Quotulatiousness

November 18, 2019

QotD: H.L. Mencken on “moral crusades”

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.


The loud, preposterous moral crusades that so endlessly rock the republic – against the rum demon, against Sunday baseball, against Sunday moving-pictures, against dancing, against fornication, against the cigarette, against all things sinful and charming – these astounding Methodist jehads offer fat clinical material to the student of mobocracy. In the long run, nearly all of them must succeed, for the mob is eternally virtuous, and the only thing necessary to get it in favor of some new and super-oppressive law is to convince it that that law will be distasteful to the minority that it envies and hates.

H.L. Mencken, “Moral Indignation”, Damn! A book of calumny, 1918.

July 21, 2019

Debunking the “common wisdom” about the “Scopes Monkey Trial”

Filed under: Education, History, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Pulliam explains what really caused the “Scopes Monkey Trial” and what was at stake … which doesn’t match up well at all against what little most people will remember about it today:

William Jennings Bryan (seated at left) being interrogated by Clarence Darrow, during the trial of the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, July 20, 1925. That Monday afternoon, because of the extreme heat, Judge Raulston moved court proceedings outdoors. The session was held on a platform that had been erected at the front of the Rhea County Courthouse to accommodate ministers who wanted to preach during the time of the trial. Defense lawyers for Scopes (John R. Neal, Arthur Garfield Hays, and Dudley Field Malone) are visible seated to the extreme right. One of the men at left, with his back to the photographer, appears to be Scopes. The court reporters are seated at the table.
Photograph by Watson Davis via Wikimedia Commons.

We are again in another contentious period in America where battles over our culture and how we should live together are acrimonious. But there have been many points in our history that indicate we are only re-engaging a form of politics that is quintessentially American. One prominent past episode that occurred in Dayton, Tennessee during the summer of 1925 — the so-called “Scopes Monkey Trial” — has captured the American imagination like few legal proceedings ever have. Noted trial lawyer Clarence Darrow was part of the large legal team representing a 24-year-old substitute high school teacher, John Thomas Scopes, who was accused of violating the state’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in a state-funded school. The celebrity co-prosecutor was William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential nominee, former Nebraska congressman, and Secretary of State to President Woodrow Wilson. Both Darrow and Bryan were prominent Progressive figures. Bryan, a left-wing evangelical and a fiery orator, is best known for his “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention.

The trial provided an opportunity for Darrow, whose reputation had been sullied by questionable tactics employed in the defense of radical labor leaders, to vindicate himself before a national audience. Chicago’s WGN radio station broadcast the trial nationwide and hundreds of reporters, some of them from overseas, covered the case. Geoffrey Cowan, author of the exhaustively-researched book The People v. Clarence Darrow, notes that Darrow achieved national notoriety, “won the support of Eastern sophisticates,” and “found new acceptance” as a result of the widely-publicized trial, especially his alleged humiliation of Darrow’s “old hero,” Bryan. This canard, which formed the dramatic crux of the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, a highly-fictionalized depiction of the trial adapted from the 1955 play written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, is just one aspect of the popular mythology that surrounds the case.

Almost all of the “conventional wisdom” concerning the Scopes trial is false. Contrary to the impression created by Inherit the Wind and other popular accounts (including the sensational reportage of H. L. Mencken of The Baltimore Sun, one of the leading journalists of his day), the trial was not a fundamentalist inquisition, but an ill-conceived publicity stunt by Dayton businessmen who were trying to attract tourists to the small town — to put Dayton on the map. To generate a test case challenging the statute, the American Civil Liberties Union had offered to defend any teacher charged with violating the Butler Act, gratis. Dayton businessmen recruited Scopes to agree to serve as the defendant, even though he was unsure he had actually taught evolution. Nonetheless, Scopes volunteered to be charged. The trial — for a misdemeanor offense — was staged. Celebrity lawyers were solicited to participate for the sole purpose of increasing public interest in the case. The Baltimore Sun paid part of the defense’s expenses because it knew that the spectacle would sell newspapers, and it did. A lot of them.

I think it would be fair to say that H.L. Mencken had a passionate dislike for William Jennings Bryan, even after Bryan’s death a few days later:

It is the national custom to sentimentalize the dead, as it is to sentimentalize men about to be hanged. Perhaps I fall into that weakness here. The Bryan I shall remember is the Bryan of his last weeks on earth — broken, furious, and infinitely pathetic. It was impossible to meet his hatred with hatred to match it. He was winning a battle that would make him forever infamous wherever enlightened men remembered it and him. Even his old enemy, Darrow, was gentle with him at the end. That cross-examination might have been ten times as devastating. It was plain to everyone that the old Berserker Bryan was gone — that all that remained of him was a pair of glaring and horrible eyes.

But what of his life? Did he accomplish any useful thing? Was he, in his day, of any dignity as a man, and of any value to his fellow-men? I doubt it. Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker. The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment’s notice. For years he evaded Prohibition as dangerous; then he embraced it as profitable. At the Democratic National Convention last year he was on both sides, and distrusted by both. In his last great battle there was only a baleful and ridiculous malignancy. If he was pathetic, he was also disgusting.

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

H/T to “WarEagle82” for the link.

June 11, 2019

QotD: Advice to young men

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.


Since Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, published his celebrated letters to his morganatic son, in 1744, there has been no adequate book, in English, of advice to young men. I say adequate, and the adjective tells the whole story. There is not, of course, a college president or a boss Y.M.C.A. secretary, or an uplifting preacher in the United States who has not written such a book, but all of them are alike filled with bilge. They depict and advocate a life that no normal young man wants to live, or could live without ruin if he wanted to. They are full of Sunday-school platitudes and Boy Scout snuffling. If they were swallowed by the youth of today the Republic of tomorrow would be a nation of idiots.

H.L. Mencken, “Another Long-Awaited Book”, Chicago Tribune, 1926-09-12.

April 24, 2019

QotD: The Utopia of Damned Fools

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The money began to pour out on November 16, 1933, to the tune of a deafening hullabaloo. By December 1 more than 1,000,000 were on the CWA [Civil Works Administration] pay roll; by January, 1934, the number reached 4,100,000. Press agents in eight-hour shifts worked day and night to tell a panting country what it was all about. The Depression, it was explained, was being given a series of adroit and fatal blows, above, below and athwart the belt. In six months there would be no more unemployment, the wheels of industry would be spinning, and the More Abundant Life would be on us. Brains had at last conquered the fear of fear.

What actually happened belongs to history. By the opening of Spring [Harry] Hopkins had got rid of his billion, and the whole thing had blown up with a bang. More people were out of work than ever before. The wheels of industry resolutely refused to spin. The More Abundant Life continued to linger over the sky line. There ensued a pause for taking breath, and then another stupendous assault was launched upon the taxpayer. This time the amount demanded was $4,880,000,000. It is now in hand, and plans are under way to lay it out where it will do the most good in next year’s campaign.

Go back to the clippings and read them again. Consider well what they say. Four preposterous nonentities, all of them professional uplifters, returning from a junket at the taxpayer’s expense, sit in a smoking car munching peanuts and talking shop. Their sole business in life is spending other people’s money. In the past they have always had to put in four-fifths of their time cadging it, but now the New Deal has admitted them to the vaults of the public treasury, and just beyond the public treasury, shackled in a gigantic lemon-squeezer worked by steam, groans the taxpayer. They feel their oats, and are busting with ideals. For them, at least, the More Abundant Life has surely come.

Suddenly one of them, biting down hard on a peanut, has an inspiration. He leapt to his feet exultant, palpitating like a crusader shinning up the walls of Antioch. How, now, comrade, have you bitten into a worm? Nay, gents, I have thought of a good one, a swell one, the damndest you will ever heard tell of. Why not put everyone to work? Why not shovel it out in a really Large Way. Why higgle and temporize? We won’t be here forever, and when we are gone we’ll be gone a long while.

But the Leader? Wasn’t he babbling again, only the other day, of balancing the budget? Isn’t it a fact that he shows some sign of wobbling of late – that the flop of the NRA [National Recovery Administration] has given him to think? Well, we can only try. We have fetched him before, and maybe we can fetch him again. So the train reaches Washington, the porter gets his tip from the taxpayer’s pocket, and the next day the four brethren meet to figure out the details. But they never get further than a few scratches, for The Leader is in one of his intuitive moods, and his Christian Science smile is in high gear. Say no more, Harry, it is done! The next morning the money begins to gush and billow out of the Treasury. Six months later a billion is gone, and plans are under way to collar five times as much more.

Such is government by the Brain Trust. Such is the fate of the taxpayer under a Planned Economy. Such is the Utopia of Damned Fools.

H.L. Mencken, “The New Deal”, The Mencken Chrestomathy, 1982 (article originally published 1935-05).

February 23, 2019

No matter which “global crisis” they cry up, their answer is always “more government”

Filed under: Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Alex Noble on the remarkable consistency of the proffered solution to any and all “global” problems:

Climatechangers are really just watermelons – green on the outside but red on the inside. You’ll notice that none of their ideas about how to prevent climate change involve anything other than bigger government.

For them, climate change is just a pretext – an irrefutable argument (“if you disagree that we need to save the planet you must want people to die!”) that enables them to demand more taxes and more power for them and their friends so they can set the world to rights.

And out here in the real world, they have their army of useful innocents – voters fearful of tackling the real world on their own without help from a cosseting State, all too ready to swallow any argument for bigger government.

Climate change largely consists of menacing them with stories about rising water and melting ice and starving polar bears, so they will allow our civil rights to be ridden over to keep us all safe. They demand it, in fact.

As H.L Mencken said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”

November 12, 2018

Woodrow Wilson

Filed under: History, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In City Journal, Lance Morrow looks back at the successes and failures of President Wilson:

It’s been a century since President Woodrow Wilson arrived in Europe, weeks after the Armistice ending World War I. A crowd of 2 million cheered him in Paris. The papers called him the “God of Peace,” the “Savior of Humanity,” a “Moses from America.” He bowed, he tipped his silk top hat — the newsreel images come flickering to us from an earlier world. He sat down with Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George and the others to hash out the fiasco of the Versailles Treaty. He returned home to the fatal wrangle over the League of Nations with Henry Cabot Lodge in the Senate. Then came the cross-country tour to sell the treaty to the American people, his collapse on the train near Wichita, and, back in Washington, the terrible stroke and the long twilight — a sequence that led, further down the road, to Warren G. Harding and, in the fullness of time, to Adolf Hitler and World War II.

Woodrow Wilson, 1919
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The Woodrow Wilson story is an American classic — a set piece, like the rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy, or the fable of John F. Kennedy. Of Wilson, the historian Barbara Tuchman wrote: “Since Americans are not, by and large, a people associated with tragedy, it is strange and unexpected that the most tragic figure in modern history — judged by the greatness of expectations and the measure of the falling off — should have been an American.”

People speak of “settled science.” One might also speak of “settled myth.” (The Kennedys are one of those.) But Wilson’s myth remains vexed and unsettled. He persists, in American memory, as a sort of botched paragon — a man who remains almost irritatingly alive and imperfect and somehow touching. The respect that he deserves is complicated — and so is the contempt. The same has been said of American idealism itself.

As with America, there are two basic versions of Wilson: the sacred and the profane. Was his greatness real or fake? He ranks in polls in the top quarter of American presidents, but with a dissenting asterisk. Was he the superbly effective Progressive president (who introduced the Federal Reserve and the graduated income tax and much else) and the prophet of twentieth-century internationalism? (Wait: Are we to thank Wilson for Vietnam? Iraq? Afghanistan?) Or was he the last fling of nineteenth-century moralism and hypocrisy — a Southern-born racist or near-racist, and a brute on the subject of civil liberties? (He tossed Eugene V. Debs in jail merely for disagreeing with him on the war, leaving it to Warren G. Harding to pardon Debs.) Some said that his mind was a Sunday school; others, that it was the pool of Narcissus. Yet he managed to be a great man all the same. It’s too bad that he did not leave the presidency, one way or another, in 1919, after the damage from his stroke became evident. Amazingly, even in the summer of 1920, the broken man had delusions of running for a third term. He felt embittered and betrayed when the Democratic nomination went to Governor James Cox of Ohio. Woodrow Wilson’s ego died harder than Rasputin.

An indispensable aspect of Wilson’s genius—and a key, perhaps, to his failure — was his lambent but vaguely narcissistic prose style, sweet in its clarities but sometimes too supple and manipulative. Unlike most presidents, he wrote his own speeches. He governed a good deal by means of language, and he used words to impose his will or to conjure up an ideal world that might be mistaken, from a distance, for the Kingdom of God. He was also a theatrical man, an actor, an excellent mimic: a performer. Was he Prospero? Or was he, in the end, Christ crucified? People spoke routinely of his messiah complex. At one point during the Paris Peace Conference, he seemed to suggest that he was actually an improvement on the messiah. Lloyd George listened in amazement as Wilson observed that organized religion had yet to devise practical solutions to the problems of the world. Christ had articulated the ideal, Wilson said, but he had offered no instructions on how to attain it. “That is the reason why I am proposing a practical scheme to carry out his aims.” Self-righteousness is tiresome in the end. Many concluded that Wilson should be remembered, without appeals to either religion or literature, as the stiff-necked, hypochondriacal son of a Presbyterian minister, led astray by his own moral vanity — either that, or as the uxorious hero of ladies’ teas. He loved the companionship of doting women but not necessarily that of strong men.

H.L. Mencken wrote of Wilson, shortly after the President’s death, in a review of The Story of a Style by Dr. William Bayard Hale:

Two or three years ago, at the height of his illustriousness, it was spoken of in whispers, as if there were something almost supernatural about its merits. I read articles, in those days, comparing it to the style of the Biblical prophets, and arguing that it vastly exceeded the manner of any living literatus. Looking backward, it is not difficult to see how that doctrine arose. Its chief sponsors, first and last, were not men who actually knew anything about the writing of English, but simply editorial writers on party newspapers, i.e., men who related themselves to literary artists in much the same way that Dr. Billy Sunday relates himself to the late Paul of Tarsus. What intrigued such gentlemen in the compositions of Dr. Wilson was the plain fact that he was their superior in their own special field — that he accomplished with a great deal more skill than they did themselves the great task of reducing all the difficulties of the hour to a few sonorous and unintelligible phrases, often with theological overtones – that he knew better than they did how to arrest and enchant the boobery with words that were simply words, and nothing else. The vulgar like and respect that sort of balderdash. A discourse packed with valid ideas, accurately expressed, is quite incomprehensible to them. What they want is the sough of vague and comforting words – words cast into phrases made familiar to them by the whooping of their customary political and ecclesiastical rabble-rousers, and by the highfalutin style of the newspapers that they read. Woodrow knew how to conjure up such words. He knew how to make them glow, and weep. He wasted no time upon the heads of his dupes, but aimed directly at their ears, diaphragms and hearts.

But reading his speeches in cold blood offers a curious experience. It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicality. Hale produces sentence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all — stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of the Hon. Gamaliel Harding. When Wilson got upon his legs in those days he seems to have gone into a sort of trance, with all the peculiar illusions and delusions that belong to a frenzied pedagogue. He heard words giving three cheers; he saw them race across a blackboard like Socialists pursued by the Polizei; he felt them rush up and kiss him. The result was the grand series of moral, political, sociological and theological maxims which now lodges imperishably in the cultural heritage of the American people, along with Lincoln’s “government for the people, by the people,” etc., Perry’s “We have met the enemy, and they are ours,” and Vanderbilt’s “The public be damned.” The important thing is not that a popular orator should have uttered such grand and glittering phrases, but that they should have been gravely received, for many weary months, by a whole race of men, some of them intelligent. Here is a matter that deserves the sober inquiry of competent psychologists. The boobs took fire first, but after a while even college presidents — who certainly ought to be cynical men, if ladies of joy are cynical women — were sending up sparks, and for a long while anyone who laughed was in danger of the calaboose. Hale does not go into the question; he confines himself to the concrete procession of words. His book represents tedious and vexatious labor; it is, despite some obvious defects, very well managed; it opens the way for future works of the same sort. Imagine Harding on the Hale operating table!

September 14, 2018

The Mencken Society versus the alt-right “Mencken Club”

Filed under: History, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the current issue of Reason, Mencken biographer Marion Elizabeth Rodgers explains why the great essayist would not welcome the adulation of the alt-right “Mencken Club”:

Libertarians and conservatives have always admired H. L. Mencken, the 20th century journalist and satirist famous for his literary and political commentary. Now the Baltimore author and editor, whose heydey lasted from the 1920s to the late 1940s, has become a hero to the alt-right, who have cherry-picked his views to support their white supremacist vision. For white nationalist leader Richard Spencer and fellow enthusiasts, Mencken embodies “worthy ideals,” namely, a questioning of “the egalitarian creed, democratic crusades, and welfare statism” that American democracy has become since the New Deal. Such is the essence of humor: It is hard to believe that Mencken would have ever given his worshippers the time of day.

[…]

Unlike the Mencken Society — a scholarly organization founded in 1976 in Baltimore that hosts talks on Mencken’s life and works by such luminaries as the late Christopher Hitchens, Arnold Rampersad, and Alfred Kazin — the Mencken Club holds pseudo-academic conferences ranging in themes as “The West: Is It Dead Yet?” or “The Right Revisited.” In 2016, the club focused on the populism of Donald Trump and the preservation of white Christian heritage through anti-immigration policies. White House speechwriter Darren Beattie spoke to members alongside Peter Brimelow, white nationalist and founder of the anti-immigrant website Vdare.com — a gig that ultimately cost Beattie his job.

Speakers rarely mention Mencken’s name at their meetings, except for random recitals from Chrestomathy or his earliest works: The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), whom the alt-right see as a great visionary, and from Men Versus the Man: A Correspondence between Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H. L. Mencken, Individualist (1910), an epistolary debate where Mencken explores Social Darwinism, eugenics, heredity, and race. In the most offensive passage, Mencken defines “the American negro” as “a low-caste man,” and that the “superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.” In its podcast, club members touted Men Versus the Man as “a fun book” and asserted “race realists, anti-globalists, educational reductionists and immigration restrictionists can draw nourishment from Mencken … and his disdain for the low-caste man.”

In reality, Mencken would have shunned the white identity politics of the alt-right. To Mencken, Nietzsche’s “superior man” was the enlightened individual of honor and courage, regardless of race, creed, or social background. Soon after 1910, Mencken reversed his views of white superiority and began calling for civil rights for African Americans. Despite the fact that his Diary contains racial slurs and ethnic slang, Mencken rebelled against “the Aryan imbecilities of Hitler” and stated: “To me personally, race prejudice is one of the most preposterous of all the imbecilities of mankind. There are so few people on earth worth knowing that I hate to think of any man I like as a German or a Frenchman, a gentile or a Jew, Negro or a white man.”

He was especially contemptuous of white Anglo-Saxon Southerners, describing them as “shiftless [and] stupid,” and extolled African Americans as “superior to the whites against whom they are commonly pitted.” Unique for the mid-1900s and into the ’20s and ’30s, he collaborated with black intellectuals and was the first white editor to publish their work in his magazine, The American Mercury, and energetically promoted their writings in his books and columns and to his publisher Alfred Knopf. He was relentless in his campaigns against the Ku Klux Klan, and he joined forces with the NAACP to testify against lynching before the U.S. Congress. He repeatedly wrote against segregation; behind the scenes he discussed strategies with African-American leaders to promote civil rights.

July 26, 2018

QotD: Protecting the truth

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.

H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956.

March 1, 2018

QotD: In praise of democracy

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I have seen many theoretical objections to democracy, and sometimes urge them with such heat that it probably goes beyond the bound of sound taste, but I am thoroughly convinced, nonetheless, that the democratic nations are happier than any other. The United States today, indeed, is probably the happiest the world has ever seen. Taxes are high, but they are still well within the means of the taxpayer: he could pay twice as much and still survive. The laws are innumerable and idiotic, but only prisoners in the penitentiaries and persons under religious vows ever obey them. The country is governed by rogues, but there is no general dislike of rogues: on the contrary, they are esteemed and envied. Best of all, the people have the pleasant feeling that they can make improvements at any time they want to — … in other words, they are happy. Democrats are always happy. Democracy is a sort of laughing gas. It will not cure anything, perhaps, but it unquestionably stops the pain.

H.L. Mencken, “The Master Illusion”, The American Mercury, 1925-03.

January 29, 2018

A new collection of H.L. Mencken’s “The Free Lance” columns

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Reason, Bill Kauffman reviews S.T. Joshi’s new selection from H.L. Mencken’s Baltimore Evening Sun essays:

The longtime Baltimore Evening Sun columnist, American Mercury editor, and rumbustiously splenetic critic, who graced this orb from 1880 to 1956, would not be published in any major newspaper today. The reasons he foresaw over a century ago, when he decried the “cheap bullying and cheaper moralizing” whose purpose was the extirpation, the annihilation, of anything resembling a robust exchange of ideas. Two beliefs puffed up the righteous censor, according to Mencken: first, “that any man who dissents from the prevailing platitudes is a hireling of the devil,” and second, “that he should be silenced and destroyed forthwith. Down with free speech; up with the uplift!”

Plus ça change and all that.

S.T. Joshi, who has chosen his primary scholarly interests — Mencken, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ambrose Bierce — with a fine eye for readability over reputation, has assembled a selection of Mencken’s Evening Sun “Free Lance” columns of 1911–1915 into a book called A Saturnalia of Bunk and contributed an informative introduction to it.

Henry Louis Mencken churned out six of these 1,200-word meringues every week, a vertiginous pace that makes Joyce Carol Oates look like Harper Lee.

Logorrheic bloggers aside, does anyone really have that much to say about the controversies of the day? Mencken once nicked Bierce for reprinting his early work, which was “filled with epigrams against frauds long dead and forgotten, and echoes of old and puerile newspaper controversies.” Is A Saturnalia of Bunk similarly irrelevant?

Happily, no. Although Mencken’s fusillades against, say, blue laws have grown fusty, his rousing conclusions — “the militant moralist tries to steal liberty and self-respect, and the man who has lost both is a man who has lost everything that separates a civilized freeman from a convict in a chain-gang” — have lost none of their punch.

These columns, composed while their author was on the shy side of middle age, afford, says Joshi, “a nearly complete view of Mencken’s political, religious, social, and cultural philosophy as it had evolved up to this point” — and this philosophy would largely remain constant for the rest of his rooted life. (Mencken, a dyed-in-the-wool third-generation Baltimorean, a sardonic citizen of his place, made his home in the house in which he grew up.)

January 17, 2018

QotD: The true purpose of public education

Filed under: Education, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else

H.L Mencken, The American Mercury, 1924-02.

December 5, 2017

Happy Repeal Day!

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Eighty-four years ago today, the US repealed Prohibition. Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken was among the first to publicly celebrate the demise of the hated legislation:

HL Mencken celebrates repeal of Prohibition, December 1933

Reason‘s Baylen Linnekin celebrates the federal anniversary, but points out that devolving powers to the various states hasn’t been quite a libertarian panacea:

[December 5th] will mark the 84th anniversary of the ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed alcohol Prohibition. The repeal of Prohibition is worth celebrating, even if the amendment was (and remains) a deeply flawed vehicle.

The chief flaw with the Amendment is, as I wrote earlier this year, that it “simply shifted much of the power to prohibit and incessantly regulate alcohol from the federal government to the states.”

States have truly made the most of their teetotalitarian authority for decades, to the detriment of both alcohol producers and—much more so—consumers.

Much of the negative impacts of states’ approach to alcohol regulation can be tied to what’s known as the three-tier system, a Prohibition relic under which states generally prohibit direct alcohol sales from a brewer, vintner, or distiller to a consumer. The three-tier system mandates these alcohol producers first sell to a distributor or retailer — a mandatory middleman — who can then sell to actual drinkers.

Laws that require this approach create a host of problems, including, for one, that they drive up consumer costs dramatically and needlessly. States’ plenary control over alcohol has been controversial for decades, as this 1987 article in the Journal of Public Health Policy makes clear, noting that “the idea of a government monopoly of a consumer product seems odd and even bizarre[.]”

Great arguments in favor of scrapping the dreaded three-tier system are often countered by those who claim doing so will bring about the end of days, or worse.

Reposted from 2013:

ReasonTV
Published on 5 Dec 2012

In honor of Repeal Day, which celebrates the end of America’s “noble experiment” in banning alcoholic beverages, Reason TV is happy to introduce you to George Cassiday, a man whose life and work should be taught to every schoolkid — and to every member of Congress hell-bent on legislating the nation’s morals.

From 1920 through 1930 — the thick of the Prohibition era — Cassiday supplied illegal liquor throughout the halls of Congress. Known as “The Man in the Green Hat,” Cassiday was the Capitol’s highest-profile bootlegger, with a client list that included senior members of the Republican and Democratic Parties. How instrumental was he to the D.C. power elite? He even had his own office in the House and Senate office buildings.

Cassiday gave up the liquor trade after his arrest in 1930, but gained notoriety by penning a series of front-page articles for The Washington Post about his days as Congress’ top bottle man.

Though he never named names, Cassiday’s stories detailed every aspect of his former business — and the depths of hypocrisy in Washington. By his own estimation, “four out of five senators and congressmen consume liquor either at their offices or their homes.” Appearing days before the 1930 mid-term elections, Cassiday’s revelations caused a national stir and helped sweep pro-Prohibitionist — and ostensibly tee-totaling — congressmen and senators out of power.

Today, with the rise of cocktail culture and prohibition-vogue in full swing, Cassiday’s life and legacy are being re-discovered. Through books such as Garrett Peck’s Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t to New Columbia Distillery’s Green Hat Gin, the remarkable story of George Cassiday — “The Man in the Green Hat” — is again being told.

Reason TV spoke with Cassiday’s son, Fred, author Garrett Peck, and New Columbia Distillery’s John Uselton to discuss George Cassiday and the end of Prohibition.

October 29, 2017

QotD: Mencken’s revised view of Coolidge

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In what manner he would have performed himself if the holy angels had shoved the Depression forward a couple of years — this we can only guess, and one man’s hazard is as good as another’s. My own is that he would have responded to bad times precisely as he responded to good ones — that is, by pulling down the blinds, stretching his legs upon his desk, and snoozing away the lazy afternoons…. He slept more than any other President, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored…. Counting out Harding as a cipher only, Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver and followed by two more. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant? There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.

H.L. Mencken, The American Mercury, 1933-04.

July 15, 2017

The Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As a long-time admirer of H.L. Mencken (since discovering Prejudices: A Selection in a used book store on Queen Street in the mid-1980s), I’ve always had an interest in the skullduggery around the “Scopes Monkey Trial” … and apparently so has Colby Cosh:

H.L Mencken celebrates the repeal of Prohibition, December 1933.

In a merely procedural sense, the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, ended on July 21, 1925 with the conviction of biology teacher John T. Scopes on the charge of instructing students that “man has descended from a lower order of animals.” But of course the real Monkey Trial is eternal, winding its way anew through American life, decade after decade. The carefully staged publicity stunt in Tennessee was merely one occasion in a longer struggle over the nature of man and the limits of his knowledge. I know this is an old-fashioned romantic ACLU-liberal view of the matter, but I hold to it.

As I write this column, county officials in Dayton are unveiling a statute of Clarence Darrow, the garrulous, crooked lawyer who represented Team Enlightenment in the original 1925 contest between Darwinian evolution and the Scriptures. In 2005, the citizens of Dayton, where Monkey Trial tourism is now a crucial industry, erected a statue of William Jennings Bryan on the grounds of the immortal Rhea County courthouse. Bryan had been the chosen hero of evangelical Christianity in the trial, dying less than a week after its conclusion, and is the namesake of a local bible college, which paid for the statue.

[…]

I became a serious student of the Scopes Trial as an undergraduate. Like anybody else, I had seen the 1960 Hollywood rendering of the play about the trial, Inherit The Wind, which represents Bryan as an ignorant windbag, Darrow as a tired, patient figure of ostentatious nobility, and a thinly disguised H.L. Mencken as a cruel nihilist newspaperman. Today, I suppose I would regard Mencken as the real hero of the show. He was privy to the ACLU’s engineering of the trial as a publicity stunt, but he also always said that Tennessee was within its constitutional rights to forbid the teaching of evolution — to be, in his view, just as backward as its people wished.

Inherit The Wind makes its pseudo-Mencken a heartless guttersnipe mostly as a device for elevating a sympathetic Darrow even further. This is part of the movie’s major liberty with the events of the trial: it has Bryan drop dead in mid-rant at the moment of its culmination, instead of waiting a few days. What I discovered as a student was that, aside from this excusable concession to theatrical unity, the film probably deserves some kind of prize for general fidelity to historical events.

April 11, 2017

QotD: The great American humourists

Filed under: History, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The great American humorists have something in common: hatred.

H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain both could be uproariously funny and charming — and Twain could be tender from time to time, though Mencken could not or would not — but at the bottom of each man’s deep well of humor was a brackish and sour reserve of hatred, for this country, for its institutions, and for its people. Neither man could forgive Americans for being provincial, backward, bigoted, anti-intellectual, floridly religious, or for any of the other real or imagined defects located in the American character.

Historical context matters, of course. As Edmund Burke said, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” Twain was born in 1835, and there was much that was detestable in the America of Tom Sawyer. Mencken, at the age of nine, read Huckleberry Finn and experienced a literary and intellectual awakening — “the most stupendous event in my life,” he called it — and followed a similar path. Both men were cranks: Twain with his premonitions and parapsychology, Mencken with his “Prejudices” and his evangelical atheism. He might have been referring to himself when he wrote: “There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.”

The debunking mentality is prevalent in both men’s writing, a genuine fervor to knock the United States and its people down a peg or two. For Twain, America was slavery and the oppression of African Americans. For Mencken, the representative American experience was the Scopes trial, with its greasy Christian fundamentalists and arguments designed to appeal to the “prehensile moron,” his description of the typical American farmer. The debunking mind is typical of the American Left, which feels itself compelled to rewrite every episode in history in such a way as to put black hats on the heads of any and all American heroes: Jefferson? Slave-owning rapist. Lincoln? Not really all that enlightened on race. Saving the world from the Nazis? Sure, but what about the internment of the Japanese? Etc. “It was wonderful to find America,” Twain wrote. “But it would have been more wonderful to miss it.”

Kevin D. Williamson, “Bitter Laughter: Humor and the politics of hate”, National Review, 2016-08-11.

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