. One is the prohibition of “buying or selling slaves.” Another is the prohibition of tobacco. Yet another is the prohibition of frequenting “misleading” movie shows, whatever that may mean. And a fourth is the prohibition of gambling.

II

The Southern Methodist discipline, in fact, is very much less harsh and rigorous than that of the Northern Wesleyans, and even on the awful subject of wine-bibbing it shows a relatively mild and civilized spirit. The Northern Methodists, for example (General Rule, 30), are forbidden to resort to “drunkenness, buying or selling spirituous liquors, or drinking them” save in cases of “extreme necessity,” whereas the Southern faithful are quite free to get drunk in cases of plain necessity, without any qualifications of extremity. Moreover, the Southern discipline lets it go at that, whereas the Northern discipline goes on to ban “all intoxicants,” whether spirituous or not, and adds “cigarettes and tobacco in all other forms” for good measure.

In the Northern church a candidate for holy orders, before he may be licensed to preach, must answer two questions satisfactorily, to wit: “Will you wholly abstain from the use of tobacco?” and “Are you in debt so as to embarrass you in the work of the ministry?” In the Southern church the first question is omitted (Ministers and Church Officers, VI, 168). As a makeweight certain others are added, for example: “Are you going on to perfection?” “Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life?” and “Are you groaning after it?” Bishop Cannon, when he was ordained, said yes to all of these questions, but he did not promise to avoid the use of tobacco, and so he is perfectly free to smoke it or chew it today (as many of his brethren of the cloth do), just as he is perfectly free to buy or sell slaves, to go to “misleading” movies, to keep a jug in his house against a possible necessity, and to play the bucket shops until he either goes broke or is rich enough to have himself made an archbishop.

To deny him these diversions upon canonical grounds is absurd. He must, of course, avoid those that are forbidden by the civil law, e.g., trading in slaves, but beyond that he is free to do as he pleases. Even a bishop is yet a man, and even a Methodist may amuse himself within the law. I see no evidence that Monsignor Cannon has ever stepped so much as an inch outside it.

III

Both branches of Methodism are extremely fond of (and hence respectful to) money, and their clergy are business men quite as much as they are priests. Open any Methodist paper at random, and the chances are at least five to one that you will light upon a call for more funds: such calls, many of them couched in peremptory terms, always greatly outnumber the treatises on the saving of souls. The two churches of the church support immense staffs of collectors, and they are hard at work all the time. For a Methodist to attend divine service without being besought to cough up for this or that great cause would be so surprising that it would probably strike him as almost miraculous. He is taught frankly that getting into Heaven costs money, and that his chances run with his liberality.

This attitude of mind naturally makes the well-heeled Babbitt a powerful personage in the church. He is in many parishes the de facto if not the de jure superior of the pastor, and can turn one pastor out and bring another in as he pleases. This is true, in particular, in the South, where the generality of the faithful are poor, and the prosperity of a given church depends upon the generosity of a few rich individuals. In the cotton-mill towns of the Carolinas two-thirds of the churches are supported by the mill magnates, and the clergy are as much their employees as the slaves in their mills. What this control amounted to was shown during the recent strike down there, when the local Methodist papers, otherwise ever eager to horn into “moral” causes, were magnificently about the exploitation and ill usage of the poor morons at the hands of their pious masters. There was plenty of space for denouncing the brutes hired by the mill-owners to put down the strike.

Thus Methodism is anything but Socialistic. On the contrary, it is all for the capitalistic system, and is perhaps the only church existing today which makes a belief in that system a cardinal article of faith. (Southern Book of Discipline, Sec. III, 30; Northern, Division I, 24.) Getting money, by its code, is not only not sinful; it is positively virtuous. The one thing that is forbidden is laying it up. It must be “systematically administered for the kingdom of God,” i.e., for the high uses and occasions of the rev. clergy. Well, Dr. Cannon is himself a clergyman.

IV

There is nothing in either Discipline, or in any other canonical text that I am aware of, which indicates that getting money by speculation is held to be less moral than getting it in any other way. If it were, then some of the most eminent Methodist laymen in the South would be lying under danger of excommunication. I avoid embarrassing the living by pointing to one now safe in Heaven: the late Asa G. Candler, inventor of Coca-Cola. The Hon. Mr. Candler, while he lived, was unquestionably the most eminent Methodist south of the Potomac. The church got millions out of him, and showed its appreciation by making his younger brother a bishop. Was his money all made by simple trading? Hardly. A good deal of it also came out of a speculative rise in the stocks he was interested in, and in the fruits of that rise many another Southern Methodist shared.

I can recall no objection to this being business. On the contrary, Dr. Candler was anointed so lavishly in all the Methodist papers that he ran goose-grease almost like the Hon. Buck Drake, of Durham, N. C., another consecrated man who was lucky in the market, and did not forget the pastors when the money rolled in. Buck made his basic millions out of cigarettes—a fact that explain the absence of a prohibition of them in the Southern Book of Discipline—but he increased his load enormously in Wall Street. When he died he left $60,000,000 to a Methodist “university” at Durham, set up to counteract Darwinian wickedness at the State University at Chapel Hill, and more millions to a fund for underpaid Methodist preachers. He is a saint in Heaven today, though while he lived was a gambler and a wine-bibber. To denounce him at any Methodist camp meeting in the South would be as gross an indecorum as to denounce St. Patrick at an oyster roast of the Knights of Columbus.

For all these reasons—and I could adduce many more—I incline to think that Monsignor Cannon is being badly used. God knows, I am not one of his partisans, but even a bishop deserves justice. To hint that his venture into high-pressure go-getting disqualifies him to bind and loose by the Wesleyan rite is as absurd as to argue that he would be disqualified if he were caught pulling the cat’s tail, lifting jam from the pantry, or telling a lie. Methodist bishops are not so easily busted. So long as they avoid necking, morphine and going to mass they are safe. Even murder is within their prerogative—that is, provided they merely applaud it, and do not undertake it personally.

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Two Views of Justice

H.L. Mencken

Dothan Eagle/October 26, 1929

On October 8, in the Senate of the United States, H. R. 2667 (the new Smoot-Grundy tariff bill) being under debate, the Hon. Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg, A. M. honoris causa, L.L. D. h. c., editor of the Grand Rapids Herald, author of “Psychological Salesmanship,” and junior Senator from the republic of Michigan, offered the following amendment: 

(b) Furniture: The (antique) furniture described in paragraph 1812 shall enter the United States at ports which shall be designated by the Secretary of the Treasury for this purpose. If any article described in paragraph 1812 and imported for sale is rejected as unauthentic in respect to the antiquity claimed as a basis for free entry, there shall be levied, collected, and paid on such article, unless exported under customs supervision, a duty of 50 per cent of the value of such article in addition to any other duty imposed by law upon such commodity. 

As everyone knows, Dr. Vandenberg’s home, Grand Rapids, is the center of the American furniture industry, and so it was not unnatural for several Senators to suspect that his high dudgeon against bogus antiques from abroad was inspired in some way, however innocently or unconsciously, by such a tender solicitude for his constituents. One such doubter was the Hon. Clarence C. Dill, B. L., of Washington. Gathering himself together, he made bold to frame what he obviously intended to be a sarcastic question, to wit: 

Does the Senator think that his own Grand Rapids furniture people could make just as good “antiques”? 

But Dr. Vandenberg was not daunted. Instead he answered instantly and very frankly: 

I am glad to answer the Senator’s question. Yes; and undoubtedly there is a great deal of fake antique furniture made in the United States; but none of it cheats American labor, none of it cheats American capital, and none of it undertakes to defraud the Treasury of the United States. That is a very big distinction. 

This plainly satisfied the Senate. Even Senator Dill announced at once that he would vote for the amendment. It was, indeed, a reply falling in with the most ancient and honorable traditions of American legislation and jurisprudence. There was in it the fine flavor of perfect classicism. For what it said, reduced to everyday terms, was simply that the public could jolly well be dammed. The amendment provided a new source of revenue for the Treasury, which is to say, for the jobholders. It secured the struggling fake antique furniture industry of Grand Rapids against foreign competition. It made sure of adequate compensation for free American workmen, skilled in the art and mystery of manufacturing bogus Sheratons and Chippendales. As for protecting the rest of us against being swindled, the Senate simply had no time to be bothered.

II

I have said that all of the Senators were satisfied by Dr. Vandenberg’s reply. That, however, is not quite accurate. Several continued to murmur. One was the Hon. Thomas J. Walsh, LL.D., of Montana. Another was the Hon. Thaddeus H. Caraway, A. B., of Arkansas. Yet another was the Hon. Millard E. Tydings, LL.D., of Maryland. Dr. Tydings’ objection took a new, and, and, for the Senate, a strange and sinister line. 

What, he demanded, did the amendment amount to in substance? Didn’t it simply turn over all persons who brought furniture from abroad to the mercies of the customs jobholders? Didn’t it expose every such person, however innocent of any intent to defraud the Treasury, to the charge of attempting a swindle, and to summary execution without trial? What was to protect a perfectly reputable and well-meaning man, already rooked by fake-antique dealers in Europe from being further rogued and penalized by a gang of ignorant and irresponsible bureaucrats? “My heavens!” roared Dr. Tydings. “We have got so in this country that just so we can make a profit out of things, the justice of an individual situation no longer counts. Just so you can make money, what does it matter if a great injustice is done to four or five, or a hundred or a thousand people?”

But Dr. Vandenberg was not to be upset. Calmly, judicially, as a lawyer, an editor, a 32 degree Mason, a Shriner, a Woodman, an Elk, a Congregationalist and a Senator, he answered: “The prospector of our own land is of greater concern to me than the European counterfeiters.” And then:

MR. TYDINGS: Even though, in accomplishing that result, the Senator from Michigan knowingly, deliberately, intentionally— 

MR. VANDENBERG: And wilfully. (Laughter.) 

MR. TYDINGS: Yes—would punish any number of people who had done no wrong, who had every honest intention of abiding by the law? 

MR. VANDENBERG: Yes; and I am not worrying very much about punishing innocent people, because this amendment is not aimed at them, and will not touch them except in rare cases. 

MR. TYDINGS: Then my ideas in government are different from those of the Senator from Michigan. I would rather have less money made, and protect the innocent people of this country, than see large amounts of money made at the expense of only four or five or even one innocent man.

III.

I have inserted a few caps to point up the colloquy. Is it any wonder that Dr. Tydings is opposed to the Anti-Saloon League, by the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals and by every other agency of Law Enforcement among us? Is it any wonder that patriotic men, both in Washington and in Baltimore, begin to talk seriously of deporting him to Russia? Who, indeed, could imagine any more poisonously anti-American doctrine than that he preaches? Let him move over from the Senate to the Supreme Court and whisper it to Mr. Chief Justice Taft, and he will be guilty of homicide as well as of sedition. Let him intone it to the Maryland Club (to which, in “Who’s Who in America,” he says he belongs), and the bouncer will give him a bum’s rush swifter and dizzier than that which would greet Alexander Berkman, Mr. Julius Holmes, or the ghosts of Sacco and Vanzetti. 

Dr. Tydings claims to be a lawyer by trade and even signs himself Legum Doctor, but there must be some mistake. Certainly any first-year law student should know the very fundamental axiom of American criminal law. If Dr. Tydings is actually unaware of it, then let him be informed: it is that it is better to punish a thousand, nay, a million innocent men than let one suspect get away. And when I say punish, I mean it in the fullest sense. It is not only the right, it is the duty of every jobholder to shoot to kill, and it is equally his duty to shoot at the first sign of suspicion. Does his bullet lay low an innocent man? Then that is a painful incident, but no more. It is, indeed, not even painful, but rather laudable and elevating, for of all the high privileges open to a free American citizen, whether innocent or guilty, the highest is that of being assassinated that the majesty of the law may be upheld. 

This axiom has been stated and ratified a thousand times as the very kernel and essence of the current federal jurisprudence, and it has been accepted by at least four-fifths of the States. The fact that it has not been accepted by the Maryland Free State is the chief count of the blistering Methodist indictment of this commonwealth. So long as we reject it we shall lie under suspicion of atheism and treason. That is exactly what is meant when the Law Enforcers plead with us to give up our evil courses and join the Union. 

IV

Thus Dr. Tydings must be put down, I suppose, as one lying outside the pale of decency. He has not only shamed the Senate by his gabble about protecting the innocent against the just pains and penalties of the laws; he has also shamed Rotary, the American Legion, and the Committee on the State War Memorial Building, to which he also belongs. Nevertheless, it may give him some comfort to reflect that a number of other Marylanders cherish this abominable heresy—including even several lawyers; more, even one or two judges. It has survived here from an earlier and more innocent era, just as Manicheism and sorcery survive in certain back reaches of the Eastern Shore and cannibalism in the remoter glades of Garrett county.

Dr. Tydings’ fellow heretics have not got much comfort, of late, out of contemplating the great deliberative body he serves in. Whenever they glance toward the seat once occupied by the Hon. William Cabell Bruce, LL.D., and behold the Hon. Phillips Lee Goldsborough, LL.D., using it as a springboard for his antics—when this depressing spectacle greets them their sensations are not unlike those of the bumpkin who reached for his girl in the dark and kissed a cow. Maryland used to have two Senators. Now it has a Senator and a Goldsborough. 

But the Senator who remains is at least authentically of the Free State. He has not yet joined the Anti-Saloon League or any of the rest of them. He has not yet submitted to baptism and dehorning by the Wesleyan rite. He is yet beautifully ignorant of respectable American law, despite all the diplomas that hang in his garage. In the name of those Marylanders who sit with him and must go to Hell with him I venture to greet him with loud and lamentable cheers. His statement of the Great Maryland Heresy was apt, pungent, plain and unanswerable. He earned his honorarium for a year by one day’s work. He is a Senator to admire and be proud of.

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The Ritchie Campaign

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/November 9, 1931

9 November 1931

The Evening Sun

The Ritchie Campaign

I

The sudden and dramatic jump in Governor Ritchie’s presidential prospects is proof of two things: first, that a really sagacious candidate, once he spits on his hands, can always do more for himself than anyone else can do for him, and second, that even in politics frankness sometimes pays. This last is not generally believed by professional politicians. They hold, as a rule, that it is safest for a candidate to avoid all the more controversial issues as much as possible, and to confine his public remarks to hollow nothings, and they point, in support of their doctrine, to the success of such adept dodgers as Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. But they forget that dodging is profitable only when the other fellow dodges, too—which, alas, is usually the case. When, by some accident of politics, a frank and able man enters the combat, he not uncommonly wins handsomely, as the examples of Cleveland and Roosevelt the elder well demonstrate. 

Dr. Ritchie, having acquired a habit of plain speaking, is at a marked tactical advantage today, for the two men that he must dispose of to get to the White House, the Hon. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lord Hoover, are both dodgers by nature and training, and it he pursues them with sufficient vigor he will undoubtedly sweat them into panic and disaster. Of the pair, I believe that Dr. Roosevelt is the more vulnerable and by far, for his artful duckings and dissemblings have manifestly aroused the suspicions of both wets and drys, and many politicians who were for him a few months ago are now in doubt about him. The wets distrust him because everyone remembers that he bowed his neck to the Anti-Saloon League in 1920, and the drys are uneasy because, under pressure of dire political necessity, he turned wet in 1930. 

If, after turning wet, he had kept up a loud wet clatter, he’d be far better off today than he is. The drys, to be sure, would be hot against him, but they are really against him now, and they will prove it when, as and if some really dry candidate leaps into the ring—say, Cordell Hull or the perennial William G. McAdoo. The wets, if they could get rid of their doubts, would be for him uproariously and almost unanimously, and he would be so strong in New York that Tammany wouldn’t dare to oppose him. But he has been horribly mum on Prohibition for more than a year, and so the wet misgivings increase daily, and such practical politicians as Governor Ely of Massachusetts and Mayor Cermak of Chicago plainly conclude that he must be thrown overboard. 

II

Why Dr. Roosevelt has not spoken out I don’t know. It may be because of temperamental defects, and it may be because he has listened to bad advice. Politicians are always making such mistakes, and then wondering what has happened to them. The trade they practice is anything but an exact science. If Dr. Roosevelt ever seriously believed that he could line up both the Eastern wets and the Southern drys, then he is foolish beyond the common. It was obvious from the start that he would have to choose sides soon or late. But he kept on postponing his decision, and now his chance is probably gone. My prediction is that when he is forced into a corner at last he will turn out to be quite as much a dry as a wet, and that he will thus go to the convention as a two-headed Law Enforcement candidate. But that won’t get him the nomination, for the wets will boil with rage, on the other side Bishop Cannon is already unequivocably against him, and so are most of the lesser Methodist luminaries.

His gradual collapse opened the way for a less vacillating aspirant, and Governor Ritchie stepped into the situation with great skill. He knows far more about politics than any other performer ever seen in these parts, and has a farsighted eye and a cool head. So far as I can make out, he has got very little help from the local professionals. If they were really for him, which I doubt, they should have been organizing his campaign six months ago—collecting money, seeing the party bosses in doubtful States, and preparing to enter the primaries. Instead they confined themselves to hatching vague and unworkable plans and making complimentary speeches. If Ritchie is now a really formidable candidate, as I believe, he owes the fact to himself alone, and if he gets to the White House he will land there without any of the inconvenient obligations which bound Harding to Daugherty and Coolidge to Butler. He will be as clear of such embarrassments as Lord Hoover, who paid his own way and had no benefactors, but only hirelings. 

III

The Governor’s mettle will be sorely tested during the next few months. Everywhere he goes he will be cautioned to lay low on this or that issue. In one place there will be uneasiness about his views on government ownership; in another place he will collide with the local prejudices about the World Court and the League of Nations; in a third he will find that the very phrase, States’ Rights, savors of simony, atheism and blasphemy. Multitudes of earnest men, some of them of the first importance, will try to convert him into another Hoover, pussy-footing and puerile. He will have to listen to a great deal of alarmed whispering in wash-rooms. 

My hope and belief is that he will disregard all this nonsense, and continue to speak out. In particular, I hope and believe that he will continue to speak out the subject of Prohibition—more, that he will speak out more plainly and resolutely than ever before. For that is the issue on which he must win, if he is to win at all. That is what will fetch him the votes when the time comes. He can well afford to let the Southern drys be damned, for they have no candidate who can conceivably beat him, and once he is nominated, four-fifths of them will vote for him anyhow. The votes he needs must come from the North and the more civilized parts of the Middle West, and both regions are overwhelmingly and incurably wet, and pray nightly for a hero to lead them out of the Methodist bullpen. 

What is needed is not a decorous constitutional argument against the Prohibition infamy, with references to cases and quotations from authorities. What is needed is a series of clarion and electrifying whoops, comparable to the performance of an evangelist at a Georgia revival, or of Monsignor Cannon before a committee of scared Senators. Let the Governor now gird himself for this disturbance. Let him think up some blistering phrases to hurl at Cannon, at Hoover, at the whole rabble of brummagem world-savers. Let him invent opprobrious names for them. Let him fling himself upon them head-on-horse, foot and dragoons. Let him make such an uproar that the whole country will attend, and the endocrines of every wet will boil. 

IV

What the wets want, in brief, is not logic: they already know all the arguments. What they want is consolation, with hope peeping alluringly over the fence. What they want is some positive and indubitable assurance, altogether beyond the slightest peradventure of doubt, that they have at last found a champion brave and strong enough to lead them. Al disappointed them by turning publicist on the stump: they poured out by the thousand to hear him skin Hoover and damn the Anti-Saloon League, and he tortured them with essays written by his staff of pseudo-intellectuals. And Roosevelt is battling and enraging them by trying to fool them: they would like him better if he came out flatly against them. 

Here is a grand chance, and I cherish the confidence that Dr. Ritchie will prove equal to it. The field is clear before him. There is no other wet of his stature who is so little burdened with encumbrances. He has no Tammany or Anti-Saloon League on his back, he has no long record of deceit and failure to live down, and his economic ideas, however disturbing they may be to this or that faction, are not well enough known to do him any general harm. The country knows him as a wet, and as a wet only. He has done as much as any man to make Prohibition suspect and disreputable. And he has done it sincerely, believing thoroughly in his case. Let him now loose the Word, and the wet majority, increasing every day, will rise to a man (and woman: I do not forget the lovely wet gals!) and heave him gloriously into the White House. 

It is, as I say, a grand chance, and for one I find it pleasant to reflect that the man has earned it, and thus deserves it. He would make an excellent President, as he has made an excellent Governor. He is no innocent idealist, but a hardboiled and highly skillful politician; nevertheless, there is a fine integrity in him, and he is so intelligent as to be a sort of miracle in American public life. Few politicians alive at this moment have so good a claim on the suffrages of their countrymen. He is plainly worth a whole herd of Hoovers. Nominate him, and Hoover will be ready to go back to England. For if the plain people are deficient in the higher cerebral centers, they at least have eyes, and once they look at the rival candidates they will be in no doubt about which way they ought to vote.

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The Asses’ Carnival

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/January 31, 1921

I

FROM the learned Memphis Commercial Appeal of January 22 I extract the following comment upon a recent hearing before the House Committee on the Censum:

The public is aware that the notorious Society for the Advancement of Colored People appeared before the committee and through its officials urged the reduction of Southern representation in Congress on the alleged ground of the practical disenfranchisement of the Negro in the South. The representatives of this organization who appeared before the committee were negroes of ability who presented their case with becoming dignity. But the manner in which they were bullied by Southern Congressmen, members of the committee, presented a humiliating contrast. . . From this exhibition it seems quite clear that the South must improve the quality of its representation if it hopes to retain the respect of the nation. One cannot imagine Lamar, or George, or Isham G. Harris, or Garland playing the role that these men did.

The eminent editor of the Commercial Appeal, I regret to say, does not overstate the facts upon which he grounds his despair. I have examined at length the stenographic report of this hearing and find it very depressing, indeed. On the one side there were two colored men, the Hon. James Weldon Johnson and the Hon. Walter F. White—polite, intelligent, calm, well-informed, dignified, self-respecting. On the other side were four Southern Congressmen, the Hon. M. M. Aswell, Larsen, Bee and Brinson—bullying, bulldozing. stupid, pettifogging, choleric, nonsensical. They cross-examined the witnesses exactly in the manner of eighth-rate lawyers in a police court—seeking to befog the issue, pressing idiotic points, setting up blathering contentions over words, making vast efforts to cover up their childishness with moral indignation. It was, in sober truth, a humiliating spectacle. One regrets that the whole report cannot be set before all voters of the republic, that they may begin to understand what intolerable blockheads make their laws at Washington.

II

BUT though I am surely no admirer of Confederate Kultur, seems to me that the Commercial-Appeal goes too far when it assumes that this exhibition had anything peculiarly Southern about it—that Northern Congressmen, taking one with another, are appreciably more intelligent than those from the South. What leads him astray is the fact that the Northern Congressmen present at the hearing were polite to the witnesses, and conducted themselves, as he says, with “courtesy and ability.” Well, why not? They were Republicans, and the witnesses were giving evidence that pleased them quite as much as it horrified them. Suppose the boot had been on the other leg? Who believes that Northern Congressmen, fighting, as the Southerners were, for their party and hence for their jobs, would have been any more knightly or intelligent?

As for me, I am not one of those who so believe. On the contrary, it seems to me that the level of the House of Representatives in these days is almost mathematically horizontal, and that for every tin-horn political hack from South of the Potomac it is quite easy to find another tin-horn political hack from the North. In brief, they are practically all in the gutter, intellectually speaking. Now and then a man of ordinary sense and dignity pops up, but it is not often. I have read the Congressional Record faithfully and have done so for years. In the Senate debates, amid oceans of tosh, one occasionally encounters a flash of wit or a gleam of sagacity; even more frequently one encounters sound information. But in the House there is seldom anything save balderdash. The discussion of measures of the utmost conceivable importance—bills upon which the security and prosperity of the whole nation depend—is carried on in a manner so imbecile and so degraded that one marvels that even politicians are capable of it.

The newspapers, unfortunately, give no adequate picture of the business. No American journal reports the daily debates in full, as the debates in the House of Commons are reported by the London Times, Daily Telegraph and Morning Post. All one hears of, as a rule, is the action taken, and too often the action taken is unintelligible without the antecedent discussion. If anyone who reads this elegy is eager for more light, then I advise him to go to some public library, ask for the Congressional Record for 1918 and read the House debate on the Volstead Act. It was, I believe, fair average debate. It was, from first to last, almost obscene in its dishonesty and stupidity.

III

WHAT this clown show costs the taxpayers annually I do not know. A Congressman is paid $7,500 a year and is allowed 20 cents mile for traveling to Washington and then back home. He is allowed, I believe, about $3,000 a year for clerk hire—that is, for personal clerk hire. Sometimes it actually costs him more; sometimes, so it is charged, it costs him less, and he pockets the difference. In addition, he is served by a great horde of secretaries, stenographers, messengers, door-openers, coat-holders, spittoon-cleaners and inkwell-fillers, all paid by the Government. He has a private office in a gaudy marble office building. Passing to and from it, he walks through a long tunnel, dug at public expense to protect him from the rain. The mails are free to him. If he would shine as a publicist, the Government prints his puerile nonsense at cost. He has many minor grafts, some of them more or less legal.

In brief, the life that he leads well represents a whisky-drummer’s dream of heaven. He is comfortable, well-paid, surrounded by luxury, important. If he is lucky, there will be a junket or two during his term, and he will travel to far parts at Government expense, and possibly on a battleship, or in some other such regal way. The theory behind all this is that the nation should reward its servants for their high services—that the halls of legislation should be thrown open to poor men as well as to rich men—that paying them well makes them honest. But the fact is that paying them well simply makes the House a magnet for every ninth-rate rabble-rouser in the land—for every loud-mouthed and indigent political lawyer, for every professional lodge-joiner, for every orator at farmers picnics, for all the submerged rabble of aspiring shysters. A man of good means and decent traditions may occasionally get in, but it is the pushing, bumptious hollowhead who is constantly fighting to get it–and only too often he succeeds. Go to “Who’s Who in America” and investigate the careers of the current members. You will find that fully a half of them are obscure lawyers, school-teachers and mortgage sharks out of almost anonymous towns. One and all the members of this majority are plastered with the brass ornaments of the more brummage in fraternal orders. One and all they are common and vulgar men, cut off sharply from every human influence and contact that makes for intelligence, dignity and sound information.

IV.

SUCH is the lower House in this 145th year of the Republic. Such are the gentlemen who make the laws that all of us must obey, and carry on the dealings of the nation with foreign peoples. Their general culture is admirably revealed by their debates. What they know of literature is what one may get out of McGuffey’s Sixth Reader. What they know of history is simply the childish nonsense taught in high-schools. What they know of the arts and sciences is absolutely nil. Find me 40 men among the 435 in the House who have ever heard of Beethoven, or who know the difference between Cézanne and Bouguereau, or who could give an intelligible account of the Crimean War, and I’ll give you a framed photograph of the Hon. Josephus Daniels. Find me 10 who read an average of 20 good books a year, and I’ll give you two photographs.

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Ambrose Bierce and His Reputation

H.L. Mencken

Springfield Morning Union/March 1, 1925

THE reputation of Ambrose Bierce, like that of Edgar Saltus, has always had something occult and artificial about it. He has been hymned in a passionate, voluptuous way by a small band of disciples, and he has been passed over altogether by the great majority of American critics, and no less by the great majority of American readers. Certainly, it would be absurd to say that he is generally read, even by the intelligentsia. Most of his books, in fact, are out of print and almost unobtainable, and there is little evidence that his massive collected works, printed in 12 volumes between 1909 and 1912, have gone into anything even remotely approaching a wide circulation.

I have a suspicion, indeed, that Bierce did a serious disservice to himself when he put those 12 volumes together. Already an old man at the time, he permitted his nostalgia for his lost youth to get the better of his critical faculty, never powerful at best, and the result was a depressing assemblage of wornout and flyblown stuff, much of it quite unreadable. If he had boiled the collection down to four volumes, or even to six, it might have got him somewhere, but as it was his good work was lost in maze of bad and indifferent work. I doubt that anyone save the Bierce fanatics aforesaid has ever plowed through the whole 12 volumes. They are filled with epigrams against frauds long dead and forgotten, and echoes of old newspaper controversies, and experiments in fiction that belong to a dark and expired age.

In the midst of all this blather there are some pearls—more accurately, there are two of them. One consists of the series of epigrams called “The Devil’s Dictionary,” the other consists of the war stories, commonly called “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians.” Among the latter are some of the best war stories ever written—things fully worthy to be ranged beside Zola’s “L’Attaque du Moulin,” Kipling’s “The Taking of Lungtungpen,” or Ludwig Thoma’s “Ein Baryischer Soldat.” And among the former are some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language.

II.

Bierce, I beliève, was the first writer of fiction ever to treat war realistically. He antedated even Zola. is common to say that he came out of the Civil War with a deep and abiding loathing of slaughter—that he wrote his war stories as a sort of pacifist. But this is certainly not believed by anyone who knew him, as I did in his last years. What he got out of his services in the field was not a sentimental horror of it but a cynical delight in it. It appeared to him as a sort of magnificent reductio ad absurdum of all romance. The world viewed war as something heroic, glorious, idealistic. Very well, he would show how sordid and filthy it was—how stupid, savage and degrading.

But to say this is not to say that he disapproved it. On the contrary, he vastly enjoyed the chance it gave him to set forth dramatically what he was always talking about and gloating over: the infinite imbecility of man. There was nothing of the milk of human kindness in old Ambrose; he did not get the nickname of Bitter Bierce for nothing. What delighted him most in this life was the spectacle of human cowardice and folly. He put man, intellectually, somewhere between the sheep and the horned cattle, and as a hero somewhere below the rats. His war stories, even when they deal with the heroic, do not depict soldiers as heroes; they depict them as bewildered fools, doing things without sense, submitting to torture and outrage without resistance, dying at last like hogs in Chicago, the literary capital of the United States.

So far, in this life, indeed, I have encountered no more thoroughgoing cynic than Bierce. His disbelief in homo sapiens went even farther than Mark Twain’s; he was quite unable to imagine the heroic, in any ordinary sense. Nor, for that matter, the wise. Man, to him, was the most stupid and ignoble of animals. But at the same time the most amusing. Out of the spectacle of life about him he got an unflagging and Gargantuan joy. The obscene farce of politics delighted him. He was an almost amorous connoisseur of theology and theologians. He howled with mirth whenever he thought of a professor, a doctor, or a husband. His favorites among his contemporaries were such superb zanies as Bryan, Roosevelt, and Hearst.

III

Another character that marked him, perhaps flowing out of this same cynicism, was his curious taste for the macabre. All of his stories show it. He delighted in hangings, autopsies, dissecting rooms. Death to him was not something repulsive, but a sort of low comedy—the last act of squalid and rib rocking buffoonery. When, grown old and weary, he made his way to Mexico, marched into the revolution then going on, and had himself shot, there was certainly nothing in the transaction to surprise his acquaintances. The whole thing was typically Biercian. He died happy, one may be sure, if his executioners made a botch of dispatching him—if there was a flash of the grotesque at the end.

I once enjoyed the curious experience of going to a funeral with him. His conversation to and from the creamatory was superb—a long series gruesome but highly amusing witticisms. He had tales to tell of crematories that had caught fire and singed the mourners, of dead bibuli whose mortal remains had exploded, of widows guarding the fires all night to make sure that their dead husbands did not escape. The gentleman whose carcass we were burning had been a literary critic. Bierce suggested that his ashes be molded into bullets and shot at publishers, that they be presented to the library of the New York Lodge of Elks, that they be mailed anonymously to Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Later on, when he heard that they had been buried in Iowa, he exploded in colossal mirth. The last time I saw him he predicted that the peasants would dig them up and throw them over the state line. On his own writing desk, he once told me, he kept the ashes of a near relative. I suggested idly that the ceremental urn must be a formidable ornament.

“Urn, hell!” he exclaimed, “I keep them in a cigar box!”

IV

There is no adequate life of Bierce, and I doubt if any will èver be written. His daughter has forbidden the publication of his letters, and shows little hospitality, I am told, to volunteer biographers. One of his disciples, George Sterling, has written about him with great insight and affection, and another, Herman George Scheffauer, has greatly extended his fame abroad, especially in Germany. But neither seems disposed to do him in the grand manner, and I know of no one else competent to do so. He liked mystification, and there are whole stretches of his life that are unaccounted for. His end had mystery in it, too. It is assumed that he was killed in Mexico, but no eyewitness has ever come forward, and so the fact, if it is a fact, remains hanging in the air.

Bierce followed Poe in most of his short stories, but it is only a platitude to say that he wrote much better than Poe. His English was less tight and artificial; he had a far firmer grasp upon character; he was less literary and more observant. Unluckily, his stories seem destined to go the way of Poe’s. Their influence upon the modern short story, at least on its higher levels, is almost nil. When they are imitated at all, it is by the lowly hacks who manufacture thrillers for the cheap magazines. Even his chief disciples, Sterling and Scheffauer, do not follow him. Sterling is a poet whose glowing romanticism is at the opposite pole to Bierce’s cold realism, and Scheffauer, interested, passionately, in experiment, has departed completely from the classicism of the master.

It is astonishing that his wit Is so little remembered. In “The Devil’s Dictionary” are some of the most devastating epigrams ever written. “Ah, that we could fall into women’s arms without falling into their hands.” It is hard to find a match for that in Oscar himself. I recall another: “Opportunity: A favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment.” Another: “Once: enough.” A third: “Husband: One who, having dined, is charged with the care of the plate.” A fourth: “Our vocabulary is defective; we give the same name to woman’s lack of temptation and man’s lack of opportunity.” A fifth: “Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage cans on their way to the dump.”

But I leave the rest to your own exploration.

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