tackled a man who was himself of superb talents as a rouser of the
proletariat, but nine times out of ten the thing succeeds. Its success
is due almost entirely to the factor that we have mentioned, to wit, to
the circumstance that the sympathy of the public is always on the side
of the prosecution. This sympathy goes so far that it is ready to
condone the most outrageous conduct in judges and prosecuting officers,
providing only they give good shows. During the late war upon
Socialists, pacifists, anti-conscriptionists and other such heretics,
judges theoretically employed to insure fair trials engaged in the most
amazing attacks upon prisoners before them, denouncing them without
hearing them, shutting out evidence on their side and making stump
speeches to the jury against them. That conduct aroused no public
indignation; on the contrary, such judges were frequently praised in the
newspapers and a good many of them were promoted to higher courts. Even
in time of peace there is no general antipathy to that sort of thing.
At least two-thirds of our judges, federal, state and municipal, colour
their decisions with the newspaper gabble of the moment; even the
Supreme Court has shown itself delicately responsive to the successive
manias of the Uplift, which is, at bottom, no more than an organized
scheme for inventing new crimes and making noisy pursuit of new
categories of criminals. Some time ago an intelligent Mexican, after
studying our courts, told us that he was surprised that, in a land
ostensibly of liberty, so few of the notorious newspaper-wooers and
blacklegs upon the bench were assassinated. It is, in fact, rather
curious. The thing happens very seldom, and then it is usually in the
South, where the motive is not altruistic but political. That is to say,
the assassin merely desires to remove one blackleg in order to make a
place for some other blackleg. He has no objection to systematized
injustice; all he desires is that it be dispensed in favour of his own
side.
VI
The mob delight in melodramatic and cruel spectacles, thus constantly
fed and fostered by the judicial arm in the United States, is also at
the bottom of another familiar American phenomenon, to wit, lynching. A
good part of the enormous literature of lynching is devoted to a
discussion of its causes, but most of that discussion is ignorant and
some of it is deliberately mendacious. The majority of Southern
commentators argue that the motive of the lynchers is a laudable
yearning to "protect Southern womanhood," despite the plain fact that
only a very small proportion of the blackamoors hanged and burned are
even so much as accused of molesting Southern womanhood. On the other
hand, some of the negro intellectuals of the North ascribe the recurrent
butcheries to the Southern white man's economic jealousy of the Southern
black, who is fast acquiring property and reaching out for the
prerogatives that go therewith. Finally, certain white Northerners seek
a cause in mere political animosity, arguing that the Southern white
hates the negro because the latter is his theoretical equal at the
polls, though actually not permitted to vote.
All of these notions seem to us to be fanciful. Lynching is popular in
the South simply because the Southern populace, like any other
populace, delights in thrilling shows, and because no other sort of
show is provided by the backward culture of the region. The introduction
of prize-fighting down there, or baseball on a large scale, or amusement
places like Coney Island, or amateur athletic contests, or picnics like
those held by the more truculent Irish fraternal organizations, or any
other such wholesale devices for shocking and diverting the proletariat
would undoubtedly cause a great decline in lynching. The art is
practised, in the overwhelming main, in remote and God-forsaken regions,
in which the only rival entertainment is offered by one-sided political
campaigns, third-rate chautauquas and Methodist revivals. When it is
imitated in the North, it is always in some drab factory or mining town.
Genuine race riots, of course, sometimes occur in the larger cities, but
these are always economic in origin, and have nothing to do with
lynching, properly so-called. One could not imagine an actual lynching
at, say, Atlantic City, with ten or fifteen bands playing, blind pigs in
operation up every alley, a theatre in every block or two, and the
boardwalk swarming with ladies of joy. Even a Mississippian, transported
to such scenes, succumbs to the atmosphere of pleasure, and so has no
seizures of moral rage against the poor darkey. Lynching, in brief, is a
phenomenon of isolated and stupid communities, a mark of imperfect
civilization; it follows the hookworm and malaria belt; it shows itself
in inverse proportion to the number of shoot-the-chutes, symphony
orchestras, roof gardens, theatres, horse races, yellow journals and
automatic pianos. No one ever heard of a lynching in Paris, at Newport,
or in London. But there are incessant lynchings in the remoter parts of
Russia, in the backwoods of Serbia, Bulgaria and Herzegovina, in Mexico
and Nicaragua, and in such barbarous American states as Alabama, Georgia
and South Carolina.
The notion that lynching in the South is countenanced by the gentry or
that they take an actual hand in it is libelous and idiotic. The
well-born and well-bred Southerner is no more a savage than any other
man of condition. He may live among savages, but that no more makes him
a savage than an English gentleman is made one by having a place in
Wales, or a Russian by living on his estate in the Ukraine. What
Northern observers mistake for the gentry of the South, when they report
the participation of "leading citizens" in a lynching, is simply the
office-holding and commercial bourgeoisie--the offspring of the poor
white trash who skulked at home during the Civil War, robbing the widows
and orphans of the soldiers at the front, and so laying the foundations
of the present "industrial prosperity" of the section, _i.e._, its
conversion from a region of large landed estates and urbane life into a
region of stinking factories, filthy mining and oil towns, child-killing
cotton mills, vociferous chambers of commerce and other such swineries.
It is, of course, a fact that the average lynching party in Mississippi
or Alabama is led by the mayor and that the town judge climbs down from
his bench to give it his official support, but it is surely not a fact
that these persons are of the line of such earlier public functionaries
as Pickens, Troup and Pettus. On the contrary, they correspond to the
lesser sort of Tammany office-holders and to the vermin who monopolize
the public functions in such cities as Boston and Philadelphia. The
gentry, with few exceptions, have been forced out of the public service
everywhere south of the Potomac, if not out of politics. The Democratic
victory in 1912 flooded all the governmental posts at Washington with
Southerners, and they remain in power to this day, and some of them are
among the chief officers of the nation. But in the whole vast corps
there are, we believe, but ten who would be accepted as gentlemen by
Southern standards, and only three of these are in posts of any
importance. In the two houses of Congress there is but one.
It is thus absurd to drag the gentry of the South--the Bourbons of New
England legend--into a discussion of the lynching problem. They
represent, in fact, what remains of the only genuine aristocracy ever
visible in the United States, and lynching, on the theoretical side, is
far too moral a matter ever to engage an aristocracy. The true lynchers
are the plain people, and at the bottom of the sport there is nothing
more noble than the mob man's chronic and ineradicable poltroonery.
Cruel by nature, delighting in sanguinary spectacles, and here brought
to hatred of the negro by the latter's increasing industrial, (_not_
political, capitalistic or social) rivalry, he naturally diverts himself
in his moments of musing with visions of what he would do to this or
that Moor if he had the courage. Unluckily, he hasn't, and so he is
unable to execute his dream _a cappella_. If, inflamed by liquor, he
attempts it, the Moor commonly gives him a beating, or even murders him.
But what thus lies beyond his talents as an individual at once becomes
feasible when he joins himself with other men in a like situation. This
is the genesis of a mob of lynchers. It is composed primarily of a few
men with definite grievances, sometimes against the negro lynched but
often against quite different negroes. It is composed secondarily of a
large number of fifth-rate men eager for a thrilling show, involving no
personal danger. It is composed in the third place of a few
rabble-rousers and politicians, all of them hot to exhibit themselves
before the populace at a moment of public excitement and in an attitude
of leadership. It is the second element that gives life to the general
impulse. Without its ardent appetite for a rough and shocking spectacle
there would be no lynching. Its influence is plainly shown by the
frequent unintelligibility of the whole proceeding; all its indignation
over the crime alleged to be punished is an afterthought; any crime will
answer, once its blood is up. Thus the most characteristic lynchings in
the South are not those in which a confessed criminal is done to death
for a definite crime, but those in which, in sheer high spirits, some
convenient African is taken at random and lynched, as the newspapers
say, "on general principles." That sort of lynching is the most honest
and normal, and we are also inclined to think that it is also the most
enjoyable, for the other sort brings moral indignation with it, and
moral indignation is disagreeable. No man can be both indignant and
happy.
But here, seeking to throw a feeble beam or two of light into the mental
processes of the American proletarian, we find ourselves entering upon a
discussion that grows narrow and perhaps also dull. Lynching, after all,
is not an American institution, but a peculiarly Southern institution,
and even in the South it will die out as other more seemly recreations
are introduced. It would be quite easy, we believe, for any Southern
community to get rid of it by establishing a good brass band and having
concerts every evening. It would be even easier to get rid of it by
borrowing a few professional scoundrels from the Department of Justice,
having them raid the "study" of the local Methodist archdeacon, and
forthwith trying him publicly--with a candidate for governor as
prosecuting officer--for seduction under promise of salvation. The
trouble down there is not a special viciousness. The Southern poor
white, taking him by and large, is probably no worse and no better than
the anthropoid proletarian of the North. What ails the whole region is
Philistinism. It has lost its old aristocracy of the soil and has not
yet developed an aristocracy of money. The result is that its cultural
ideas are set by stupid and unimaginative men--Southern equivalents of
the retired Iowa steer staffers and grain sharks who pollute Los
Angeles, American equivalents of the rich English nonconformists. These
men, though they have accumulated wealth, have not yet acquired the
capacity to enjoy civilized recreations. Worse, most of them are still
so barbarous that they regard such recreations as immoral. The
dominating opinion of the South is thus against most of the devices that
would diminish lynching by providing substitutes for it. In every
Southern town some noisy clown of a Methodist or Presbyterian clergyman
exercises a local tyranny. These men are firmly against all the
divertissements of more cultured regions. They oppose prize-fighting,
horse-racing, Sunday baseball and games of chance. They are bitter
prohibitionists. By their incessant vice-crusades they reduce the
romance of sex to furtiveness and piggishness. They know nothing of
music or the drama, and view a public library merely as something to be
rigorously censored. We are convinced that their ignorant moral
enthusiasm is largely to blame for the prevalence of lynching. No doubt
they themselves are sneakingly conscious of the fact, or at least aware
of it subconsciously, for lynching is the only public amusement that
they never denounce.
Their influence reveals strikingly the readiness of the inferior
American to accept ready-made opinions. He seems to be pathetically
eager to be told what to think, and he is apparently willing to accept
any instructor who takes the trouble to tackle him. This, also, was
brilliantly revealed during the late war. The powers which controlled
the press during that fevered time swayed the populace as they pleased.
So long as the course of Dr. Wilson was satisfactory to them he was
depicted as a second Lincoln, and the plain people accepted the estimate
without question. To help reinforce it the country was actually flooded
with lithographs showing Lincoln and Wilson wreathed by the same branch
of laurel, and copies of the print got into millions of humble homes.
But immediately Dr. Wilson gave offence to his superiors, he began to be
depicted as an idiot and a scoundrel, and this judgment promptly
displaced the other one in the popular mind. The late Major General
Roosevelt was often a victim of that sort of boob-bumping. A man of
mercurial temperament, constantly shifting his position on all large
public questions, he alternately gave great joy and great alarm to the
little group of sagaciously wilful men which exercises genuine
sovereignty over the country, and this alternation of emotions showed
itself, by way of the newspapers and other such bawdy agencies, in the
vacillation of public opinion. The fundamental platitudes of the nation
were used both for him and against him, and always with immense effect.
One year he was the last living defender of the liberties fought for by
the Fathers; the next year he was an anarchist. Roosevelt himself was
much annoyed by this unreliability of the mob. Now and then he sought to
overcome it by direct appeals, but in the long run he was usually
beaten. Toward the end of his life he resigned himself to a policy of
great discretion, and so withheld his voice until he was sure what hymn
was being lined out.
The newspapers and press associations, of course, do not impart the
official doctrine of the moment in terms of forthright instructions;
they get it over, as the phrase is, in the form of delicate suggestions,
most of them under cover of the fundamental platitudes aforesaid. Their
job is not to inspire and inform public discussion, but simply to colour
it, and the task most frequently before them is that of giving a
patriotic and virtuous appearance to whatever the proletariat is to
believe. They do this, of course, to the tune of deafening protestations
of their own honesty and altruism. But there is really no such thing as
an honest newspaper in America; if it were set up tomorrow it would
perish within a month. Every journal, however rich and powerful, is the
trembling slave of higher powers, some financial, some religious and
some political. It faces a multitude of censorships, all of them very
potent. It is censored by the Postoffice, by the Jewish advertisers, by
the Catholic Church, by the Methodists, by the Prohibitionists, by the
banking oligarchy of its town, and often by even more astounding
authorities, including the Sinn Fein. Now and then a newspaper makes a
valiant gesture of revolt, but it is only a gesture. There is not a
single daily in the United States that would dare to discuss the problem
of Jewish immigration honestly. Nine tenths of them, under the lash of
snobbish Jewish advertisers, are even afraid to call a Jew a Jew; their
orders are to call him a Hebrew, which is regarded as sweeter. During
the height of the Bolshevist scare not one American paper ventured to
direct attention to the plain and obtrusive fact that the majority of
Bolshevists in Russia and Germany and at least two-thirds of those taken
in the United States were of the faith of Moses, Mendelssohn and Gimbel.
But the Jews are perhaps not the worst. The Methodists, in all save a
few big cities, exercise a control over the press that is far more rigid
and baleful. In the Anti-Saloon League they have developed a machine for
terrorizing office-holders and the newspapers that is remarkably
effective, and they employed it during the long fight for Prohibition to
throttle all opposition save the most formal.
In this last case, of course, the idealists who thus forced the
speakeasy upon the country had an easy task, for all of the prevailing
assumptions and prejudices of the mob were in their favour. No doubt it
is true, as has been alleged, that a majority of the voters of the
country were against Prohibition and would have defeated it at a
plebiscite, but equally without doubt a majority of them were against
the politicians so brutally clubbed by the Anti-Saloon League, and ready
to believe anything evil of them, and eager to see them manhandled.
Moreover, the League had another thing in its favour: it was operated by
strictly moral men, oblivious to any notion of honour. Thus it advocated
and procured the abolition of legalized liquor selling without the
slightest compensation to the men who had invested their money in the
business under cover of and even at the invitation of the law--a form of
repudiation and confiscation unheard of in any other civilized country.
Again, it got through the constitutional amendment by promising the
liquor men to give them one year to dispose of their lawfully
accumulated stocks--and then broke its promise under cover of alleged
war necessity, despite the fact that the war was actually over. Both
proceedings, so abhorrent to any man of honour, failed to arouse any
indignation among the plain people. On the contrary the plain people
viewed them as, in some vague way, smart and creditable, and as, in any
case, thoroughly justified by the superior moral obligation that we have
hitherto discussed.
Thus the _Boobus americanus_ is lead and watched over by zealous men,
all of them highly skilled at training him in the way that he should
think and act. The Constitution of his country guarantees that he shall
be a free man and assumes that he is intelligent, but the laws and
customs that have grown up under that Constitution give the lie to both
the guarantee and the assumption. It is the fundamental theory of all
the more recent American law, in fact, that the average citizen is
half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or
his own thoughts. If there were not regulations against the saloon (it
seems to say) he would get drunk every day, dissipate his means,
undermine his health and beggar his family. If there were not postal
regulations as to his reading matter, he would divide his time between
Bolshevist literature and pornographic literature and so become at once
an anarchist and a guinea pig. If he were not forbidden under heavy
penalties to cross a state line with a wench, he would be chronically
unfaithful to his wife. Worse, if his daughter were not protected by
statutes of the most draconian severity, she would succumb to the first
Italian she encountered, yield up her person to him, enroll herself upon
his staff and go upon the streets. So runs the course of legislation in
this land of freemen. We could pile up example upon example, but will
defer the business for the present. Perhaps it may be resumed in a work
one of us is now engaged upon--a full length study of the popular mind
under the republic. But that work will take years....
VII
No doubt we should apologize for writing, even so, so long a preface to
so succinct a book. The one excuse we can think of is that, having read
it, one need not read the book. That book, as we have said, may strike
the superficial as jocular, but in actual fact it is a very serious and
even profound composition, not addressed to the casual reader, but to
the scholar. Its preparation involved a great diligence, and its study
is not to be undertaken lightly. What the psychologist will find to
admire in it, however, is not its learning and painstaking, its
laborious erudition, but its compression. It establishes, we believe, a
new and clearer method for a science long run to turgidity and
flatulence. Perhaps it may be even said to set up an entirely new
science, to wit, that of descriptive sociological psychology. We believe
that this field will attract many men of inquiring mind hereafter and
yield a valuable crop of important facts. The experimental method,
intrinsically so sound and useful, has been much abused by orthodox
psychologists; it inevitably leads them into a trackless maze of
meaningless tables and diagrams; they keep their eyes so resolutely upon
the intellectual process that they pay no heed to the primary
intellectual materials. Nevertheless, it must be obvious that the
conclusions that a man comes to, the emotions that he harbours and the
crazes that sway him are of much less significance than the fundamental
assumptions upon which they are all based.
There has been, indeed, some discussion of those fundamental assumptions
of late. We have heard, for example, many acute discourses upon the
effects produced upon the whole thinking of the German people, peasants
and professors alike, by the underlying German assumption that the late
Kaiser was anointed of God and hence above all ordinary human
responsibility. We have heard talk, too, of the curious Irish axiom
that there is a mysterious something in the nature of things, giving the
Irish people an indefeasible right to govern Ireland as they please,
regardless of the safety of their next-door neighbours. And we have
heard many outlandish principles of the same sort from political
theorists, _e.g._, regarding the inalienable right of democracy to
prevail over all other forms of government and the inalienable right of
all national groups, however small, to self-determination. Well, here is
an attempt to assemble in convenient form, without comment or
interpretation, some of the fundamental beliefs of the largest body of
human beings now under one flag in Christendom. It is but a beginning.
The field is barely platted. It must be explored to the last furlong and
all its fantastic and fascinating treasures unearthed and examined
before ever there can be any accurate understanding of the mind of the
American people.
GEORGE JEAN NATHAN
H.L. MENCKEN
_New York, 1920._
THE AMERICAN CREDO
Sec.1
That the philoprogenitive instinct in rabbits is so intense that the
alliance of two normally assiduous rabbits is productive of 265
offspring in one year.
Sec.2
That there are hundreds of letters in the Dead Letter Office whose
failure to arrive at their intended destinations was instrumental in
separating as many lovers.
Sec.3
That the Italian who sells bananas on a push-cart always takes the
bananas home at night and sleeps with them under his bed.
Sec.4
That a man's stability in the community and reliability in business may
be measured by the number of children he has.
Sec.5
That in Japan an American can buy a beautiful geisha for two dollars and
that, upon being bought, she will promptly fall madly in love with him
and will run his house for him in a scrupulously clean manner.
Sec.6
That all sailors are gifted with an extraordinary propensity for amour,
but that on their first night of shore leave they hang around the
water-front saloons and are given knock-out drops.
Sec.7
That when a comedian, just before the rise of the curtain, is handed a
telegram announcing the death of his mother or only child, he goes out
on the stage and gives a more comic performance than ever.
Sec.8
That the lions in the cage which a lion-tamer enters are always sixty
years old and have had all their teeth pulled.
Sec.9
That the Siamese Twins were joined together by gutta percha moulded and
painted to look like a shoulder blade.
Sec.10
That if a woman about to become a mother plays the piano every day, her
baby will be born a Victor Herbert.
Sec.11
That all excursion boats are so old that if they ran into a drifting
beer-keg they would sink.
Sec.12
That a doctor knows so much about women that he can no longer fall in
love with one of them.
Sec.13
That when one takes one's best girl to see the monkeys in the zoo, the
monkeys invariably do something that is very embarrassing.
Sec.14
That firemen, awakened suddenly in the middle of the night, go to fires
in their stocking feet.
Sec.15
That something mysterious goes on in the rooms back of chop suey
restaurants.
Sec.16
That oil of pennyroyal will drive away mosquitoes.
Sec.17
That the old ladies on summer hotel verandas devote themselves entirely
to the discussion of scandals.
Sec.18
That a bachelor, expecting a feminine visitor, by way of subtle
preliminary strategy smells up his rooms with Japanese punk.
Sec.19
That all one has to do to gather a large crowd in New York is to stand
on the curb a few moments and gaze intently at the sky.
Sec.20
That one can get an excellent bottle of wine in France for a franc.
21
That it is dangerous to drink out of a garden hose, since if one does
one is likely to swallow a snake.
Sec.22