H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/December 28, 1931

I

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.

II

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.

IV

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.