The Anti-Bamboozler: Early writings of H. L. Mencken

http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-anti-bamboozler/article/2011032

by drjohnson • 9 years ago

63 30 9 years ago

weeklystandard.com

melq2• 9 years ago

This article leaves out the fact that the 'Sage of Baltimore' was also a miserable racist and anti-semite.

lim_nick• 9 years ago

above and beyond the norms of the time?

yesenadam6• 9 years ago

So it sounds like you just read his wikipedia page? I hadn't heard about his diaries; thanks for that, will read. I don't know what your "miserable" adds except "should be lynched".

This letter[0] from someone who knew him shows quite another side to that story.

I can't resist giving some samples of his remarkably vivid, acute and funny prose. A lot of his best stuff was written as newspaper editorials in the 1910s-1930s - incomparably better than any editorial you'll see nowadays. (Some of his best is collected in the Prejudices and Selected Prejudices series.)

"[The Declaration of Independence, a] piece of platitudinous poetry comparable to “The Psalm of Life” or Hamlet’s soliloquy, has seized such a powerful hold upon the imagination of the world’s largest civilized nation that it corrupts and conditions the whole of the national thinking. … So potent among us is a mere string of sonorous phrases, a piece of windy flapdoodle, a rhapsody almost empty of intelligible meaning, and probably composed under the influence of ethyl alcohol. And yet, as I say, it is more powerful than a million swords. It looms larger than the massive fact of Gettysburg. It is worth more than the whole Civil War. The man who loosed it upon posterity has left it a vaster heritage than the man who invented baseball." – Smart Set, Critics of More or Less Badness, Nov 1914

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it." – Observations on Government

"A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The marks of that so-called intuition are simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, a habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, a magnifico, a demi-god. The substance is a poor mountebank. …

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian, or a corporation director. And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all."

"I have said that 95 per cent. of married men are faithful. I believe the real proportion is nearer 99 per cent. What women mistake for infidelity is usually no more than vanity. Every man likes to be regarded as a devil of a fellow, and particularly by his wife. On the one hand, it diverts her attention from his more genuine shortcomings, and on the other hand it increases her respect for him. Moreover, it gives her a chance to win the sympathy of other women, and so satisfies that craving for martyrdom which is perhaps woman’s strongest characteristic. A woman who never has any chance to suspect her husband feels cheated and humiliated. She is in the position of those patriots who are induced to enlist for a war by pictures of cavalry charges, and then find themselves told off to wash the general’s underwear." - Damn!

The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who, on grounds of decorum and morality, avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies. Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man. – Notes on a Tender Theme, 2

"Man’s natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false. Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statement at all. It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. It is so in nearly every field of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first “advanced” gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour in the first chautauqua, and it will be so until the high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptococci.

No doubt the imagination of man is to blame for this singular weakness. That imagination, I daresay, is what gave him his first lift above his fellow primates. It enabled him to visualize a condition of existence better than that he was experiencing, and bit by bit he was able to give the picture a certain crude reality. Even to-day he keeps on going ahead in the same manner. That is, he thinks of something that he would like to be or to get, something appreciably better than what he is or has, and then, by the laborious, costly method of trial and error, he gradually moves toward it. In the process he is often severely punished for his discontent with God’s ordinances. He mashes his thumb, he skins his shin; he stumbles and falls; the prize he reaches out for blows up in his hands. But bit by bit he moves on, or, at all events, his heirs and assigns move on. Bit by bit he smooths the path beneath his remaining leg, and achieves pretty toys for his remaining hand to play with, and accumulates delights for his remaining ear and eye.

Alas, he is not content with this slow and sanguinary progress! Always he looks further and further ahead. Always he imagines things just over the sky-line. This body of imaginings constitutes his stock of sweet beliefs, his corpus of high faiths and confidences – in brief, his burden of errors. And that burden of errors is what distinguishes man, even above his capacity for tears, his talents as a liar, his excessive hypocrisy and poltroonery, from all the other orders of mammalia. Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself, but also and more particularly by himself – by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true." – Meditation on Meditation, Prejudices: Third Series, 1922

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/04/books/l-the-diary-of-h-l-m...

bbctol• 9 years ago

Curiosity: how much Mencken have you read? It's odd to say someone who thinks he was racist (he really, really was) has only read his Wikipedia page, and then post a wall of text from a different single source.

coldtea4• 9 years ago

This article leaves out the fact that the 'Sage of Baltimore' was also a miserable racist and anti-semite

Which is neither here, nor there. Half of the population or more was at the time (and for far later). Was he exceptionally more of those things? I don't think so, he just expressed some of those things in public works.

So it's like mentioning that Julius Cesar wasn't against keeping slaves, or that Washington didn't think women should vote.

alphonsegaston• 9 years ago

Appealing to the values of an ignorant majority is quite an ironic position to take when defending Mencken.

More pragmatically, he was a misanthrope, which, whatever its other charms, rarely serves one well in seeing past ingrained bigotry and bias.

dandersh• 9 years ago

I find this to be a poor and lazy defense in general, but even more so given the elitism and condecension Mencken had for the "half or more" of the population. People have to squint and misappropriate for other figures like Nietzsche, but not so for Mencken. There is a reason for that...I say this as someone who has works of both on their bookshelf.

Also it should be noted that some of the most damning material was found in his private journals describing people/organizations that he interacted with personally.

dtornabene5• 9 years ago

On the contrary, if you're going to hold someone up as a sage of the time, compare them to other sages. And you can take someone like John Dewey, who was very well known in the early 20th century, or Randolph Borne as examples of people who were quite perceptive, as sages, and point that they were in fact openly explicitly anti racist. Quite a few of the socialist, social democratic and communist writers of the period had a public record of deep thorough social and political criticism that rivaled menckens sans racism. The "judge them by the standards of their time" can only work so close to our own time, or if you exclude those voices that counter your narrative.

Edited: Its also I think worth pointing out when someone who is held up a paragon of democracy, like Washington is, held views that were quite anti-democratic. If this persons vision of democracy was limited, should we not note this? Regardless (within reason) of the time? There were people publicly writing at the time of the American revolution that believed in an end to slavery, the right of woman and non-property holders to vote, etc. There was a reason that The Federalist Papers were written, it was assumed that the arguments for the adoption of the constitution and the government it would create were liable to lose out for a variety of reasons. We tend to collapse the range of debate that was happening at that time.

dtornabene5• 9 years ago

Its a shame that you're getting down voted to nothing because his racism wasn't simply a personal flaw, it was endemic to his whole thought process. Mencken was an avowed Nietzschean, who published a volume on his philosphy and added forwards to english translations to the Anti-Christ (and maybe more). Its also worth pointing out that his personal interpretation of Nietsche's work was focused especially on the "superman" theory, and more specifically on the idea that there are those who are fit to rule and those who aren't. The fact that this was published in the Weekly Standard, without mention of his racism, shouldn't be surprising.

yesenadam6• 9 years ago

"A volume"? The very first book on Nietzsche published in English, no less, I believe. (1907)

I read it, it's very good. He says in several places (to paraphrase) "This idea of Nietzsche's is absolutely insane." - something no scholar of Nietzsche comes within a mile of doing nowadays.

Your whole post sounds like a third-hand report. Have you read his writings on American democracy? He couldn't be more scathing about the people who in fact do rule.

"It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker. … In the face of this singular passion for conformity, this dread of novelty and originality, it is obvious that the man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. He may slide into office once or twice, but soon or late he is bound to be held up, examined and incontinently kicked out. This leaves the field to the intellectual jelly-fish and inner tubes." – Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, 26/7/1920

Incidentally, have you read Anti-Christ? I doubt it. It's not "the Anti-Christ" (i.e. the devil) but Anti-Christ (i.e. something written against, arguing against Jesus) - which it's not, actually. I don't think it says a single word against Jesus, of whom Nietzsche seems very fond - it's against the church and priests and their corruption of the original christian message. I thought it made a lot of sense. (As do all of Nietzsche's books - well ok, parts of Ecce Homo sound loony)

Reading you again.. you're explaining Mencken's supposed racism by that he was a Nietzschean? Hmm. I don't see the connection. Oh, is it a Nazi-Nietzsche connection? Well, read Nietzsche - no trace of racism. He was embarrassed by German nationalism, never said anything positive about it or Germany, was far fonder of French writers, was more likely to say something against Germans than against Jews. And he thought Emerson was the greatest writer of the 19th C - about whom the worst Nietzsche could say was that he was too influenced by German thought. Actually Emerson wrote a lot of Nietzsche-sounding anti-democratic-sounding stuff, a lot more than Nietzsche did. Nietzsche wasn't very political at all, hardly wrote about it.

edit: Could downvoters please explain why? thank you.

trgv2• 9 years ago

That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.

This is vintage Mencken. My favorite is his obituary for William Jennings Bryan: http://history.msu.edu/hst203/files/2011/02/Mencken-In-Memor...

In my opinion, Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Nixon is a direct descendant of that work: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-...

I suppose, with Mencken, you should make reference to his racism (not to mention his strange views on Mathematics). I see him as a memorable writer. You can be a good writer and hold ignorant, offensive views.

coldtea4• 9 years ago

I suppose, with Mencken, you should make reference to his racism

I think that the things worth making a reference for, in regards to a historical figure, is things that weren't shared by 60% or more of the population of his time.

eli• 9 years ago

His private writings are kinda racist even for the 1920s and 30s.

trgv2• 9 years ago

These days it is often assumed that if you don't mention this kind of thing then you are tacitly endorsing it. I don't buy into that, but I don't mind playing along.

sabalaba• 9 years ago

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” ― Prejudices: First Series

tim333• 9 years ago

His quote "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." seems sadly apt these days.

The Anti-Bamboozler: Early writings of H. L. Mencken

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