Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  His final conclusion was as unsound as his premisses. All it came to was a plain begging of the question. Why does a man forbid his wife to drink all the alcohol she can hold? Because, he said, it “detracts sensibly from his comfort or pleasure.” In other words, it detracts from his comfort and pleasure because it detracts from his comfort and pleasure. Meanwhile, the real answer is so plain that even a professor should know it. A man forbids his wife to drink too much because, deep in his secret archives, he has records of the behavior of other women who drank too much, and is eager to safeguard his wife’s connubial rectitude and his own dignity against what he knows to be certain invasion. In brief, it is a commonplace of observation, familiar to all males beyond the age of twenty-one, that once a woman is drunk the rest is a mere matter of time and place: the girl is already there. A husband, viewing this prospect, perhaps shrinks from having his chattel damaged. But let us be soft enough to think that he may also shrink from seeing humiliation and bitter regret inflicted upon one who is under his protection, and one whose dignity and happiness are precious to him, and one whom he regards with deep and (I surely hope) lasting affection. A man’s grandfather is surely not his chattel, even by the terms of the Veblen theory, yet I am sure that no sane man would let the old gentleman go beyond a discreet cocktail or two if a bout of genuine bibbing were certain to be followed by the complete destruction of this dignity, his chastity and (if a Presbyterian) his immortal soul.

  One more example of the Veblenian logic and I must pass on. On page 135 of “The Theory of the Leisure Class” he turned his garish and buzzing searchlight upon another problem of the domestic hearth, this time a double one. First, why do we have lawns around our country houses? Secondly, why don’t we use cows to keep them clipped, instead of employing Italians, Croatians and blackamoors? The first question was answered by an appeal to ethnology: we delight in lawns because we are the descendants of “a pastoral people inhabiting a region with a humid climate” – because our dolicho-blond ancestors had flocks, and thus took a keen professional interest in grass. (The Marx motif! The economic interpretation of history in E flat.) But why don’t we keep flocks? Why do we renounce cows and hire Jugo-Slavs? Because “to the average popular apprehension a herd of cattle so pointedly suggests thrift and usefulness that their presence … would be intolerably cheap.” Plowing through a bad book from end to end, I could find nothing sillier than this. Here, indeed, the whole “theory of conspicuous waste” was exposed for precisely what it was: one per cent. platitude and ninety-nine per cent. nonsense. Had the genial professor, pondering his great problems, ever taken a walk in the country? And had he, in the course of that walk, ever crossed a pasture inhabited by a cow (Bos taurus)? And had he, making that crossing, ever passed astern of the cow herself? And had he, thus passing astern, ever stepped carelessly, and –

  John D.

  From the American Mercury, Dec., 1932, pp. 508-10. A review of God’s Gold: the Story of Rockcfeller and His Times, by John T. Flynn; New York, 1932

  WHEN the tale of old John D. Rockefeller’s long days and heroic deeds is summed up at last, it will probably turn out that his career in business was really the least interesting part of him. His era saw many more picturesque ornaments of that great mystery, and not a few of them were his partners – Archbold, H. H. Rogers, Henry M. Flagler, and so on. Any one of these would make a better book than Mr. Flynn’s—in fact, they are largely responsible for the goodness of his book as it stands. Some of them were pirates and some were poets. There was a vast saltiness in all of them; they gave a pungent flavor to their times. But Rockefeller, as Mr. Flynn well says, was only a sort of sublimated bookkeeper. While the others were out in the highways and byways, bellowing and brawling, he remained at home casting accounts. It was his natural gift for that science which brought him his billion. He knew how to arrange things neatly, and how to do them cheaply. He made the oil business a going concern by introducing economy into it, and neatness, and honest arithmetic, and all the other kinds of virtue that certified public accountants esteem. He converted its enormous wastes into enormous profits, and most of those profits stayed where they belonged, which is to say, in his own pocket. The rest got lots of money too, but he always got the most. After thirty years’ hard study of moral theology I can only say that I believe he deserved it.

  Far more interesting than his story of his acquisitions is the story of his spendings. There is no evidence that he had a sense of humor, but in days of his first grandeurs he developed a very good substitute for it, and that substitute sufficed to save him from the follies which usually consume American millionaires. When he moved to New York in the early 80s he was already quite rich enough to bust into what then passed for fashionable society there. He had at least as much money as the Astors and probably considerably more than the Vanderbilts. There was no reason why he should not have bought a yacht for himself, and begun to train his children for polo and polygamy. But he did nothing of the sort. Instead, he kept himself and his house steadfast to the austere Baptist theology of his youth, and had no truck whatever with Ward Mcallister’s fleshpots. On Sunday mornings he got into a long-tailed coat, put on a plug hat, and went to church. If Mrs. Rockefeller happened to be detained at home by household business he made notes of the sermon, and on his return, re-preached it to her, with pauses for applause. The children were brought up on the strictest Baptist principles, and knew little of luxury. There was one tricycle for the four of them: “if they have just one they will learn to give up to one another.”

  Nor was old John an easy mark for the chiselers who always beset rich Americans, flattering them and seeking to rook them. Upon all of their customary rackets he cast a fishy eye, for he had notions of his own about the disposition of his money. The chief of them was to the effect that it was wasteful and foolish to pay out hard dollars for mere ameliorations. Thus he did not relieve the concrete poor; he tried to devise schemes that would work against poverty in general. He put up no hospitals for the indigent sick: instead, he staked medical research with millions, and so tried to make sickness less likely. Even in the religious field he was a hard nut for touring missionaries and other such racketeers to crack. Sometimes, to be sure, he gave them money, but always he added a plan for the reorganization and delousing of their business. In brief, he did not cease to be a bookkeeper when he shut his actual books, and retired to fight (and conquer) the ulcers that adorned his gastric mucosa, and filled him with sadness. On the contrary, he simply took on more and wider bookkeeping, and in the course of a few years he had pretty well revolutionized American philanthropy.

  Whether or not his scheme was a good one is not yet demonstrated with any certainty. His chief enterprise, the Rockefeller Foundation, has unquestionably made some useful contributions to medical science, but the cost, in all probability, has gone beyond the net return. Perhaps it would have been more sensible, instead of trying to set up a sort of Standard Research Company, to have spread the money among the multitude of smaller units, searching always for the genuine genius and giving him the equipment he so often lacks. But that plan would have presented enormous difficulties, and perhaps Rockefeller did the best thing possible, considering the circumstances of the time and his own lack of special knowledge. His chief almoner was always the Rev. Frederick Taylor Gates, a go-getting Baptist clergyman. No doubt an adviser less dependent upon the Holy Spirit for light would have done better, but it must be said for Pastor Gates that, taking one day with another, he did pretty well.

  There is no evidence that Rockefeller was ever beset by any doubts about the simple theology of his youth. His innocent faith, for many years, made him a heavy contributor to the Anti-Saloon League, and hence one of the chief promoters of the pestilence of snooping, spying, slugging and blackmail that so long demoralized the Republic. When, in the end, he began to have doubts about the matter he quietly withdrew his support and went into prayer, and in due course there emanated from him, through his son John, a blast
so devastating that what was left of Prohibition collapsed overnight. The Baptist clergy were flabbergasted, and their indignation was immense. But not many of them gave voice to it, for it was beyond their daring to flout a Rockefeller. The two Johns, indeed, remained the most eminent and authoritative Baptists extant, though the younger one also upset the Geistliche by patronizing a tabernacle which subscribes to open communion and is thus full of suspicious characters, Baptistically speaking.

  Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Rockefellers, in the last analysis, was their fidelity to this rustic and preposterous shamanism. Most Americans, when they accumulate money, climb the golden rainspout of the nearest Episcopal Church, wherein the crude Yahweh of the backwoods is polished and perfumed, and speaks the vulgate with an English a. But the Rockefellers clung to the primeval rain-god of the American hinterland, and never showed any sign of being ashamed of Him. The old Hell of the Bible was Hell enough for them.

  1 New York, 1910. The Socialist was Robert Rives La Monte.

  2 He wrote four books between The Higher Learning and his death in 1929, but they were only reboilings of old bones, and attracted no notice.

  XV. ODD FISH

  A Good Man Gone Wrong

  A review of Doomed Ship, by Judd Gray; New York, 1928, in the American Mercury, Feb., 1929, pp. 254–55. Part of this was first printed in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Jan. 2, 1928. After the review appeared I received a letter from one of Mr. Gray’s closest relatives, approving and supporting my theory as to the origins of his crime

  MR. GRAY went to the electric chair in Sing Sing on January 11, 1928, for his share in the butchery of Mrs. Ruth Snyder’s husband. The present book was composed in his last days, and appears with the imprimatur of his devoted sister. From end to end of it he protests pathetically that he was, at heart, a good man. I believe him. The fact, indeed, is spread all over his singularly naïve and touching record. He emerges from it as the almost perfect model of the Y.M.C.A. alumnus, the conscientious husband and father, the Christian business man, the virtuous and God-fearing Americano. It was his very virtue, festering within him, that brought him to his appalling doom. Another and more wicked man, caught in the net of La Snyder, would have wriggled out and gone on his way, scarcely pausing to thank God for the fun and the escape. But once poor Judd had yielded to her brummagem seductions, he was done for and he knew it. Touched by sin, he shriveled like a worm on a hot stove. From the first exchange of wayward glances to the final agony in the chair the way was straight and inevitable.

  All this sounds like paradox, but I offer it seriously, and as a psychologist of high gifts. What finished the man was not his banal adultery with his suburban sweetie, but his swift and over-whelming conviction that it was mortal sin. The adultery itself was simply in bad taste: it was, perhaps, something to be ashamed of, as stealing a poor taxi-driver’s false teeth would be something to be ashamed of, but it was no more. Elks and Shriners do worse every day, and suffer only transient qualms. But to Gray, with his Presbyterian upbringing and his idealistic view of the corset business, the slip was a catastrophe, a calamity. He left his tawdry partner in a daze, marveling that there could be so much wickedness in the world, and no belch of fire from Hell to stop it. Thereafter his demoralization proceeded from step to step as inexorably and as beautifully as a case of Bright’s disease. The woman horrified him, but his very horror became a kind of fascination. He resorted to her as a Christian dipsomaniac resorts to the jug, protestingly, tremblingly and helplessly. In his blinking eyes she became an amalgam of all the Loreleis, with the Rum Demon peeping over her shoulder. Whatever she ordered him to do he did at once, like a man stupefied by some diabolical drug. When, in the end, she ordered him to butcher her oaf of a husband, he proceeded to the business almost automatically, wondering to the last instant why he obeyed and yet no more able to resist than he was able, on the day of retribution, to resist his 2,000 volts.

  In his narrative he makes much of this helplessness, and speculates somewhat heavily upon its cause. That cause, as I hint, is clear enough: he was a sincere Presbyterian, a good man. What is the chief mark of such a good man? That he cannot differentiate rationally between sin and sin—that a gnat gags him as badly as a camel. So with poor Gray. His initial peccadillo shocked him so vastly that he could think of himself thereafter only as a sinner unspeakable and incorrigible. In his eyes the step from adultery to murder was as natural and inevitable as the step from the cocktail-shaker to the gutter in the eyes of a Methodist bishop. He was rather astonished, indeed, that he didn’t beat his wife and embezzle his employers’ funds. Once the conviction of sin had seized him he was ready to go the whole hog. He went, as a matter of record, somewhat beyond it. His crime was of the peculiarly brutal and atrocious kind that only good men commit. An Elk or a Shriner, persuaded to murder Snyder, would have done it with a certain decency. Moreover, he would have demanded a plausible provocation. But Gray, being a good man, performed the job with sickening ferocity, and without asking for any provocation at all. It was sufficient for him that he was full of sin, that God had it in for him, that he was hopelessly damned. His crime, in fact, was a sort of public ratification of his damnation. It was his way of confessing. If he had any logical motive it was his yearning to get into Hell as soon as possible. In his book, to be sure, he speaks of Hell under the name of Heaven. But that is mere blarney, set down for the comfort of his family. He was too good a Presbyterian to have any illusions on the point: he was, in fact, an amateur theologian of very respectable attainments. He went to the chair fully expecting to be in Hell in twenty seconds.

  It seems to me that his story is a human document of immense interest and value, and that it deserves a great deal more serious study than it will probably get. Its moral is plain. Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone. Run a boy through a Presbyterian Sunday-school and you must police him carefully all the rest of his life, for once he slips he is ready for anything.

  Valentino

  From PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES, 1927, pp. 305–11. Valentino died Aug. 23, 1926. This piece first appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 30, 1926

  BY one of the chances that relieve the dullness of life and make it instructive, I had the honor of dining with this celebrated gentleman in New York, a week or so before his fatal illness. I had never met him before, nor seen him on the screen; the meeting was at his instance, and, when it was proposed, vaguely puzzled me. But soon its purpose became clear enough. Valentino was in trouble and wanted advice. More, he wanted advice from an elder and disinterested man, wholly removed from the movies and all their works. Something that I had written, falling under his eye, had given him the notion that I was a judicious fellow. So he requested one of his colleagues, a lady of the films, to ask me to dinner at her hotel.

  The night being infernally warm, we stripped off our coats, and came to terms at once. I recall that he wore suspenders of extraordinary width and thickness. On so slim a young man they seemed somehow absurd, especially on a hot Summer night. We perspired horribly for an hour, mopping our faces with our handkerchiefs, the table napkins, the corners of the tablecloth, and a couple of towels brought in by the humane waiter. Then there came a thunderstorm, and we began to breathe. The hostess, a woman as tactful as she is charming, disappeared mysteriously and left us to commune.

  The trouble that was agitating Valentino turned out to be very simple. The ribald New York papers were full of it, and that was what was agitating him. Some time before, out in Chicago, a wandering reporter had discovered, in the men’s wash-room of a gaudy hotel, a slot-machine selling talcum-powder. That, of course, was not unusual, but the color of the talcum-powder was. It was pink. The news made the town giggle for a day, and inspired an editorial writer on the Chicago Tribune to compose a hot weather editorial. In it he protested humorously against the effeminization of the American man, and laid it
lightheartedly to the influence of Valentino and his sheik movies. Well, it so happened that Valentino, passing through Chicago that day on his way east from the Coast, ran full tilt into the editorial, and into a gang of reporters who wanted to know what he had to say about it. What he had to say was full of fire. Throwing off his 100% Americanism and reverting to the mores of his fatherland, he challenged the editorial writer to a duel, and, when no answer came, to a fist fight. His masculine honor, it appeared, had been outraged. To the hint that he was less than he, even to the extent of one half of one per cent., there could be no answer save a bath of blood.

  Unluckily, all this took place in the United States, where the word honor, save when it is applied to the structural integrity of women, has only a comic significance. When one hears of the honor of politicians, of bankers, of lawyers, of the United States itself, everyone naturally laughs. So New York laughed at Valentino. More, it ascribed his high dudgeon to mere publicity-seeking: he seemed a vulgar movie ham seeking space. The poor fellow, thus doubly beset, rose to dudgeons higher still. His Italian mind was simply unequal to the situation. So he sought counsel from the neutral, aloof and seasoned. Unluckily, I could only name the disease, and confess frankly that there was no remedy—none, that is, known to any therapeutics within my ken. He should have passed over the gibe of the Chicago journalist, I suggested, with a lofty snort—perhaps, better still, with a counter gibe. He should have kept away from the reporters in New York. But now, alas, the mischief was done. He was both insulted and ridiculous, but there was nothing to do about it. I advised him to let the dreadful farce roll along to exhaustion. He protested that it was infamous. Infamous? Nothing, I argued, is infamous that is not true. A man still has his inner integrity. Can he still look into the shaving-glass of a morning? Then he is still on his two legs in this world, and ready even for the Devil. We sweated a great deal, discussing these lofty matters. We seemed to get nowhere.