Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  Such are the facts. I apologize for the Babylonian indecency of printing them.

  Lodge

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, June 15,1920. Written on my return from the Republican National Convention in Chicago, which nominated Warren G. Harding for the Presidency. Henry Cabot Lodge, then a Senator from Massachusetts and one of the leaders of the Republican party, was permanent chairman of the convention. I came back from Chicago on the same train that carried him, and in fact had the compartment next to his. The weather was very hot and there was no air-conditioning. In the morning coming into Washington he astounded humanity by appearing in the corridor in his shirt-sleeves. Harding died on Aug. 2, 1923, and Lodge on Nov. 9, 1924

  WHAT Lodge thinks of it, viewing all that ghastly combat of mountebanks in ironical retrospect, would make an interesting story—perhaps the most interesting about the convention that could be told, or even imagined. He presided over the sessions from a sort of aloof intellectual balcony, far above the swarming and bawling of the common herd. He was there in the flesh, but his soul was in some remote and esoteric Cathay. Perhaps even the presence of the flesh was no more than an optical delusion, a mirage due to the heat. At moments when the whole infernal hall seemed bathed in a steam produced by frying delegates and alternates alive, he was as cool as an undertaker at a hanging. He did not sweat like the general. He did not puff. He did not fume. If he put on a fresh collar every morning it was mere habit and foppishness—a sentimental concession to the Harvard tradition. He might have worn the same one all week.

  It was delightful to observe the sardonic glitter in his eye, his occasional ill-concealed snort, his general air of detachment from the business before him. For a while he would watch the show idly, letting it get more and more passionate, vociferous and preposterous. Then, as if suddenly awakened, he would stalk into it with his club and knock it into decorum in half a minute. I call the thing a club; it was certainly nothing properly describable as a gavel. The head of it was simply a large globe of hard wood, as big as an ordinary cantaloupe. The handle was perhaps two feet long. The weight of it I can’t estimate. It must have been light, else so frail a man would have found it too much for him. But it made a noise like the breaking in a door, and before that crash whole delegations went down.

  Supporting it was the Lodge voice, and behind the voice the Lodge sneer. That voice seemed quite extraordinary in so slim and ancient a man. It had volume, resonance, even a touch of music: it was pleasant to hear, and it penetrated that fog of vaporized humanity to great depth. No man who spoke from the platform spoke more clearly, more simply or more effectively. Lodge’s keynote speech, of course, was bosh, but it was bosh delivered with an air—bosh somehow dignified by the manner of its emission. The same stuff, shoveled into the atmosphere by any other statesman on the platform, would have simply driven the crowd out of the hall, and perhaps blown up the convention then and there. But Lodge got away with it because he was Lodge—because there was behind it his unescapable confidence in himself, his disarming disdain of discontent below, his unapologetic superiority.

  This superiority was and is quite real. Lodge is above the common level of his party, his country and his race, and he knows it very well, and is not disposed toward the puerile hypocrisy of denying it. He has learning. He has traditions behind him. He is absolutely sure of himself in all conceivable American societies. There was a profound irony in the rôle that he had to play at Chicago, and it certainly did not escape him. One often detected him snickering into his beard as the obscene farce unrolled itself before him. He was a nurse observing sucklings at their clumsy play, a philosopher shooing chickens out of the corn. His delight in the business visibly increased as the climax was approached. It culminated in a colossal chuckle as the mob got out of hand, and the witches of crowd folly began to ride, and the burlesque deliberations of five intolerable days came to flower in the half-frightened, half-defiant nomination of Harding—a tin-horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor.

  I often wonder what such a man as Lodge thinks secretly of the democracy he professes to cherish. It must interest him enormously, at all events as spectacle, else he would not waste his time upon it. He might have given over his days to the writing of bad history—an avocation both amusing and respectable, with a safe eminence as its final reward. He might have gone in for diplomacy and drunk out of the same jug with kings. He might have set up general practise as a Boston intellectual, groaning and sniffing an easy way through life in the lofty style of the Adams brothers. Instead he dedicated himself to politics, and spent years mastering its complex and yet fundamentally childish technique.

  Well, what reward has it brought him? At 73 he is a boss in the Senate, holding domination over a herd of miscellaneous mediocrities by a loose and precarious tenure. He has power, but men who are far beneath him have more power. At the great quadrennial pow-wow of his party he plays the part of bellwether and chief of police. Led by him, the rabble complains bitterly of lack of leadership. And when the glittering prize is fought for, he is shouldered aside to make way for a gladiator so bogus and so preposterous that the very thought of him must reduce a scion of the Cabots to sour and sickly mirth.

  A superior fellow? Even so. But superior enough to disdain even the Presidency, so fought for by fugitives from the sewers? I rather doubt it. My guess is that the gaudy glamor of the White House has intrigued even Henry Cabot—that he would leap for the bauble with the best of them if it were not clearly beyond his reach. The blinding rays, reflected from the brazen front of Roosevelt, bathed him for a while; he had his day on the steps of the throne, and I suspect that he was not insensitive to the thrill of it. On what other theory can one account for his sober acceptance of the whole Roosevelt hocus-pocus save on this theory of bedazzlement? Imagine the prince of cynics actually bamboozled by the emperor of mountebanks! Think of Swift reading Nick Carter, Edward Bok and Harold Bell Wright!

  He came back from Chicago on the same train that carried Harding. Harding traveled in one car and Lodge in another. So far as I could observe their communications were confined to a few politenesses. Lodge sat in a compartment all alone, gazing out of the window with his inscrutable ghost of a smile. He breakfasted alone. He lunched alone. He dined alone. His job was done, and he was once more serenely out of it.

  The Perihelion of Prohibition

  From the Sydney (Australia) Bulletin, July 20, 1922. This piece, of course, is now of only antiquarian interest, but I am printing it to recall to America what went on during the glaring noonday of Prohibition, when its agents controlled all branches of the government at Washington and in most of the States, and its end seemed far away. There is yet no adequate history of those years. Americans always tend to forget things so disagreeable. They have put the memory of Prohibition out of their minds just as they have put the memory of the great influenza epidemic of 1918–19

  PROHIBITION by constitutional amendment has been in force in the United States for three years, everywhere with the full power of the Federal Government behind it, and in most of the 48 States with stringent State laws to help. The results of that colossal effort to enforce it may be briefly summarized as follows:

  1. The State and Federal Governments, taken together, have lost the $500,000,000 annual revenue that was formerly derived from excises and licenses, and general taxation has had to be increased to make it up.

  2. There has been created, at a cost of $50,000,000 a year, a great army of Prohibition detectives, spies and agents provocateurs, four-fifths of whom are already corrupt.

  3. There has been created another army of so-called bootleggers, dealing partly in wines and liquors smuggled from Canada and the West Indies, and partly in beers, wines and liquors manufactured illicitly at home, and its members take a joint profit that is certainly not less than $750,000,000 a year, and probably runs to $1,500,000,000.

  4. Brewing and distilling and wine-making have been reestablished
as home industries, and the business of supplying the necessary materials—malt syrup, bottles, corks, etc. – has taken on gigantic proportions.

  5. In every American city, and in nine-tenths of the American towns, every known alcoholic beverage is still obtainable—at prices ranging from 100% to 500% above those of pre-Prohibition days—and even in the most remote country districts there is absolutely no place in which any man who desires to drink alcohol cannot get it.

  In brief, Prohibition is a failure, and it grows a worse failure every day. There was a time, shortly after the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect, when it showed some promise of being a success, especially in the farming regions, and on the strength of that promise very optimistic reports were sent broadcast by the extremely diligent press-agents of the Anti-Saloon League, and a number of confiding foreigners—for example, Sir Arthur Newholme, the Englishman—were made to believe that the New Jerusalem was actually at hand. But that was simply because the great majority of Americans had not been taking the thing seriously—because they had been caught unawares by the extraordinarily drastic provisions of the Volstead Enforcement Act. The instant they realized what was upon them they applied the national ingenuity and the national talent for corruption to the problem, and in six months it was solved. On the one hand they devised a great multitude of schemes for circumventing the law; on the other hand they proceeded gallantly to the business of debauching the officers sworn to enforce it. Since then there has been a continuous struggle between guns and armament, with guns gradually drawing into the lead. No man, not even the most romantic Prohibitionist, argues that there is anything remotely resembling a general enforcement of Prohibition today. And no unbiased and reflective man, so far as I know, sees the slightest sign that it will ever be enforced hereafter.

  The business of evading it and making a mock of it, in fact, has ceased to wear any of the customary aspects of crime, and has become a sort of national sport. The criminal, in the public eye, is not the bootlegger and certainly not his customer, but the enforcement officer. This new-fangled agent of justice has begun to take on an almost legendary character. He is looked upon by the plain people as corruption incarnate—a villainous snooper and blackmailer whose sole public function is to increase the price of drinks. When he comes into court for attacking an illicit distiller with firearms, as happens often, juries handle him roughly. Not infrequently he is mobbed while he is at his work. The effects of this public sentiment are obviously very damaging to the morale of the service. In the Federal branch there is a constant changing of personnel, and the average agent now lasts no more than six months. In that time, if he is honest, he has become disgusted by the work he is called upon to do, and alarmed by the general view of it. And if, as is probably more usual, he has gone into it simply to get as much as he can while the getting is good, he has made enough to retire. I have heard of one Federal agent in New York who, on a salary of $2000 a year, paid $4000 rent for his apartment, and kept two automobiles.

  Most of the strong liquors sold in the large cities of the East come either from Canada or from the Bahamas. Those from Canada are brought across the international border in large motor-lorries, and the business is so extensive and so well organized that the bribes paid to the officers employed to oppose it, both on the Canadian side and on the American side, are standardized, and so, barring accident, a bootlegger can estimate the cost of his goods to within a few dollars a case, and prepare for financing his operations accordingly. The supplies that come from the Bahamas are transported in small schooners. Some put in by night at lonely places along the immense American coast, where motor transportation awaits their cargoes. Others boldly enter the ports, and the Customs officers are either deceived with false manifests or boldly bribed.

  Most of the stuff thus brought in is Scotch whiskey. In preProhibition days it sold in New York at from $30 to $40 a case. Now it brings from $80 to $110, according to the supply. In the main, it is honest goods. But some of the lesser bootleggers—those who sell it, not by the case, but by the bottle—sophisticate it with home-made imitations, chiefly compounded of cologne spirits, prune-juice, pepper and creosote. Very little gin is imported, for it is too easily made at home. As for wines, the bootleggers chiefly confine their attentions to champagne, which brings $120 a case in New York. Under the Volstead Act it is perfectly lawful to import wines for “medicinal and sacramental” purposes. The bootleggers import champagne as “medicine,” and then trust to the venality of the Prohibition enforcement officers to get it released for the general trade. The business of bringing in still wines is now almost entirely in the hands of Jewish rabbis in the ghettos of the coast towns. The law allows a Jew in good standing to buy 15 gallons of wine a year for ritualistic use. These gentlemen of God, in return for a profit of from $10 to $15 a case, inscribe all solvent comers on their books as orthodox Ashkenazim—and if the customer has money enough, he may go upon the books of a dozen different rabbis, and under a dozen different safely Jewish names.

  As I have said, very little gin is imported, though the widespread popularity of the cocktail makes a steady and immense demand for it. It is manufactured at illicit distilleries, or by the simple process of diluting grain alcohol to 50% strength and adding a few drops of juniper oil and glycerine to the quart. It sells at from $40 to $65 a case, according to quality. All the known liqueurs are made by the same bootleggers, even absinthe. The necessary oils and herbs are imported from France, Italy and Germany, and added to a mixture of alcohol, water and syrup. Some of the liqueurs thus concocted are of surprisingly good quality. In fact, the absinthe now on tap in New York is quite as good as the Swiss absinthe formerly sold in the bars. It costs $15 a quart. Everywhere south of New York so-called corn whiskey, made of maize, is manufactured in stupendous quantities; in one southern State there are said to be no less than 10,000 stills in operation. It is an extremely bad drink, but the native palate, particularly in the country, favors it—and in the cities it is often transformed by devious arts into a very fair rye whiskey. It sells for from $10 to $30 a gallon.

  I have left beers and light native wines to the last. The extent to which brewing has been revived in the home in the United States is almost incredible. In some States every second housewife has become a brewer, and some of the beers and ales thus produced are extremely agreeable. A batch of wort may be cooked in an hour, the fermentation is over in four or five days, and two weeks after bottling the brew is fit to drink. In one American city of 750,000 inhabitants there are now 100 shops devoted exclusively to the sale of beer-making supplies, and lately the proprietor of one of them, by no means the largest, told me that he sold 2000 pounds of malt-syrup a day. Two thousand pounds of malt-syrup will make 4000 gallons of prime ale. It costs 2 cents a pint-bottle to make. When the breweries were still running the cheapest beer cost about 4 cents.

  Before Prohibition the American people drank very little wine. They were, in fact, just beginning to appreciate their excellent California wines when the Eighteenth Amendment was passed. Some of the California grape-growers, in despair, plowed up their vineyards and planted oranges and olives. Now they wish that they had been less hasty. Last Autumn wine was made in hundreds of thousands of American households, and the price of grapes rose to $125 a ton. I know of no American home, indeed, in which some sort of brewing, wine-making or distilling is not going on. Even in the country, where belief in Prohibition still persists, practically every housewife at least makes a jug or two of blackberry cordial. Every known fruit is expectantly fermented; in the cities raisins and currants are in enormous demand. Even the common dandelion, by some process unknown to me, is converted into a beverage that gently caresses.

  Well, if the American people are thus so diligently alcoholic—in the city folk patronize the bootleggers and make beer, and the far-flung yokels experiment with wines and set up stills—why does Prohibition remain the law of the land? In the large cities the majority against it is now at least 4 to 1; in the country
it loses public confidence steadily. Then, why isn’t it abandoned, and the vast losses that go with it saved, and the inconceivable corruption abated? The answer is too complex to be made in the space that I have remaining. Part of it lies in the fact that the process of amending the Constitution in the United States is very deliberate and vexatious; it took fully 75 years of persistent agitation to get Prohibition adopted, and it will take years of attack to get it formally rejected. But another part of the answer lies in the curious power that fanatical minorities have in American politics—a power that enables them, by playing upon the weaknesses of the two great parties, to overcome their lack of votes.

  The End of Prohibition

  From The Wet Wets Triumph, Making of a President, 1932, pp. 133–46. A Chicago dispatch to the Baltimore Evening Sun, June 30, 1932. In those days I always covered the national conventions of the two great parties for the Sunpapers. The Republicans, led by the unfortunate Hoover, adopted a compromise plank on Prohibition at the 1932 convention. It was already apparent to everyone that the dry millennium was drawing to a close, but Hoover belicved that it would nevertheless last through what be hoped would be his second term, and thus insisted on placating the drys. Roosevelt II, the chief Democratic candidate, went even further. He sent A. Mitchell Palmer to Chicago with a plank that was actually more favorable to the drys than Hoover’s. But this only aroused the eager and panting wets, and they staged a revolt in the resolutions committee. To the surprise of everyone they got enough support from the South and Middle West to put over their minority, or wet wet plank, and it was thus the majority plank when it reached the floor of the convention. One of the few major politicos to hold out against it was Cordell Hull. The rest joined the procession, and by the end of the year the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act were only evil memories.