Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  I believe that the United States could put an end to this unpleasant situation and at no great cost or risk. If it started tomorrow to arm in earnest, no other nation could hope to keep up with it: they’d all be bankrupt in two years if they tried to hold the pace. This fact became obvious at the close of the world war, when even England, the richest of the contestants and the one that had profited most by the war, saw clearly that she could not keep up with Uncle Sam on the seas. So she had her agents in Washington root hard for the disarmament conference that silly American pacifists had already proposed, and the result was that the United States agreed to keep the American fleet down to the level of the English fleet. This was a great folly. It left England still able to dream of tackling and butchering the accursed Yankee, and so opened the way for more wars. If the United States had built twenty or thirty battleships and then employed them to sink all the English and Japanese battleships there would be peace in the world today, and it would be genuine. True enough, the English would have yelled blue murder and called upon God to witness that they were being undone by an international criminal, but they’d have got over it quickly, and by this time they’d have become used to keeping the peace. As it is, they remain free to start another war whenever they please, and it seems very likely that, unless France undergoes a transformation little short of miraculous, they will do so very soon. The United States will be drawn into it and will have to pay for it.

  My scheme, to be sure, would exact force and put the whole world at the mercy of the United States. But that would be nothing new. The world is at the mercy of force today, and it is exerted by powers that, in the main, are even less reputable than the United States. Our own stealings are in Latin America, where no one ventures to oppose us. The others scramble for the loot elsewhere and constantly threaten war. The way to make them stop is not to get them to sign a vast mass of puerile and meaningless agreements, but to sharpen a terrible swift sword and let them feel its edge.

  Summary Judgment

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, June 12, 1922

  My conclusions about the late war remain as follows: (a) that the American pretense of neutrality down to 1917 was dishonest and dishonorable, (b) that the interests of the United States were actually on the side of Germany, and against both England and France, (c) that the propagation of the notion to the contrary was a very deft and amusing piece of swindling, and (d) that the American share of the war, after 1917, was carried on in an extremely cowardly manner. Every day I meet some man who was hot for the bogus Wilsonian idealism in 1916 and 1917, and is now disillusioned and full of bile. Such men I do not respect.

  The Next Round

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 18, 1921

  The surest way to bring on a war, it would seem, is to prove that it would be in violation of the great ethico-cosmic laws which produce sunsets, the laughter of little children, and all the lovely varieties of roses and sarcomata, and hence cannot conceivably take place. This benign process now works magnificently toward a clash between the two great empires of promoters and usurers, Japan and the United States. The same American Association for International Conciliation which demonstrated conclusively, in the Spring of 1914, that all Europe was bathed in good-will, is now marshaling its unanswerable proofs that we and the Japs must not and shall not fight. And to the benign business a vast multitude of lesser uplifters, vision-seers, Shakers, Muggletonians, human service-bringers, snatchers, chautauquans, message-bringers and civilization-embalmers also address themselves. I doubt that there is an editorial-writer in the Republic who has not written at least one leading article on the subject, and I doubt that a single such article has failed to describe the coming rough-house as unthinkable. Nevertheless, my agents in the Far East, hitherto very reliable, report that disbelief in the impossibility of the thing increases by geometrical ratio as one approaches the probable scene of the carnage. Here on the Atlantic seaboard practically every right-thinking man regards the whole alarm as no more than a bugaboo manufactured by Hearst. On the Pacific Coast men discuss it seriously. In Hawaii they discuss it fearfully. In Australia they dream horrible dreams about it. In Japan, so I hear, the grindstones work day and night, and every two-handed sword takes on a razor edge.

  The Art of Selling War

  From the Baltimore Sun, May 9, 1939

  The fact that all the polls run heavily against American participation in the threatening European war is not to be taken seriously. A secret poll taken in any of the countries principally concerned would show the same result precisely. The overwhelming majority of Englishmen don’t want war, and hope that it will never come again, and the same thing is true of the majority of Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Poles, Russians, Roumanians and Serbs. It was true of the same people down to August 2, 1914 and of Americans down to April 6, 1917.

  But wars are not made by common folk, scratching for livings in the heat of the day; they are made by demagogues infesting palaces. It is not necessary for these demagogues to complete the sale of a war before they send the goods home, as a storekeeper must complete the sale of, say, a suit of clothes. They send the goods home first, and then convince the customer that he wants them. History teaches that this is always very easy, for a number of reasons. One is that the very unpopularity of war makes people ready to believe, when they suddenly confront it, that it has been thrust upon them. They can’t imagine wanting it themselves; ergo, it must have been willed by the other fellow. But why don’t they blame their own demagogues? Because their own demagogues have been pretending, all the while, to be trying to prevent it. This attempt is now being made, and in a large and heroic way, by MM. Hitler, Mussolini and Chamberlain. It is also being made by the Hon. Mr. Roosevelt. Thus, when it fails, the other fellow is manifestly to blame.

  Another reason why peaceful people are so easily fetched by war is that they fear to be thought cowards. Their very peacefulness is a suspicious fact, even in their own minds, and when they are challenged they try to get rid of it by playing brave. This accounts for the extraordinary bloodthirstiness, once war has begun, of pacifists, including especially the rev. clergy. They still dislike war, but they don’t want anyone to think that they dislike it because they are afraid of it; so they set up a howl for force without stint, and preach that he who dallies is a dastard and he who doubts is damned.

  But the main reason why it is easy to sell war to peaceful people is that the demagogues who act as salesmen quickly acquire a monopoly of both public information and public instruction. They pass laws penalizing anyone who ventures to call them to book, and in a little while no one does it any more. This happened at the time the United States entered the last World War, and it will happen again if the Hon. Mr. Roosevelt manages to whoop up another one. On the day war is declared the Espionage Act will come into effect, and all free discussion will cease. No one will have access to the radio who is not approved by the White House, and no newspaper will be able to dissent without grave risk of denunciation and ruin. Any argument against the war itself, and any criticism of the persons appointed to carry it on, will become aid and comfort to the enemy. The war will not only become moral all over; it will become the touchstone and standard of morality. This impeccability will extend at once to all acts and utterances of the Administration. It will become treason to observe that the Hon. Mr. Wallace has failed to save the farmers, and treason tinged with heresy to argue that the Hon. Mr. Ickes is a jackass.

  A few weeks of that razzle-dazzle will suffice to convert most people to the war and to intimidate and silence the stray recalcitrants who hold out. All of us rationalize our necessities in this world, and one of the pressing necessities of war-time is to go along, or, at all events, not to fall back. It becomes harder and harder to resist, both socially and psychologically. The dissenter is not only suspected by all his neighbors; he also begins to suspect himself.

  Thus the job of demagogy is completed, and a brave and united nation confronts a craven and ignominious foe.
It is not until long afterward that anyone ventures to inquire into the matter more particularly, and it is then too late to do anything about it. The dead are still dead, the fellows who lost legs still lack them, war widows go on suffering the orneriness of their second husbands, and taxpayers continue to pay, pay, pay. In the schools children are taught that the war was fought for freedom, the home and God.

  Onward, Christian Soldiers!

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, May 19, 1940

  The Hon. Mr. Roosevelt’s heroic attempt to rescue England from the law of natural selection has got off to a good start, and may be expected to develop with undiminishing radiancy. As everyone knows, it has been long in preparation, and it would have been launched months ago if the hazards of the third-term campaign had not counseled caution. But with the Hon. John N. Garner lying dead upon the field and nearly all the other erstwhile Fifth Column men leaping for cover, the way is now open to panic the booboisie in the grand manner, and this, no doubt, will be promptly undertaken and achieved. In a few weeks it will be a primary article of American dogma that it is an act of lunacy, and not only an act of lunacy but also immoral and against God, to change barrels going over Niagara. The impediment lying in the proletarian disinclination to be butchered must be considered, of course, but it is not likely to last long. The plain people having abandoned the barber-shop, the village grocery and the dream-book for the radio, are now wholly dependent upon it for information and ideology, and in very short order they will be getting a horse-doctor’s dose of both. Six successive nights of White House crooning will make them pant for Hitler’s poisonous blood; indeed, it would take only seven or eight to make them pant for Churchill’s. That crooning will be on us anon, beginning for the same at middle C and running up gloriously to A above the clef.

  War Without Art

  From the Smart Set, April, 1918, pp. 142–43.

  A review of THE STORY OF A COMMON SOLDIER OF ARMY LIFE IN THE CIVIL WAR, by Leander Stillwell; Kansas City, 1917

  Judge Stillwell is a resident of Erie, Kansas, a remote outpost in the saleratus and hog cholera belt. After great difficulties my agents in Kansas City located the town, waited upon the judge, and procured a copy of the work. I have since read it with the utmost pleasure. It is a modest and excellent composition, a chronicle of war without any of the customary strutting and bawling in it. Judge Stillwell served in the Union Army for four years, and saw some of the most savage fighting of the Civil War, but he nowhere hints that the event of Appomattox was due to his personal butcheries, nor does he expose the strategical imbecilities of the generals he fought under, nor does he describe or discuss any battle at which he was not present, nor does he pile on the rhetoric in describing the battles he actually saw. In brief, a war book of a quite unusual sort, and an effective antidote to the gorgeous tomes which now burden the book-counters. More, it is done in plain, straightforward American, naked and unashamed.

  The learned jurist, now a hearty ancient of seventy-three, went into the war a boy of eighteen. His home was in the jungle of southwestern Illinois and his whole service was seen as a member of Company D, 61st Illinois Infantry, a regiment raised by countrymen, and officered and manned by countrymen from first to last. Stillwell enlisted as a private, was made a corporal at the end of his training, and a good while later, after bearing himself creditably in the field, was promoted to sergeant. He remained a sergeant until near the end. Then, with the Confederacy in collapse and the war practically over, some of the officers of the regiment retired and he was made a second lieutenant and finally a first lieutenant. This was the full extent of his promotions. He came home with a sword over his shoulder, but he had never drawn it in battle. All his fighting had been done with a musket and in the ranks.

  The 61st Illinois was at Shiloh and fought through the first day, but was held in reserve thereafter. Stillwell describes what he saw, and then shuts down; the battle, as he depicts it, was merely a small affair in the woods. But what a thrill he sets into that brief scene with his arctic, almost biblical phrases! One sees the row of plow-boys in their first, dismayed surprise; one hears the appalling slambang of it; one feels them stagger and fall back; one almost smells them in their swift, sweaty retreat. And then the retirement to the river, and the long wait by the water while Buell’s divisions landed from the steamboats and clawed their way into the woods, and forty bands played “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” The picture jumps and jiggers like a moving picture film. It is full of brilliant flashes, little episodes that stick in the mind. No better writing could be imagined.

  The 61st was before Vicksburg, but never near enough to look down into the city. The judge does not lie about it; he doesn’t pretend that he was nearer than he was; he doesn’t tell how his eagle eye laid a 42-centimetre gun and shot off the campanile of the First Methodist Church; he mentions no wading in blood. What one actually gets from him is a dramatic vision of vast tumults on the horizon, of a gigantic battle sensed from afar. Occasionally a shell came near—but no one paid much attention to shells. The main business was to find something to eat, and especially something better than the salt-horse and Yankee beans of the Army. One fairly tastes those beans toward the close. They are mentioned on every page—perhaps 200 times. General Grant is mentioned but twice.

  Another capital chapter describes an obscure and petty battle on the railroad below Murfreesboro, Tenn.—a battle so small that the history books probably do not mention it at all. But for Sergeant Stillwell it was the wildest combat of the whole war, and so he goes into it in detail, and makes it extraordinarily vivid. The 61st had been told off to guard a supply train, and the Confederates ambushed train and regiment in the woods. There followed a brisk fight in the night, and following the fight a disorderly retreat along the railroad tracks. The men floundered through thickets and country streams, lost and calling to one another. Their officers took to the woods, were driven out, fell wounded in the ditch along the track. The fat colonel, winded by his colossal sprinting, rolled over like an ox and was pounced upon by the yelling rebels. Altogether, a shocking and lamentable affair—and here set down superbly.

  So to the end. One gets a constant feeling of reality; no mere artfulness could contrive it. Nor is all the good writing in the battle scenes. The last scene of all, the war done, is one of the best managed in the book. Here we see the return of the veteran of twenty-two, now proudly embellished with the shoulder-straps of an officer. Discharged at Springfield, after a long wait for his money, he makes his way to the little village nearest his home, his coat off, his sword shouldered like a musket. His expectations are not concealed; he has gallantly served his country; he glances about for signs of welcome. But no such signs appear. A yokel in the village store gapes at him idly but does not hail him; a housedog barks as he passes on; that is all. “Discharged soldiers were now numerous and common, and no longer a novelty.” Two hours later he is helping his father to cut and shock the corn.

  I commend this little volume to your kind attention.

  Memorials of Dishonor

  From the American Mercury, Nov., 1929, pp. 381–82.

  A review of THE TRAGIC ERA: THE REVOLUTION AFTER LINCOLN, by Claude G. Bowers; Boston, 1929

  Mr. Bowersr’s book is a long one and in parts it is painfully dull; nevertheless, I’d be glad to second a motion to compel every Federal judge in America, every member of the W.C.T.U. and the D.A.R., every Rotarian and Kiwanian, and every self-confessed hero of the late war to memorize it on penalty of the bastinado. For it is a magnificent antidote to the whole rumble-bumble of Law Enforcement, with side swipes at all the other varieties of pious nonsense which now delude the American people. It deals with a period when “idealism” was loose upon the land as never before or since, and the tale it has to tell is one of almost unmitigated oppression, corruption and false pretenses. Then, as now, politicians, theologians and stock-jobbers combined to bring in the Millennium, and then, as now, the fruits were only extortion and excess. It is
difficult, reading the record, to believe it. It seems a sheer impossibility that such things could have happened in a country pretending to be civilized. Yet happen they did, and not all the scouring and polishing of prostitute historians can ever erase the damning facts.

  The period, of course, was that of the two Grant administrations. Ignorant, stupid, plebeian and uncouth, with the tastes of a village drunkard and the pathetic credulity of a yokel at a county fair, Grant staggered through his eight years of disgrace and dishonor. He had an instinct for trusting scoundrels which almost amounted to genius. So long as Lincoln lived the influence of that vast and mystical personage held him in leash, and in his final dealings with Lee the orders that came from above even got him some reputation as a humane and sensible man. But once old Abe was in the boneyard, his native imbecility developed rapidly and brilliantly. By 1866 he was already lined up with the harpies and fanatics who sought to destroy Andrew Johnson, and thereafter, until his second term ended in a blast of horrible stenches, he was the stalking-horse of every infamy. There is no record, after the first year or two, that he ever so much as suspected that most of his friends were scoundrels. In the midst of it all he believed that they were virtuous, and marvelled that their patriotic inspirations could be challenged. Today, appropriately enough, the largest American city does honor to his manes. It is sad, but it is fitting.