The Chris Moeller Archives

A Very Mencken Fourth

I've begun reading a book entitled "Mencken's America," a collection of writings by early 20th Century journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken.

The son of immigrants, Mencken was, first and foremost, a cultural critic of the United States-- critical of the nation's Puritanism and religious fundamentalism, its prejudice toward baffoons as candidates for public office, and its virtually sacred preoccupation with commerce. His heyday of social influence overlapped the women's suffrage movement, Prohibition, the Scopes Monkey Trial, and the birth of Hollywood, all of which he chronicled at length. And despite his typically vicious verbal assault on his home country, he remained, by his own account, "chauvinist" and "loyal" to this "Eden of clowns," and challenged any and all dissenters to debate there's a better show to be had anywhere in the world.


I offer a few choice Mencken passages on "Eden's" 230th birthday:

On America's prejudice and passion, "No sense of abstract justice seems to reside in the soul of the American. A mob man in his ways of thinking, he shows all of the mob's sentimentality, suggestibility, credulity, irascibility, bad sportsmanship and lust for cruelty. On the one hand, the United States is probably the only country in Christendom in which Christ might reappear and preach to the people without danger from the police; and on the other hand, it is the only country, save perhaps England, in which utter social and political extinction is the portion of the man who departs in the slightest from the current fashions in morals, theology, political theory or dress."


On America's Puritanism, "Every one of (the American's) great political movements has been a moral movement; in almost every line of his literature there is what Nietzsche used to call moralic acid; he never thinks of great men and common men, of valuable men and useless men, but only of good men and bad men. And to this moral way of thinking he adds a moral way of acting. That is to say, he feels that he is bound to make an active war upon whatever is bad, that his silence is equivalent to his consent, that he will be held personally responsible, by a sharp-eyed, long-nosed God, for all the deviltry that goes on around him. The result, on one hand, is a ceaseless buzzing and slobbering over moral issues, many of them wholly artificial and ridiculous, and on the other hand, an incessant snouting into private conduct, in the hope of bringing new issues to light."


On America's sexuality, "His cities reek with prostitution; his newspapers devote enormous space to matters of amour; his one permanent intellectual exercise is the exchange of obscene and witless anecdotes. Recognizing this weakness himself, he makes elaborate efforts to armor himself against it. No other civilized white man is so full of hypocritical pruderies. He is afraid of all 'suggestion,' as he calls it, in books, pictures and plays. He cannot look at a nude statue innocently; he cannot even imagine a nude woman innocently. Words and images that have no more effect upon a German or a Frenchman than the multiplication table are subtly salacious to the American, and lead him into evil. He is forbidden to kiss his girl in the public parks because he cannot be trusted to stop at kissing... The ordinances of all his large cities embody a specific denial that he has kidneys; he is afraid to face squarely the commonplaces of physiology. A man eternally tortured by the animal within him, a man forever yielding to brute passion and instinct, his one abiding fear is that he may be mistaken for a mammal."


On America's evangelical clergy, "What one mainly notices about these ambassadors of Christ, observing them in the mass, is their colossal ignorance. They constitute, perhaps, the most ignorant class of teachers ever set up to lead a civilized people; they are even more ignorant than the county superintendents of schools. Learning, indeed, is not esteemed in the evangelical denominations, and any literate plowhand, if the Holy Spirit inflames him, is thought to be fit to preach... His body of knowledge is that of a street-car motorman or a movie actor. But he has learned the cliches of his craft and he has got him a long-tailed coat, and so he has made his escape from the harsh labors of his ancestors, and is set up as a fountain of light and learning."


On America's pastime, "Baseball escapes from (a) general ban (on sporting immorality) for two reasons: the first is that its essential immorality, as an expression of joy, is covered up by its stimulation of a childish and orgiastic local pride, a typically American weakness, and the second of which, flowing from the first, is that it offers an admirable escape for that bad sportsmanship and savage bloodlust which appear in all the rest of the American's diversions. An American crowd does not go to a baseball game to see a fair and honest contest, but to see the visiting club walloped and humiliated. If the home club can't achieve the walloping unaided, the crowd helps-- usually by means no worse than mocking and reviling, but sometimes with fists and beer bottles. And if, even then, the home club is drubbed, it becomes the butt itself, and is lambasted even more brutally than the visitors. The thirst of the crowd is for victims, and if it can't get them in one way it will get them in another."


On American freedom, "All of (the American's) thinking is done, and most of his acts are done, not as a free individual but as one of a muddled mass of individuals. When the impulse to function seizes him, he does not function and have done, but looks about him for others who yearn to function in the same way. In two words, he is a chronic joiner. He does not stand for something; he belongs to something. And whether that something be a political party, a trades union, a fraternal order or a church, it quickly reduces him to the condition of an automaton, so that in a short while his opinions and acts become nothing more than weak reflections of its opinions and acts... The American's one true exercise of the infinite freedom he boasts of is revealed in his creation of innumerable and complex aristocracies. He must have lords to look up to; he must have bosses to lead him; he must have heroes to admire. The one guide he distrusts eternally is his own unfettered spirit."

posted by CM @ 10:30 AM