PREJUDICES
FOURTH SERIES
_THE WORKS OF H. L. MENCKEN_
PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES[1]
PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES[1]
PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES[1]
PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES
A BOOK OF BURLESQUES[1]
A BOOK OF PREFACES[1]
IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN[1][2]
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE[1]
THE AMERICAN CREDO
[_With George Jean Nathan_]
_OUT OF PRINT_
VENTURES INTO VERSE
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS
THE ARTIST
A LITTLE BOOK IN C MAJOR
A BOOK OF CALUMNY
MEN VS. THE MAN
[_With R. R. LaMonte_]
HELIOGABALUS[2]
[_With Mr. Nathan_]
EUROPE AFTER 8:15 [_With Mr. Nathan and W. H. Wright_]
THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE[1]
_TRANSLATIONS_
THE ANTICHRIST, BY F. W. NIETZSCHE
_NEW YORK: ALFRED · A · KNOPF_
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Also Published in England
[2] Also Published in Germany in translation
PREJUDICES
FOURTH SERIES
By H. L. MENCKEN
[Illustration]
PUBLISHED AT THE BORZOI · NEW YORK · BY
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. · PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1924 ·
SET UP, AND ELECTROTYPED BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, N.
Y. · PAPER FURNISHED BY W. F. ETHERINGTON & CO., NEW YORK. · PRINTED
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HUNDRED AND TEN COPIES AS FOLLOWS: ONE HUNDRED AND TEN ON BORZOI ALL
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MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I The American Tradition, 9
II The Husbandman, 43
III High and Ghostly Matters, 61
1. The Cosmic Secretariat, 61
2. The Nature of Faith, 65
3. The Devotee, 76
4. The Restoration of Beauty, 77
5. End-Product, 78
6. Another, 79
7. Holy Clerks, 79
IV Justice Under Democracy, 85
V Reflections on Human Monogamy, 103
1. The Eternal Farce, 103
2. Venus at the Domestic Hearth, 108
3. The Rat-Trap, 110
4. The Love Chase, 112
5. Women as Realpolitiker, 113
6. Footnote for Suffragettes, 114
7. The Helpmate, 114
8. The Mime, 116
9. Cavia Cobaya, 117
10. The Survivor, 118
11. The Veteran’s Disaster, 119
12. Moral Indignation, 119
13. The Man and His Shadow, 120
14. The Balance-Sheet, 123
15. Yearning, 124
VI The Politician, 125
VII From a Critic’s Notebook, 138
1. Progress, 138
2. The Iconoclast, 139
3. The Artists’ Model, 140
4. The Good Citizen as Artist, 140
5. Definitive Judgments, 141
VIII Totentanz, 145
IX Meditations in the Methodist Desert, 158
1. The New Galahad, 158
2. Optimist vs. Optimist, 161
3. Caveat for the Defense, 167
4. Portrait of an Ideal World, 173
X Essay in Constructive Criticism, 180
XI On the Nature of Man, 197
1. The Animal That Thinks, 197
2. Veritas Odium Parit, 198
3. The Eternal Cripple, 199
4. The Test, 200
5. National Characters, 201
6. The Goal, 204
7. Psychology at 5 A. M., 204
8. The Reward, 205
9. The Altruist, 205
10. The Man of Honor, 206
XII Bugaboo, 207
XIII On Government, 220
XIV Toward a Realistic Aesthetic, 237
1. The Nature of Art, 237
2. The One-Legged Art, 240
3. Symbiosis and the Artist, 248
XV Contributions to the Study of Vulgar
Psychology, 253
1. The Downfall of the Navy, 253
2. The Mind of the Slave, 261
3. The Art Eternal, 269
XVI The American Novel, 278
XVII People and Things, 294
1. The Capitol of a Great Republic, 294
2. Ambassadors of Christ, 296
3. Bilder aus schöner Zeit, 297
4. The High Seas, 299
5. The Shrine of Mnemosyne, 300
PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES
I. THE AMERICAN TRADITION
1
Ever since Dr. William Crary Brownell, _de l’Académie Américaine_,
published his little volume, “Standards,” in 1917, a vast hullabaloo
has been going on among the native, white, Protestant _Gelehrten_ of
the Republic, particularly in the great open spaces of the South and
Middle West, in favor of what they call the American tradition in
letters. Perhaps I libel Brownell, a worthy if somewhat gummy man,
by hinting that he started this whooping; it may be that its actual
generator was George Creel, the Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, the
Hon. James M. Beck, the Hon. A. Mitchell Palmer or some other such
master-mind of that patriotic and intelligent era. Whatever its
parentage, it was at least born in the holiest of wedlock, and to the
applause of all right-thinking men; and if I now presume to pull its
ear I surely hope that no one will suspect that I thereby question its
legitimacy. It is, in fact, absolutely and irrefragably American from
snout to _os calcis_, not only in outward seeming and demeanor, but
also in inner essence, and anyone who flouts it also flouts everything
that is most sacred in the spirit of Americanism. To that business I
herewith address myself briefly.
What, then, is the spirit of Americanism? I precipitate it conveniently
into the doctrine that the way to ascertain the truth about anything,
whether in the realms of exact knowledge, in the purple zone of the
fine arts or in the empyrean reaches of metaphysics, is to take a
vote upon it, and that the way to propagate that truth, once it has
been ascertained and proclaimed by lawful authority, is with a club.
This doctrine, it seems to me, explains almost everything that is
indubitably American, and particularly everything American that is most
puzzling to men of older and less inspired cultures, from American
politics to American learning, and from the lush and unprecedented
American code of morals to the amazing and almost fabulous American
code of honor. At one end it explains the archetypical buffooneries
of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, the Anti-Saloon League, the
Department of Justice and all other such great engines of cultural
propaganda, and at the other end it explains the amusing theory that
the limits of the nation’s æsthetic adventures are to be fixed by a
vague and self-appointed camorra of rustic Ph.D.’s, and that any
artist, indigenous or imported, who dares to pass them is not only a
sinner against the beautiful but also a traitor to the flag, and that
he ought, shall and must be throttled by the secular arm. Patriotism
thus gathers in æsthetics and gives it suck, as it has already given
suck to ethics. There are artists who are worthy of the boon of
freedom, and there are artists who are criminal and must be put down,
as anarchists and polygamists are put down. The fancies of the poet in
his velvet coat, the vast soarings and grapplings of the metaphysician
in his damp cell, the writhings of the logician chained to his rock,
become either right or wrong, and whatever is right in them is American
and whatever is wrong is not American.
How far this last notion goes under the Constitution is best shown,
not in the relatively _pianissimo_ pronunciamentoes of such suave and
cautious dons as Brownell, who are themselves often sadly polluted
by foreign ideas, despite their heroic struggle to remember Valley
Forge and San Juan Hill, but in the far more frank and passionate
bulls of their followers in the seminaries of the cow States, where
every male of _Homo sapiens_ has copious _vibrissæ_ on his chest
and Nordic blue eyes in his head, and is a red-blooded, go-getting,
up-and-coming he-man. I introduce at once a perfect speciman, Doughty
of Texas--a savant but little known in the diabetic East, but for
long a favorite expert in comparative morals in the university at
Austin--not a professor, alas, for he lacks the Ph.D., but _amicus
curiæ_ to the other professors, as befits his trade of jurisconsult,
and a frequent author of critical papers. Doughty has passion but he
also has diligence: a combination not too common. Unlike the lean and
slippered Beers, of Yale, who once boasted that he had read none of the
books he was denouncing, Doughty is at pains to look into even the most
subversive, as a dutiful Censor Librorum looks into even “Science and
Health” and the works of Dr. Marie C. Stopes. Some time ago, determined
to get at and expose the worst, he plowed magnificently through a whole
library--through all the new poetry from Carl Sandburg to “The Spoon
River Anthology,” and all the new novels from Dreiser to Waldo Frank,
and all the vast mass of immoral criticism accompanying them, from that
in the _Dial_ and the _Nation_ to that in the _Little Review_, _S4N_
and the Chicago _Literary Times_. “For many months now,” he reported
when he emerged at last, “there has passed before me the whole ghastly
array.... I have read the ‘books’; the ‘fiction’ and the ‘verse’;
the ‘drama,’ the ‘articles’ and the ‘essays’; the ‘sketches’ and the
‘criticisms,’ and whatever else is squeaked and gibbered by these
unburied and not-to-be-handled dead.... It is this unnamable by-product
of congenital deficiency, perverted dissipation and adulterated
narcotics ... which I refer to as ‘modern [American] literature.’”
And what is the Texas Taine’s verdict upon this modern American
literature? The verdict, in brief, of all other right-thinking,
forward-looking he-men, North, East, South, West--the verdict of every
American who truly loves the flag, and knows congenitally what is right
and what is wrong. He not only finds that it is, in itself, nothing
but “swept-up rottenness and garbage--the dilute sewage of the sordid
mental slums of New York and Chicago”; he also finds that the ladies
and gentlemen who compose it are no more than “a horde of chancre-laden
rats,” that they constitute a “devil’s crew of perverted drug-addicts,”
that they are engaged unanimously upon a “flabby and feeble assault
... upon that ancient decency that for unnumbered generations of the
white Northern races of mankind, at least, has grown and strengthened
as a seed cast upon kindly soil,” and, finally, that “no one of the
‘writers’ of this unhappy array was in the service of the United
States in the Great War”--in brief, that the whole movement is no more
than a foul conspiracy to tear down the flag, uproot the Republic and
exterminate the Nordic Blond, and that, in consequence, it is the
duty of every American who is a member “of a white Nordic race, save
the Teutonic,” to come sliding down the pole, grab the tarpot, and
go galloping to the alarm. So concluding and stating in rich Texan
phrases, the Doughty proceeds to rend specifically a typical book by
one of these immigrant foes to “the heritage of American and English
men.”... The one he chooses is “Jurgen,” by James Branch Cabell, of
Virginia!
2
This long-horned policeman of letters, I admit, is more exuberant than
most. There are no soothing elms on the campus at Austin; instead there
is only the cindered _plaza de toros_ of the Ku Klux Klan. Patriotism,
down there, runs wilder than elsewhere. Men have large hands and loud
voices. The sight of the flag makes their blood leap and boil; when
it is affronted they cannot control themselves. Nevertheless, the
doctrine thus stated in harsh terms by the dreadful Doughty, is, in
its essence, precisely the doctrine of his more urbane colleagues--of
Brownell _de l’Académie Américaine_, of Brander Matthews _de l’Académie
Américaine_, of Sherman _de l’Académie Américaine_, of Erskine _de
l’Institut National_, of Boynton, of old Beers, of all the rest.
It is a doctrine, as I have said, that is thoroughly American--as
American, indeed, as Prohibition, correspondence schools, the Knights
of Pythias or chewing-gum. But by the same token it is a doctrine
that has no more fundamental sense or dignity than the politics of a
Coolidge or the theology of a Billy Sunday. It is, to come to the bald
fact at once, mere drivel--an endless series of false assumptions and
_non-sequiturs_--bad logic piled recklessly upon unsound facts. It is
the product of men who, drilled beyond their capacity for taking in
ideas and harrowed from infancy by harsh and unyielding concepts of
duty, have borrowed the patriotic philosophy of suburban pastors and
country schoolmarms, and now seek to apply it to the consideration of
phenomena that are essentially beyond their comprehension, as honor is
beyond the comprehension of a politician. It is rural Fundamentalism in
the black gown and disarming whiskers of _Wissenschaft_; its inevitable
fruit is what Ernest Boyd has aptly called Ku Klux Kriticism.
The simple truth, of course, is that the standards and traditions these
sublimated Prohibition enforcement officers argue for so eloquently
have no actual existence in the first-line literature of the American
people--that what they demand is not a lofty fidelity to a genuine
ideal, but only an artificial and absurd subservience to notions that
were regarded with contempt by every American of the civilized minority
even when they prevailed. In other words, what they argue for is not a
tradition that would take in Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman and Mark
Twain, but a tradition that would pass over all these men to embrace
Cooper, Bryant, Donald G. Mitchell, N. P. Willis, J. G. Holland,
Charles Dudley Warner, Mrs. Sigourney and the Sweet Singer of Michigan.
Even Longfellow, I daresay, must be left out, for didn’t he drink of
green and terrible waters in Paris as a youth and didn’t Poe accuse him
of stealing from the Spanish and the German? Certainly even Longfellow,
to go back to Doughty’s interdict, “simmered in the devil’s cauldron of
central Europe” and was “spewed out of Italy and France.” Could Bryant
himself qualify? Didn’t he trifle with strange tongues and admire enemy
aliens? And what of Lowell? His Dante studies surely had a sinister
smack; one can’t imagine a Texas Grand Goblin approving them. Bayard
Taylor I refrain from mentioning at all. His translation of “Faust”
came to a just judgment at last when it was hurled from the shelves
of every American university patronized by the issue of 100 per cent.
Americans. Its incineration on a hundred far-flung campuses, indeed,
was the second great patriotic event of the _annus mirabilis_ which saw
the launching of Brownell’s “Standards” and the entrance of the Ku Klux
Klan into literary criticism.
How little the patriot-pedagogues know of the veriest elements
of American literary history was shown very amusingly some time
ago when one of them, a specialist in the Emerson tradition, got
himself into a lather denouncing some Greenwich Village Brandes for
arguing that beauty was independent of morals and its own sufficient
justification--only to be confronted by the disconcerting fact that
Emerson himself had argued the same thing. Can it be that even
pedagogues are unaware that Emerson came to fame by advocating a
general deliverance from the stupid and flabby tradition his name
is now evoked to support, that his whole system of ideas was an
unqualified protest against hampering traditions of every sort, that if
he were alive today he would not be with the professors but unalterably
against them? And Emerson was surely not alone. Go through the list of
genuinely first-rate men: Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, Mark Twain. One and
all they stood outside the so-called tradition of their time; one and
all, they remained outside the tradition that pedants try so vainly
to impose upon a literature in active being today. Poe’s poems and
tales not only seemed strange to the respectable dolts of his time;
they seemed downright horrible. His criticism, which tells us even
more about him, was still worse: it impinged upon such dull fellows as
Griswold exactly as “Jennie Gerhardt” impinged upon the appalled tutors
in the alfalfa colleges. And what of Hawthorne? Hawthorne’s onslaught
upon the Puritan ethic was the most formidable and effective ever
delivered, save only Emerson’s. And Whitman? Whitman so staggered the
professors that it is only within the last few years that they have
begun to teach him at all; those who flourished in 1870 avoided all
mention of him as carefully as their successors of today avoid mention
of Dreiser or Cabell. And Mark Twain? I put a professor on the stand,
to wit, my Christian friend, Phelps of Yale. Go to Phelps’ “Essays on
Modern Novelists,” and you will find a long and humorous account of the
efforts of unintelligent pedagogues to read Mark out of the national
letters altogether--and go to Van Wyck Brooks’ “The Ordeal of Mark
Twain” and you will discover what great damage that imbecility did to
the man himself. Phelps printed his book in 1910. It was the first book
by a doctor of beautiful letters to admit categorically that Mark was
an artist at all! All the other professors, even in 1910, were still
teaching that Washington Irving was a great humorist and Mark a mere
clown, just as they are teaching now that the criticism of Howells and
Lowell was superior to the criticism of Huneker, and that Henry van
Dyke is a great artist and Cabell a bad one.
Historically, there is thus nothing but folly and ignorance in all
the current prattle about a restoration of the ancient American
tradition. The ancient American tradition, in so far as it was
vital and productive and civilized, was obviously a tradition of
individualism and revolt, not of herd-morality and conformity. If one
argues otherwise, one must inevitably argue that the great men of the
Golden Age were not Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe and Whitman, but Cooper,
Irving, Longfellow and Whittier. This nonsense, no doubt, is actually
argued in the prairie seminaries; it even has its prophets, perhaps, in
backwaters of the East; certainly one finds little in controversion of
it in the prevailing text-books. But it remains nonsense all the same.
The fact that it has been accepted for years explains the three great
disgraces of American letters: the long neglect of Whitman, Melville
and Mark Twain. And the fact that it is now challenged actively--that
practically all young Americans of any appreciable intelligence now
rebel against it--that the most significant sign of the times, in many
ways, is the open revolt of the new generation against the teaching
of their elders--this fact explains the new vigor that has got into
American literature, and its consequent running amok. That running
amok, to be sure, is leading to excesses--but so did the running amok
of Whitman lead to excesses; so did the timorous running amok of Mark
Twain. In order to get the rest of “Leaves of Grass” we must somehow
manage to survive “A Woman Waits for Me”; in order to get “Huckleberry
Finn” we must swallow the buffooneries of “The Innocents Abroad.” In
brief, we must be willing to pay a price for freedom, for no price that
is ever asked for it is half the cost of doing without it.
3
It so happens that many of the men and women who have sought to
exercise this freedom in our time have been of stocks other than
the so-called Anglo-Saxon, either wholly or in part--that they have
represented the newer stocks which threaten, not only in the fine arts
but in practically all departments of human activity, including even
business, to oust the Anglo-Saxon from his old hegemony. The fact,
in a day of increasing racial consciousness, has greatly colored the
whole controversy and made it extraordinarily bitter. The doctrine
gradually set up between 1914 and 1917, and given the full force of law
in the latter year, that a citizen of German blood, or suspected of
German blood, stood on a plane inferior to that occupied by a citizen
of British blood, and had a less valid claim to the equal protection
of the Constitution and the laws--this doctrine was extended, in
the post-war years of terror, to all Americans not specifically
Anglo-Saxon. How seriously it has been taken in the more remote parts
of the Republic is well displayed by the strophes that I have quoted
from good Doughty--a gentleman who seems quite as content to take
his anthropology from Madison Grant and Gertrude Atherton as he is to
take his manners from the cattle-herders of his native steppes. Even
more ludicrous attempts to set up Ku Klux criteria in letters might
be dredged from the writings of more urbane, and, in theory, more
intelligent and civilized critics--for example, Brander Matthews. The
rancorous animosity that has pursued such men as Dreiser is certainly
not wholly æsthetic, or even moral; it is, to a very large extent,
racial. The man is obviously not an Anglo-Saxon; _ergo_, there is
something sinister about him, and he must be put down. The more solid
becomes his position as a man of letters, the more offensive he
becomes to the colonial mind. His crime, indeed, is that he has made
headway--that a new American tradition, differing radically from the
old one that pedagogues preach, tends to grow up around him--that in
European eyes, and even in English eyes, he becomes more typical of
America than any of the literary Knights of Pythias who are pitted
against him. It thus becomes a matter of self-preservation to dispose
of him, and when it turns out to be difficult to do so by logical means
then there is a quick and easy recourse to evangelistic means.
The effects of this holy war, alas, have differed greatly from those
intended. Far from alarming and stampeding the non-Anglo-Saxons upon
whom it has been waged, it has actually forced them, despite their
differences, into a certain common action, and so made them far more
formidable than they were when it began. And far from establishing
any superiority in the Anglo-Saxon, it has only spread the suspicion
that, for all his pretensions, he must be a very inferior fellow at
bottom, else he would not be so eager to call in the mob to help him
in a purely literary feud. As one who has stood on the battlements for
years, and smelt the powder of every salvo, I can only report that I
have come to believe in this inferiority thoroughly, and that it seems
to me to be most obvious in those who most vociferously uphold the
so-called American tradition. They are, in the main, extremely stupid
men, and their onslaughts are seldom supported by any formidable weight
of metal. What they ask the rest of us to do, in brief, is simply to
come down voluntarily and irrationally to their own cultural level--the
level of a class that easily dominated the country when it was a
series of frontier settlements, but that has gradually lost leadership
as civilization has crept in. The rest of us naturally refuse, and
they thereupon try to make acquiescence a patriotic matter, and to
alarm the refractory with all sorts of fantastic penalties. But it
must be obvious that they fail far more often than they succeed--and
their failure is a melancholy proof of their intrinsic inferiority.
The current of thought in the United States, at least among the
relatively civilized minority, is not actually toward the abject
colonialism that they advocate; it is against that colonialism. We are
further from sweetness and light today than we ever were before, and
we are further from cultural slavery to the harassed and care-worn
Motherland. With overwhelming numbers on their side, and every form of
external authority, and all the prevailing shibboleths, the spokesmen
of Anglo-Saxon domination come to grief every time they tackle the
minority, or even any minority within the minority, and at no time do
they come to grief more dramatically than when they prepare for battle,
in the traditional Anglo-Saxon manner, by first trying to tie their
opponents’ hands.
When I speak of Anglo-Saxons, of course, I speak inexactly and in the
common phrase. Even within the bounds of that phrase the American
of the prevailing stock is Anglo-Saxon only partially, for there is
probably just as much Celtic blood in his veins as Germanic, and his
norm is to be found, not South of the Tyne and west of the Severn,
but on the bleak Scotch hills. Among the first English colonists
there were unquestionably many men of purely Teutonic stock from the
East and South of England, and their influence is yet visible in many
characteristic American folkways, in certain traditional American
ideas--some of them now surviving only in national hypocrisies--, and,
above all, in the fundamental peculiarities of the American dialect of
English. But their Teutonic blood was early diluted by Celtic strains
from Scotland, from the North of Ireland and from the West of England,
and today those Americans who are regarded as being most thoroughly
Anglo-Saxons--for example, the mountaineers of the Appalachian slopes
from Vermont to Georgia--are obviously far more Celtic than Teutonic,
not only physically but also mentally. They are leaner and taller than
the true English, and far more given to moral obsessions and religious
fanaticism. A Methodist revival is not an English phenomenon; it is
Scotch. So, fundamentally, is Prohibition. So is the American tendency,
marked by every foreign student of our history, to turn all political
combats into moral crusades. The English themselves, of course, have
been greatly polluted by Scotch, Irish and Welsh blood during the past
three centuries, and for years past their government has been largely
in the hands of Celts, but though this fact, by making them more like
Americans, has tended to conceal the difference that I am discussing,
it has certainly not sufficed to obliterate it altogether. Such a man
as Lloyd George, in all his ways of thinking, is almost precisely like
an American--but the English notion of humor remains different from the
American notion, and so does the English view of personal liberty,
and on the same level of primary ideas there are many other obvious
differences.
But though I am thus convinced that the American Anglo-Saxon wears a
false label, and grossly libels both of the great races from which
he claims descent, I can imagine no good coming of trying to change
it. Let him call himself whatever he pleases. Whatever he calls
himself, it must be plain that the term he uses designates a genuinely
distinct and differentiated race--that he is separated definitely, in
character and habits of thought, from the men of all other recognizable
strains--that he represents, among the peoples of the earth, almost
a special species, and that he runs true to type. There is, indeed,
very little tendency to variation in him--that is, in the mass. The
traits that he developed when the first mixture of races took place
in colonial days are the traits that he still shows; despite the
vast changes in his material environment, he is almost precisely the
same, in the way he thinks and acts, as his forefathers were. Some
of the other great races of men, during the past two centuries, have
changed very noticeably--for example, think of the complete dying out
of adventurousness in the Spaniards and its sudden appearance in the
Germans--but the American Anglo-Saxon has stuck to his hereditary guns.
Moreover, he tends to show much less variation than other races between
man and man. It is an axiom that, when five Russians or Germans meet,
there are four parties in conflict, but it is equally an axiom that,
among a hundred Americans, at least ninety-five will be found to hold
exactly the same views upon all subjects that they can grasp at all,
and may be trusted to react exactly alike to all ordinary stimuli.
No other race, save it be the Chinese, is so thoroughly solid, or so
firmly unresponsive to ideas from without.
4
The good qualities of this so-called Anglo-Saxon are many, and I am
certainly not disposed to question them, but I here pass them over
without apology, for he devotes practically the whole of his literature
and fully a half of his oral discourse to celebrating them himself,
and so there is no danger that they will ever be disregarded. No other
known man, indeed, is so violently the blowhard, save it be his English
kinsman; even the Frenchman, by comparison, is relatively modest and
reticent. In this fact lies the first cause of the ridiculous figure
he commonly cuts in the eyes of other people: he brags and blusters so
incessantly that, if he actually had the combined virtues of Socrates,
the Cid and the Twelve Apostles, he would still go beyond the facts,
and so appear a mere Bombastes Furioso. This habit, I believe, is
fundamentally English, but it has been exaggerated in the Americano
by his larger admixture of Celtic blood. In late years in America it
has taken on an almost pathological character, and is to be explained,
perhaps, only in terms of the Freudian necromancy. Braggadocio, in
the 100 per cent. American--“we won the war,” “it is our duty to
lead the world,” “the land of the free and the home of the brave,”
the “Americanization” movement, and so on--is probably no more than
a protective mechanism erected to conceal an inescapable sense of
inferiority.
That this inferiority is real must be obvious to any impartial
observer. Whenever the Anglo-Saxon, whether of the English or of the
American variety, comes into sharp conflict with men of other stocks,
he tends to be worsted, or, at best, to be forced back upon extraneous
and irrelevant aids to assist him in the struggle. Here in the United
States his defeat is so palpable that it has filled him with vast
alarms, and reduced him to seeking succor in grotesque and extravagant
devices. In the fine 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 early settlers. To call the roll of
Americans eminent in almost any field of human endeavor beyond that
of mere dull money-grubbing is to call a list of strange and often
outlandish names; even the panel of Congress presents a startling
example. Of the Americans who have come into notice during the past
fifty years as poets, as novelists, as critics, as painters, as
sculptors and in the minor arts, less than half bear Anglo-Saxon names,
and in this minority there are few of pure Anglo-Saxon blood. So in the
sciences. So in the higher reaches of engineering and technology. So
in philosophy and its branches. So even in industry and agriculture.
In those areas where the competition between the new and the old
blood-streams is most sharp and clear-cut, say in New York, in seaboard
New England and in the farming 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 sentimental and
illusory.
The descendants of the later immigrants tend generally to move upward;
the descendants of the first settlers, I believe, tend plainly to move
downward, mentally, spiritually and even physically. Civilization is
at its lowest mark in the United States precisely in those areas where
the Anglo-Saxon still presumes to rule. 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 still firmly in the
saddle, there Ku Kluxery flourishes, and Fundamentalism, and lynching,
and Prohibition, and all the other stupid and anti-social crazes of
inferior men. It is not in the big cities, with their mixed population,
that the death-rate is highest, and politics most corrupt, and religion
nearest to voodooism, and every decent human aspiration suspect; it is
in the areas that the recent immigrations have not penetrated, where
“the purest Anglo-Saxon blood in the world” still flows. I could pile
up evidences, but they are not necessary. The fact is too plain to
be challenged. One testimony will be sufficient: it comes from two
inquirers who made an exhaustive survey of a region in Southeastern
Ohio, where “the people are more purely Americans than in the rest of
the State”:
Here gross superstition exercises strong control over the thought
and action of a large proportion of the people. Syphilitic and other
venereal diseases are common and increasing over whole counties, while
in some communities nearly every family is afflicted with inherited
or infectious disease. Many cases of incest are known; inbreeding is
rife. Imbeciles, feeble-minded, and delinquents are numerous, politics
is corrupt, and selling of votes is common, petty crimes abound, the
schools have been badly managed and poorly attended. Cases of rape,
assault, and robbery are of almost weekly occurrence within five
minutes walk of the corporation limits of one of the county seats,
while in another county political control is held by a self-confessed
criminal. Alcoholic intemperance is excessive. Gross immorality and
its evil results are by no means confined to the hill districts, but
are extreme also in the towns.
As I say, the American of the old stock is not unaware of this steady,
and, of late, somewhat rapid degeneration--this gradual loss of his
old mastery in the land his ancestors wrung from the Indian and the
wild cat. He senses it, indeed, very painfully, and, as if in despair
of arresting it in fact, makes desperate efforts to dispose of it
by denial and concealment. These efforts often take grotesque and
extravagant forms. Laws are passed to hobble and cage the citizen of
newer stocks in a hundred fantastic ways. It is made difficult and
socially dangerous for him to teach his children the speech of his
fathers, or to maintain the cultural attitudes that he has inherited
from them. Every divergence from the norm of the low-cast Anglo-Saxon
is treated as an _attentat_ against the commonwealth, and punished
with eager ferocity. On the level of the country Ku Kluxers the
thing goes to the length of downright assault; a man in Arkansas or
Mississippi who ventured to speak a foreign language, or to concern
himself publicly with such of the fine arts as country Methodists
cannot comprehend, or to let it be known that he was a member of the
Roman Catholic Church would run some risk of being tarred and feathered
by his neighbors, or of having his house burned down over his head.
Worse, there is scarcely less pressure in the higher reaches of the
so-called intellect. The demand for a restoration of what is called the
American tradition in letters is nothing more or less, at bottom, than
a demand for a supine and nonsensical conformity--a demand that every
American, regardless of his racial character and his natural way of
thinking, force all his thoughts into the low-caste Anglo-Saxon mold.
It is bound to fail of effect, of course, and in that very fact lies
the best of imaginable proofs of the mental poverty of those who voice
it. It is not brought forward in an effort at persuasion; it is issued
as an order, raucously and absurdly--and every time it is flouted the
Anglo-Saxon slips another inch down the hill. He cannot prevail in fair
competition, and, for all his bellicose flourishes, he cannot prevail
by force and intimidation. There remains for him the rôle of martyr,
and in this he already begins to display himself affectingly. The
music of Americans, we are told gravely, is barred out of our concert
halls and opera houses because their managers and conductors are all
accursed foreigners. American painters and sculptors have to struggle
against a dense tide of immigrants. American criticism has become
so anti-American that poets and novelists of the old stock are on a
sort of blacklist, and cannot get justice. Only in the colleges does
the Anglo-Saxon intellectual hold his own, and even there he is now
menaced by swarms of Jews, and must devise means of putting them down
or perish with his brothers of the fine arts.
5
It so happens that I am myself an Anglo-Saxon--one of far purer blood,
indeed, than any of the half-bleached Celts who pass under the name in
the United States and England. I am Angle and I am Saxon, and I am very
little else, and that little is all safely white, Nordic, Protestant
and blond. Thus I feel free, without risk of venturing into bad taste,
to regard frankly the _soi-disant_ Anglo-Saxon of this incomparable
Republic and his rather less dubious cousin of the Motherland. How do
the two appear to me, after a quarter of a century spent largely in
accumulating their disfavor? What are the characters that I discern
most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer
at once that two stick out above all others. One is his curious and
apparently incurable incompetence--his congenital inability to do any
difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or
writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears
and alarms--in short, his hereditary cowardice.
To accuse so enterprising and successful a race of cowardice, of
course, is to risk immediate derision; nevertheless, I believe that a
fair-minded examination of its history will bear me out. Nine-tenths of
the great feats of derring-do that its sucklings are taught to venerate
in school--that is, its feats as a race, not the isolated exploits of
its extraordinary individuals, most of them at least partly of other
stocks--have been wholly lacking in even the most elementary gallantry.
Consider, for example, the events attending the extension of the two
great empires, English and American. Did either movement evoke any
genuine courage and resolution? The answer is plainly no. Both empires
were built up primarily by swindling and butchering unarmed savages,
and after that by robbing weak and friendless nations: Mexico, Spain,
the Boer republics. Neither produced a hero above the average run of
those in the movies; neither exposed the folks at home to the slightest
danger of reprisal. The battles of Omdurman and Manila Bay were typical
of these great swarmings of the Anglo-Saxon--the first a bald massacre,
and the second a combat at odds of at least fifty to one. They produced
highly typical Anglo-Saxon heroes--Kitchener, an Irishman, and Dewey,
largely French. Almost always, indeed, mercenaries have done the
Anglo-Saxon’s fighting for him--a high testimony to his common sense,
but scarcely flattering, I fear, to the truculence he boasts of. The
British empire was won mainly by Irishmen, Scotchmen and native
allies, and the American empire, at least in large part, by Frenchmen
and Spaniards. Moreover, neither great enterprise cost any appreciable
amount of blood; neither presented grave and dreadful risks; neither
exposed the conqueror to the slightest danger of being made the
conquered. The British won most of their vast dominions without having
to stand up in a single battle against a civilized and formidable
foe, and the Americanos won their continent at the expense of a few
dozen puerile skirmishes with savages. All the Indian wars in American
history, from the days of John Smith to those of Custer, did not bring
down as many men as the single battle of Tannenberg. The total cost of
conquering the whole area from Plymouth Rock to the Golden Gate and
from Lake George to the Everglades, including even the cost of driving
out the French, Dutch, English and Spaniards, was less than the cost of
defending Verdun.
So far as I can make out there is no record in history of any
Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies, nor
upon any war at all when there was the slightest danger of getting
beaten, or even of suffering serious damage. The French have done it,
the Dutch have done it, the Germans have done it, the Japs have done
it, and even such inferior nations as the Danes, the Spaniards, the
Boers and the Greeks have done it, but never the English or Americans.
Can you imagine the English taking such a chance as the Germans took
in 1914, or as the Turks took in 1922, or as the French prepare to
take today? Can you imagine the United States resolutely facing a war
in which the odds against it were as huge as they were against Spain
in 1898? It seems to me that the facts of history are wholly against
any such fancy. The Anglo-Saxon always tries to take a gang with him
when he goes to war, and even when he has it behind him he is very
uneasy, and prone to fall into panic at the first threat of genuine
danger. Here I put an unimpeachably Anglo-Saxon witness on the stand,
to wit, Dr. Charles W. Eliot, of Harvard. I find him saying, in an
article quoted with approbation by the _Congressional Record_, that
during the Revolutionary War the colonists now hymned so eloquently
in the school-books “fell into a condition of despondency from which
nothing but the steadfastness of Washington and the Continental army
_and the aid from France_ saved them,” and that “when the War of
1812 brought grave losses a considerable portion of the population
experienced a moral collapse, from which they were rescued only by the
exertions of a few thoroughly patriotic statesmen and the exploits of
three or four American frigates on the seas”--to say nothing of an
enterprising Corsican gentleman, Bonaparte by name. In both these
wars the Americans had enormous and obvious advantages, in terrain, in
allies and in men; nevertheless, they fought, in the main, very badly,
and from the first shot to the last a majority of them stood in favor
of making peace on almost any terms. The Mexican and Spanish Wars I
pass over as perhaps too obscenely ungallant to be discussed at all;
of the former, General U. S. Grant, who fought in it, said that it was
“the most unjust war ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
Who remembers that, during the Spanish War, the whole Atlantic Coast
trembled in fear of the Spaniards’ feeble fleet--that all New England
had hysterics every time a strange coal-barge was sighted on the
sky-line, that the safe-deposit boxes of Boston were emptied and their
contents transferred to Worcester, and that the Navy had to organize a
patrol to save the coast towns from depopulation? Perhaps those Reds,
atheists and pro-Germans remember it who also remember that during
the World War the entire country went wild with fear of an enemy who,
without the aid of divine intervention, obviously could not strike it a
blow at all--and that the great moral victory was gained at last with
the assistance of twenty-one allies and at odds of eight to one.
But the American Civil War remains? Does it, indeed? The almost
unanimous opinion of the North, in 1861, was that it would be over
after a few small battles; the first soldiers were actually enlisted
for but three months. When, later on, it turned unexpectedly into a
severe struggle, recruits had to be driven to the front by force,
and the only Northerners remaining in favor of going on were Abraham
Lincoln, a few ambitious generals and the profiteers. I turn to
Dr. Eliot again. “In the closing year of the war,” he says, “large
portions of the Democratic party in the North _and of the Republican
party_ advocated surrender to the Confederacy, _so down-hearted were
they_.” Down-hearted at odds of two to one! The South was plainly more
gallant, but even the gallantry of the South was largely illusory.
The Confederate leaders, when the war began, adopted at once the
traditional Anglo-Saxon device of seeking allies. They tried and
expected to get the aid of England, and they actually came very near
succeeding. When hopes in that direction began to fade (_i. e._, when
England concluded that tackling the North would be dangerous), the
common people of the Confederacy, the progenitors of the chivalric Ku
Kluxers of today, threw up the sponge, and so the catastrophe, when
it came at last, was mainly internal. The South failed to bring the
quaking North to a standstill because, to borrow a phrase that Dr.
Eliot uses in another connection, it “experienced a moral collapse of
unprecedented depth and duration.” The folks at home failed to support
the troops in the field, and the troops in the field began to desert.
Even so early as Shiloh, indeed, many Confederate regiments were
already refusing to fight.
This reluctance for desperate chances and hard odds, so obvious in the
military record of the English-speaking nations, is also conspicuous in
times of peace. What a man of another and superior stock almost always
notices, living among so-called Anglo-Saxons, is (_a_) their incapacity
for prevailing in fair rivalry, either in trade, in the fine arts or
in what is called learning--in brief, their general incompetence,
and (_b_) their invariable effort to make up for this incapacity
by putting some inequitable burden upon their rivals, usually by
force. The Frenchman, I believe, is the worst of chauvinists, but
once he admits a foreigner to his country he at least treats that
foreigner fairly, and does not try to penalise him absurdly for his
mere foreignness. The Anglo-Saxon American is always trying to do
it; his history is a history of recurrent outbreaks of blind rage
against peoples who have begun to worst him; hence Know Nothingism, Ku
Kluxery, American Legionism, and all the rest of it. Such movements
would be inconceivable in an efficient and genuinely self-confident
people, wholly assured of their superiority, as a Frenchman is of
his or a German of his, and they would be equally inconceivable in
a truly gallant and courageous people, disdaining unfair advantages
and overwhelming odds. Theoretically launched against some imaginary
inferiority in the non-Anglo-Saxon man, either as patriot, as democrat
or as Christian, they are actually launched at his general superiority,
his greater fitness to survive in the national environment. The effort
is always to penalize him for winning in fair fight, to handicap him in
such a manner that he will sink to the general level of the Anglo-Saxon
population, and, if possible, even below it. Such devices, of course,
never have the countenance of the Anglo-Saxon minority that is
authentically superior, and hence self-confident and tolerant. Of that
minority I do not speak here. It is serene in peace as it is brave in
war. But in the United States, at least, it is pathetically small, and
it tends steadily to grow smaller and feebler. The communal laws and
the communal _mores_ are made by the folk, and they offer all the proof
that is necessary, not only of its general inferiority, but also of
its alarmed awareness of that inferiority. The normal American of the
“pure-blooded” majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling
that there is a burglar under the bed, and he gets up every morning
with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen.
6
It is difficult, I submit, to admire such a people unreservedly,
despite the good qualities that I have passed over. They lack the
ease and tolerance, the fine adventurousness and love of hazard which
go with a sense of firm security--in other words, with a sense of
genuine superiority. The Anglo-Saxon of the great herd is, in many
important respects, the least civilized of men and the least capable
of true civilization. His political ideas are crude and shallow. He
is almost wholly devoid of æsthetic feeling; he does not even make
folk-lore or walk in the woods. The most elementary facts about the
visible universe alarm him, and incite him to put them down. Educate
him, make a professor of him, teach him how to express his soul, and
he still remains palpably third-rate. He fears ideas almost more
cravenly than he fears men. His blood, I believe, is running thin;
perhaps it was not much to boast of at the start; in order that he may
exercise any functions above those of a trader, a pedagogue or a mob
orator, it needs the stimulus of other and less exhausted strains.
Poe, Whitman, Mark Twain--these were typical products of such crosses.
The fact that they increase is the best hope of the intellect in
America. They shake the old race out of its spiritual lethargy, and
introduce it to disquiet and experiment. They make for a free play of
ideas. In opposing the process, whether in politics, in letters or in
the ages-long struggle toward the truth, the prophets of Anglo-Saxon
purity and tradition only make themselves ridiculous. Under the
absurd _Kultur_ that they advocate Aggasiz would have been deported
and Whitman would have been hanged, and the most eminent literati
flourishing in the Republic today would be Edgar Guest and Dr. Frank
Crane.