Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  Such are the sweet-smelling and altruistic agronomists whose sorrows are the Leitmotiv of our politics, whose welfare is alleged to be the chief end of democratic statecraft, whose patriotism is the so-called bulwark of this so-called Republic.

  Zoos

  From DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY, 1918, pp. 80–85.

  First printed in the New York Evening Mail, Feb. 2, 1918

  I OFTEN wonder how much sound and nourishing food is fed to the animals in the zoological gardens of America every week, and try to figure out what the public gets in return for the cost thereof. The annual bill must surely run into millions; one is constantly hearing how much beef a lion downs at a meal, and how many tons of hay an elephant dispatches in a month. And to what end? To the end, principally, that a horde of superintendents and keepers may be kept in easy jobs. To the end, secondarily, that the least intelligent minority of the population may have an idiotic show to gape at on Sunday afternoons, and that the young of the species may be instructed in the methods of amour prevailing among chimpanzees and become privy to the technic employed by jaguars, hyenas and polar bears in ridding themselves of lice.

  So far as I can make out, after laborious visits to some of the chief zoos of the nation, no other imaginable purpose is served by their existence. One hears constantly, true enough (mainly from the gentlemen they support) that they are educational. But how? Just what sort of instruction do they radiate, and what is its value? I have never been able to find out. The sober truth is that they are no more educational than so many firemen’s parades or displays of skyrockets, and that all they actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State Legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

  Education your grandmother! Show me a schoolboy who has ever learned anything valuable or important by watching a mangy old lion snoring away in its cage or a family of monkeys fighting for peanuts. To get any useful instruction out of such a spectacle is palpably impossible. The most it can imaginably impart is that the stripes of a certain sort of tiger run one way and the stripes of another sort some other way, that hyenas and polecats smell worse than Greek ’bus boys, that the Latin name of the raccoon (who was unheard of by the Romans) is Procyon lotor. For the dissemination of such banal knowledge, absurdly emitted and defectively taken in, the taxpayers of the United States are mulcted. As well make them pay for teaching policemen the theory of least squares, or for instructing roosters in the laying of eggs.

  But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men to study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, has ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoölogy, and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actual learning, but in the Sunday newspapers. He is to biology what the late Camille Flammarion was to astronomy, which is to say, its court jester and reductio ad absurdum. When he leaps into public notice with some new pearl of knowledge, it commonly turns out to be no more than the news that Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had her teeth plugged with zinc and is expecting twins. Or that Pishposh, the man-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that Damon, the grizzly, has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail, nose and remaining ear.

  Science, of course, has its uses for the lower animals. A diligent study of their livers and lights helps to an understanding of the anatomy and physiology, and particularly of the pathology, of man. They are necessary aids in devising and manufacturing many remedial agents, and in testing the virtues of those already devised; out of the mute agonies of a rabbit or a dog may come relief for a baby with diphtheria, or means for an archdeacon to escape the consequences of his youthful follies. Moreover, something valuable is to be got out of a mere study of their habits, instincts and ways of mind—knowledge that, by analogy, may illuminate the parallel doings of the genus homo, and so enable us to comprehend the primitive mental processes of the rev. clergy.

  But it must be obvious that none of these studies can be made in a zoo. The zoo animals, to begin with, provide no material for the biologist; he can find out no more about their insides than what he discerns from a safe distance and through the bars. He is not allowed to try his germs and specifics upon them; he is not allowed to vivisect them. If he would find out what goes on in the animal body under this condition or that, he must turn from the inhabitants of the zoo to the customary guinea pigs and dogs, and buy or steal them for himself. Nor does he get any chance for profitable inquiry when zoo animals die (usually of lack of exercise or ignorant doctoring), for their carcasses are not handed to him for autopsy, but at once stuffed with gypsum and excelsior and placed in some museum.

  Least of all do zoos produce any new knowledge about animal behavior. Such knowledge must be got, not from animals penned up and tortured, but from animals in a state of nature. A professor studying the habits of the giraffe, for example, and confining his observations to specimens in zoos, would inevitably come to the conclusion that the giraffe is a sedentary and melancholy beast, standing immovable for hours at a time and employing an Italian to feed him hay and cabbages. As well proceed to a study of the psychology of a jurisconsult by first immersing him in Sing Sing, or of a juggler by first cutting off his hands. Knowledge so gained is inaccurate and imbecile knowledge. Not even a professor, if sober, would give it any faith and credit.

  There remains, then, the only true utility of a zoo: it is a childish and pointless show for the unintelligent, in brief, for children, nurse-maids, visiting yokels and the generality of the defective. Should the taxpayers be forced to sweat millions for such a purpose? I think not. The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combatted at the public expense, and not fostered. He is a public liability and public menace, and society should seek to improve him. Instead of that, we spend a lot of money to feed his degrading appetite and further paralyze his mind. It is precisely as if the community provided free champagne for dipsomaniacs, or hired lecturers to convert the Army to the doctrines of the Quakers.

  1 It is not altogether a matter of pressure. Large numbers of rustic legislators are themselves believers in chiropractic. So are many members of Congress.

  2 This offer was made in 1927. There were no takers. After World Wat II the jobholders at Washington, many of them patrons of chiropractic themselves, decided that any veteran who longed to study the science was eligible to receive assistance under the G. I. Bill of Rights. Thus a multitude of fly-by-night chiropractic schools sprang up, and their students were ranked, officially, precisely on all fours with those who studied at Harvard.

  XXI. THE HUMAN BODY

  Pathological Note

  From the Smart Set, Dec., 1919, pp. 66–67

  THE EXACT nature of disease is a matter that still gives pause to MM. the pathologists. All that may be said about it with any certainty is that a given condition is an apparent departure from the normal balance, and it tends to destroy the organism and produce death. When one comes to non-lethal abnormality, it would be absurd to assume that it is to be regarded, ipso facto, as regrettable. The perfectly normal human being, the absolutely average man, is surely anything but an ideal creature. A great many admittedly abnormal men, even in the direction of what is called disease, are his obvious superiors, and this class includes many so-called men of genius. As for the fact that disease tends to produce death, this is a matter of small significance. Life itself tends to produce death; living is a sort of gradual dying. All that distinguishes what is known as a healthy man from what is known as a diseased man is that the latter promises to die sooner—and even this probability is not always borne out by the event. Men afflicted with diseases regarded a
s fatal often live so long that their physicians begin to regard them as personal enemies and have to get them out of the way, by giving them doses out of the black bottle.

  The fact is that certain diseased states are very favorable to the higher functioning of the organism—more favorable, indeed, than states of health. One of the diseases that American gobs were saved from in 1917 by the virtuous watchfulness of the Hon. Josephus Daniels is of such curious effect upon the mental powers that, under certain conditions, it would be much more sensible to call it a benefit than a handicap. True enough, ninety-nine out of a hundred victims who show signs of its mental effect move toward insanity, but the hundredth moves toward genius. Beethoven, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were such victims, if the word may be used of giants. The mild toxemia accompanying the disease kept them keyed up to stupendous effort. All three died of it in the end, but while they lived it acted upon them like some extraordinarily powerful stimulant, and there is little doubt that their great achievements were at least partly due to it.

  In this case, of course, ideas of loathsomeness reinforce mere fear, and so most sane men would rather do without the stimulation than face the disease. But there are other maladies, not popularly regarded as loathsome, which also seem to prick up the intellect. One of them is tuberculosis. It is perfectly possible that the superior mental development of the white races may be due to the fact that they have suffered from tuberculosis for many centuries. History shows a vast number of extraordinary consumptives, and it is common observation that even the stupidest man, once he is attacked by the tubercle bacilli, begins to exhibit a certain alertness. Perhaps the time will come when promising young men, instead of being protected from such diseases at all hazards, will be deliberately infected with them, just as soils are now inoculated with nitrogen-liberating bacteria.

  This plan, of course, will tend to diminish the length of their days, but that will be no objection to it, for its aim will not be to improve the candidates quantitatively, but to improve them qualitatively. The science of hygiene, which is largely in the hands of quacks, lays too much stress upon mere longevity, and when it gets beyond longevity it seeks only the good of common men. To produce better stockbrokers, Knights of Pythias, Sons of the Revolution, corner grocerymen, labor leaders and other such cocci, it is necessary, of course, to keep them physically well, for if they are valuable at all, it is chiefly as physical machines. They serve to reverse and complete the great nitrogenfixing process of vegetable life. But if it were possible to produce a Chopin with a few doses of tubercle bacilli, even at the cost of killing him at thirty-nine, it would surely be worth while. And if a technique is ever worked out for producing a Beethoven, or even making measurably more likely the production of a Beethoven, with any other pathogenic organisms, them certainly only idiots will complain if they kill him at fifty-seven.

  The Striated Muscle Fetish

  From the American Mercury, June, 1931, pp. 156–58

  IN the American colleges, anon and anon, there goes on a crusade against the gross over-accentuation of athletic sports and pastimes, but it is not likely that it will ever yield any substantial reform. On the one hand, college authorities, and especially college presidents, are far too politic a class of men to take any really effective steps against an enterprise that brings in such large sums of money, and on the other hand they are far too conventional to challenge the common delusion that athletics, in themselves, are uplifting and hence laudable. The most one hears, even from the radicals among them, is that it is somehow immoral for college stadiums to cost five times as much as college libraries; no one ever argues that the stadiums ought to be abolished altogether. Yet it is plain that that position might be very plausibly maintained.

  The popular belief in athletics is grounded upon the theory that violent exercise makes for bodily health, and that bodily health is necessary to mental vigor. Both halves of this theory are highly dubious. There is, in fact, no reason whatever for believing that such a game as, say, football improves the health of those who play it. On the contrary, there is every reason for believing that it is deleterious. The football player is not only exposed constantly to a risk of grave injury, often of an irremediable kind; he is also damaged in his normal physiological processes by the excessive strains of the game, and the exposure that goes with playing it. If it were actually good for half-grown boys to wallow for several hours a day in a muddy field, with their heads bare and the bleak autumnal skies overhead, then it would also be good for them to be sprayed with a firehose before going to bed. And if it were good for their non-playing schoolmates to sit watching them on cold and windy bleachers then it would also be good for those schoolmates to hear their professors in the same place.

  The truth is that athletes, as a class, are not above the normal in health, but below it. Despite all the attention that they get from dietitians, rubbers and the medical faculty, they are forever beset by malaises, and it is almost unheard of for one of them to pass through an ordinary season without a spell of illness. When a college goes in for any given sport in the grand manner it always has to prepare five or six times as many players as the rules demand, for most of its stars are bound to be disabled at some time or other. Not a few, after a game or two, drop out altogether, and are heard of no more. Some are crippled on the field, but more succumb to the mere wear and tear. In other words, the exercise they get does not really improve their vigor; it only develops and reveals their lack of vigor. The survivors are not better animals than they were; they were simply better animals than the general in the first place.

  The cult of health, indeed, has been carried to plainly preposterous lengths. It is whooped up, in large part, by medical men turned uplifters, i.e., by men trained in medicine but with no talent for it, and an aversion to it. The public hygiene movement is chiefly in the hands of such quacks, and they seem to have a powerful and baleful influence upon colleagues who should know better. This influence shows itself, inter alia, in the current craze to employ heliotherapy in a wholesale and irrational manner, without any consideration whatever for the comfort of the patient or the nature of his disease. My prediction is that exposing sick people to glaring sunlight, or to any kind of artificial light that simulates it, will some day go as far out of fashion as bleeding them has gone today. The fact is that, to the higher varieties of civilized man, sunlight is often injurious, and their natural inclination to keep out of it is sound in instinct. If it were beneficial, then farmers would be healthier than city men, which they are surely not. Man has apparently sought the shade since his earliest days on earth, and all of his anthropoid ancestors seem to have been forest dwellers.

  Fresh air is another medicament that will be trusted less hereafter than it is today. Everyone can recall the time when poor consumptives were exposed to the wintry blasts on mountaintops. Most of them, of course, died painful deaths, but the recovery of those who didn’t was ascribed to the rarefied air. But now it begins to be understood that the only valuable part of this treatment was the rest, which the roaring of the winds obviously impeded rather than helped. At about the same time the pedagogues of the United States also succumbed to the fresh air craze, and the taxpayers were rooked into laying out millions for elaborate and costly ventilating systems for the public schools. But now it has been found that the air which comes in around the edges of an ordinary window is all the pupils really need, and the pedagogues, abandoning their insane ventilating systems, begin to bellow for expensive quartz window-panes, to let in the ultra-violet rays. This lunacy will last a while, and then go out. Even pedagogues, it appears, have a certain capacity for learning.

  But not much. In the matter of athletics they are hampered by bad training. Most of them, at least in the colleges, are themselves college graduates, and thus accept the campus scale of values. Inasmuch as the average boy of eighteen would far rather be heavy-weight champion of the world than Einstein, that scale is heavily loaded in favor of mere physical prowess. The poor ’gogues, subs
cribing to it, can never quite rid themselves of a sneaking admiration for football stars. Practically every one of them, when he dreams at night, dreams that he is a reincarnation of Sandow. Thus they cannot be trusted to make any really vigorous onslaught upon the college athletic racket. If a reform ever comes, it will not come from college faculties, but from college trustees, most of whom are fortunately without college training. But these trustees, alas, have their dreams too: they dream that they are J. P. Morgans. Thus the only way to get rid of the combats of gorillas which now bring millions to the colleges will be to invent some imbecility which brings in even more. To that enterprise, I regret to have to report, I find myself unequal.

  Moral Tale

  From the Baltimore Sun, April 11, 1935.

  Welch was born in 1850 and died in 1934

  THE LATE Dr. William H. Welch, one of the stars of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, was a sort of walking reductio ad absurdum of some of the most confident theories of his fellow resurrection-men. For diet he cared precisely nothing, yet he lived to be 84. In exercise he took so little interest that he never had a golf-stick or even a billiard-cue in his hands, yet he was hale and hearty until his last brief illness. And to top it all, he came into the world with the very sort of physique which, if the insurance statisticians are to be believed, means certain death before 50.