Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

If you think I exaggerate, then all I ask is that you read a couple of issues of any high-toned educational journal, say, the Journal of the National Education Association. Or examine a dozen or two of the dissertations, chosen at random, turned out by candidates for the doctorate at any eminent penitentiary for pedagogues, say Teachers College, Columbia. What you will find is a state of mind that will shock you. It is so feeble that it is scarcely a state of mind at all. The pedagogues harangue one another in the precise terms of visiting Odd Fellows, and when they discuss a technical subject they commonly do it so witlessly that one is almost tempted to suspect them of irony. It is an appalling experience to read such stuff. But, save in a few fortunate places, the men and women who perpetuate it run the public-schools of America, and have upon them the burden of making the youth of the land fit for citizenship. How badly they achieve that business is made manifest every time there is a fair test. After more than a century of free education at least two out of three Americans, here as elsewhere, remain completely ignorant of the veriest fundamentals of human knowledge, and are aroused to fury against them on hearing them stated.

  Katzenjammer

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 24, 1931

  There was a time when teaching school was a relatively simple and easy job, and any young woman who had no talent for housework was deemed fit for it. But that time is no more. The pedagogue of today, whether male or female, must not only undergo a long and arduous course of preliminary training; he (or she) must also keep on studying after getting an appointment. The science of pedagogy has become enormously complicated, and it changes constantly. Its principles of today are never its principles of tomorrow: they are incessantly modified, improved, revised, adorned. They borrow from psychology, metaphysics, sociology, pathology, physical culture, chemistry, meteorology, political economy, psychiatry and sex hygiene. And through them, day and night, blows the hot wind of moral endeavor. Thus the poor gogue (or goguess) has to sweat incessantly. In Summer, when the rest of us are lolling in the cool speakeasies, he suffers a living death in Summer school, trying to puzzle out the latest arcana from Columbia University. Has he a normal school diploma in his pocket? Then it is waste paper in two years. Is he artium baccalaureus? Then an M.A. is set to prodding and shaming him. Is he himself an M.A.? Then two Ph.D.s are on his tail. It is a dreadful life.

  The Golden Age of Pedagogy

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, June 6, 1927

  The stray student of genuine intelligence must find life in the great rolling-mills of learning very unpleasant, and I suppose that he seldom stays until the end of his course. He must see very quickly that the learning on tap in them is mainly formal and bogus—that it consists almost wholly of feeble nonsense out of text-books, put together by men who are unable either to write or to think. And he must discover anon that its embellishment by the faculty is almost as bad—that very few college instructors, as he encounters them in practise, actually know anything worth knowing about the subject they presume to teach. Has the college its stars—great whales of learning, eminent in the land? Well, it is not often that an undergraduate so much as sees those whales, and seldom indeed that he has any communion with them. The teaching is done almost exclusively by understrappers, and the distinguishing marks of those understrappers is that they are primarily pedagogues, not scholars. The fact that one of them teaches English instead of mathematics and another mathematics instead of English is trivial and largely accidental. Of a thousand head of such dull drudges not ten, with their doctors’ dissertations behind them, ever contribute so much as a flyspeck to the sum of human knowledge.

  Here, of course, I speak of the common run of colleges and the common run of pedagogues. The list of such colleges, in the World Almanac, runs to six pages of very fine print. They are scattered all over the land, but they are especially thick in the Cow States, where the peasants have long cherished a superstitious veneration for education, and credit it with powers almost equal to those of a United Brethren bishop or Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. The theory is that a plow hand, taught the binomial theorem and forced to read Washington Irving, a crib to Caesar’s “De Bello Gallico,” and some obscure Ph.D.’s summary of “The Wealth of Nations,” with idiotic review questions, becomes the peer of Aristotle, Abraham Lincoln, and B. J. Palmer, the Mr. Eddy of chiropractic. It is, I fear, a false theory; he becomes simply a bad plow hand—perhaps with overtones, if Mendel is kind to him, of a good Rotarian. In the more pretentious vats of learning, I suppose there is an atmosphere more favorable to human husbandry, but even there it is probably far less favorable than popular legend makes it out. I can’t imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind. For even the good ones are manned chiefly by third-rate men, and any boy of sharp wits is sure to penetrate to their inferiority almost instantly. Men can fool other men, but they can seldom fool boys. The campus view of professors is notoriously highly critical, and even cruel. Well, the view is formulated by the whole body of students—the normal, half-simian majority as well as the intelligent minority. What must the really bright boys think!

  Such bright boys, I believe, get little out of college, aside from the salubrious cynicism that I have mentioned. If they learn anything there, it is not by the aid of their instructors, but in spite of them. They read. They weigh ideas. They come into contact, perhaps, with two or three genuinely learned men. They react sharply against the general imbecility of their fellows. Such is the process of education.

  The half-wits get even less, but what they get is obviously more valuable to them. Though they emerge with their heads quite empty of anything rationally describable as knowledge, they have at least gained something in prestige: the hinds back at home, still chained to the plow, admire and envy them. So they go into politics and begin the weary trudge to Congress, or they enter upon one of the learned professions and help to raise it to the level of the realtor’s art and mystery, or they become mortgage sharks, or perhaps they proceed to the lofty rank and dignity of Artium Magister or Doctor Philosophiae, and consecrate themselves to ironing out the rabble following after them. In addition to the prestige, they carry home certain cultural (as opposed to intellectual) gains. They have learned the rules of basket-ball, football, high-jumping, pole-vaulting and maybe lawn tennis. They have become privy to the facts that a dress coat is not worn in the morning or with plus-fours, that an Episcopalian has something on a Baptist and even on a Presbyterian, that smoking cigarettes is not immediately followed by general paralysis, and that a girl may both believe in the literal accuracy of Genesis, and neck. They have become, in a sense, house-broken, and learned how to trip over a rug gracefully, without upsetting the piano. They have read “Mlle, de Maupin,” “Night Life in Chicago,” and the complete files of Hot Dog. They have tasted gin. Above all, they have acquired heroes: the aurochs who broke the Ohio Wesleyan line, the swellest dresser on the campus, the master politician, the cheer leader, the senior who eloped with the ingénue of the No. 8 “Two Orphans” company, the junior caught in the raid on the roadhouse, the sophomore who made $3,000 letting out “Ulysses” at $1 a crack, the baseball captain, the champion shot-putter, the winner of the intercollegiate golf tourney. In other words, they have become normal, healthy-minded Americanos, potential Prominent Citizens, the larvae of sound Coolidge men; they have learned how to meanly admire mean things.

  If I had a son and he seemed middling dull, I’d send him to Harvard, for Harvard is obviously the best of all American universities. It not only inculcates the sublime principles of Americanism as well as any other; it also inoculates all its customers with a superior air, and that superior air, in a democratic country, is a possession of the utmost value, socially and economically. The great masses of men never question it: they accept it at once, as they accept a loud voice. These masses of men are uneasy in their theoretical equality: their quest is ever for superiors to defer to and venerate. Such
superiors are provided for them by Harvard. Its graduates have a haughty manner. Moreover, they are entitled to it, for Harvard is plainly the first among American universities, and not only historically. I believe that a bright boy, sent to its halls, is damaged less than he would be damaged anywhere else, and that a dull boy enjoys immensely greater benefits. Its very professors show a swagger; there is about them nothing of the hang-dog look that characterizes their colleagues nearly everywhere else. The tradition of the place is independent and contumacious. It was the first American university to throw out the theologians. It encourages odd fish. It cares nothing for public opinion. But all the while it insists upon plausible table manners, and has no truck with orators.

  A Harvard man feels at ease in Zion, and with sound reason. A Yale man, however he may snort and roar, can never get rid of the scarlet fact that, while he was being fattened for the investment securities business, he was herded into chapel every morning. It rides him through life like a Freudian suppression; he recalls it in the forlorn blackness of the night as a Y.M.C.A. secretary recalls a wicked glass of beer, or the smooth, demoralizing, horrible whiteness of a charwoman’s neck. A Princeton man remembers the Fundamentalists at commencement—flies in amber, spectres at memory’s feast. In all the other great universities there are coeds. In the lesser colleges there are rules against smoking, beadles, courses in Americanization, praying bands. The Harvard man, looking back, sees only a pink glow. His college has not turned out a wowser in 150 years. His accent and necktie are correct. His classmates continue to be worth knowing. No wonder he regards the Republic as his oyster.

  A Liberal Education

  From the Smart Set, May, 1921, pp. 140–42

  On the first page of “American Writers of the Present Day, 1890 to 1920,” by the learned Dr. T. E. Rankin, professor of rhetoric in the University of Michigan, I find the following sentence: “Precisely the same situation pertains now.”

  Somehow this use of the word interests me. Obviously, a professor of rhetoric in a great university should be an authority on such matters—but just how can a situation pertain? I go to the Standard Dictionary for light, and find that the synonyms of pertain are appertain, concern, belong, regard, relate. I substitute them and obtain:

  Precisely the same situation appertains now.

  Precisely the same situation concerns now.

  Precisely the same situation belongs now.

  Precisely the same situation regards now.

  Precisely the same situation relates now.

  I turn to page 52 of the same great work, and find the following:

  On the basis of such a distinction as that of length or brevity, one might as well speak of the two or three act play as a dramalette or dramolet, which no one appears anxious to do.

  Anxious? Does the professor mean eager? Again, on page 56, what does he mean by the word pseudo-hallucination? Pseudo is from the Greek word, pseudes, meaning false. Well, how can an hallucination be true? Is it not, by its very nature, a falsity? If so, then we have here a double falsity, a false falsehood. I proceed to page 60. I find: “One is ‘playing safe’ when he.…” On page 109 it occurs again: “If one will turn to page 239,… he will find …” And on page 126: “One cannot refrain from quoting when he thinks.…” And so on.

  Obviously, the science of rhetoric is developing rapidly at the University of Michigan. Here is a professor who has already thrown overboard the dictionaries and is fast preparing himself to do the same with the grammar-books. Ring Lardner himself is scarcely more disdainful of Harvey and Webster. But that is as far as his rebellious spirit goes. When it comes to moral and aesthetic matters, as opposed to purely lexicographical and grammatical matters, he shows all of the conservatism that befits an awakener of the souls and intellects of youth. His book, indeed, is an almost perfect model of professorial critical theory. It praises Coningsby Dawson’s “Carry On” as the work of “a master of literary style,” it puts Cale Young Rice “high among those who belong to the really tuneful throng,” it hails F. Marion Crawford as “beyond a doubt a man of genius”—and it groups James Huneker with Christopher Morley and Robert Cortes Holliday, dismisses Dreiser on the ground that he is “uncreative,” calls Hamlin Garland’s “A Son of the Middle Border” a novel, and elaborately avoids any mention whatsoever of James Branch Cabell and Willa Cather. I find myself, indeed, so fascinated by this work that I am unable to put it down; I have already read it three times. Almost every page introduces me to literati of whose existence I have been hitherto unaware: Mrs. Sherwood Bonner MacDowell, Mrs. Louise Clarke Prynelle, Miss Martha Young, Mrs. Annie C. Allinson, Miss Sara Jeannette Duncan, Eric Mackay Yoeman, Hugh J. Maclean, Dr. J. B. Dollard, Prof. J. D. Logan, Arthur S. Bourinot, and so on. And everywhere I find judgments that offer me light and leading. Of all the “young men of America who are now writing novels, Ernest Poole perhaps gives the greatest promise.” Edward Lucas White, it appears, is a man of such talent that “we should have more abiding books” if more of our writers imitated him. Huneker was a laborious fellow, but his style was “jerky, unpleasantly so,” and his “diction often not so much erudite as so farfetched as to be strained to misapplication.” William Allen White’s “A Certain Rich Man” is a “great novel”: “few books are more persuasive—partly because the author devoted three years to the writing of it.” Charles D. Stewart’s “Partners of Providence” is “such a book as the world has waited for ever since Mark Twain’s stories of river life came to the end of their writing.” Edwin Markham and Cale Young Rice are first-rate poets, but Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell are frauds. Richard Hovey spoiled his verse by imitation of “the vagrom spirit of Walt Whitman.” But best of all are the professor’s reticences. Mark Twain, it appears, wrote “Tom Sawyer Abroad” after 1890, but not “The Mysterious Stranger” or “What Is Man?” As for such writers as Montague Glass, Charles G. Norris, Henry B. Fuller, Joseph Medill Patterson, George Ade, Abraham Cahan, E. W. Howe, Vincent O’Sullivan, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis and Zona Gale, they simply do not exist. Sherwood Anderson is condemned to Coventry along with Cabell and Miss Cather. Ezra Pound, John McClure and Eunice Tietjens are unheard of among the poets. The salient American critics of life are Paul Elmer More and Agnes Repplier. There is no mention whatever of any critic of music or painting or the drama (save only the “unpleasant” Huneker), or of any of the young Liberals, or of any such fellow as Upton Sinclair, Norman Hapgood, Brooks Adams, Ralph Adams Cram, or Brand Whitlock. Among the dramatists there is praise for Charles Rann Kennedy, Charles Kenyon, Marguerite Merington and Percy Mackaye, but not a word either for or against Zoë Akins and Eugene O’Neill.

  A curious work, indeed. A perfect specimen of the depths of banality to which the teaching of “English” and “literature” has descended in some of our public seminaries. I do not offer it as the worst that I know of, but as something fairly typical; I have on my desk a book from the University of Nebraska that is ten times as nonsensical. Nor do I expose it to the gaze of the nobility and gentry simply to poke fun at a poor professor—one who, according to “Who’s Who in America,” has pursued the humanities for twenty-four years, and holds two learned degrees, and is a favorite lecturer, and contributes to such gazettes as Poet-Lore and the Homiletic Review, and has taught rhetoric at the University of Michigan since 1905, and is, moreover, an unyielding patriot and a sound Christian. What interests me is the effect upon the poor yokels who strive heroically for a “liberal” education at such universities as Michigan, and are then belabored and stupefied with such balderdash. Can you imagine the thirst for enlightenment that must be in some of those candidates for the arts degree, and the vast sacrifices that must stand behind their candidacy—remote farmers sweating like slaves for year after year that their sons and daughters may be “educated,” farmwives wearing out their lives in miserable drudgery and loneliness, pennies saved one by one, thousands of little deprivations, hopes cherished through whole generations? And then the result—a bath of
bosh. If a professor writes a text-book, I assume that it is for his students: who else would want to read it? Well, imagine a young man or woman outfitted with such a notion of the literature of the country as one finds in the tome of Prof. Rankin. Think of raising chickens and milking cows for twenty years to pay for such an education. I am surely not one to laugh at the spectacle. To me it seems to be tragic.

  The Lower Depths

  From the American Mercury, March, 1925, pp. 380–81.

  A review of THE SOCIAL OBJECTIVES OF SCHOOL ENGLISH, by Charles S. Pendleton; Nashville, 1924

  Here, in the form of a large flat book, eight and a half inches wide and eleven inches tall, is a sight-seeing bus touring the slums of pedagogy. The author, Dr. Pendleton, professes the teaching of English (not English, remember, but the teaching of English) at the George Peabody College for Teachers, an eminent seminary at Nashville, in the Baptist Holy Land, and his object in the investigation he describes was to find out what the teachers who teach English hope to accomplish by teaching it. In other words, what, precisely, is the improvement that they propose to achieve in the pupils exposed to their art and mystery? Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic or military?

  In order to find out, Pendleton, with true pedagogical diligence, proceeded to list all the reasons for teaching English that he could find. Some he got by cross-examining teachers. Others came from educators of a higher degree and puissance. Yet others he dug out of the text-books of pedagogy in common use, and the dreadful professional journals read by teachers. Finally, he threw in some from miscellaneous sources, including his own inner consciousness. In all, he accumulated 1,581 such reasons, or, as he calls them, objectives, and then he sat down and laboriously copied them upon 1,581 very thin 3×5 cards, one to a card. Some of these cards were buff in color, some were blue, some were yellow, some were pink, and some were green. On the blue cards he copied all the objectives relating to the employment of English in conversation, on the yellow cards all those dealing with its use in literary composition, on the green cards all those having to do with speech-making, and so on. Then he shook up the cards, summoned eighty professional teachers of English, and asked them to sort out the objectives in the order of appositeness and merit. The results of this laborious sorting he now sets before the learned.