That story, I need scarcely say, is anything but edifying. One rises from it, indeed with the impression that the misdemeanor which caused Wilde’s actual downfall was quite the least of his onslaughts upon the decencies — that he was of vastly more ardor and fluency as a cad and poltroon than ever he became as an immoralist. No offense against what the average civilized man regards as proper and seemly conduct is missing from the chronicle. Wilde was a fop and a snob, a toady and a social pusher, a coward and an ingrate, a glutton and a grafter, a plagiarist and a mountebank; he was jealous alike of his superiors and of his inferiors; he was so spineless that he fell an instant victim to every new flatterer; he had no sense whatever of monetary obligation or even of the commonest duties of friendship; he lied incessantly to those who showed him most kindness, and tried to rob some of them; he seems never to have forgotten a slight or remembered a favour; he was as devoid of any notion of honour as a candidate for office; the moving spring of his whole life was a silly and obnoxious vanity. It is almost impossible to imagine a fellow of less ingratiating character, and to these endless defects he added a physical body that was gross and repugnant, but through it all ran an incomparable charm of personality, and supporting and increasing that charm was his undoubted genius. Harris pauses more than once to hymn his capacity for engaging the fancy. He was a veritable specialist in the amenities, a dinner companion sans pair, the greatest of English wits since Congreve, the most delightful of talkers, an artist to his finger-tips, the prophet of a new and lordlier aesthetic, the complete antithesis of English stodginess and stupidity.
H.L. Mencken, “Portrait of a Tragic Comedian”, The Smart Set, 1916-09.
December 5, 2024
QotD: Oscar Wilde
November 23, 2024
QotD: Nietzsche’s message
H.L. Mencken, “Transvaluation of Morals”, The Smart Set, 1915-03.
November 9, 2024
QotD: George Bernard Shaw
H.L. Mencken, “Shaw as Platitudinarian”, The Smart Set, 1916-08.
January 25, 2024
The Bathtub Hoax and debunked medieval myths
David Friedman spends a bit of time debunking some bogus but widely believed historical myths:
“Image” by Lauren Knowlton is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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The first is a false story that teaches a true lesson — the U.S. did treat Amerinds unjustly in a variety of contexts, although the massive die off as a result of the spread of Old World diseases was a natural result of contact, not deliberate biological warfare. The second lets moderns feel superior to their ignorant ancestors; most people like feeling superior to someone.
Another example of that, deliberately created by a master, is H.L. Mencken’s bathtub hoax, an entirely fictitious history of the bathtub published in 1917:
The article claimed that the bathtub had been invented by Lord John Russell of England in 1828, and that Cincinnatian Adam Thompson became acquainted with it during business trips there in the 1830s. Thompson allegedly went back to Cincinnati and took the first bath in the United States on December 20, 1842. The invention purportedly aroused great controversy in Cincinnati, with detractors claiming that its expensive nature was undemocratic and local doctors claiming it was dangerous. This debate was said to have spread across the nation, with an ordinance banning bathing between November and March supposedly narrowly failing in Philadelphia and a similar ordinance allegedly being effective in Boston between 1845 and 1862. … Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was claimed to have campaigned for the bathtub against remaining medical opposition in Boston; the American Medical Association supposedly granted sanction to the practice in 1850, followed by practitioners of homeopathy in 1853.
According to the article, then-Vice President Millard Fillmore visited the Thompson bathtub in March 1850 and having bathed in it became a proponent of bathtubs. Upon his accession to the presidency in July of that year, Fillmore was said to have ordered the construction of a bathtub in the White House, which allegedly refueled the controversy of providing the president with indulgences not enjoyed by George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Nevertheless, the effect of the bathtub’s installation was said to have obliterated any remaining opposition, such that it was said that every hotel in New York had a bathtub by 1860. (Wikipedia)
Writing more than thirty years later, Mencken claimed to have been unable to kill the story despite multiple retractions. A google search for [Millard Fillmore bathtub] demonstrates that it is still alive. Among other hits:
The first bathtub placed in the White House is widely believed to have had been installed in 1851 by President Millard Fillmore (1850-53). (The White House Bathrooms & Kitchen)
Medieval
The desire of moderns to feel superior to their ancestors, helps explain a variety of false beliefs about the Middle Ages including the myth, discussed in detail in an earlier post, that medieval cooking was overspiced to hide the taste of spoiled meat.
Other examples:
Medieval witch hunts: Contrary to popular belief, large scale persecution of witches started well after the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval church viewed the belief that Satan could give magical powers to witches, on which the later prosecutions were largely based, as heretical. The Spanish Inquisition, conventionally blamed for witchcraft prosecutions, treated witchcraft accusations as a distraction from the serious business of identifying secret Jews and Muslims, dealt with such accusations by applying serious standards of evidence to them.
Chastity Belts: Supposedly worn by the ladies of knights off on crusade. The earliest known evidence of the idea of a chastity belt is well after the end of the crusades, a 15th century drawing, and while there is literary evidence for their occasional use after that no surviving examples are known to be from before the 19th century.
Ius Prima Noctae aka Droit de Seigneur was the supposed right of a medieval lord to sleep with a bride on her wedding night. Versions of the institution are asserted in a variety of sources going back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, but while it is hard to prove that it never existed in the European middle ages it was clearly never the norm.
The Divine Right of Kings: Various rulers through history have claimed divine sanction for their rule but “The Divine Right of Kings” is a doctrine that originated in the sixteenth and seventeenth century with the rise of absolute monarchy — Henry VIII in England, Louis XIV in France. Medieval rulers were absolute in neither theory or practice. The feudal relation was one of mutual obligation, in its simplest form protection by the superior in exchange for set obligations of support by the inferior. In practice the decentralized control of military power under feudalism presented difficulties for a ruler who wished to overrule the desires of his nobility, as King John discovered.
Some fictional history functions in multiple versions designed to support different causes. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria has been variously blamed on Julius Caesar, Christian mobs rioting against pagans, and the Muslim conquerors of Egypt, the Caliph Umar having supposedly said that anything in the library that was true was already in the Koran and anything not in the Koran was false. There is no good evidence for any of the stories. The library existed in classical antiquity, no longer exists today, but it is not known how it was destroyed and it may have just gradually declined.
June 19, 2023
QotD: Nietzsche’s view of women
H.L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1913.
April 7, 2022
Alberta’s recall law
Recall laws are not common in Canada, with Alberta’s new law being only the second example:
The Recall Act, which was part of a 2019 UCP platform pledge to “strengthen democracy and accountability in Alberta” mirrors the terms of the recall law enacted in B.C. after the 1991 election that swept a scandal-plagued Social Credit party out of power (and, a few years later, out of existence). Like Alberta’s law, the B.C. law requires the signatures of 40 per cent of eligible voters in a constituency gathered within a 60-day period to trigger a by-election. In B.C., this barrier has not yet been cleared despite 26 recall initiatives (although, in a few cases, politicians have resigned rather than fight).
Recall laws are not unique to Canada. The United Kingdom has had recall legislation since 2015, but it differs from the Alberta and B.C. laws in that it is triggered not by disgruntled voters but by MP wrongdoing, including being convicted of expense fraud, suspended from the House of Commons or sentenced to prison. Despite this extra requirement, the apparent criminal propensity of U.K. politicians plus a low threshold of 10 per cent of voters to trigger a by-election mean that the law has already been used successfully twice.
You may also remember the California vote last summer, in which the oleaginous Governor Gavin Newsom comfortably survived a state-wide recall. After some early uncertainty, California’s fit of popular pique ended in exactly the same place as the gubernatorial election three years earlier — literally, to the decimal place — with 61.9 per cent support for Newsom. After 18 months and half a billion dollars, all the process proved was that the period of appointed military governors from 1847-1850 remains the high-water mark for good governance in California.
The argument against recalls starts with the fact that they bear the same relationship to democracy that a mulligan does to the rules of golf. We already have regular elections to vote out unpopular politicians. A recall is for people who can’t wait four years to admit their own mistake. It is an impetuous power for impatient people. Besides, voting the bums out is the chief joy of democracy — surely we can wait a few years to savour the moment.
Some elected politicians are unworthy of the trust placed in them. But that is our fault as voters. Venting our frustrations at the people we elected is a cop out. Mencken infamously wrote that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” He was right. In an hereditary aristocracy, you can blame the bad luck of the genetic lottery, and in an autocracy you can fume about the injustice of might making right. But in a democracy, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We voted ’em in, and now we deserve to get it good and hard … for four years at least.
January 15, 2022
QotD: “Jack Ketch as Eugenist”
The murder rate is very low in England, perhaps the lowest in the world. It is low because nearly all the potential ancestors of murderers were hanged or exiled in the Eighteenth Century. Why is it so high in the United States? Because most of the potential ancestors of murderers, in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries were not hanged. And why did they escape? For two plain reasons. First, the existing government was too weak to track them down and execute them, especially in the West. Second, the qualities of daring and enterprise that went with their murderousness were so valuable that it was socially profitable to overlook their homicides. In other words the job of occupying and organizing the vast domain of the new Republic was one that demanded the aid of men who, among other things, occasionally butchered their fellow men. The butchering had to be winked at in order to get their help. Thus the murder rate, on the frontier, rose to unprecedented heights, while the execution rate remained very low. Probably 100,000 men altogether were murdered in the territory west of the Ohio between 1776 and 1865; probably not 100 murderers were formally executed. When they were punished at all, it was by other murderers — and this left the strain unimpaired.
H.L. Mencken, “Miscellaneous Notes: Jack Ketch as Eugenist”, Prejudices: Fifth Series, 1926.
September 5, 2021
QotD: Cavemen
H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women, 1918.
February 28, 2021
QotD: The essential role of writers like Twain and Mencken
A nation needs its Twains and Menckens. (We could have got by without Molly Ivins.) The excrement and sentimentality piles up high and thick in a democratic society, and it’s sometimes easier to burn it away rather than try to shovel it. But they are only counterpoints: They cannot be the leading voice, or the dominant spirit of the age. That is because this is a republic, and in a republic, a politics based on one half of the population hating the other half is a politics that loses even if it wins. The same holds true for one that relies on half of us seeing the other half as useless, wicked, moronic, deluded, or “prehensile morons.” (I know, I know, and you can save your keystrokes: I myself am not running for office.) If you happen to be Mark Twain, that sort of thing is good for a laugh, and maybe for more than a laugh. But it isn’t enough. “We must not be enemies,” President Lincoln declared, and he saw the republic through a good deal worse than weak GDP growth and the sack of a Libyan consulate.
Kevin D. Williamson, “Bitter Laughter: Humor and the politics of hate”, National Review, 2016-08-11.
October 13, 2020
QotD: Generalizations
H.L. Mencken, Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist, 1910.
September 10, 2020
QotD: The power and wisdom of the voters
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956.
September 7, 2020
QotD: H.L. Mencken on progress
H.L. Mencken, Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist, 1910.
July 27, 2020
H.L. Mencken
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Eric Oppen (with whom I’ve had a few brief email conversations) discusses the work of the “Sage of Baltimore”:
H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.
I would say that, on the whole, Mencken is still quite readable and enjoyable, and many of his observations on the American scene are still as valid as when he made them. He has his weaknesses. He’s not much of an historian, which limits him when he takes up historical subjects. He never got over what he saw as the unfair treatment the German cause got in the American press between 1914 and the entry of the US into World War One. He also often identifies people as Jewish or black when it’s not really relevant to what he’s saying, but this was more a custom of his time than out-and-out bigotry. While he often has uncomplimentary things to say about Jews, and blacks, his greatest scorn is reserved for “the lintheads” — his term for the poor whites of the South. He regarded them as barely worthy of human status.
[…] his views on most subjects were quite compatible with libertarian positions. He was an inveterate opponent of government overreaching (which was behind a lot of his ferocious opposition to Prohibition) and while I don’t think he’d approve of drug use, he’d see our War on (Some Unpopular) Drugs as the assault on the Constitution that it is. While he was by no means hostile to blacks, and went out of his way to promote black writers (many of the figures in the “Harlem Renaissance” owed a lot to his support), he’d also denounce affirmative action and our current frenzy of “anti-racism” in scathing terms. His views on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and how it has been turned into an alternate, and superior, Constitution would probably scorch the paint off the walls.
Mencken’s views on people’s private lives would have infuriated many of his contemporaries. While he disapproved of homosexuality, referring to it negatively in entries in his private diaries, he was by no means a howling “homophobe.” His writings on the travails of Oscar Wilde are very sympathetic to Wilde’s sufferings, which Mencken thought were wholly disproportionate to what he was known to have done. Mencken referred to Lord Alfred Douglas, in a review of Douglas’ book about Wilde, as a Tartuffe — that is to say, a posturing hypocrite.
Having been a reporter for years in Baltimore, back when reporters were very like the old film noir view of them, Mencken was very much a man of the world, and inclined to great tolerance on others’ sex lives. When he wrote of prostitutes, he refrained from the sort of pious moralizing that was expected in his time. He said that prostitutes often actively preferred their profession to other work available to them, and that most of them ended up respectably married. He kept his own love life very private, and was a faithful husband to his wife throughout their brief marriage, but he does mention, here and there, having had other lovers, whom he does not name even in writings designated to come to light only long after everybody involved was dead. By his own account in his Diary, he lost his virginity at age fourteen to a girl of his own age, who had already had other experiences before him. He felt that such experiences, unless pregnancy happened, did no one any harm.
While he was an atheist, Mencken had no particular hostility to religion per se, no matter what the Fundamentalists of his day thought. His book Treatise on the Gods makes interesting reading, although it is marred, in my view, by Mencken’s lack of knowledge of languages. He praises Christianity for having “the most gorgeous poetry,” but as far as I know, he could not read Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, and was thinking in terms of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. However, the book is still worth reading, although a serious student of the subject would find it limited.
If you’ve been a regular visitor to the blog, you’ll know I have a huge regard for H.L. Mencken’s work and there are many Mencken quotes that have done duty as QotD entries over the years.
April 30, 2020
QotD: Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity (and Judaism)
H.L. Mencken, “Transvaluation of Morals”, The Smart Set, 1915-03.
April 27, 2020
QotD: H.L. Mencken’s literary theory
H.L. Mencken, “Private Reflections”, The Smart Set, 1922-12.
