Notes on democracy

by H. L. Mencken

The gentlemen of the Upper House are measurably better, if only because they serve for longer terms. A Congressman, with his two-year term, is constantly running for re-election. Scarcely has he got to Washington before he must hurry home and resume his bootlicking of the local bosses. But a Senator, once sworn in, may safely forget them for two or three years, and so, if there is no insuperable impediment in his character, he may show a certain independence, and yet survive. Moreover, he is usually safer than a Congressman, even as his term ends, for his possession of a higher office shows that he is no inconsiderable boss himself. Thus there are Senators who attain to a laudable mastery of the public business, particularly such as lies within the range of their private interests, and even Senators who show the intellectual dignity and vigour of genuine statesmen. But they are surely not numerous. The average Senator, like the average Congressman, is simply a party hack, without ideas and without anything rationally describable as self-respect. His backbone has a sweet resiliency; he knows how to clap on false whiskers; it is quite impossible to forecast his action, even on a matter of the highest principle, without knowing what rewards are offered by the rival sides. Two of the most pretentious Senators, during the Sixty-Ninth Congress, were the gentlemen from Pennsylvania: one of them, indeed, was the successor to the lamented Henry Cabot Lodge as the intellectual snob of the Upper House. Yet both, under pressure, performed such dizzy flops that even the Senate gasped. It was amusing, but there was also a touch of pathos in it. Here were men who plainly preferred their jobs to their dignity. Here, in brief, were men whose private rectitude had yielded to political necessity—the eternal tragedy of democracy. I turn to the testimony of a Senator who stands out clearly from the rest: the able and uncompromisingly independent Reed of Missouri. This is what he said of his colleagues, to their faces, on June 2, 1924:

[The pending measure] will be voted for by cowards who would rather hang on to their present offices than serve their country or defend its Constitution. It would not receive a vote in this body were there not many individuals looking over their shoulders toward the ballot-boxes of November, their poltroon souls aquiver with apprehension lest they may pay the price of courageous duty by the loss of the votes of some bloc, clique, or coterie backing this infamous proposal. My language may seem brutal. If so, it is because it lays on the blistering truth.

Senator Reed, in this startling characterization of his fellow Senators, plainly violated the rules of the Senate, which forbid one member to question the motives of another. But there was no Senator present that day who cared to invoke those rules. They all knew that Reed told the truth. Their answer to him was to slink into the cloak-rooms, and leave him to roar at the Vice-President and the clerks. He not only described the Senate accurately; he also described the whole process of law-making under democracy. Our laws are invented, in the main, by frauds and fanatics, and put upon the statute books by poltroons and scoundrels.

8.

The Rewards of Virtue

I have spoken of the difficulties confronting an intelligent and honourable man who aspires to public office under this system. If he succeeds, it is only by a suspension of natural laws, and his success is seldom more than transient: his first term is commonly his last. And if, favoured by luck again, he goes on, it is only in the face of opposition of an almost incredible bitterness. The case of the Senator I have just mentioned is aptly in point. He is a man of obvious ability and integrity, but in his last campaign in Missouri he was opposed by a combination of all the parties and all their factions, with the waspish ghost of the late Dr. Wilson hanging over the battlefield. It was only his own amazing talents as a popular orator, aided by the post-war Katzenjammer and a local delight in vigorous, rough-and-ready-fighters, that overcame the tremendous odds against him. In most other American States he would have been defeated easily; in many of them his defeat would have been overwhelming. Only in the newer States and in the border States have such men any chance at all. Where party fidelity has run strong for years they are barred from public life completely. No Senator of any genuine dignity and ability could come out of the Georgia of to-day, and none could come out of the Vermont. Such States must be content with party hacks, and the country as a whole must submit to their depressing imbecilities and ignoble contortions. All of them are men who have trimmed and fawned. All of them are forbidden a frank and competent discussion of most of the principal issues facing the nation.

But there is something yet worse, and that is the assumption of his cowardice and venality that lies upon even the most honourable man, brought into public office by a miracle. The mob is quite unable to grasp the concept of honour, and that incapacity is naturally shared by the vast majority of politicians. Thus the acts of a public man of genuine rectitude are almost always ascribed, under democracy, to sordid and degrading motives, i. e., to the sort of motives that would animate his more orthodox colleagues if they were capable of his acts. I believe that the fact is more potent in keeping decent men out of public life in the United States than even the practical difficulties that I have rehearsed, and that it is mainly responsible for the astounding timorousness of our politics. Its effects were brilliantly displayed during the final stages of the battle over the Eighteenth Amendment. The Prohibitionist leaders, being mainly men of wide experience in playing upon the prejudices and emotions of the mob, developed a technique of terrorization that was almost irresistible. The moment a politician ventured to speak against them he was accused of the grossest baseness. It was whispered that he was a secret drunkard and eager to safeguard his tipple; it was covertly hinted that he was in the pay of the Whiskey Ring, the Beer Trust, or some other such bugaboo. The event showed that the shoe was actually on the other foot—that many of the principal supporters of Prohibition were on the pay-roll of the Anti-Saloon League, and that judges, attorneys-general and other high officers of justice afterward joined them there. But the accusations served their purpose. The plain people, unable to imagine a man entering public life with any other motive than that which would have moved them themselves if they had been in his boots—that is to say, unable to imagine any other motive save a yearning for private advantage—reacted to the charges as if they had been proved, and so more than one man of relatively high decency, as decency goes in American life, was driven out of office. Upon those who escaped the lesson was not lost. It was five or six years before any considerable faction of politicians mustered up courage enough to defy the Prohibitionists, and even then what animated them was not any positive access of resolution but simply the fact that the Anti-Saloon League was obviously far gone in corruption, with some of its chief agents in revolt against its methods, and others in prison for grave crimes and misdemeanours.

I am, myself, not cursed with the itch for public office, but I have been engaged for years in the discussion of public questions, and so I may be forgiven, I hope, for intruding my own experience here. That experience may be described briefly: there has never been a time when, attacking this or that current theory, I have not been accused of being in the pay of its interested opponents, and I believe that there has never been a time when this accusation was not generally believed. Years ago, when the Prohibitionists were first coming to power, they charged me with taking money from the brewers and distillers, and to-day they charge me with some sort of corrupt arrangement with the bootleggers, despite the plain fact that the latter are not their opponents at all, but their allies. The former accusation seemed so plausible to most Americans that even the brewers finally gave it credit: they actually offered to put me on their pay-roll, and were vastly surprised when I declined. It was simply impossible for them, as low-caste Americans, to imagine a man attempting to discharge a public duty disinterestedly; they believed that I had to be paid, as their rapidly dwindling bloc of Congressmen had to be paid. So in all other directions. When, fifteen or twenty years ago, I began exposing the quackeries of osteopaths, chiropractors and other such frauds, they resorted instantly to the device of accusing me of taking a retainer from the mythical Medical Trust, i. e., from such men as the Mayo brothers, Dr. George Crile, and the faculty of the Johns Hopkins. Later on, venturing to denounce the nefarious political activity of the Methodist Church, and of its ally, the Ku Klux Klan, I was accused by spokesmen for the former of receiving bribes from the Vatican. The comstocks went even further. When I protested against their sinister and dishonest censorship of literature, they charged me publicly with being engaged in the circulation of pornography, and actually made a vain and ill-starred attempt to railroad me to jail on that charge.

The point is that such accusations are generally believed, especially when they are leveled at a candidate for office. The average American knows what he would do in like case, and he believes quite naturally that every other man is willing and eager to do the same. At the start of my bout with the comstocks, just mentioned, many American newspapers assumed as a matter of course that I was guilty as charged, and some of them, having said so, were forced into elaborate explanations afterward to purge themselves of libel. Of the rest, most concluded that the whole combat was a sham battle, provoked on my own motion to give me what they regarded as profitable publicity. When I speak of newspapers, of course, I speak of concrete men, their editors. These editors, under democracy, constitute an extremely powerful class. Their very lack of sound knowledge and genuine intelligence gives them a special fitness for influencing the mob, and it is augmented by their happy obtuseness to notions of honour. Their daily toil consists in part of praising men and ideas that are obviously fraudulent, and in part of denouncing men and ideas that are respected by their betters. The typical American editor, save in a few of the larger towns, may be described succinctly as one who has written a million words in favour of Coolidge and half a million against Darwin. He is, like the politician, an adept trimmer and flatterer. His job is far more to him than his self-respect. It must be plain that the influence of such men upon public affairs is generally evil—that their weight is almost always thrown against the public man of dignity and courage—that such a public man cannot hope to be understood by them, or to get any useful support from them. Even when they are friendly they are apt to be so for preposterous and embarrassing reasons. Thus they give their aid to the sublime democratic process of eliminating all sense and decency from public life. Coming out of the mob, they voice the ideas of the mob. The first of those ideas is that a fraud is somehow charming and reassuring—in the common phrase, that he is a regular fellow. The second is that an honest and candid man is dangerous—or, perhaps more accurately, that there is no such animal.

The newspaper editor who rises above this level encounters the same incredulous hostility from his fellows and his public that is encountered by the superior politician, cast into public life by accident. If he is not dismissed at once as what is now called a Bolshevik, i. e., one harbouring an occult and unintelligible yearning to put down the Republic and pull God off His throne, he is assumed to be engaged in some nefarious scheme of personal aggrandizement. I point, as examples, to the cases of Fremont Older, of San Francisco, and Julian Harris, of Columbus, Ga., two honest, able and courageous men, and both opposed by the vast majority of their colleagues. The democratic process, indeed, is furiously inimical to all honourable motives. It favours the man who is without them, and it puts heavy burdens upon the man who has them. Going further, it is even opposed to mere competence. The public servant who masters his job gains nothing thereby. His natural impatience with the incapacity and slacking of his fellows makes them his implacable enemies, and he is viewed with suspicion by the great mass of democrats. But here I enter upon a subject already discussed at length by a competent French critic, the late Emile Faguet, of the French Academy, who gave a whole book to it, translated into English as “The Cult of Incompetence.” Under democracy, says Faguet, the business of law-making becomes a series of panics—government by orgy and orgasm. And the public service becomes a mere refuge for prehensile morons—get yours, and run.