Second Mencken Chrestomathy Read online

  Mr. Lamb does not belong to this atheistic faction. Being a Rotarian is to him a serious business, and he believes that membership should be very strictly guarded. As is well known, the rules of the order provide that only one man of any given trade or profession may belong to any given club. This provision, it appears, is frequently the cause of difficulties and heart-burnings. Suppose, for example, that a club is confronted by “two leading banks doing practically a similar line of business, each with an executive that is fully capable of exemplifying Rotary.” What to do? If the executive of one bank is elevated to membership, then the executive of the other will be full of shame and repining, and the fact, I daresay, will show itself the next time any member of the club asks him for accommodations. Many clubs have resolved such dilemmas by the arts of the sophist. They have put down one executive as a “commercial” banker and the other as a “savings” banker, and then elected both, yelling merrily the while, and bombarding the candidates with ham bones and asparagus. Mr. Lamb is against such subterfuges. He looks forward to what is bound to happen when two grocers try to horn in, or two electrical contractors, or two bootleggers—one, perhaps, disguised as a merchandise broker and the other as a wholesale druggist. The pressure from dubious men is naturally very great. They try to get into Rotary on account of the prestige and credit that membership gives, just as all the chiropractors in Washington try to get into the Cosmos Club, and all the social pushers everywhere in the Republic offer themselves for baptism in the Episcopal Church. If Rotary admitted them, it would soon descend to the level of the Shriners, the Moose, or the American Academy of Political and Social Science. But in small cities it is frequently hard to keep them out, for the only banker or newspaper editor or plumbing contractor available may be a palpably questionable fellow, with no taste whatever for Service. Thus the club is forced either to take him in despite his deficiencies, or to resign itself to staggering on without any representative of his important and puissant trade.

  Such problems fever Mr. Lamb, who has a legal and moral cast of mind, and he gives over a large part of his book to a discussion of them. He believes that many of them would be solved if Rotary were confined strictly to the larger cities. The members of the clubs in such cities, going to a district or national convention, are often appalled on meeting their brethren from South Lockport and Boggsville. The former, as befits their high civic position, are commonly men of great austerity; the latter come to the meeting wearing flamboyant bands around their hats, carrying American flags and booster banners, and exhaling, perhaps, the fetor of rustic moonshine. It is hard for men of such disparate tastes and social habits to consider amicably, and to any ponderable public profit, the inordinately difficult and important questions with which Rotary deals. As well ask elephants and goats to gambol together. The big city clubs themselves face other problems, and some of them give great concern to the more thoughtful variety of Rotarians. There are those, as I have said, which flow out of the constitutional provision that but one member shall be admitted from each avocation. That rule frequently bars out men of the highest idealism, whose presence in the councils of Rotary would strengthen the organization and so benefit the Republic. The minute one wholesale grocer or patent medicine manufacturer is elevated to membership all the others in town are automatically barred, and among them, it appears, there are sometimes men of so large a passion for Service that they were plainly designed by Omnipotence to be Rotarians. Not a few classification committees, as I have hinted, stretch the rule to let such men in, but Mr. Lamb sees the danger of that sort of playing with fire, and sounds a solemn warning.

  Another problem: what to do with active and useful members who change their occupation and so lose their classification? Suppose A, elected as a Ford dealer, abandons that great art and mystery for the knit underwear business? A representative of the knit underwear business, B by name, is already a member, and he naturally hangs on to the high privileges and prerogatives that go with the fact. Is A to be dropped, or is the rule against duplications to be once more invaded? Most Rotary clubs, according to Mr. Lamb, get around the difficulty by electing A to honorary membership, but as a purist he is against that device, for it simply begs the question. Moreover, it is unjust to A. If he is entitled to any membership at all, he is entitled to full membership, with the power to vote and hold office. The constitutional lawyers of Rotary have been wrestling with the problem for a long while, but so far they have failed to solve it. Mr. Lamb is naturally reluctant to discuss it in a doctrinaire manner, but I suspect that he is in favor of throwing A out altogether—a cruel scheme, certainly, but one that at least disposes of the difficulty. To permit A to hang around sucking his thumb while his successor radiates idealism is as indecorous as it would be for a lady married to her second husband to stable her first in the spare room. Raised to honorary membership, he becomes a sort of club eunuch. It would be kinder to strip him of his accoutrements and heave him out.

  From all of this it is evident that the conscientious Rotarian is by no means the gay and happy fellow that he appears to be in the newspaper reports of his doings and in the columns of “Americana.” All the while he is lavishing Service upon the rest of us his own heart is devoured by cares. The government of Rotary, like that of the United States, is one of law, not of men. The most stupendous Rotarian, in the eye of that law, is of no more importance than the humblest brother. Well, law hatches lawyers, and the minute lawyers appear there is trouble. Even the Elks have found that out. At their annual conventions they put in many weary hours trying constitutional cases. Outside the band is playing, but within the chamber of their deliberation they have to listen to long arguments, with a maddening gabble of precedents. An Elks’ convention used to be a very lively affair, with the boys riding around in open barouches, covered with badges and throwing away money; now it is indistinguishable from a session of the Supreme Court of the United States. A Rotary convention becomes even worse, for Rotarians are more serious men than Elks. The idealism of the nation is in their keeping. If they took their responsibilities lightly there would be chaos.

  The Yokel

  From FOUR MORAL CAUSES, PREJUDICES: FIFTH SERIES, 1926, p. 11

  The yokel has scarcely any privacy at all. His neighbors know everything that is to be known about him, including what he eats and what he feeds his quadrupedal colleagues. His religious ideas are matters of public discussion; if he is recusant the village pastor prays for him by name. When his wife begins the biological process of giving him an heir, the news flies around. If he inherits $200 from an uncle in Idaho everyone knows it instantly. If he skins his shin, or buys a new plow, or sees a ghost, or takes a bath it is a public event. Thus living like a goldfish in a glass globe, he acquires a large tolerance of snoutery, for if he resisted it his neighbors would set him down as an enemy of their happiness, and probably burn his barn. It seems natural and inevitable to him that everyone outside his house should be interested in what goes on inside, and that this interest should be accompanied by definite notions as to what is nice and what is not nice, supported by pressure. So he submits to governmental tyranny as he submits to the village inquisition, and when he hears that city men resist, it only confirms his general feeling that they are scoundrels. They are scoundrels because they have a better time than he has—the sempiternal human reason.

  Varieties of Envy

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, June 15, 1936

  The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of infamy. If these villains could be put down, he holds, he would at once become rich, powerful and eminent. Nine politicians out of every ten, of whatever party, live and have their being by promising to perform this putting down. In brief, they are knaves who maintain themselves by preying on th
e idiotic vanities and pathetic hopes of half-wits.

  What is thus promised, of course, always falls far short of fulfillment. The politicians devote themselves ardently enough to robbing A, who is an honest and useful man, eager only to pay his way, in order to bribe and flatter B, who is lazy, stupid and incompetent, and a very large part of the national income is dissipated in the process. But B still remains clearly inferior to A. He was inferior as a blastocyte, and he continues so as a nascent cadaver at a rally of Townsendites or New Dealers. He is therefore easy meat for the rascals who promise to give him, not merely a dole, but irresistible power. He dreams of becoming so mighty, en masse, if not on his own, that the nation will tremble at his tread, and Wall Street will entreat him for peace terms. In brief, he puts on a night-shirt and joins the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion, or some other such amalgamation of crooks and fools.

  It seems to be little noticed that this yearning to dragoon and terrify all persons who happen to be lucky is at the bottom of the puerile radicalism now prevailing among us, just as it is at the bottom of Ku Kluxery. The average American radical today likes to think of himself as a profound and somber fellow, privy to arcana not open to the general; he is actually only a poor fish, with distinct overtones of the jackass. What ails him, first and last, is simply envy of his betters. Unable to make any progress against them under the rules in vogue, he proposes to fetch them below the belt by making the rules over. He is no more an altruist than J. Pierpont Morgan is an altruist, or Jim Farley, or, indeed, Al Capone.

  Every such rescuer of the downtrodden entertains himself with gaudy dreams of power, far beyond his natural fortunes and capacities. He sees himself at the head of an overwhelming legion of morons, marching upon the fellows he envies and hates. He thinks of himself in his private reflections (and gives it away every time he makes a speech or prints an article) as a gorgeous amalgam of Lenin, Mussolini and Genghis Khan, with the Republic under his thumb, his check for any amount good at any bank, and ten million heels clicking every time he winks his eye. Not infrequently, he throws in a private brewery or distillery, belching smoke in his personal service, and a girl considerably more sightly than he can scare up by his native magnetism. When such grotesque megalomania reaches a certain virulence a black wagon dashes up, and its two honest deckhands, Jack and Emil, haul off another nut to the psychopathic hoosegow. But not many of the patients go that far. They retain all their ordinary faculties. They can eat, drink, talk, sweat, walk, dance and hope. They read the New Masses, sing “The Internationale,” and lecture on “Das Kapital” without having read it. A vision enchants them, and perhaps one should allow that, considering their natural gifts, it is as beautiful as any they are capable of. But it will come to nothing. Like the dupes of the Black Legion, they are doomed to be fooled.

  The Immigration Problem

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, March 24, 1924

  Congress is sure to make the new immigration law, whenever it is passed, very strict, and once it is in force there will be a considerable decrease in immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. The result, in the long run, must be a complete reorganization of American industry, and to some extent, of American agriculture. Both have been based, at least for a century past, upon a free flow of immigrants. These immigrants have done all the dirty work of the nation, and so left the native whites free to pursue higher enterprises. They have built the railroads of the country, paved the city streets, mined most of the coal and other minerals, done the heavy labor of a large proportion of the farms, and performed countless other varieties of menial and drudging work. For three generations native white servants have been almost unknown in America, and native whites have done very little shoveling in ditches. For years the word laborer was synonymous among us with Irishman, just as it has been synonymous with Italian for the past two decades. The workers in the sweatshops have never been Americans, but always Jews.

  What will happen when this supply of drudges is cut off? Who will go into the ditch with a shovel and pick when the laborious Sicilian climbs out? Will it be his son, born in America? I doubt it: the son of an immigrant almost invariably makes his way to a level above his father’s: the exceptions are rare and almost miraculous. Will it be, then, the Negro? Again I doubt it: there are not enough Negroes to go ’round as it is, and they are not likely to increase either relatively or absolutely, for the death-rate among them, as they come North and enter industry, grows enormous. Who, then, will handle the pick? My belief is that it will be handled, soon or late, by the Anglo-Saxon—that he will slide down to it inevitably—that he is already, along his lower margin, beginning to descend—that, in brief, the net result of restricting immigration, ostensibly in his interest, will be to enslave and degrade him.

  I do not argue, of course, that the superior varieties of Anglo-Saxons will take to the ditch: what I argue is simply that the lower varieties, when the struggle to keep out of it comes on in earnest, will prove to be inferior to the children of immigrants, and even to the better sort of surviving Negroes, and that they will thus find themselves forced down to the bottom. That these lower varieties are already going downhill must be apparent to any observer. Even as a whole, the strain is obviously not holding its old leadership. In the arts, in the sciences, and even in the more complex sorts of business the children of the later immigrants are running away from the descendants of the original settlers. To call a list of Americans eminent in almost any field above that of mere money-grubbing is to call a list of strange and often outlandish names; even the roll of Congress presents an almost startling example. In areas when the competition between the new and the old strains is most sharp and clearcut, say in New York, in Massachusetts and in the agricultural States of the upper Middle West, the defeat of the Anglo-Saxon is overwhelming and unmistakable. Once his predominance everywhere was actual and undisputed; today, even where he remains heavily superior numerically, it is largely only sentimental.

  On his lower levels his situation is even worse. He is not only not moving ahead at the same pace as his co-nationals of other stocks: he is rapidly degenerating, mentally, spiritually and even physically. Civilization is at its lowest ebb in the United States precisely in those areas where the Anglo-Saxon still rules unchallenged. He runs the whole South—and in the whole South there are not as many first-rate men as in many a single city of the mongrel North. Wherever he is dominant, there Ku Kluxery flourishes, along with Fundamentalism, and lynching, and Prohibition, and free silver, and all the other recurrent crazes of the Chandala. It is not in the big cities, with their mixed population, that the death-rate is highest, and politics is most corrupt, and religion is nearest to voodooism, and every decent human aspiration is suspect, but in the areas that immigration has not penetrated, where “the purest Anglo-Saxon blood in the world” still flows.

  So far this lower variety of Anglo-Saxon has been able to profit by his historical advantages. White, broken to the national harness and at ease in the national language, he has evaded direct competition with both the Negroes and the invading hordes of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants. But his present plight in the cotton areas of the South shows how illusory his immunity really is—how easy it is to deprive him of it. For years and years, in the South, the inferior whites lived by preying upon the Negroes. A correspondent in South Carolina, highly learned in such matters, tells me that most of them did no work whatever. They forced the darkey to work in the fields, and then robbed him of his earnings. For the rest, they sent their children into the cotton mills. Then, of a sudden, the darkey began to escape to the North. What to do? At first, characteristically, they tried to hold him by force. But he continued to escape, and presently they faced the dreadful necessity of going to work themselves. With what result? With the result that the Negroes who have remained, farming their own land, are now clearly their superiors. The poor white trash are at work at last—but the Negroes are better workmen. I incline to think that the same thing will happen in industry, once the la
ck of labor begins to be felt acutely. There will be a desperate competition for the better jobs. They will go to those workmen who are most diligent and most competent—in other words, to those who can best discharge their duties. The low-grade Anglo-Saxon is neither diligent nor competent. He tends to gravitate downward, even now, to puerile jobs; he is less and less the boss and more and more the clerk. When the abyss yawns at the bottom, I believe that he will fall into it.

  Utopia in Little

  From the American Mercury, May, 1922, pp. 123–26.

  A review of ARCTIC VILLAGE, by Robert Marshall;

  New York, 1933

  In the Summer of 1929, having some idle time on his hands, Mr. Marshall took a map of Alaska from his shelf and searched it for blank spaces. He found that only two of any size were left—one in the vicinity of Mt. McKinley and the other at the head-waters of the Koyukuk river, north of the Arctic Circle. The latter, for various reasons, attracted him more than the former, so he set out for it by way of Fairbanks, and after a journey of 2,000 miles by rail, boat and air, found himself in the little town of Wiseman. He quickly made friends with its seventy-six white inhabitants, forty-four Eskimos, six Indians and one mulatto, and came to like them so much in a two-months’ stay that he decided to return in 1930. He got back in August of that year, and remained more than a year. All the while he kept diligent notes of what he saw and heard, and now he offers his observations in the form of a somewhat elaborate study of the Wiseman Kultur. It is a sort of miniature “Middletown” and it makes a very interesting and valuable book.