Répétition Générale

H.L. Mencken

The Smart Set/January, 1921

§ 1

On Criticism.— (1) The notion that a critic, to be competent, must be a practitioner of the art he criticizes; (2) the notion that a doctor, to cure a bellyache, must have a belly-ache.

§ 2

In Extenuation and Apology.— There are two kinds of dramatic critics: destructive and constructive. I am a destructive. There are two kinds of guns: Krupp and pop.

§ 3

The Journalist.—The fiction of such romantic fellows as Jesse Lynch Williams and the late Richard Harding Davis is probably responsible for the widespread notion that newspaper work makes for a high degree of sophistication, and that old newspaper men are all very sharp and skeptical fellows, with keen eyes for quackery and very hard to fool. This is actually true of only a small minority of them. The average newspaper man, young or old, is quite as credulous and sentimental as the average stock-broker or delicatessen-dealer. It was an appetite for romance that took him into the profession in the first place, and that appetite is constantly fed and fostered by the somewhat childish excitement of his daily life. The events that chiefly concern and arouse him are not genuinely important events, but merely melodramatic events. In other words, the typical newspaper man is one who reacts to terrestrial phenomena like the typical reader of his paper, i.e., like the typical idiot. His so-called nose for news, so much praised by persons who confuse it with the colour sense of a Velasquez or the delicate ear of a Brahms, is simply a capacity for determining instinctively what a car-conductor or a Baptist clergyman will regard as interesting. This, nine times out of ten, is something that is utterly uninteresting to a civilized man. It takes a naive and hollow fellow to develop any such talent. He must start off with a profound ignorance of all genuine human values, and he must reinforce that ignorance with a vast knowledge of bogus values, painfully acquired and taken quite seriously by himself. To say that the possession of this blowsy and imbecile knowledge is sophistication is to say nonsense. If it is, then so is the knowledge of a Swedenborgian theologian or a negro witch-doctor. The burden of it eventually destroys all that remains of the logical sense of its possessor. No man is easier to fool than an old journalist. The politicians, in fact, make a regular trade of fooling him; he must be fooled before the rank and file of the boobery may be fooled. Press agents find him an easy mark. He is constantly victimized by the hocus-pocus of such mountebanks as the Hon. A. Mitchell Palmer. He believes childishly in all the heroes of the proletariat, from the Hon. Babe Ruth to the Hon. Herbert Hoover. He is so far out of contact with the intellectual life of his race and time that he is quite unable to comprehend it. He sees the world essentially as a police sergeant or a ward heeler sees it. His instinctive antipathy to all civilized culture and aspiration is the instinctive antipathy of obtuseness. He hates intelligence because intelligence is the enemy of his habitual sentimentality.

Journalism, of course, also has room for a quite different sort of man, to wit, the cynic. This cynic is attracted to it by its very imbecility; he delights in belabouring the boobs with their own bosh, and even more in having fun with other journalists. Often a streak of boyishness is in him; he likes the uproar, the mountebankery, the combat. Such a cynic was the late Charles A. Dana. He believed in nothing. To him the battle of ideas was a mere spectacle. His intelligence revolted against the assumptions made by both sides. Another journalistic cynic of high talents is Hearst, a man much hated by his inferiors. Yet another is Watterson. But such superior intelligences are rare in journalism. Few journalists have their sharp sense of reality, their serene immunity to emotion, their capacity for intellectual detachment. The average is a fellow who believes in his own balderdash. In brief, a fellow indistinguishable from a Congressman, a clergyman or the owner of a prosperous sash-weight factory.

§4

The Galatea Complex.—A man, when taken with a woman, seeks to make her over in accordance with his own standards and ideals. The more she responds to his sculptor’s chisel, the more his admiration for her is augmented. But, presently, when the statue is completed and perfect, the man turns to another slab of uncut marble by way of fresh experiment for his unsatisfied vanity.

§5

Patriis Virtutibus.—That Prohibition has taken from the American one of his most amusing pastimes, the Prohibitionists loudly challenge. They assert that if drinking and becoming pleasantly alcoholed is an amusing pastime, then the American is better off, and eventually happier, without that pastime. Speaking for one American, I deny it. I do not care for golf; it doesn’t amuse me; and it makes me lame. Cocktails do amuse me, and they do not make me lame. Furthermore, if I drink cocktails with a man, I enjoy his conversation. It is livelier, gayer, more interesting than the idiotic conversation about strokes, putts and holes that I have to listen to if I play golf with him. Nor do I care for the other so-called sports; I can see neither profit nor pleasure in running across a lot after a leather ball that some other bonehead has hit with a round piece of wood, or in sitting up half the night waiting to be given a playing card that will make my hand worth $1.50 in I. O. U.’s, or in walking three miles through the Park inhaling the smell of monkeys and Italians. Reading is part of my profession; I like to get away from it when I have play-time. What is there left? I live in New York. I am a bachelor. I have no lawn to mow, no wife to fight, no children to put didies on. What is left, obviously, is a cocktail or two. When the five o’clock whistle blows and I roll down my sleeves and throw my lead pencil into the spittoon, I want to sit down with a friend and spill two-thirds of gin and one-third of vermouth into me. I have been doing it for the last twenty-two years; my father did it before me; my grandfather— God rest his old red nose!—did it before him. I am happy, healthy, prosperous. My father was happy, healthy, prosperous. My grandfather was happy, healthy, prosperous. I want to keep on being as I have been, and as they were. If the Prohibitionists insist upon my going out and getting lumbago on a sport moor instead of staying comfortably indoors and getting mildly and healthfully snooted, then I say the devil take ’em. I had my first drink, at the table of my parents, at the age of nine: a bit of claret. I shall have my last drink at my own table—God willing, with my mother—if I have to put on a pair of greasy whiskers, turn my collar hind-end foremost and, thus disguised as a Methodist clergyman, sneak it across the Canadian border myself.

§6

Query.—If, born over again, you had the choice of being any other man living in the world today, which man would you select? I ask the question purely out of idle curiosity. As for me, I’m darned if I can pick one.

§7

On Patriotism.—Patriotism is conceivable to a civilized man in times of stress and storm, when his country is wobbling and sore beset. It then appeals to him as any victim of misfortune appeals to him. But when it is safe, happy and prosperous it can only excite his loathing. The things that make countries safe, happy and prosperous—a secure peace, an active trade, political serenity at home—are all intrinsically disgusting. It is as impossible for a civilized man to love his country in good times as it would be for him to respect a cheese-monger.

§8

The Eternal Proletarian.—It is curious that no one has ever thought to test the practical efficacy of popular education by subjecting a few thousand normal individuals of the lower classes to a rigid intellectual test. The current school statistics reveal nothing. They show that the average plowhand, say in Qhio, can read and write after a fashion and is able to multiply 8 by 17 after four trials, but they tell us nothing about his stock of fundamental ideas or about his capacity for elementary logic. Is such a fellow appreciably superior to the villein of the Middle Ages? Sometimes I am inclined to doubt it. I suspect, for example, that the belief in witchcraft is still almost as widespread among the boobery, even of such advanced states as Iowa, as it was in the year 1500. Surely the negroes of the hinterland all believe in witches, and no doubt most of the whites are with them, though not disposed to talk about it. The belief in ghosts penetrates to very much higher levels. I know very few Americans, indeed, who are wholly innocent of it. One constantly comes upon grave defenses of the imbecility by college professors. I venture the guess that an honest and secret poll of the Harvard faculty would show a large majority on the spooky side. In the two Houses of Congress it would be difficult to find a dozen men willing to denounce such nonsense publicly. It would not only be politically dangerous for them to do so; it would also go against their consciences.

When one comes to the more attenuated varieties of supernaturalism one may almost say that the American people, despite a century of education, are still unanimously believers. There are whole states in the Republic in which it remains social suicide for a man to let it be known that he does not believe that he will turn into a gaseous vertebrate when he dies and sit upon the right hand of God. All the current religions of the land hang upon the theory that there is an immortal soul in every one of us, proof against both the embalmer’s formaldehyde and the crematory’s fire. To question this theory is still a form of social indecorum ; no newspaper ever does it, even by inference; even such godless sheets as the Nation, the Freeman and the New Republic never do it. For simply mentioning the matter in this place, I will be denounced by 100% Americans in all parts of the country, and no doubt this issue of The Smart Set will be barred from the Long Island roadhouses, the Lambs Club and the Albany night-boat.

§9

Spiritual Values.—One sniffing at such puerile tosh as the Woodrows, Billy Sundays and Bryans of the world unload is always accused of being anaesthetic to spiritual values. The charge is more tosh. I do not despise spiritual values, messieurs; I simple despise the ignoble spiritual values of ignoble men. My plea is for honesty, justice, self-respect, dignity, decency, honour. In other words, the things I ask for are precisely the things that none of the professional mongers of spiritual values can comprehend.

§10

Munsey.—Biographical crescendo of the publishing genius of Frank A. Munsey: The Golden Argosy, The New York Star, The New York Continent, The Live Wire, The Ocean, The New York Daily News, The Boston Journal, The Scrap Book, The Cavalier, The New York Press, The Philadelphia Times, The Railroad Man’s Magazine, The All-Story Magazine, The New York Sun. . . .

§11

Safeguarding the Young.—During the past three or four years the Comstocks have managed to suppress two American books of high and dignified quality and to prevent the publication of perhaps three or four more. Meanwhile the leading advertisement in the leading American literary journal is that of a dealer who offers a long list of frankly pornographic works. Such, in brief, are the fruits of the regulation of the arts by pigs.

§12

The Cinema as an Instrument of War.—That the movies were the one great factor in assisting the government of the United States to prosecute successfully the late war against Germany and make the world unsafe for Pschorrbrau must be apparent to any professor who studied the situation with an open mind. For example, that the sinister workings of the Wilhelmstrasse would have remained a cryptic menace to the United States had it not been for the complete exposé of those deviltries by the sagacious films, few can longer doubt. While the American Secret Service was still baffled by the uncanny activities of the German spy bureau, while it was still utterly in the dark as to the precise mysterious manner in which this spy system was subtly accomplishing its nefarious ends, the movies came to the rescue of the nation, showed up the entire business and put a spike into the whole doggone shebang.

Take, for instance, the amazing movie entitled “Behind Hunnish False Whiskers,” produced for the information and enlightenment of the baffled United States Secret Service by the Super-Excelsior Film Company. Until this picture was flashed upon the screen, the United States Secret Service had laboured under the false impression that what the agents of the Wilhelmstrasse were most eager to accomplish was the general weakening, in one way or another, of America’s military and naval efficiency. On this indefinite theory the American Secret Service was expending all its effort and wasting precious money and invaluable time while the German spies were left free to the consummation of the dirty work they were, unperceived by our Secret Service, actually up to. Imagine the surprise of our Secret Service agents and the officials of the United States government, therefore, when they drifted casually into “Behind Hunnish False Whiskers” (scenario by the eminent military expert, Miss Mae Alys Winckmann, of Los Angeles) and learned to their intense consternation that what the German spy system was really centering all its energies on was not the debilitating of the mass of American fighting forces on land and sea, nor the blowing up of warehouses and ammunition works, nor yet the plotting against railroad shipments, nor the sowing of discord among labourers in the shipyards, nor the buying up of senators from the Middle West, nor the arming of a vast horde of aliens along the Canadian border, nor anything like this, but the blowing up of what was apparently the most important strategic bridge in all America, the blowing up of a bridge that, once destroyed, would completely disrupt the military plans of the United States and render those plans practically useless, the blowing up of a bridge whose enormous importance had not even occurred to the American officials—the bridge, to wit, that spans the small creek back of the Bull Durham billboard in the vacant lot two blocks to the left of the Super-Excelsior Film Company’s studio over in Fort Lee, New Jersey!

I betray no secret when I tell you that it was directly as a result of this startling exposé that the United States Secret Service agents arrested Herman Schmierkàse’s son-in-law, August Rinderbrust, and found, in the back room of his delicatessen store—and not three hundred yards from the bridge—a Brownie kodak and several undeveloped snapshots of the Fort Lee ferry, Grant’s tomb and Olga Petrova.

Consider, too, the now famous case of the manner in which the eyes of the officials at Washington were opened by the movie entitled “Inside Secrets of the Kaiser’s Wiener Schnitzel, or, How the Berlin Spy System Has Enveloped America in a Net of Marinierte Rostbraten,” written by the celebrated military strategist, Miss Minnie P. Dingle, of Goshen, N. Y. (winner of the Grandioso Film Company’s prize of ten dollars in gold for the best 25,000 word motion picture scenario dealing with the war), and produced by the Grandioso Film Company, J. Pierce Stonehead directing, in its California studios at an expense of no less than $80,000, of borrowed money. (It will be remembered that, up to the time this masterly movie was presented, the authorities were resting complacent under the delusion that the Kaiser’s agents in this country were directing their chief intrigue toward such ends as disabling American ships and German ships that had been taken over upon the declaration of war, spreading insidious propaganda, making blue-prints of coast fortifications and harbour works, and the like.) It was “Inside Secrets of the Kaiser’s Wiener Schnitzel, or, How the Berlin Spy System Has Enveloped America in a Net of Marinierte Rostbraten” that disclosed the true intent of the enemy and permitted the authorities to take action and save the country before it was too late. This movie—and here I but repeat what is now history—gave the first inkling that what the Huns were up to in America was by no means what the United States authorities ignorantly and foolishly supposed but, quite to the contrary, that what they were up to and what they were bending all their energies to accomplish was nothing less than the chloroforming of William A. Brady’s daughter Alice, and the snitching from her of a blue-print which, so I have been informed, contained the valuable secret of the exact amount of open floor space available in the Famous Players’ studio in West 56th Street for Elsie Ferguson’s next picture.

The part that the movies played in stirring up the patriotism of the nation and keeping that patriotism at white heat—an essential thing in the successful prosecution of the war—cannot be overestimated. Who so callous that he could resist the appeal, for example, of the movie showing the ruins of the Bon Ton Shirt and Collar Factory at Thirty-second Street and Tenth Avenue after its recent fire and labelled “What Was Left of the Village of Fromage de Brie after the German Hordes Had Passed Through It”? And who so without soul that he could remain passive before the display of a few hundred feet clipped out of an old movie of “The Two Orphans” and set forth as “View of Two Little Belgian Kiddies Whose Father Was Shot by the Huns?” But the value of the movie as an adjunct of war by no means rests here.

That the movie may serve as a record of the war, as a history of the war, one can doubt no more than one can doubt what I have already proved in these other important directions. For instance, let me recall to your mind the famous movie entitled “With the German Armies on the Eastern Front,” displayed promiscuously in this country before we entered the war and announced as “official” and as having been taken by a staff of German government photographers directly on the firing line. Can one forget the vividness of this remarkable record? Can one be oblivious to its value to the school-children of the future in learning the methods of warfare, the manner in which the enemy carried on its Russian campaign, etc., etc. Who, for instance, can fail to appreciate the value as a strategic military document of the well-remembered scene in this movie showing German soldiers drinking beer out of tin cans, of the equally unforgettable scene showing the Kaiser attending a garden party at Stuttgart in 1905 and labelled “Ovation to the Emperor in Warsaw After the Recent Taking of that City by His Troops,” of the remarkable scene showing two young German soldiers washing their socks, and of that never-to-be-forgotten picture of German efficiency showing a Prussian lieutenant successfully shaving himself in front of a broken mirror? That the movies assisted, more than any other thing, in making America realize, while we were still a neutral nation, the imperative necessity for preparedness, is now fully obvious. The manner in which these movies brought home to us the horrors consequent upon an invasion of the United States by an armed and relentless foe and so awakened us to an immediate need for a sufficiently big and powerful army and navy, is readily recalled.

Chief among the movies which eloquently proved this to us was the one called “The Fall of a Nation.” As I remember this stirring screen document, it brought home to us the terrifying realization that down on Long Island there lived a blonde against whom the whole German army had evil designs. That the United States was as a nation asleep and that it was all-vital that it wake up instanter and put a couple of million trained men in the field and build a fleet of a thousand new battleships to keep the Boches from imprinting unwelcome kisses on the mouth of this Long Island blonde, the movie demonstrated so clearly that the government at Washington got busy at once. And I violate no confidence when I tell you that the sinking of the Lusitania, supposed by many misinformed persons to have been responsible for the waking up of the country to German frightfulness, had very much less to do with it than the scene in “The Fall of a Nation” which showed the Freeport virgin being chased around the room by a bibulous Hun file-closer.

Then, too, there was the similar movie put out by Mr. J. Stuart Blackton and called, if I am not mistaken, “Defenseless America” or something of the sort. This movie, a powerful plea for Preparedness, brought to the attention of our government the error in “The Fall of a Nation” and explained that it was not a Freeport blonde that the German army had its eyes on, but a New York brunette. The moment the enemy landed in America, this movie showed us, it was due to make a bee-line for the home of this dark metropolitan chicken and surround the house while its Commander-in-Chief went up to the library on the second floor and made a lascivious eye at the houri.

Plainly enough, such things were enough to make any nation, however backward, sense at once the need for a strong fighting force. And so I confidently repeat that movies like this and the many allied movies were the one great and incontrovertible aid to our government in its prosecution of the war. Without these movies, I shudder to think what might have happened.

§13

Two Definitions.—Democracy, on the one hand, is the desire to be impertinent to one’s superiors. On the other hand, it is the yearning to be respected by one’s inferiors.

§14

A Simple Complex.—Imagine a respectable and (intellectually) well-ironed young man grown stage-struck. Imagine him a bit conscience-smitten, and eager to purge his soul. Imagine him setting about it by seeking for virtuous elements in the thing he admires. Imagine him finding them—for example, intellectual purpose. Imagine him now seized by a pedagogical passion to impart his discovery to other respectable folks. Imagine them grateful to him for relieving their minds. Imagine—but you have already imagined a worthy man, Prof. Brander Matthews de l’Académie Américaine, A.B., LL.B., D.C.L., Litt. D , LL.D.

§15

The Red Gospel.—It is commonly urged against the so-called scientific Socialists, with their materialistic conception of history, that they overlook certain spiritual qualities that are independent of wage-scales and metabolism. These qualities, it is urged, colour the aspirations and activities of civilized man quite as much as his material condition, and so make it impossible to consider him simply as an economic machine. As examples, the anti-Marxians cite patriotism, pity, the aesthetic sense, and the yearning to know God. Unluckily, the examples are ill-chosen. Millions of men are quite devoid of patriotism, pity and the aesthetic sense, and have no desire to know God. Why don’t the anti-Marxians cite a spiritual quality that is genuinely universal? There is one readily to hand. I allude to cowardice. It is, in one form or other, visible in every human being. It almost serves to mark off the human race from all the other higher animals. Cowardice, I believe, is at the bottom of the whole caste system. In order to escape going to war himself, the peasant was willing to give the warrior certain privileges—and out of those privileges has grown the whole structure of modern society. Go back still further. Property arose out of the fact that a few relatively courageous men were able to accumulate more possessions than whole hordes of thoroughly cowardly men and, what is more, to retain them after accumulating them. Socialism would go aground on this rock, as communism has gone aground upon it in Russia.

§16

Genealogical.—Paul, geb. Saul: the primordial Stammvater of Bloomingdale geb. Blumenthal, Noblestone geb. Edelstein, Belmont geb. Schoenberg, and Robinson geb. Rabinovitz.

§17

Philosophy I .—If I had my life to live over again, I would live it precisely as I have lived it. Well, precisely is probably going a bit too far. One thing, at least, I would have done differently. I would have laid in a bigger stock.

§18

The One-Legged Art.—To me, at all events, painting seems to be half an alien among the fine arts. Its credentials, of course, are sounder than those of acting, but they are surely not as sound as those of music, poetry, drama, sculpture and architecture. The trouble with painting is that it lacks movement, which is to say, the chief function of life. The best the painter can hope to accomplish is to fix the mood of an instant, the momentary aspect of something. If he suggests actual movement he must do it by palpable tricks, all of which belong to craftsmanship rather than to art. The work that he produces is comparable to a single chord in music, without preparation or resolution. It may be beautiful, but its beauty plainly does not belong to the highest order. The senses soon tire of such beauty. If a man stands before a given painting for more than five or ten minutes, it is usually a sign of affectation: he is trying to convince himself that he has more delicate perceptions than the general. Or he is a painter himself and thus engrossed by the technical aspects of it, as a plumber might be engrossed by the technical aspects of a fine bathroom. Or he is enchanted by the story that the picture tells, which is to say, by the literature that it illustrates. True enough, he may go back to a painting over and over again, just as a music-lover may strike, and restrike a chord that pleases him, but it can’t hold him for long at one session—it can’t move his feelings so powerfully that he forgets the real world he lives in.

Sculpture is in measurably better case. The spectator, viewing a fine statue, does not see something dead, embalmed and fixed into a frame; he sees something that moves as he moves. A fine statue, in other words, is not one statue, but hundreds, perhaps even thousands. The transformation from one to another is infinitely pleasing; one gets out of it the same satisfying stimulation that one gets out of the unrolling of a string quartet or of such a poem as “Atalanta in Calydon,” “Heart of Darkness” or “Faust.” So with architecture. It not only revolves; it also moves vertically, as the spectator approaches it. When one walks up Fifth Avenue past St. Thomas’s Church one certainly gets an effect beyond that of a beautiful chord; it is the effect of a whole procession of beautiful chords, like that at the beginning of the slow movement of the “New World” symphony or that in the well-known and much-battered Chopin prélude, opus 28, No. 20. If it were a painting it would soon grow tedious. No one, after a few days, would give it a glance, save perhaps strangers in the city.

This intrinsic hollowness of painting has its effects even upon those who most vigorously defend painting as the queen of all the fine arts. One hears of such persons “haunting the galleries,” but one always discovers, on inquiry, that it is the showrooms that they actually haunt. In other words, they get their chief pleasure by looking at an endless succession of new paintings: the multitude of chords produces, in the end, a sort of confused satisfaction. One never hears of them going to a public gallery regularly to look at this or that masterpiece. Even the Louvre seldom attracts them more than a dozen or so times ina lifetime. The other arts make a far more powerful and permanent appeal. I have read “Huckleberry Finn” at least forty times and “Typhoon” probably twenty times, and yet both pleased me as much (nay, more) the last time as they did the first time. I have heard each of the first eight symphonies of Beethoven more than a hundred times, and some of Haydn’s quite as often. Yet if Beethoven’s C Minor were announced for performance tonight, I’d surely go to hear it. More, I’d enjoy every instant of it. Even second-rate music has this lasting quality. Some time ago I heard Johann Strauss’s waltz, “Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald,” for the first time in a long while. I knew it well in my goatish days; every note of it was still familiar. Nevertheless, it gave me exquisite delight. Imagine a man getting exquisite delight out of a painting of corresponding calibre— a painting already so familiar to him that he could reproduce it from memory!

§19

The Celluloid Artist.—Much of the prevailing sniffing at moving-picture actors, in this place and elsewhere, is plainly based upon a bilious and impotent jealousy. The movie mime is simply one who approaches more closely than any other familiar man to the ideal life of the standard American vision. That is to say, he does little work for a great deal of money, achieves heroic acts without running any risk, and is constantly pursued by women of an oriental and sinister voluptuousness. This is precisely what every normal American young man, graduated from a reputable American college, hopes to come to himself: the dream well mirrors the high aesthetic and ethical flight of the American people.

§20

Finis.—A charming woman is any woman who believes that you are not a fool.

Sound and Fury

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Morning Sun/December 14, 1931

What with their grandiose effort to stampede and paralyze Baltimore with threats of boycott, ruin and desolation, their even more grandiose effort to terrify the sinful Sunpapers into leaping to the mourners’ bench and accepting lynching as a Christian sacrament, and their announced determination, come what may, to save the Republic and the True Faith from the hellish conspiracies of the Russian Bolsheviki, the Salisbury fee-faw-fums are giving a very gaudy show–so gaudy, indeed, that I marvel to see Baltimoreans so indifferent to it. It is quite as good as any of the similar shows that are set up from time to time in the deeper reaches of the Bible Belt, and it has the prime virtue of being all our own. But very few Baltimoreans seem to be aware that it is going on, and those few take no apparent interest in it.

The local papers of the lower Shore, for a week past, have been bursting with incandescent and highly instructive stuff. They have not only mirrored faithfully the emotions of a pious and patriotic people at an heroic moment; they have also printed a number of new facts about the sublime event of December 4. One item, which I take from the Berlin-Ocean City News, is that the ceremony was not performed in churchly silence, as the Sunpaper’s correspondents reported, but to the tune of “kicking and screaming.” Nor was this kicking and screaming, it appears, done by the lynchee, for he was in a strait-jacket and had his head tightly bound, but by the six Salisbury boosters who led the lynchers.

Another interesting item is that the rope was not flung over the fatal tree by “several men,” as the lying Sunpaper reported, but by a gallant Salisbury “schoolboy”—no doubt a graduate of some seminary in ropecraft, chosen for his talent. A third item I lift from the celebrated Marylander and Herald of Princess Anne, a leader in the current movement to bust Baltimore by boycott:

“One member of the mob took his knife and cut off several toes from the Negro’s feet and carried them away with him for souvenirs.”

What has become of these souvenirs the Marylander and Herald does not say. No doubt they now adorn the parlor mantelpiece of some humble but public-spirited Salisbury home, between the engrossed seashell from Ocean City and the family Peruna bottle. I can only hope that they are not deposited eventually with the Maryland Historical Society, or sent to Archbishop James Cannon, Jr., the most eminent of all the living natives of Salisbury.

MY remarks in this place on December 7, under the heading of “The Eastern Shore Kultur,” seem to have upset the Marylander and Herald, for it devotes the better part of two columns of black type on its first page to a calm and well-reasoned refutation of them. The essence of this refutation is that, along with the Hon. Bernard Ades, LL.B., I am affiliated with “anarchist and Communist groups, composed for the most part of men and women from the lowest strata of the mongrel breeds of European gutters.” To this the Cambridge Daily Banner adds the charge that I am a lyncher myself, for didn’t I once propose to take William Jennings Bryan “to the top of the Washington Monument in Washington, disembowel him, and hurl his remains into the Potomac”?

This proposal, unfortunately, I can’t recall, but no doubt the editor of the Daily Banner has a better memory than I have. In any case, I am constrained to acknowledge it on the general ground that a theologian is capable of anything. The Worcester Democrat, of Pocomoke City, though it does not mention my ghastly designs on Dr. Bryan, joins the Daily Banner in denouncing me as a lyncher, and offers to bet that both Dr. Edmund Duffy, the Sunpaper’s wizened cartoonist, and I “are cussing the luck which prevented [us] from getting [our] hands on the rope that swung ‘Mister’ Williams to a tree.” Going further, it ventures the view that both of us could have danced with glee around the bonfire of human flesh; could easily have imagined a barbecue was on hand; could have eaten the flesh of the carcass, and smacked [our] lips over the fine flavor of the gasoline. This fancy, which I leave to the Freudians, warms up the Pocomoke brother, and he proceeds as follows:

“Mencken’s soul, if he has one, must have come from a hyena, a rattlesnake, or a skunk. There must have been present at his birth a flock of leathern-winged bats, a nest of rattlesnakes, a swarm of hornets, and a colony of toad frogs–all contributing to his special form of life. There must have been some such scene attending his later existence as portrayed by the immortal William where the witches concoct a charm made up of poisoned entrails, fillet of a fenny snake, eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, tongue of dog, adder’s fork. blind worm’s sting, lizard’s leg, scale of dragon, and all cooled with baboon’s blood. With all this, his body was smeared good and plenty, and behold! the creature in its present form!”

III

I reprint these brief extracts from a diatribe that runs on to a column because they serve very well to show what effect the lynching spirit, if it is allowed to go unchecked, has upon the minds of simple people—even upon the more literate minority thereof. If a man who is apparently familiar with respectable literature can write so, what is one to look for in the common run of low-down politicians, prehensile town boomers, ignorant hedge preachers, and other such vermin? That a community so debauched is in a mood to restore the orderly processes of civilized government is certainly hard to believe. Inflamed to frenzy by the very men who ought calm it, it is bound to proceed to other outrages, and unless the decenter people of the region regain the upper hand such outrages will undoubtedly follow.

These decenter people, I should add in fairness, have not been wholly silent. Even some of the newspapers of the Shore, though they are under cruel pressure from the reigning witch burners, have spoken out courageously against the Williams lynching. One such is the Salisbury Advertiser. Though it seeks to the blame for the atrocity upon the Communists, it yet denounces plainly “an ugly blot upon the name and reputation of our peace-loving Christian community which it will take generations to live down, and [which] cannot ever be erased,” and goes on to argue that, by now, even “those having part in the consummation of the deed” are probably ashamed of themselves.

The Star and the News of Elkton, in the upper part of the Shore, speak even more plainly, and especially the former, which does not mention the Communists, but condemns the lynching roundly as the “diabolical act” of a “depraved mob,” and calls upon Governor Ritchie and the Wicomico county authorities “to bring the perpetrators of this unspeakable crime to justice, and by doing so give notice that such vicious outrages will not be tolerated in Maryland.”

The question before the house is thus quite simple. It is whether the Salisbury lynchers will be permitted to escape punishment for their crime, and so inspire a long series of like atrocities among similar town boomers, or whether the decent people of the lower Shore will band themselves together effectively and see that the guilty are brought to heel. Every schoolboy in Salisbury knows who was in the mob. The names of those who dragged the victim from the hospital, blind and helpless, are known, and so is the name of the hero who made off with the souvenir toes. The leaders are on public display at this moment, bathed in moron admiration.

The Salisbury Advertiser is probably right: some of the very men who ran with the pack on December 4 have by now found their “sympathy with such illegal procedure” oozing out of them. There were plenty of other Salisburians who were on the other side from the start. From some of them, in fact, I have received letters during the past week. What remains to be done is to organize this decent opinion against the scoundrels who disgraced the town, and to bring them to justice as quickly as possible lest civilized government be abandoned altogether on the lower Shore. This may take some time, but it can be done if a few resolute leaders step forward, giving notice to Ku Kluxry that they are not afraid. The chief lynchers are already very uneasy, and they have reason to be.

Meanwhile, their attempt to becloud the issue by ranting against Communists and depicting the Sunpapers as Red need deceive no one. There were open threats of lynching against Yuel Lee in Snow Hill before any Communist appeared on the Shore, and they were heard again at Cambridge when it was proposed so unwisely to try him there. The judges and district attorneys at Cambridge actually asked Governor Ritchie for troops so early as November 13. In brief, a lynching was brewing among the Shore Ku Kluxers, and everyone knew it. That Williams happened to be the victim instead of Lee was only an accident. The will to lynch was already there.

That the murder of Mr. Elliott was a brutal and revolting one no one denies. Nor does anyone blame his son for attempting, on discovering it, to dispose of his murderer. Any other son would have done the same thing. But it is one thing to yield thus to a sudden and natural passion, and quite another to plan and execute a deliberate and inexcusable crime. The sole question to be determined is whether the civilized people of Maryland will permit such crimes to be perpetrated with impunity. The Salisbury lynchers must make up their minds to the fact that that question is not going to be got rid by puerile gabble about Communist plots and childish efforts to alarm their betters.

Address to Ritchie Men

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/January 12, 1931

In the spring of 1920 the most conspicuous citizen of the United States, and withal the most popular, was the Hon. Herbert C. Hoover, LL.D. The plain people were already tiring of the Archangel Woodrow, but Dr. Hoover was still high in their favor. There was a widespread demand, artfully supported by the remains of the British press bureau, that he be promoted to the White House, and multitudes of Americans liked him so well that they were willing to vote for him either as a Republican or as a Democrat. Dr. Hoover himself, at least for a while, seemed to vacillate between the two parties, but early in the year he discovered that he had been a lifelong Republican, and in June he opened gorgeous headquarters in Chicago and prepared to accept the party nomination. With my own eyes I saw ten barrels of Hoover buttons in the custody of his agents, and enough Hoover posters to cover all the barns in Iowa.

But when the convention met Dr. Hoover was nowhere. Every time his name was mentioned by one of the orators the delegates arose and gave him three rousing cheers, but when the time came to nominate a candidate they had other engagements. Some of them, chiefly the darker brethren, voted doggedly for the Hon. Frank O. Lowden, LL.D., a son-in-law of the Pullman Company and very easy with his money. Others voted for General Leonard Wood, who carried the Roosevelt torch and had rich and doting friends. Yet others voted for the muriatic Hiram W. Johnson of California, who owned and operated what remained of the Progressive movement in the cow country. For days the three factions struggled desperately in the hellish heat of a Chicago June, until finally it became apparent to everyone that not one of them could ever beat the other two. So they gave up the vain fight, mopped their brows dismally, and nominated the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio, now a saint in Heaven.

Why Harding? Why the most abject and obscure of United States Senators? Why a fifth-rate political hack from a seedy little Ohio town? Why not the Hon. Mr. Hoover, then as now a godly and gifted man—and surely ten times as popular, judging by the exclamations in the barber-shops as he has ever been since? The answer is quite simple. Hoover had the gallery, but Harding had a small but reliable block of votes. Hoover, under the hands of Wilson and God, had saved the world from pillage and rapine, but Harding could trust the Ohio delegation. So Harding was duly nominated, prevailing over Cox at the ensuing plebiscite, went into the White House, and left a fragrance of juniper and patchouli there which lingers to this day, despite all the exorcisms of Monsignor Cannon. The best that Hoover could make was the ninth spot in his Cabinet, seven places below Andy Mellon and but one above Puddler Jim Davis.

A lesser man, bumped so painfully, would have retired sadly to nurse his hurts, and perhaps forsworn ambition forevermore. But not so the Great Engineer. His alert and resilient mind, long trained in the mine stock business, applied itself instantly to the business of finding out what had happened to him. It didn’t take him long to do so. He had made, it appeared, a very serious mistake. A stranger to American customs, he had assumed in all innocence that the way to get a Presidential nomination was to enchant and stagger the great masses of the plain people. He discovered that the true way was to go out quietly and round up delegates, which is to say, professional politicians.

Having made this discovery he proceeded at once to turn it to his uses. Before the end of 1921 unfamiliar faces began to appear in the Hoover office. They were the faces of gentlemen skilled at the art and mystery of practical politics—gentlemen who knew how to round up the dark brethren in the South, gentlemen who understood the factional intricacies of Iowa, Missouri, and Utah, gentlemen who professed to know what the farmers were longing for in Kansas and what the miners would swallow in Pennsylvania. There were, too, a number of journalists—able and seasoned fellows who knew even more about politics than the politicians. Dr. Hoover made them welcome and listened to them attentively. Presently some of them were working for him. He had plenty of money and loved to have bright men around him. One of the journalists became his confidential secretary. The other gentlemen began to say that there was much talk of Hoover in their bailiwicks.

No effects were visible at the 1924 convention, for Dr. Coolidge, as everyone will recall, had a walk-over. The Hoover men, by now a pretty large company, were all for him. Dr. Hoover himself remained in the Cabinet—not altogether to Dr. Coolidge’s delight, but there he stuck. Meanwhile, more and more gentlemen called at his office, and more and more of them were very practical men, and not too squeamish—Claudius Huston, for example. Returning home, they let it be known that the people of their sections were all talking Hoover. At this many of the politicians resident in Washington—for example, Jim Watson and old Charlie Curtis—laughed. They had witnessed the debacle at Chicago, and they believed, being stupid fellows, that Dr. Hoover was still a political innocent, and ripe for another.

In 1928 they went to Kansas City to see him butchered again. What confronted them was a long row of blackamoors from the South—all Hoover men, hog-tied and ready to serve. And another long row of white delegates—hog-tied in the same way, and just as ready. The struggle was over in ten minutes. Vare of Pennsylvania and old Andy Mellon were the first to climb down, and after them came Watson, Curtis and the rest. In 1920 Dr. Hoover had the gallery, but no votes. In 1928 he had the votes, and damn the gallery! What it cost him, God knows: it must have been a pretty penny. But he was rich and could afford it—and now he is President of the United States.

III

This long prologue brings me to the few words that I venture to address to Governor Ritchie’s true friends. They believe, and I think with sound reason, that he stands a good chance of getting the Democratic nomination next year. Of all the candidates so far brought out, he is at once the most attractive and the most worthy. Unlike the Hon. Owen D. Young, he has no inconvenient strings tied to him and is not open to attack by demagogues. Unlike the Hon. Franklin D. Roosevelt, he is not saddled with Tammany and did not wait until the last minute to turn wet. And unlike the Hon. Mr. Buckley of Ohio and other such aspirants, he is already well known throughout the country and does not have to be hawked like a new corn cure. He stands for a body of ideas that is coherent, sensible, and fast making converts. He has had long experience in public service and shows a high capacity for it. He is a frank, intelligent, and honorable man, with enough courage and color to make him dramatic and interesting. Moreover, he is a very skillful practical politician.

But all these things will not suffice to get him the nomination. Something more will be necessary, as Dr. Hoover discovered so sadly in 1920. He will need votes—and reliable votes—and now is the time to get them. They will not come in spontaneously; they will not come in for the asking. The few that Maryland can muster, of course, are already in the bag, but they were not enough to start anything in 1924 or in 1928, and they will not be enough in 1932. What is needed is the solid support of one of the larger States. If Pennsylvania, say, could be fetched, then the Ritchie candidacy would become formidable at once. If Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and California could be brought into line, or the majority of the Southern States, with Massachusetts in the offing, then it would be all over save the charges of fraud.

Some of these States, it seems to me, are still open to persuasion. They have no candidates of their own, save maybe favorite sons who will disappear at the first clash, and they show no sign of being heated up by either Roosevelt or Young. Both gentlemen, however, have their friends hard at work. Roosevelt’s, I believe, have opened headquarters in Washington and are already busy in a dozen States. Young can rely upon the support of every power-grabber in the country, and hence of most of the bankers. But neither, I believe, could withstand a really energetic assault. They are very vulnerable men. Ritchie, in fair combat, could probably beat either or both of them, especially in the South and West. But the South and West move only under pressure. They must be solicited, as Dr. Hoover solicited them so competently between 1920 and 1928. If Ritchie is presented to them in the proper way, they will, I am convinced, incline toward him. But if he is not presented, then they will forget that he exists.

Eighteen months remain until the convention. In eighteen months and three weeks, indeed, it will be over. My suggestion to the Ritchie men is that they form an organization without further delay, raise a couple of hundred thousand dollars, hire some professionals, and take to the road. They have spent quite enough time telling the Governor that he is a good fellow, and the candidate foreordained. What is needed now, and it must come very quickly, is definite and decisive action.

Blind Leaders of the Blind

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/December 28, 1931

What was accomplished by the late melancholious Hunger March on Washington, either for the Communists who organized it or for the hungry it was supposed to succor? I can see nothing whatever. The marchers even failed to get a rise out of the Washington police. They proved at the White House that men without either blocks of votes or wads of greenbacks in their pockets were not welcomed to the Presence, but that was known before. At the Capitol they insulted a sympathetic Mormon Senator—the Hon. Mr. King, of Utah—who offered very decently to help them, but failed to gain entrance to either House, and left nothing behind them save a bad smell. And on their journey their boorish manners disgusted everyone who tried to be polite to them, and alienated thousands of persons who, at the start, were disposed to view them in a very kindly way.

The truth is that the Communist movement in the United States is badly led, and is making little if any progress. In most other countries it has more or less intelligent leaders, and they formulate and carry out a more or less rational programme, but here it seems to have fallen into the hands of mere clowns. What they are after appears to be only personal publicity, and when they have got it they are satisfied. Every time they horn into a strike the poor strikers come quickly to grief, and every time they essay to “rescue” some victim of the capitalistic courts he is worse off at the end than he was at the start. Elsewhere in the world they get ardent support from large sections of the intelligentsia, but in the United States, forgetting the Sex Boys and a few despairing Liberals of the New Republic school, they get none.

I doubt that they have gained any appreciable number of new adherents since the depression began. When they announce a free feed, of course, many down-and-outs flock in, and when they propose grandly to seize a cotton mill, to empty a jail, or to legalize the marriage of colored field-hands to white ladies of the higher income-tax brackets they naturally provoke a certain amount of cheering. But it does not appear that the converts thus made are really inoculated with the glad juices of the Marxian gospel. And it surely does not appear that they stick.

What dubious progress the holy cause has made is probably due far more to the denunciations of the American Legion, the D. A. R. and other such bands of professional patriots than to the eloquence of the Communist evangelists themselves. There is a familiar type of inferior man, usually close to the borders of Moronia, who gets a thrill out of belonging to proscribed and apparently sinister organizations. The Ku Klux Klan fetched him in its day, and before it the A. P. A. He was numerous in the old Knights of Labor, in the I. W. W., and even in the Farmers’ Alliance. He is strongly attracted to the American Legion itself, especially in the States where it tries to run things, and is not unknown in the lower ranks of the Freemasons. Communism, in certain of its phases, naturally sets his blood to leaping, for its programme is very brave and gaudy, and it is greatly feared by many persons who should know better.

Unfortunately, there are other phases of it which quickly alarm him, once he hears of them. If he is a Southerner he can’t stomach its noisy (but not too serious) advocacy of racial equality, and whether Southerner or Northerner he is commonly greatly upset by its hostility to religion. Most of the tin-pot orders that preceded it laid heavy stress upon piety, and not a few of them—notably the Klan—had formal ecclesiastical approval. But Communism is flatly against not only the Pope but also the Methodist bench of bishops, and so the neophyte grows uneasy. During the late strikes in North Carolina the Bolshevik evangelists “converted” a large number of lintheads, but in a few months those lintheads were all reclaimed by their pastors, and some of them went to the length of issuing a manifesto protesting that they had been sound Baptists all the while, and in no doubt about Hell for an instant.

In brief, Communism collides with too many ineradicable American prejudices to prosper among us. The white native is horrified by some of its salient dogmas, and the colored brother begins to sicken as soon as he discovers that its promise to deliver him from Jim-Crowism is only a promise. Thus various bands of foreigners, mainly very ignorant, become the residuary legatees. But by American law and custom such foreigners have no rights, and in consequence they are unable to do more than make a noise. And because they are divided sharply, like the rest of us, by racial distrusts and animosities, even that noise is not very loud.

III

This is a pity, for Communism, whatever its deficiencies, is at least a very interesting idea, and it deserves to be presented by spokesmen of more dignity and authority, and in decent English. It is surely as sensible as the Single Tax, or the Direct Primary, or the Initiative and Referendum, or any of the other perunas that have been whooped up in the United States in recent years, openly and without protest. For one, I am disposed to believe that it is quite as sensible as democracy. But democracy is preached day in and day out by whole herds of eminent and respectable men, including even Presidents, whereas Communism has to depend for exposition upon greasy nobodies bawling from soap boxes, and aesthetes who arrived at it by way of carnal gin parties in Greenwich Village.

Thus it is condemned before it is heard, and its obvious usefulness as a means of scaring the bubbitti of the land is greatly hobbled and impeded. They yell pretty loudly, to be sure, even now, but their yells are all falsetto: there is no genuine alarm in them. Life would be much more amusing in the Republic if the Communist grand wizards could come to closer quarters with them, and blow hot blasts into their actual faces. Until the death of the late Victor Berger there was always a Socialist in Congress—usually only one, and invariably a very mild one. But though he was mild and alone, he often gave very good shows, and made the first pages. I’d like to see 30 or 10 Communists there, well organized and full of sin. Certainly he would do much better than the discordant windjammers who now posture as Progressives.

As things stand, Congress lacks any really effective Opposition. The Democrats and Republicans are simply two gangs of professional politicians fighting for jobs, and the Progressives are mainly idiots. A Communist bloc would be good for a circus two or three times a week. It would have the floor all the time, it would greatly upset. Lord Hoover and his friends, and it would do no real harm to anyone—save maybe to the rev. chaplains of the two Houses. Every day, reading the prayers of those holy men in the Congressional Record, I marvel that the Lord God Jehovah does not have at them with a thunderbolt. Well, what He neglects to do with the artillery of Heaven a Communist bloc might do very neatly with the weapons of rhetoric.

But we are in for no such luck. Communism among us remains a frowsy and puerile evangel, monopolized by humorless and incompetent men. If the professional patriots ceased bawling about it, it would scarcely be heard of at all. It has made no more impression on the American labor movement than Seventh Day Adventism or the New Thought. The unions that carry on in English are all violently against it, and it has failed dismally to organize the unorganized. The white serfs in the mines and cotton mills distrust it as unholy, and the colored brethren, too canny (save when they happen to be half-wit) to be fooled. Its fate seems to be fade into the limbo which enshrouds Greenbackism, Populism and the Single Tax.

Nor is there any sign that it is making better weather elsewhere—that is, outside Russia. It came a cropper in Italy so long ago as 1919, it failed soon afterward in Hungary, it has been going downhill steadily in England and Germany, in France it is sick unto death, and in Belgium, Holland and Scandinavia it shows no apparent progress. When Alphonse XIII was dethroned in Spain some of the monarchists bellowed that a Communist plot was to blame, but that was only the childish hooey that we are used to hearing from the D. A. R. As a matter of fact, Communists had little to do with the revolution, and the new government is anything but friendly to them.

There remains Russia. Is Communism a success in that unhappy land? Then democracy is also a success in Mississippi and Marine rule in Haiti. The Russians boast that they have no unemployment, but neither, in the rational sense, have they any employment: everyone simply struggles desperately for a bare and bad living. In precisely the same sense there is no unemployment among the flea-bitten share-croppers who plow the mud of Arkansas. The Bolsheviki now propose to educate their victims. If they ever really do so they will open the way for their own downfall. For the moment the Russian masses begin to read anything save government propaganda they will see how they have been swindled, and proceed to butcher their exploiters.

The Free State Pays the Price

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/December 21, 1931

With arrests imminent in Salisbury, the investigation of the lynching of December 4 will presently pass into the hands of the criminal court there, and once it is at bar discussing it will be an indecorum. In the interval it may be worthwhile to examine briefly some of the effects of the crime upon the credit and dignity of Maryland. Those effects bear upon all of us, for while the lower Shore is a small part of the State it is an ancient one, and whatever any considerable number of its citizens say and do, publicly and without general and immediate challenge, is naturally mistaken for the act and voice of the Maryland people. This may be irrational and unjust, and no doubt it is—as Shoremen themselves, in fact, have often argued when the whole State has been credited with Baltimore’s surpassing wetness—but such is the way human beings think, and being unable to change it we must learn to suffer it.

In the present case there can be no doubt whatever that Maryland has suffered a severe loss in reputation, and will be a long time recovering it. One need not, of course, be quite so gloomy as the Salisbury Advertiser, which holds that the scandal “will take generations to live down, and cannot ever be erased.” But there is every reason to believe that it will be remembered for a good many years, and at very inconvenient and embarrassing moments. The Leo Frank case is now ancient history in Georgia, and those who were responsible for it long ago decided formally to forget it, but it is recalled constantly by other persons, and to the obvious damage of the State. Similarly, the Sacco-Vanzetti case has ceased to be discussed in Massachusetts, but elsewhere it is talked of very often, and millions of people are acutely aware of it who never think of Harvard University.

The lynching in Wicomico county will not be remembered as long as the case of Sacco and Vanzetti nor even as long as the case of Frank, for its victim was a poor black half-wit, friendless and no doubt well deserving death for his crime. No committee of uplifters will be formed to make whoopee in his memory, and there will be no stoning of American consulates at Buenos Aires and Budapest. A week after the court finishes with the business he will be forgotten. But it will not be so soon forgotten that the proud old State of Maryland, after years of honorable standing among the most enlightened and orderly of American commonwealths, has been shoved down again—let us hope only transiently—to the ruffianly level of Mississippi and Arkansas.

The newspaper comment that I have seen—and there has been a great deal of it—has nearly all struck the same note. That is the note of genuine surprise that anything so out of harmony with the State tradition should have happened in a Maryland town. If Williams had been lynched in rural Georgia the news would have got only a few lines, but when he was lynched in Maryland it was worth black type, usually on the front page. Poor Salisbury got such advertising as its most ardent boosters never dreamed of. Its name was spread across a thousand newspapers, and became known to millions who had never heard it before. And every one of those millions was reminded that it was in Maryland.

At some time in the future, after the Wicomico county court has brought the case to an end, I plan to reprint the comment of the papers on both Shores, and some selections from those of papers elsewhere, at home and abroad. For the present, a few selections must suffice. As I have said, most of the out-of-State papers show only bewilderment: they can scarcely believe that such news should come from Maryland. But others, especially the more backward States, are derisory rather than sympathetic, and seem to gloat over the fact that Maryland has succumbed to their frequent example. I point, for instance, to the Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tenn., a State celebrated largely for two things: that it was the scene of the Scopes monkey trial and that it has had more than 200 lynchings since 1889:

“In nearly all cases, Southern lynchings are the result of grave provocation. But in Maryland, a Negro who has killed a white man and was himself almost killed by the son of the victim was taken from the hospital and lynched. The almost-dead man had to be carried to the point where he was strung up. His body was taken to the Negro district of the town of Salisbury, where it was cremated as the mob shouted.”

The logic here may be characteristically shaky, but the intent is plain enough, and so is the advertising. The Tribune, in far-away Albuquerque, N.M., is more logical but no less devastating:

“Tom Johnson, the Negro convicted of the brutal murder of a little Santa Fe girl, must die in the electric chair . . .We commend the case of Johnson to the attention of other localities in the United States, particularly to the officials and citizens of the great Free State of Maryland . . Several days ago mob law broke out in Maryland and a wounded Negro was lynched. The Negro was guilty of shooting his employer. Santa Fe county citizens flamed with indignation at a greater outrage in their community, but they kept their heads. The officials of Santa Fe county acted quickly, calmly. The case has been a triumph of orderly process throughout, Sheriff Baca took no chances.”

III

No one expects much from Tennessee, or, for that matter, from New Mexico. The former is a backward State upon almost all counts. It ranks forty-second in wealth, whereas Maryland is nineteenth. In education it is forty-first, in health forty-fourth, and in public order forty-third. Its usual place in the news is that of a comic character, what with its anti-evolution laws, its Holy Rollers and its boozing Prohibitionists. Nor is New Mexico much better, for it is very sparsely settled, and though it has no horde of illiterate Negroes, as Tennessee has, it is burdened with even less literate Mexicans. Its rank in wealth is thirty-fifth, in education forty-second, in health forty-fifth, and in public order thirty-fourth. Its death rate from homicide is actually larger than Oklahoma’s and its record for lynching is worse than Florida’s.

Certainly no Marylander, not even a loyal Salisburyian in his lucid moments, likes to think of Maryland getting into such company. For many years past the Free State has been going up the ladder, not down. Its schools have been improved, its death rate has declined, and it has made an excellent record for public order. During the years from 1889 to 1930 inclusive its lynching record grew better year by year, and for the whole period it had less than half as many lynchings, to each 100,000 of population, as Virginia, less than a quarter as many as Kentucky, less than a fifth as many as Tennessee, and less than one-fourteenth as many as Mississippi. Since the turn of the century, indeed, its record has been far better than that of the country as a whole.

Nor has this advance gone unmarked. I think it safe to say that most reflective Americans, in late years, have come to admire Maryland, and that not a few have learned to envy it. Its sound laws,
honest courts, and enlightened public opinion have been often noticed. All Americans have come to know that, almost alone among the States south of the Mason & Dixon line, it has resisted
stoutly and successfully the pernicious influence of such anti-social agencies as the Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan. It has had much less graft than the other densely populated States, and what little has occurred has been promptly and severely punished. It is generally orderly, even in its most remote parts, and its one big city, Baltimore, has been singularly free from that gang terrorism which has beset so many other cities. The word has gone out that Maryland has reasonable laws; that they are administered fairly; that no man, whatever his color or condition, is denied his plain rights, and that opinion among the people strongly supports this state of affairs. A Maryland Governor has attracted national attention by advocating the Maryland program, and a good part of his importance as a Presidential candidate is due to the fact that people elsewhere would like to be governed as well as we have been.

As one who has spent a great deal of time and energy, for years past, in whooping up the virtues of the State, both at home and abroad, I am naturally distressed to see it disgraced before the world, and if I have spoken against those responsible for that disgrace in harsh terms I have no apologies to offer. At a single stroke they have undone the good work of years. At a single stroke they have made Maryland ashamed, even in the presence of Tennessee and New Mexico. And to add to their offense they have sought to distract attention from it by setting up a vain and hollow bluster against those who have denounced it.

Two weeks ago, writing in this place, I argued that the lynching of Williams was foreseen and inevitable—that its roots were in a turbulence that had been rising for a long while, unchallenged
by those who should have put it down. I see no reason to change that view. The very manner in which presumably enlightened Shoremen have tried to cover up the crime offers it impressive
support. Nor am I alone in holding it. Here, for example, is an extract from an editorial in the Frederick Citizen, a paper that surely cannot be accused of any prejudice against country people:

“Our sympathy goes to Wicomico County in particular and the lower Eastern Shore in general. Sympathy because the economic and intellectual opportunities of this beautiful but isolated peninsula are so limited that those men of industry and vision to whom inevitably community leadership is intrusted have found themselves impelled to pack up their bags and hie away to more favored lands. Hence Eastern Shore leadership has fallen into the hands of second and third raters, from whom the citizenry in general have taken their cue. Sordidness and Intolerance have become familiar in a section once famous for Culture and Gentility. For years there has been recognized on the Shore a leadership that appeals strictly to Emotion, and lets Reason grow cold and numb.”

A notice under the masthead of the Citizen informs me that it is “the official and recognized organ of the Democratic party in Frederick country.” From the masthead itself I learn that the president of the company publishing the paper is the Hon. David C. Winebrenner 3d, Secretary of State of Maryland.

Dr. France’s Platform

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/April 27, 1931

BAPTISMAL and burial services are ingeniously (or is it ingenuously?) combined in the manifesto of Dr. Joseph I. France, candidate for the Presidency, issued to a somewhat unresponsive country on April 8. In the very same words which announce his candidacy he sets forth the reasons which will make his nomination and election impossible. Item, he calls for a revival of the Bill of Rights. Item, he calls for common honesty and common decency in high office, including especially the highest. Item, he—

But I have said enough, I think, to show that his chances of succeeding Lord Hoover are no greater—if, indeed, they are as great—as those of Al Capone. The first alone is enough to damn him beyond redemption, for it arrays every great engine of opinion in the country against him, from the Supreme Court to all save two or three of the big newspapers, and from the American Legion to the bishops of state church. The Bill of Rights, quotha? I believe in all seriousness that it would be safer for an aspirant to the Presidency to advocate communism, cannibalism, or even Darwinism. In many American States they now jail men for less.

It is, however, the second item that really cooks Dr. France’s goose. Imagine a candidate trying to reach the White House by renouncing and denouncing “colorless compromise, weak negation and dishonorable equivocation!” Can it be that the hon. gentleman is actually as innocent as all that? If so, then let him give some study to the recent history of his country. He will discover that every President since Cleveland has got into office by one route or the other—that is, either by compromise, by negation or by dishonorable equivocation. Has he so soon forgotten that Dr. Wilson promised solemnly to keep us out of the war? The last candidate to fly and flaunt his true colors was the Hon. Alton B. Parker, Jr. and he was beaten ignominiously by the master trimmer, Roosevelt. Even Al Smith, let us remember sotto voce, was quite content to run as a wet on a platform that was dry, and with a client of the Anti-Saloon League as his runningmate.

I HALF suspect that Dr. France has more humor in him than is generally believed, and is simply trying to have some fun with Dr. Hoover, in whose knees and neck there is more rubber than in all the tire-factories of Akron. To a man of his principles the dodging, skulking, groveling type of politician is naturally revolting, and hence a fair target for ribaldry. But it is one thing to mock, and quite another thing to fetch the crowd. My fear is that Dr. France, like many an idealist before him, vastly overestimates the native decency of the American people. He seems to believe (or, at all events, to hope) that they are as much disgusted by the Hooverian politics as he is. But that is probably a gross error. They are really not offended by the Great Engineer’s limber efforts to hold his job for four years more. What offends them is simply his failure to perform a miracle.

Dr. France alludes to this failure in his manifesto—at events, so I interpret his reference to “self-advertised supermen.” But it seems to me that he makes far too little of it. That Hoover is immensely unpopular must be plain to everyone; indeed, there is evidence that it is plain to Hoover himself. The crowds in the movie parlors flatly refuse to applaud him, and so do the crowds in the streets; he had to go all the way to Porto Rico to hear really hearty cheers—and God knows what it cost young Teddy Roosevelt, in toil and moil, to produce them. The plain people blame him for all their present woes. He gets a black thought every time the roof leaks or the baby cries.

All this, of course, is very unjust to him. He is no more responsible for the present economic situation than he is for the downfall of poor Alfonso XIII, and he could not remedy it if he tried. But there are many evils that he could remedy, and very easily. He could clear out the gang of political harpies which now infests Washington, with the White House as its base. He could get some common decency into our dealings with Latin America. He could throw out the stupid hacks who pollute his Cabinet, and put in honest and competent men. Above all, he could abandon his “dishonorable equivocation” about Prohibition, and deal with it in a frank, sensible and self-respecting manner. But he does none of these things, nor anything like them. His one aim is to avoid every issue that is likely to bring him trouble in 1932, and to that end he is apparently willing to sacrifice everything that men of any dignity hold dear.

III

BUT, as I say, all of this arouses little, if any, public indignation. There is no sensitiveness to such dishonors in the communal breast. The wets, I fancy, would be quite content, and even thrilled, if the hon. gentleman came to the conclusion tomorrow that the Prohibition jig was up, and so deserted his Methodist friends between days, and began howling for personal liberty. Nor would the Methodists, I suspect, be greatly surprised. No one expects a President, in this one-hundred-and-fifty-fifth year of the Republic, to be a candid man. No one expects him to make any sacrifice of his personal fortunes to the common weal. No one expects him to be jealous of his honor.

No one, that is, save a few romantics of the school of Dr. France. They still look for honest leadership in the White House, and they count upon it to restore the American passion for justice and the dignity of American public life. France himself, it some incredible act of God put him in Hoover’s place, would strive magnificently to that end. Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, he would try to resuscitate the Bill of Rights, and make it once more a living force. He would deal honestly and courageously with the problems confronting him, if not always wisely. He would heave himself with groans and hallelujahs into a herculean effort to move the immovable, resist the irresistable, purge the unspeakable, and solve the insoluble.

He will never, of course, get the chance. He is as safely vaccinated against sueceding Hoover as I am against succeeding Pius Xl. But that is no reason, it seems to me, for laughing at him. If his somewhat grandiose programme does not voice the hopes of any considerable body of his countrymen, then it at least voices hopes that are honest, and honorable, and, in the best sense—a sense now almost obsolete in the United States—patriotic. The Republic that he dreams of would be a shade priggish, perhaps, but it would be far more worthy of a self-respecting man’s allegiance than it is today. There might be plenty of reason to be discontented with it, but there would be no reason to be ashamed of it.

DR. FRANCE made a good Senator, and in difficult days. He stood against the Wilson holy war upon the Bill of Rights at a time when it took a lot of courage, and he never faltered. No Marylander of his generation has ever done more to establish and maintain the Maryland Free State scheme of things; he was battling for it pertinaciously long before most of those who now talk about it had ever heard of it. His reward was that he was thrown out of office to the tune of violent objurgations and revilings.

His concrete opponent, when he came up for reflection, was the Hon. William Cabell Bruce, another good Senator. It has always seemed to me to be a magnificently ironical fact that Dr. Bruce, who depicted him in the campaign as a kind of anarchist, was actually in full sympathy with most of his principles, and afterward maintained them with great vigor in the Senate. Some day, I hope, Dr. Bruce will review his speeches during that contest with a judicial eye, and make public amends to Dr. France. For the two men, at bottom, believe in precisely the same things: their only real difference is over ways and means of attaining them.

But this is a detail of politics, which is to say, of a science compounded of irrationalities. The important thing is that Dr. France, after eight years of retirement, has got into action again. He will not reach the White House, but there is plenty of work for him to do at home, and within the bounds of his own party. Under the leadership of that depressing nonentity, Dr. Goldsborough, it has become a mere rabble of professional jobholders, with a dismal sprinkling of prehensile Babbitts. It is years since Goldsborough last had an idea, and it will be years before he has another. If Dr. France heaves a bomb or two into that vacuum he will be doing something valuable to his party, and something also valuable to his country.

World War II Heroes Have Few Shrines Erected Yet to Their Memories

Westbrook Pegler

Columbus Ledger/January 20, 1956

Can anyone explain why our Second Big War and the Korean War have produced so few statues to individual heroes and parks or squares named after generals or admirals? There are practically none of the proud patriotic landmarks which have been the tradition of organized nations and homogeneous peoples even in defeat.

If I mention the statue to the Marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima I believe I have almost covered that phase of the story. But if there are other such monuments they are relatively few and this strange change may be observed negatively in all the other countries, except probably Russia. Incidentally a young West Point lieutenant of infantry remarked at the time of the Iwo flag-raising that it seemed strange to him that it took so many Leathernecks to plant a flag-staff weighing a couple of pounds. Of course that may have been the corps spirit speaking.

I saw a story of a strike riot recently which gave sidelong mention of a square in a small eastern city named for General MacArthur. But where are memorials equivalent to Grant Park, Sheridan Road and Logan Square in Chicago? Pershing Square in New York, Los Angeles and Danbury and Father Duffy Square in the confluence of Broadway and Seventh Avenue? Horace Greeley is honored with a square in New York but is General Patton?

We had Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and La Guardia Field in New York long before those statesmen were laid away, even though both had technically disapproved monuments to living persons. Roosevelt’s practical if somewhat immodest acknowledgement of his-own grandeur had been plainly implied by his preparations for the memorial library and for his grave, which soon got formal designation by the Department of the Interior as a “shrine.” His mother barely missed ennoblement in the consecration of a lounging place for skid row bums and children and their mothers on the lower East Side. Robert Moses, a churlish Republican who built this untidy reservation after a stretch of old tenements had been knocked down, frustrated La Guardia’s reverent purpose by neglecting to order the street-corner signs His primary reason for that was the old lady’s parsimony in reversing the cost of a 50-cent phone call from Hyde Park to tell him she could not be down for the dedication because she had a cold. The city paid the 50 cents but saved something on the traditional scaffolds for the orators and other dignitaries and the wages of men to tack up the bunting and take it down.

Is there an Eisenhower Boulevard somewhere that I have not heard of? It seems to me that the only memorial to Ike was a temporary and unofficial salute tinged with sarcasm in London, where Grosvenor Square, an American center, was commonly called “Eisenhower Platz.” There is in this square a big bronze figure of Roosevelt in the naval cape, a defined honor to which he was never entitled and surly Americans of contrary political and moral principles have have threatened to get drunk and desecrate it. Would I be thought ill of if I should say that this would be a good idea?

The French and the Italians have a lighthearted, mercurial way of exalting heroes temporarily and tearing them down permanently. I have often marveled that the name of President Wilson remained on a street in Paris as long as it did, but I did not make observations last trip and it may have been renamed in honor of some Communist by now. In Rome recently I met Italians who scoffed when I told them the Spanish square at the foot of the stairs had been renamed briefly by Benito Mussolini the Square, or Place, of Marshal De Bono after some successful skirmish of his in Abyssinia. The change was made on strips of paper pasted over the old signs. But his glory vanished long ago when an unfortunate victim of political change and indomitable Italian incompetence in major war condemned him to temporary ignominy at the hands of a Facist firing squad.

The West Germans have no monuments and men who surely must have been combat fighters wear nothing in their lapels. But neither do Americans nor British, and Frenchmen seem to lay more value on their Legion of Honor, which is very cheap, than on their military medal, almost as hard to come by as our Medal of Honor. Many Germans, however, and women as well as men and young persons of both sexes display proof that they were there. These are the blind, who wear a yellow brassard with dots on it, which not only identifies them as casualties of the war, but permits them to beg, and those who lost an arm or a leg. The German civilians took terrible punishment from our bombers and women and children suffered about equally with the men.

We have discouraged the Germans from honoring their heroes with massive statues and clearings. They seem not to mind but perhaps they only share the apathy which controls our strange conduct in this matter.

Most of our small towns, North and South, still maintain in their central squares those rain-washed limestone figures of the soldiers of a terrible war, and there came in the ‘twenties a good crop of that conventional Doughboy in the flat iron hat charging with a bayonet, a tedious exercise of the training areas seldom invoked in battle.

But the monument industry has failed to exploit the market since 1915, and one reason may be that we are hatefully divided on the merits of General Marshall and General MacArthur and so on down the line.

I doubt that I shall live to see a statue of Harry S. Truman, even in Kansas City.

Catholics and Union Men

Westbrook Pegler

The Times-News/February 28, 1956

I have often saluted the Tablet of Brooklyn as the best Catholic diocesan paper in the United States, and its managing editor, Pat ScanIan, both by inference and in plainer terms, as the best editor in this phase of our press.

It is with more sorrow than respect, therefore, that I find them both praising George Meany, the boss of the combined rackets of the AFL and the CIO, on the occasion of his speech opposing commerce with Soviet Russia lest the enemy be thus nourished by our business to carry on sly and sinister works among us.

Meany is about 25 years behind Westbrook Pegler and a hundred other journalists who recognized and opposed this evil when Roosevelt and Walter Reuther, Meany’s partner in power in the new combination, were joyously consorting with communists while Meany was bumbling along as a docile, sedentary bureaucrat of a thoroughly vicious political phenomenon.

If Meany had said then that which so belatedly he says today, to the applause of The Tablet, Mr. Scanlan and some of the prelacy, he made no impression on the memory of a pioneer in this difficult but, to honest Americans, ever-delightful contest. The truth is that he never opened his mouth against any phrase of communism until now and, further, that he has joined these last few years a contemptible gang of opportunists of Tom Dewey’s adherence to destroy and crush, even to death, Joe Ryan, the one man who personally kept Harry Bridges and the communists of the CIO Longshoremen’s union off the eastern seaboard and the gulf.

Ryan made Meany what he is today, promoting him from the status of punk. But for Ryan, Bridges would have seized the remainder of the American ports during the war and would control their commerce now.

There is nothing to indicate that Meany had anything to do with this repulse.

Ryan did it himself and, moreover, while other unions of the AFL were keeping loyal Negro workers on the permit list without hope of full membership, Ryan not only welcomed Negro dockers to his conventions at the same Commodore hotel where Meany made this speech, but elevated them to regional offices.

While Ryan was doing this, Meany kept a still tongue in his fat head, a silent, compliant political agent of the party which, however painful the truth may be to Harry Truman, did load the labor relations board, the state department, agriculture, treasury and the department of justice with communists, meaning in a shorter and uglier word, traitors.

That is the party which Meany served all this time through his rising influence in the AFL, which was and is today an appanage of the party of the communists.

Mr. Scanlan is a savvy man who knows his way around the seamier phases of politics and unionism. Thus, he knows that Meany’s own home union, the plumbers, is rotten with graft, extortion and more primitive crime in locals across the land and that George has never exerted himself to any effect at all against a condition which must be a challenge to any man aspiring as Meany does to the respect of the Catholic community.

I am sincere in saying that I sadly regret this editorial by a fine paper which has had in my opinion the strongest moral influence of all our press, religious and worldly, these last 15 or 20 years. Mr. Scanlan has fought strongly and at times has taken risks which only a few of us colleagues knew to expose communists and less forthright enemies allied with them but professing to oppose them, including fakers of religious aspect.

But he knows that George Meany previously never hit a lick against communism or against old-line union racketeering, either. George Meany was one of those miserable pilgrims who went crawling to the Sing Sing cell of Joe Fay, secretly, however, and on business so indecent that he has never dared to say what it was. Fay betrayed labor, which Meany, in a facetious manner of speaking, represents by the free choice of the working stiff. It is hard to find anyone to respect in this morbid situation.

A Communication

Ray Stannard Baker

The New Republic/December 5, 1914

SIR: It was an excellent custom of the older statesmen—Burke, for example—to stand aside from time to time and examine the state of the nation. Whither, they asked, are we drifting? What is the prevalent thought or tendency of our times? Are events shaping themselves to the true advantage of our nation or are they not?

Never was there a moment in our own history when it seemed so important to stand aside from the daily event, to be calm, to examine dispassionately the state of the nation, and to inquire what effect the monstrous cataclysm of Europe may have upon the thought of our country. The period since the close of the Spanish-American war sixteen years ago has been one of the great epochs, in some ways the greatest epoch, in the history of the United States. It is a fact patent to all men that great changes have been going on in the fundamental thought of the American people.

We may inquire what this one idea is that has been at work in America during the last sixteen years, shaping the events of the time and determining their ultimate issue. At the close of the Spanish War it was said with some grandiloquence that we had at length attained our majority, had taken our place as a world-power. It was said that the logic of events had now driven us to assume the “white man’s burden” of foreign colonization. Expansion was the thought of the hour. We were momentarily thrilled with the knowledge that the sun never set upon the stars and stripes. But it was soon evident that the “great idea” at work was not the idea of colonial expansion. Neither commercial nor military arguments convinced us. No sooner had we established a stable government in Cuba than we withdrew; we apparently neglected a great opportunity for territorial aggression and influence in China.

It is a remarkable thing in history that a victorious nation, filled with a new sense of greatness and power, should at once turn upon itself and its institutions the remorseless eye of self-examination. The period of exposure and “muck-raking” followed close upon the war. We began to ask ourselves what sort of a nation we really had, what political parties stood for, whether justice was being done in America. Eight or ten years ago I heard J. A. Hobson, the distinguished British economist, who was then visiting this country, say that the most remarkable feature of our life appeared to him to be the willingness, yes, the eagerness, of Americans to know the worst about themselves. The corruption of cities, the abuses of public service corporations, the tyranny of riches—all these things were spread boldly before the people. At first the work was done by private investigators and writers in magazines, but it was soon taken over by well-financed popular committees, by state legislatures, and finally by the Federal Congress and Federal commissioners. It is probable that no other nation ever before submitted itself to such a searching self-examination.

This interest and curiosity has shown itself everywhere in our life. We want to know how the other man lives. Consider the flood of books and articles which have appeared during the last ten years describing the life of the poor, the prisoner, the prostitute, the idle rich, the energetic rich, the tramp, the criminal, the foreign immigrant, the negro. Peary’s explorations to the Pole were not more eagerly followed than the early adventures of Jacob Riis and Jane Addams among the tenements. In fiction the leading characters have often been burglars, detectives, tramps, street women, boss politicians, negroes. Every part of our life has been written about, investigated, surveyed.

This era of self-examination has been curiously unemotional. It was not dictated by hunger or want; nor has it ever approached physical revolution. The country all along has been relatively so prosperous that to many a conservative it has been a mystery why there should be all this conscience-questioning restlessness. It is noteworthy that in States where conditions were best, most prosperous, there were the fewest evidences of injustice or inequality, as in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, California, the movement has been most virile, and that in States where social conditions were darkest, as in Pennsylvania, the desire for self-examination has seemed to be weakest. No, this was the cool self-examination of a full-grown nation.

Probably we should soon have begun to look inward even if there had been no Spanish War, for the vast physical and mechanical changes in our life during the past fifty years would have made it necessary for us soon or late to pause and take account of ourselves. But undoubtedly the Spanish War made us suddenly self-conscious. We began to be profoundly interested in one another, in our institutions, in our politics. We had learned how to struggle and win separately, now we wanted to know how to struggle and win collectively, as a people.

This examination, then, has naturally resulted in a great body of new laws and institutions, the purpose of which is to make America a more comfortable home for all of us. We are beginning to hold down tyrants of property, beginning to secure a juster distribution of wealth and power. These reconstructive movements, affecting rich and poor alike, were not prompted merely by want and envy and bitterness. There have been revolts, indeed, among the hungry submerged, like that of the I.W.W. at Lawrence, Mass., but so far as I know not one important leader in the new movement has come from that element. The revolution, as distinguished from sporadic revolts, has been led by men and women, mostly cultivated men and women, whose souls have been stirred by the sight of injustice in a free country; who have asked themselves, passionately, “Who hath given to me this sweet, And given my brother a crust to eat, And when will his wage come in?”

In short, during the last few years in America we have been developing with all our energy the highest art of all arts—the art of living together. I believe this to be “the one idea more powerful than any other” that is shaping the events of the time.

Foreign travelers who come to our shores often compare our civilization unfavorably with that of Europe. They charge us with producing no vital art, no literature, no drama, no music. It may be so; it may not be so; we can tell better fifty years hence. But should not a nation, like an individual, be judged according to its excellence in the art which it is seeking most sedulously to cultivate? We are primarily engaged in the business of discovering better ways of living together, and it is significant that at every point at which art or science or education or religion touches this “one idea,” there it is virile and original, there it is making history.

Those artists, for example, who are doing the most original work in America are those who are seeking ways of helping men to live together more beautifully. I think we do not appreciate yet the significant work of a group of artists, architects and engineers who have begun to mold the unformed and individualistic cities of America—the “city-planners.” Burnham of Chicago was an artist of vision and original power, and Arnold Brunner of New York is a worthy successor. These men are trying to grasp the modern city as a whole, and clothe its growth with beauty.

Another example may be found in the drama. We may not be cultivating Barries or Shaws, but wherever the drama is really in touch with the “one idea” of the epoch, there it is spontaneous, vital, lives from within. This is to be seen in the almost spontaneous growth of pageantry in America. A community creates a pageant or a masque out of the materials of its own life and history, its own citizens do the acting, its own people support the work. Why blame us for not producing a certain kind of drama when we are actually developing a dramatic art of unknown potentiality that is sincerely trying to express the spirit of the times? For the same reason religion is vital at those points at individually may escape the common struggle and be “saved,” there it is failing; but wherever it is inspiring men to practice the art of living nobly together, there it is having a new birth.

Similarly it is the political party that defends private interests against public interests that is passing away; while the party with a social vision and a social program which aims to help us along with the “one idea” of our times is the party that is growing strong. In education likewise it is not the old college which seeks to raise individuals to a lonely isolation of culture that is growing fastest, but rather the State university, with its virile extension departments, the aim of which is to let no ignorant man escape.

Where have American scientists recently been making their greatest advances? Probably the most notable contributions have been in medicine, that science which lies closest to the “one great idea.” Recall the work of the great sanitarians in cleaning up tropical cities; think of Gorgas at Panama; consider the campaign against tuberculosis, hook-worm, typhoid fever, cancer. Such scientific campaigns to make the nation a healthier and therefore a better place to live in were never before known. Such has been the prevailing tendency in this nation such is “the one idea more powerful than any other” which has been shaping the events of the time.

Now comes the explosion in Europe, an unpredictable event which has shaken all the world. What effect will it have upon America? Already there are signs that the opportunities presented by a prostrate Europe where half the people have stopped producing, stopped shipping, stopped trading, have whetted the ardor of that type of mind in America which seeks individual advantage. Here are unique possibilities of fortune and power; let us seize the trade of Europe while it is prostrate, let us set up new manufacturing establishments to do the work which they have done, let us invade South America and the Orient.

Now the danger of all this is that it will damp the enthusiasm with which we have been studying the precious art of living together. Where there is a chance for a man to get rich quickly, for example, he easily forgets his neighbors. He begins to wish to live above them, not with them. And what is true of individuals in this particular is true also of nations. It is in a moment like this that we should stand aside calmly and consider the state of the nation, examine the precious thing we have, and reflect upon the dangers which threaten it.

Seen in Turkey

Ray Stannard Baker

The Outlook/October 4, 1902

THOUGH my first experience on Turkish soil was not of a nature to be comforting, it was at least highly illuminative; a glimpse through the doorway gave a pretty clear idea of the disorder of the house. The boundary station at the Servian frontier was a substantial stone building set in the midst of a wide, rolling plain that somehow recalled our own lonely Montana prairie. The moment the train stopped, a strapping fellow in wide trousers and a sash filled with knives came and carried off my luggage, and I soon found myself entangled in a perfect maze of officials, all in fezes, but wearing many sorts of uniforms. I had been somewhat prepared for a customs ordeal—the familiar bugaboo of every frontier—but here were new experiences, typical of the strange country into which we were now being initiated—and initiated is the word that applies most appropriately to our adventures. First, an officer in a gorgeous though tarnished uniform (all uniforms in Turkey are both gorgeous and tarnished) came and demanded my passport, the strong armor of the stranger in Turkey. Two or three others went into my luggage, and though they seemed to be intent on confiscating a good deal of it, they did their duty with unexpected politeness. I had a dozen or more books which they unceremoniously gathered up and carried off, including several notebooks which could not be replaced. My camera they carried into an adjoining room, and by the condition of some of the films when I had them developed the officials must have opened it to make sure that it contained no dynamite. Every scrap of printed matter, even to the old newspapers in which I had wrapped my shoes, was confiscated. When they had ransacked my bags and made sure I had no more printed matter which might be seditious, no revolvers or bombs, no tobacco or spirits, and so on, I was allowed to pack up again. Then I made a plea for my camera, and a very polite little man in a fez led me into an adjoining room where an old gray Turk, also politeness itself, was sitting, legs drawn up under him tailor-fashion, in a low armchair. He was surrounded by five or six clerks. With my camera before him on the table he filled out a blank and pasted several stamps upon it. I held out a handful of Austrian money, and when he had picked out what he wanted he returned the camera with a low bow. He had charged me about a dollar duty. Then I tried for my books in the other office. Here I found another half-score of officials arranged around a small, close room. A few were smoking cigarettes, and several had the inevitable Turkish coffee-cups on the table before them. My books were distributed about among a number of the inspectors. I explained that they were perfectly inoffensive books, that they contained nothing derogatory to the Osmanli Government or the Mohammedan religion; but they seemed in no hurry to return them to me. Indeed, they appeared to be wholly unable to understand what I wanted; and as the train was now ready to start, I resorted to the universal language—the usual method by which the stranger in Turkey gets what he wants: my hand went into my pocket. It was amusing to see with what alacrity my books were now gathered up—all but three, selected apparently at random— and returned to me. Several weeks later I succeeded, by applying through an American Consul, in getting back even these confiscated volumes. I now applied for my passport, upon which the officers had written an indorsement in Turkish, and I was finally privileged to enter the Sultan’s domain. I have spoken of this common experience somewhat at length owing to its significance, for the methods here pursued were typical of all Turkey. Here in this little outlying station were four departments of the public service, each represented by a considerable force of men: first, the customs; second, the censor; third, the police; and, fourth, the soldiery. Excluding the military guards, of whom there were perhaps a score in immediate view, all armed and in marching order, there were twenty-five civil officials, perhaps more, employed to do work which in Germany or in America would easily be done by three men. The train on which I came contained not to exceed half a dozen passengers, and only two, so far as I could make out, had any luggage to be examined. Indeed, there were only two passenger trains every twenty-four hours, and perhaps a freight train in the same time, and yet here was a force of twenty-five officials to examine luggage, passports, and freight (or such of it as was examined before reaching its destination). Administrative officialdom and police supervision exist in Germanay to the weariness of the American visitor, but they are of a wonderfully different sort. Germany is one of the best administered of nations, its machinery is the most complete and perfect, and, if there is too much of it, at least it runs with perfect smoothness. But Turkey, with infinitely more machinery, is quite the worst administered. Anyone who wishes laboratory experience in political economy and sociology need only follow a visit in Germany with an experience in Turkey.

A little later, as I became more familiar with Turkish affairs, I began to read other meanings in all this officialdom. It is perhaps a common idea that Turkey is inhabited by Turks as England is inhabited by the English, or even the United States by Americans, and it comes as a surprise to find how few real Turks there are in Turkey, especially in European Turkey, in comparison with other nationalities; and that, of course, is one of the great sources of discord and disorder. In Macedonia, for instance, the real Turks— the Mohammedan Turks—are very much in the minority. Here dwell the remnants of half a dozen ancient and tenacious peoples, not only of differing nationalities, but even of diverse race and religion. Bulgarians in great numbers live side by side with Greeks, Servians, Albanians, Wallachians, Spanish Jews, Armenians, and scattered representatives of other peoples—all jealous, all now awakening, under the spreading influences of education, to national pride and hope, and all subject to the ineffective and often cruel domination of the military Turk.

All the officials of the frontier post of which I have spoken, therefore, were real Turks, and their great surplusage in numbers was due to the fact that only two occupations are open to the young Turk of good family—the army or the civil government. The Turk has no business or professional ability or ambition. He is just what he was when he conquered the country centuries ago—a rude and successful soldier; though representatives of a better class of Turks are sometimes thinly veneered with French culture. The warrior blood of the Osmanli keeps them still in the ascendency, though they have never acquired the art of civilized government. Flocks of young Turks crowd into the civil service every year and begin plotting for advancement. Many of them serve without even a nominal salary, and in cases where there is a salary attached to the more important offices, it is rarely paid by the bankrupt government. Consequently the only way in which this vast number of officials can get a living is to steal right and left, directly and indirectly. The average Turk regards it no sin to take what he can from the Christian, who is ever a dog. But not only does he accept bribes from outsiders, but he steals with equal facility from the Government which he serves; not without excuse, it is true, for the Government always owes him. Every Turk of high rank maintains an expensive establishment, a harem, and an endless number of servants, and he must have money from some source and have it regularly. Therefore, if he is buying supplies for his regiment, for instance, half the money sometimes goes into his own pocket, besides the bribe which he gets from the German or the English or the Austrian merchant who sells him undergrade goods. If he is building a road, he skimps on the bridges so that they soon fall to pieces, he saves on the grades, pares away wages, and all the surplus goes to swell his own income. Naturally, this system cannot exist except in an atmosphere foul with suspicion: every official watching every other, trying to make his way into the favor of the Court so that he may obtain better places and steal more money. And the Sultan in his palace suspects and fears all. Of the twenty-five officials at the frontier post, several, at least, must have been spies. I might, indeed, have enumerated the spies as a fifth class.

There are two sorts of real Turks, or Osmanli, for the Turk never calls himself Turk. The first is the official or governing class already mentioned—corrupt, proud, ignorant, hospitable, polite, cruel. The second are the Mohammedan peasants, mostly herders and primitive farmers, in many respects an admirable people—indeed, the rock on which the Turkish Government really rests. To their deep and usually fanatical religious belief, to their loyalty to the Sultan as the head of the church, and to their fatalistic intrepidity as warriors, the Osmanli in a large degree owe their survival as a power. They are a patient, honest, frugal, temperate, hospitable, even merry people, though ignorant and often fanatically cruel. Between these two extremes of the Mohammedan Turks are the great masses of the other peoples, from Armenians to Bulgarians, largely Christian or Jew, who conduct the business and fill the professions of the Empire, and from whom the parasitic official Turk takes his living. The Turk is no match in business or in wit for the Armenian or the Greek, and he knows it. Even in the government offices Armenian or Greek clerks often do all the real business, and in cases where a Turk appears as the nominal owner of a business house it is practically certain that the manager and all the clerks will be Christians or Jews. Even the large Turkish landowners employ Christian managers and borrow money of Jewish bankers. It is a mistake to infer that the Turk hates the Christian or wishes he were out of the country. By no means. The attitude of the Turk is one of supreme contempt; to the followers of the Prophet the Christian is a dog, but a very useful dog, one who earns the money which the Turk makes it his pleasure to get as best he may. He is so contemptuous that he does not even persecute the Christian for his religious beliefs; he simply does not care what the Christian believes. I have sometimes heard it said in the Turk’s favor that he tolerates the missionaries, but (I confess my ignorance) I was surprised to find that the missionaries in Turkey do not attempt in any way to reach or to convert the real Turks (Mohammedans). That would not be permitted for an instant; their sole work lies in raising the standard and converting to Protestantism the subject races of the Empire, who are already Christian (Greek Orthodox) in name. They are no more missionaries to the Turks than they would be if they were in Greece or in Russia. But while the Turks do not object to the missionaries on the ground of their religious teachings, they do fear their educational work, for education always means a revival of independence, a hope of political liberty. Bulgaria is said to have won its independence from Turkey as the result of the educational work of Robert College.

The Turkish army is made up wholly of Mohammedans; none of the great Christian population is armed or permitted to carry arms, for the Turks recognize the fact that what they have won by force must be held by force. And this Mohammedan army is constantly employed in putting down Christian uprisings. It is a mistake to say that the massacres in Turkey are the result of religious hatred, though the calculating Turkish official sometimes stirs to blood the deep-seated fanaticism of the peasant Turk, and accomplishes his purposes by inciting a “holy war.” When ten thousand Armenians perish in a day or two in Constantinople, it is because the Armenian is beginning to feel his education, is growing too rich. The Turk uses the only argument known to the dull master of a clever servant—that of brute force.

Over all this diverse mass of Christians, the nationalities hating one another only less than they hate the Turks, and over the patient Mohammedan peasant rules the small, corrupt official class of Turkey, living in shabby luxury and caring not the least what becomes of their country or their cities or anything else so long as they can get money to spend. As a result, the stranger in Turkey is impressed at once and everywhere with a profound sense of disorder, disorganization, decay, and the Turk reposing among his ruins with a serenity so monumental as to be almost admirable—the serenity of perfect self-assurance, religious infallibility, and fatalism. Indeed, serenity is to the Turk what stolidity is to the German, sprightliness to the Frenchman, and energy to the American—a sort of keynote to his character. Does his coffee come in cold, is his tobacco wet, has his brother been thrown into jail, is his country threatened with dismemberment; never mind, he rolls his cigarette, blows out a cloud of smoke, and goes about his business with a smooth brow. What is to be, is to be, and there is an end of it! And so his cities fall into disrepair, he has hardly a good road in the Empire, his railroads and other important public works are nearly all controlled by foreign companies, but he goes on living serenely, constructing nothing, creating nothing, his only works of importance being mosques, palaces, barracks, and fountains, and in all of these not a glimmer of originality in architecture. If the Turk were driven from his Empire to-day, he would leave absolutely nothing in art, science, invention, government, or even in military science to show for his centuries of occupation; nothing but a blot of misrule and a lowered moral resistance. So far as he is concerned, the country is worse off to-day than it was when the Sultans first crossed the Bosphorus.

Lacking administrative and executive capacity, the Turk has sought refuge in multiplicity of regulations, the enforcement of which by hordes of officials and soldiers not only cripples and limits business enterprise and the development of a naturally rich and fertile country, but arouses the antagonisms of the governed. Turkey is always on the verge of revolution. In Macedonia, for instance, the country districts are now practically in the hands of enemies of the Empire, though rebellion only smolders as yet, here and there breaking into flame. Turkish soldiers are everywhere. Armed guards patrol all the railroads; one often sees them standing at attention when the train passes. Every railroad station, every town, swarms with them. At night the policemen, even in towns as large as Salonica, go armed with rifles. A foreigner is not allowed to travel anywhere in the interior without a guard, for fear of brigands. Indeed, heavy penalties in the form of fees are set on traveling even for the natives, for no person is permitted to travel from one town to another or to leave the country without a yol tezkereh (traveling permission). When I wanted to go from Salonica to Seres and Constantinople, I found it necessary to apply several days in advance through the American Consul, tell where I was going, establish my identity as an American citizen, and pay a fee. When I was ready to take the train, I had to have my tezkereh examined and approved before I could purchase my ticket.

It is not difficult to imagine how such a system hampers business of every sort. And that is not the worst of it. One is not only hindered in his movements, but he is watched and spied upon continually, especially if he is connected with suspected Christians or his business in the country is not thoroughly known. The ordinary tourist sees comparatively little of these unpleasant phases of Turkish officialdom because he rarely goes anywhere except to Constantinople, where he lives in the European quarter and furnishes a profitable source of revenue to officials and merchants alike. In short, the Turk suspects everybody and everything, and no private act, no seclusion, is safe from his intrusion. Every telegram sent from the public offices is at once reported to the authorities. No one can safely send a letter by the Turkish post unless he is willing to have it opened and read, and take the chances of having it confiscated if the censor finds anything that can be twisted into an insult to Mohammedanism. As a result of this condition and the inability of foreigners residing in Turkey to communicate with any certainty with their friends, some of the great European nations have established post-offices of their own in Turkish cities, in which they employ only Europeans, use their own stamps, and watch their mail-bags until they pass beyond the prying eyes of the Turks. In Salonica there are no fewer than five post-offices—British, Austrian, French, Servian, and Turkish; in Constantinople, six. If one wishes to be sure of his mail, he must inquire at four of them at least; and if he really wants to have his letters reach their destination, he must send them through some post-office other than Turkish. For the reason that the authorities cannot be sure of a complete knowledge of all the conversation that might pass, the telephone has been excluded from the Empire; and no Turkish city is electrically lighted because, it is said, the officials discovered the word dynamo in the applications for the necessary contracts, and, dynamo suggesting dynamite, the official Turk was paralyzed with fear! So all Turkey is still candle-lighted, or at best lamp-lighted.

Whatever is Turkish in Turkey is sure to be out of order, disorganized, dirty; whatever is foreign is, by contrast, well kept. The railroads, which are nearly all operated by foreign capital, are in good repair and the service is reliable. Occasionally the inert mass of officialdom is prodded into doing some public work. For instance, a road is projected, German engineers lay it out, the money is appropriated, and sometimes, if enough is left after it gets through the hands of the officials and the German is allowed to superintend the work, the road is actually built. And then it is absolutely forgotten. A very little work each year would keep it in good repair, but that little is never done. In the first place, there is never any money with which to do it, and in the second place the Turkish officials don’t care. The military works fare a little better than the civic works, but this is usually the result of the prodding of the German officers, who are doing their best to reduce the magnificent raw material for soldiery in Turkey into some semblance of European discipline. As an example of the utter ineffectiveness of the Turk in the matter of public works, I recall a drive I took along a road which led out of Salonica. It had been built at large expense, broad enough to accommodate two wagons abreast, and once it must have been a splendid highway. Now, however, it had fallen to the exclusive use of donkey-trains and foot-passengers. We drove across the first bridge without falling through, though several boards had disappeared and many of the others were loose. The second bridge was still worse, and must have been impassable to a loaded wagon; at night it would have been dangerous even to a donkey—and this within two or three miles of one of the chief cities of the Empire. In the same way, the public buildings are out of repair, pavements are unspeakably bad, and even the mosques are falling into decay. I visited a very ancient mosque that had once been a Christian church. It had a magnificent mosaic dome, bits of which were continually falling away and no effort was made to put an end to the ruin. Indeed, the priest gathered up a handful of the gilded mosaic squares from the floor and presented them to his visitors as souvenirs, nor was he at all loth, upon our departure, to accept a few piasters as trinkgeld.

In leaving the railroad station in Constantinople one is impressed by the sight of a building which stands out as a noteworthy sight on account of its air of good order. Upon inquiry I learned that this was the Public Debts building, controlled by foreigners. Surely nothing could better typify the decadence and demoralization of the Turk than this—one of the finest buildings of his capital devoted to the control of the country’s debts, and that in the hands of foreigners!

And yet, among all the disadvantages and abuses of Turkish life, there are offsetting advantages. For one thing, living is very cheap—probably cheaper than it is anywhere else in Europe. If it were not so, indeed, the Turk could not exist at all. The tourist in Constantinople, staying at one of the hotels in Pera, does not find it out, but in the smaller cities a traveler can live at a rate that astonishes him. I remember my first experience in making a purchase in Turkey. I got out of the train at a little station in the interior to get something to eat. The only thing I could see that looked really clean was a basin of boiled eggs. I thought I would buy one or two to take with me on the train, so I handed the man a small silver piaster piece, about four and one-half cents in American money, and motioned that I wanted its worth in eggs. I thought he looked a bit surprised, hut he counted them out, and to my astonishment I found myself returning to the train with both hands full—almost a setting. He had given me eight. At the best hotel in Salonica I had a very large and comfortable room opening to the waters of the Aegean Sea, with a splendid view of Mount Olympus rising in the distance, for sixty cents a day. One can get a good table d’hote meal for from twenty-three to forty-four cents, wine included. A few cents will pay a porter to carry one’s luggage a long walk, and a beggar is glad of a tenth of a cent. For one cent one may obtain a cup of incomparable Turkish coffee. And these, it must be borne in mind, are the prices at which a stranger may live; the native, of course, spends a much smaller amount. It is said, indeed, that the poorer people live for a few cents a day.

A few of the eatables in Turkey—I mean the real Turkish dishes—are tempting even to the foreign palate, though most of the native cooking is bad enough. In Constantinople the visitor scarcely escapes the ordinary French cooking, done by Greeks, but in the smaller towns he may try the native dishes to his heart’s content—if not always to his stomach’s. The most famous of all Turkish dishes is, of course, Turkish coffee. The Turks certainly know how to make coffee, as the Viennese know how to make chocolate and the English tea. Coffee is, indeed, the national drink of the Turk. Whatever may be his other faults, the Turk is not a drunkard, though he is an inveterate coffee-tippler. As soon as he gets up in the morning he has his cup of coffee; he has another with his breakfast, another when he sits down to work, and thereafter at regular intervals all day long. The Turk’s idea of solid contentment is to sit with one leg drawn up under him, a cup of coffee on the low table at his side, and a big bubbling water-pipe near at hand—a water-pipe or a cigarette, for the ancient water-pipe is not seen as often as it once was, and the cigarette is literally everywhere, smoked by women as well as men. But I was speaking of Turkish coffee. It comes in the smallest of china cups, and it is almost as thick and sweet as syrup. Each cup is made separately in a sifiall, long-handled tin dish over a charcoal fire, and is served boiling hot. In the bottom there is always a thick sediment of grounds. A cup makes hardly more than one good swallow, but, as a stimulant, it is quite as effective as a much larger cup prepared as we make it. The Turk is famous also for his sweet tooth. He is a great maker and eater of candy, rich preserved figs, dates, fruit, and olives.

One gets mixed up over the methods of keeping time in Turkey. The Turk counts his day from sunset, and as sunset changes every day he must also change his watch if he would keep the right time. When the railroads first entered Turkey, the natives complained because the trains changed time every day, when in reality their watches were changing. Some of the more advanced Turks now carry watches with a face on each side, one regulated for Turkish and the other for “Frank” time, as they call it.

But one of the principal purposes of time in Turkey seems to be for whiling away. One of the odd things that impressed me when I first arrived was the strings of beads carried by many of the men, not worn at the waist or around the neck, but held in the hand, the fingers constantly at work telling them over. At first I thought it had some religious significance; perhaps they were saying prayers as the Roman Catholics do; but I soon saw that Jews and Mohammedans as well as Christians were addicted to the habit. I finally inquired the meaning of the custom.

“Oh,” was the answer, “they want something to help pass the time.”

Afterwards I saw this custom practiced everywhere. Once on a railroad train a fine-looking Turkish officer; got into the compartment with me. He had a string of amber beads which he told back and forth for hours. I observed also that he had allowed the nails of his little fingers to grow more than an inch beyond his fingertips. Evidently he cultivated them carefully, for they were fine and white. Think how much work such a man must do!

Taken as a whole, the impression left on the Occidental visitor in Turkey is one of the utter hopelessness and incurability of present conditions. The internal corruption is so deep-seated, the problems are so complex, the international relationships so delicate, that there seems no way out. A long-time resident in Turkey, who has been closely connected with the greater affairs of the Empire, said to me:

“Those who have been here longest are the most hopeless. One thing is certain: reform can never come except through rivers of blood.”

If there is a glimmer of hope anywhere in the darkness, it is the peasant herder and farmer, at present ignorant, downtrodden, even stupid, it is true, clinging to ancient and time-wasting customs with perverse tenacity, but honest, industrious, frugal, patient, and healthy. Let the light touch the souls of these men of the hills and the fields, and they may yet rise up and cleanse their country. I shall not soon forget a boatman on the Bosphorus, a real Turkish peasant who had come to hope. I had been attracted to him because among all the boats his was the neatest and cleanest, polished until it shone, seats carefully carpeted, rowlocks shiny and newly oiled. For himself, he was a fine, sturdy, frank-eyed fellow about thirty years old. No sooner were we seated and he had begun to row in long, steady strokes down the blue Bosphorus, than he asked my dragoman if I were not an American. Upon receiving an affirmative answer, his face lighted up, and he said that he had a brother and a sister in America, the former a railroad fireman. He told me how much his brother made—a small fortune, a year’s savings, every month, it seemed to him. I asked him if his brother was not homesick.

“No,” he replied; “it is a good country, America.”

He told me that he was saving money himself to go to America. He had just paid the last that he owed on his boat, and it was worth nearly enough to take him to New York. As a last expression of his idea of escape, he told me that his brother no longer wore a fez. He was free. Even here in this benighted land has reached the inspiration of a free country; and there are many signs that the leaven of hope, filtering in by way of railroads, newspapers (censored though they are), and schools, is at work deep down among the downtrodden but vital peasant classes of the Empire.

The Archive

Historic American Journalism

Tag Archives: history

Répétition Générale

Sound and Fury

Address to Ritchie Men

Blind Leaders of the Blind

The Free State Pays the Price

Dr. France’s Platform

World War II Heroes Have Few Shrines Erected Yet to Their Memories

Catholics and Union Men

A Communication

Seen in Turkey