But before him there also stretched an acre or two of faces—the faces of dull Pennsylvania peasants from the adjacent farms, with here and there the jowls of a Philadelphia politician gleaming in the pale Winter sunlight. It was too cold that day to his badly-cushioned bones for a long speech, and the audience would have been mortally offended by a good one. So old Abe put away his reflections, and launched into the tried and sure-fire stuff. Once started, the furor loquendi dragged him on. Abandoning the simple and crystal-clear English of his considered utterance, he stood a sentence on its head, and made a pretty parlor ornament of it. Proceeding, he described the causes and nature of the war in terms of the current army press bureau. Finally, he launched a sonorous, meaningless epigram, and sat down. There was immense applause. The Pennsylvania oafs were delighted. And the speech remains in all the school-books to this day.
Lincoln had too much humor in him to leave a diary, and so we do not know what he thought of it the day following, or a month later, or a year. But it is safe to assume, I believe, that he vacillated often between laughing at it sourly and hanging himself. For he was far too intelligent to believe in any such Kiwanian bombast. He could no more have taken it seriously than he took the strutting of Mr. Secretary Seward seriously, or the cerebral steam-pressure of General Grant. He knew it, you may be sure, for what it was. He was simply doomed, like many another good man before and after him, to keep his soundest and loftiest thoughts to himself. Just as Plato had to adapt his most penetrating and revolutionary thoughts to the tastes and comprehension of the sophomores assembled to hear him, so Lincoln had to content himself, on a great occasion, with ideas comprehensible to Pennsylvania Dunkards, which is to say, to persons to whom genuine ideas were not comprehensible at all. Knowing their theological principles, he knew that, in the political field, they grazed only on pansies.
Nor is this all. The highest flights of human intellect are not only inordinately offensive to the overwhelming majority of men; they are also, at least in large part, incapable of reduction to words. Thus the best thought of the human race does not appear in its written records. What is set down in orderly and seemly sentences, even today, always has some flavor in it of the stilted rubbish that the Sumerian kings used to engrave upon their tombs. The current clichés get into it inevitably; it is never quite honest. Complete honesty, intellectually, seldom expresses itself in formal words: its agents of notification are rather winks and sniggers, hip flasks and dead cats. The language was not made for it. Reading Shakespeare, a man of penetrating intelligence, one frequently observes him trying to put a really novel and apposite thought into words—and falling helplessly into mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. The groundlings pulled him and the deficiencies of human speech pushed him. The result is many a magnificent salvo of nonsense, vastly esteemed by the persons who esteem that sort of thing.
I propose no remedy. In fact, I am convinced that no remedy is possible, or even imaginable. The human race seems doomed to run, intellectually, on its lowest gear. Sound ideas, when by chance they become articulate, annoy it and terrify it; it prefers the sempiternal slobber.
Revolution
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Dec. 22, 1930
IT is the law of political revolution that the actual upset of a government is always preceded by concessions to the malcontent party. So long as Porfirio Diaz ruled Mexico like a house of correction he was perfectly safe, but the moment he released Francisco Madero from jail and began to talk of reforming the judiciary, dividing the big estates and widening the suffrage his doom was sealed, and within a year he was a fugitive and Madero was President. So with the Czar of Russia. He signed his own death warrant when he signed the decree calling the first Duma: even if a World War had never come he would have lost his throne inevitably, and his head with it. So in many another case, ancient and modern. There has never been a successful revolution out of the clear sky. Always the doomed despot has prepared for it by making concessions to his enemies.
The psychology behind this phenomenon is so simple that even a psychoanalyst should be able to penetrate it. What protects the despot, so long as he lays about him boldly, is the fact that very few men, even among rebels, have any appreciable courage. Whether physically or morally, they seldom attack a power that can really hurt them, and is plainly willing and eager to do so. But the moment that power shows any sign of fading into weakness, they become very daring and are hot for defying it. Next to outright abdication, the chief sign of such weakening, at least to most men, is a readiness to compromise. They have no belief whatever in the excuses commonly given for it: generosity, a sense of justice, conversion to new ideas, and so on. They always see it, and perhaps quite rightly, as simply a cloak for fear.
Thus the despot who hedges, no matter how exalted his motives may be in his own view, appears to his enemies as one who has lost his grip, and at the first chance they fly at his throat, usually to the tune of loud protestations of altruism. The leaders among them appear suddenly to be full of courage, for courage is always a relative matter, and the man who runs from a lion in the full possession of its faculties will pull the tail of a lion down with the palsy. Simultaneously, the camp-followers and me-toos, hitherto discreetly silent, begin to beat heroically on washtubs and to demand a chance to get at him.
New England
From THE LAST NEW ENGLANDER, PREJUDICES: FIFTH SERIES, 1926, pp. 244–54
ORTHODOX American history assumes that the witch-burners and infant-damners had it all their own way in New England, even down to Revolutionary times. They actually met with sturdy opposition from the start. All their seaports gradually filled up with sailors who were anything but pious Christian men, and even the back-country had its heretics, as the incessant wars upon them demonstrate. The fact that only Puritans could vote in the towns has deceived the historians; they mistake what was the law for what was really said and done. We have had proofs in our own time that that error is easy. Made by students of early New England, it leads to multiple absurdities.
The fact is that the civilization that grew up in the region, such as it was, owed very little to the actual Puritans; it was mainly the product of anti-Puritans, either home-bred or imported. Even the school system, so celebrated in legend, owed whatever value was in it to what were currently regarded as criminals. The Puritans did not found their schools for the purpose of propagating what is now known as learning; they founded them simply as nurseries of orthodoxy. Beyond the barest rudiments nothing of any worldly value was taught in them. The principal subject of study, first and last, was theology, and it was theology of the most grotesque and insane sort ever cherished by man. Genuine education began in New England only when the rising minority of anti-Puritans, eventually to become a majority, rose against this theology, and tried to put it down. The revolt was first felt at Harvard; it gradually converted a seminary for the training of Puritan pastors into something resembling an actual university. Harvard delivered New England, and made civilization possible there. All the men who adorned that civilization in the days of its glory – Emerson, Hawthorne and all the rest of them—were essentially anti-Puritans.
Today, save in its remoter villages, New England is no more Puritan than, say, Maryland or Missouri. There is scarcely a Protestant clergyman in the entire region who, if the Mathers could come back to life, would not be condemned by them instantly as a heretic, and even as an atheist. The dominant theology is mild, skeptical and wholly lacking in passion. The evangelical spirit has completely disappeared. Save in a small minority of atavistic fanatics, there is a tolerance that is almost indistinguishable from indifference. Roman Catholicism and Christian Science are alike viewed amiably. The old heat is gone. Where it lingers in America is in far places—on the Methodist prairies of the Middle West, in the Baptist back-waters of the South. There, I believe, it still retains not a little of its old vitality. There Puritanism survives, not merely as a system of theology, but also as a way of life. It colors every human
activity; it is powerful in politics; learning wears its tinge. To charge a Harvard professor of today with agnosticism would sound as banal as to charge him with playing the violoncello. But his colleague of Kansas, facing the same accusation, would go damp upon the forehead, and his colleague of Texas would leave town between days.
New Deal No. 1
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Dec. 31, 1934
THE STATE of affairs in France in 1845 was a great deal like the state of affairs in the United States in 1928. The country, after some heavy grunting and contriving, had at last recovered from the Napoleonic wars, there was an immensely stupid but immensely respectable King on the throne, the Cabinet, headed by F. P. G. Guizot, was committed to the principle of “Peace and no reform,” business was good and getting better, the prices of all stocks and bonds were striking new highs, wages were soaring with them, and the whole landscape seemed to be covered with molasses. The English, glowering across the channel, and the Germans, stealing dark glances over the Rhine, were frankly envious, and it was at this time, I believe, that the latter invented one of the most eloquent of their phrases, wie Gott in Frankreich.
But in 1847 something slipped, and before the year was out France was tortured by billions of ants in its pantaloons. No one seemed to know just what had happened. One day everything was lovely, and the next day there was a panic on the Stock Exchange, the shops of Paris were suddenly empty, factories were closing down everywhere, and hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen were out of work. The politicians, of course, all had glib explanations, some saying one thing and some another, and the professors at the Sorbonne issued a great many contradictory graphs and tables of statistics, but the plain people distrusted the former as rogues and the latter as idiots, and in consequence there was much murmuring in the land.
It went on pianissimo for six months or so, and then rose unpleasantly to forte, with frequent bursts of sforzando. Simultaneously a great many new wizards began to rove the country, many of them preaching a novel gospel called Socialism, lately invented by a man named Karl Marx. The whole trouble, said these wizards, was due to the Rotten Rich. France, it appears, was still bursting with wealth, but the Rotten Rich were hogging all of it. Look at their elegant carriages in the Bois, with red wheels, plate-glass doors and coachmen arrayed like ambassadors. Regard the obscene way in which they drape silks, satins, pearls, rubies and diamonds upon their wives, daughters and concubines. Take a peep, mon cher, into their baroque mansions, and observe the immoral displays of gilt chairs, leopard-skin rugs, and hand-painted oil paintings. Above all, my little rabbit, think of their tight hold upon their docile serf, that false and wicked King, Louis Philippe.
So on February 24, 1848, Louis Philippe was heaved out, and a provisional government was set up in his place. This government, it turned out later, was operated from behind the scenes by professional politicians, but all the plain people could see of it at the start was an impressive Brain Trust, then something new in the world. There have been many Brain Trusts since, and some of them have glittered with genius, but certainly there has never been another that took the shine off this first one. For it not only included all the political and economic advanced thinkers of the time, from Louis Blanc to Louis Blanqui, and from Jacques Cavaignac to Alexandre Ledru-Rollin; it also could show a gifted proletarian metaphysician, Alexandre Albert, and a celebrated poet, Alphonse de Lamartine.
These talented men proceeded at once to give France a Planned Economy. The capitalistic system was abolished overnight, and in place of it there was established a system of Shared Wealth, not unlike the late Huey Long’s. It was ordained that the old inequality between man and woman should cease, and that every freeborn French citizen should have in future, not what he could get, but what he yearned for. But where was the money to come from? From the Rotten Rich, of course. Hadn’t they been grinding the faces of the poor since the days of Charlemagne? Weren’t they known to be so full of their illgotten spoils that their very hides were nigh to bursting?
Unfortunately, making them disgorge was not as easy as it looked. Large numbers of them had departed for Palo Alto with Louis Philippe, and many had managed to take their gold and chattels with them. The rest protested that they were broke like everyone else. Their baroque mansions were boarded up and their anthropophagous factories were shut down. All through the Winter jobs became scarcer and scarcer. People began to tramp through the streets of Paris demanding bread. The Brain Trust labored day and night on its revolutionary plans to make society over, but even its boldest and most forward-looking devices could not keep pace with the backward slosh of events.
Finally, it came out with a new scheme, and announced that the problem was solved at last. The trouble hitherto, it explained, had been that the plain people had depended too much on the Rotten Rich for jobs. Now all that would be done away with. Henceforth, the dishing out of all jobs would be in the hands of the Government, which is to say, of the Brain Trust. Public factories would be erected at once, and every workman who wanted to work would be accommodated. There would be no more unemployment in France, and the workers, instead of yielding up 99% of the fruits of their labor to capital, would henceforth take all.
The erection of these factories was intrusted to a young advanced thinker with the charming name of Marie, and he fell to work furiously. In addition, he prepared to undertake open-air public works on an enormous scale—the construction of two huge railway stations in Paris, the dredging of the River Oise, the building of new canals and railways in all directions, and so on. But for some reason undetermined—maybe the secret machinations of the outlawed capitalists, maybe the sinister workings of the law of supply and demand—all the jobs thus made failed to accommodate the hordes of jobless. In fact, their numbers kept on increasing, and soon there were riots in Paris, and M. Marie was out of a job himself, and a bright young professor named Thomas was put in his place.
But Professor Thomas came a cropper, too, and by the end of 1848 France was in a far worse state than it had been at the beginning of its New Deal. Many members of the original Brain Trust had been sent packing by now, but others always turned up, and these recruits kept on functioning with increasing assiduity as the dismal year wore on. Every day they announced some new and grander scheme to bring in the millennium, and every day they abandoned some busted one. Meanwhile, the plain people went on looking for jobs and not finding them, and the politicians behind the scenes waited for their chance. It came in December. Within the space of a few days they turned the Brain Trust out and made the accommodating Louis Napoleon President of France. At once the Rotten Rich began to creep back, the closed factories began to reopen, and there began to be jobs again. Three years later Louis Napoleon became Emperor.
Some of the details of this story are worth noting. One is that the Brain Trust, despite all its highfalutin pretensions, was never anything save a sort of falseface for politicians. They let it rave on so long as the plain people believed in its magic, but when that magic was seen to be bogus by everyone they emerged from behind the arras, and took over their old business at the old stand. Another is that the Brain Trust, though it was made up of the self-confessed first intellects of the time, scored a complete goose egg. Not a single one of its fine schemes to bring in the More Abundant Life really worked. At the end of its operations all that it had to show was a gigantic public debt, the highest tax rate ever heard of in France, and an almost endless line of unemployed.
What this adventure cost the country, first and last, I don’t know, but certainly it must have been many millions of francs. Its goat was the French taxpayer. He had to pay, in the end, for all the crazy building of gaudy railway stations, and all that frantic dredging of rivers and digging of canals. Starting out with the thesis that the Rotten Rich were scoundrels and ought to be squeezed, the Brain Trust proceeded easily to the thesis that any man who had any property whatsoever was a scoundrel, too, and ought to be squeezed equally. The rich, in the main, managed to escape,
but the little fellow could not get away, and squeezed he surely was.
And what became of the Brain Trust when the show was over? It disappeared as mysteriously as it had come together, leaving scarcely a trace. The only genius on its roll who was a man of any actual distinction in the world was the poet, Lamartine. After it blew up, he decided to go in for politics professionally, and in 1849 he ran for President of France against Louis Napoleon. Beaten by millions of votes, he returned to the poetical business, but even at that he could no longer make a living, and in his last days the French Government had to put him on the dole. Of such sort were the smart and saucy fellows who undertook, in the France of a century ago, to overthrow the capitalistic system, redistribute wealth, abolish poverty, find a job for everyone, and bring in the New Jerusalem.
The Greeks
From the American Mercury, Oct., 1927, pp. 254–55. A review of The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. V; Cambridge (England), 1927
THE GREEKS of the palmy days remain the most overestimated people in all history. Ever since the Renaissance it has been a high indecorum to question their genius, and never a month passes that another book does not come out, praising them in loud, astounding terms. More men of the first rank were assembled in the Athens of Pericles, we are told, than any other city, or even any other nation, has ever housed. Going further, we are told that they remain unsurpassed to this day, in quality as in quantity. Greek science is depicted as the father of all modern science, Greek art as the Ur-art, Greek philosophy as the last word in reason, and the Greek government of Pericles’s time as democracy made perfect. In all this, alas, there is mainly only buncombe. The plain facts are that Greek science, even at its best, would be hard to distinguish from the science prevailing among Hottentots, Haitians and Mississippi Baptists today, that Greek art was chiefly only derivative and extremely narrow in range, that Greek philosophy was quite as idiotic as any other philosophy, and that the government of the Greeks, even at its best, was worse than the worst of Tammany. One discovers plenty of proofs of all this in the present massive volume. It was written by scholars sharing the usual academic prejudice in favor of everything Greek, but nevertheless they manage to tell the truth in it, at least between the lines. They show that the salient Greek philosophers of Pericles’s time were almost identical with the chautauqua orators of bucolic America, and that the more enlightened Greeks regarded them as public nuisances. They show that beauty, to the Greeks, was not something for everyday, but a rare luxury and means of display. They show that the Greek government was knavish and incompetent—that it was constantly engaging in crooked enterprises abroad, and frequently became so corrupt and oppressive at home that the decent people of Athens had to rise up and reform it. And they show that most of the genuinely intelligent Greeks were foreigners, and that such natives as showed sense, e.g., Aristophanes, were commonly thrown out of the country.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 24