H.L. Mencken

Dothan Eagle/October 26, 1929

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

MR. VANDENBERG: And wilfully. (Laughter.) 

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

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

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

III.

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/January 31, 1921

I

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

III

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

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

IV.

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