Prejudices, fifth series

by H. L. Mencken

I refrain from any more: all these got enough votes to put them among the first 200 objectives—200 out of 1581. Nor do I choose them unfairly; most of those that I have not listed were quite as bad as those I have. But, you may protest, the good professor handed his cards to a jury of little girls of eight or nine years, or to the inmates of a home for the feeble-minded! He did, in fact, nothing of the kind. His jury was very carefully selected. It consisted of eighty teachers of such professional keenness that they were assembled at the University of Chicago for post-graduate study. Every one of them had been through either a college or a normal school; forty-seven of them held learned degrees; all of them had been engaged professionally in teaching English, some for years. They came from Michigan, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Toronto, Leland Stanford, Chicago and Northwestern Universities; from Oberlin, De Pauw, Goucher, Beloit and Drake Colleges; from a dozen lesser seminaries of the higher learning. They represented, not the lowest level of teachers of English in the Republic, but the highest level. And yet it was their verdict by a solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good capitalizers!

I present Dr. Pendleton’s laborious work as overwhelming proof of a thesis that I have maintained for years, perhaps sometimes with undue heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the estate of a childish necromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful to think that the young American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing? Here and there, true enough, a competent teacher of English is encountered. I could name at least twenty in the whole country. But it does not appear that Dr. Pendleton, among his eighty, found even one. There is not the lightest glimmer of intelligence in all the appalling tables of statistics and black, zig-zag graphs that he has so painfully amassed. Nor any apparent capacity for learning. The sound thing, the sane thing and the humane thing to do with his pathetic herd of A. B.’s would be to take them out in the alley and knock them in the head.

5
The Heroic Age

JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON, by Claude G. Bowers. Boston: The Houghton Mifflin Company. JEFFERSON AND MONTICELLO, by Paul Wilstach. Garden City, L. I.: Doubleday, Page & Company. CORRESPONDENCE OF JOHN ADAMS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1812-1826, selected by Paul Wilstach. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. [The American Mercury, March, 1926.]

Jefferson, in one of his last letters to Adams, dated March 25, 1826, spoke of the time when both came into fame as the heroic age. The phrase was certainly not mere rhetoric. The two men differed enormously, both in their personalities and in their ideas—perhaps quite as much as Jefferson differed from Hamilton or Adams from his cousin Sam—but in one thing at least they were exactly alike: they were men of complete integrity. As Frederick the Great said of the Prussian Junker, one could not buy them, and they would not lie. The fact, at times, made them bitter enemies, and the virtues of the one were cancelled by the virtues of the other, to the damage of their common country. But when they stood together, they were irresistible, for complete integrity, when it does not spend itself against itself, is always irresistible—one of the few facts, to me known, that is creditable to the human race. The masses of men, like children, are easily deceived, but in the long run, like children again, they show a tendency to yield to character. Bit by bit it conquers them. They see in it all the high values that they are incapable of reaching themselves. They see the courage that they lack, and the honesty that they lack, and the resolution that they lack. All these things were in both Adams and Jefferson. They fell, in their day, into follies, but I don’t think that anyone believes they were ever pushed into them. Adams, no doubt, could be bamboozled, but neither he nor Jefferson could be scared.

I fear that the gallant iconoclasts who revise our history-books sometimes forget all this. Engaged upon the destruction of legends, all of them maudlin and many of them downright insane, they also, at times, do damage to facts. One of these facts, it seems to me, ought not to be forgotten, to wit, that it took a great deal of courage, in the Summer of 1776, to sign Jefferson’s celebrated exercise in colonial Johnsonese. There were ropes dangling in the air, and they were uncomfortably near. There were wives and children to be considered, and very agreeable estates. However dubious their primary motives, the men who signed took a long chance, quietly, simply, and with their faces to the front. How many of their successors in our own time have ever followed their example? I find it hard to think of one. The politician of to-day lacks their courage altogether; he lacks their incorruptible integrity. He is a complete coward. The whip of the Anti-Saloon League is enough to make him leap and tremble; the shadow of the rope would paralyze him with terror. He is for sale to anyone who has anything valuable to offer him, and the day after he has sold out to A he is ready to sell out to A’s enemy, B. His honor is that of a street-walker.

So far we have progressed along the highroad of democracy. The gentleman survives in our politics only as an anachronism; his day is done. Mr. Bowers, in “Hamilton and Jefferson,” traces the beginning of the decline; Mr. Wilstach, in the volume of Adams-Jefferson letters, shows it in full tide. Both authors are partial to Jefferson, and present charming portraits of him, especially Mr. Wilstach, in his other book, “Jefferson at Monticello.” It seems to me that they often confuse the man and his ideas, especially Mr. Bowers. Jefferson was unquestionably one of our giants. There was more in his head than there has been in the heads of all the Presidents in office since he went out. He was a man of immense intellectual curiosity, profound originality, and great daring. His integrity was of Doric massiveness. But was he always right? I don’t think many reflective Americans of to-day would argue that he was. Confronting enemies of great resourcefulness and resolute determination, he was forced, bit by bit, into giving his democratic doctrine a sweep and scope that took it far beyond the solid facts. It became a religious dogma rather than a political theory. Once he was gone, it fell into the hands of vastly inferior men, and soon it had reached its reductio ad absurdum. Jefferson died in 1826. By 1829, when Jackson came in, it was a nuisance; by 1837, when he went out, it was a joke.

Jefferson’s enthusiasm blinded him to the fact that the liberty to which he had consecrated the high days of his early manhood was a two-headed boon. There was, first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own government, levy their own taxes, and make their own laws—in brief, freedom from the despotism of the King. There was, second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased—in brief, freedom from the despotism of the majority. Hamilton was as much in favor of the first kind of liberty as Jefferson: he made, in fact, even greater sacrifices for it. But he saw that it was worth nothing without the second kind—that it might easily become worth less than nothing, for the King, whatever his oppressions en gros, at least gave some protection to the isolated subject. Monarchy might be the protector of liberty as well as the foe of liberty. It had been so, in fact, in the Prussia of Frederick. And democracy might be far more the foe than the protector. It was obviously so in the France of the Reign of Terror. Hamilton, a hard-headed man, given to figures rather than to theories, saw all this; Jefferson, a doctrinaire, even in his best moments, saw only half of it. That failure to see together was at the bottom of their difference—and their difference came very near wrecking the United States. Burr’s bullet probably prevented a colossal disaster. But it also opened the way for troubles in the years to come. We are in the midst of them yet, and we are by no means near the end of them.

The shadow of Jeffersonism, indeed, is still over us. We are still bound idiotically by the battle-cries of a struggle that was over more than a century ago. We have got the half of liberty, but the other half is yet to be wrested from the implacable fates, and there seems little likelihood that it will be wrested soon. All the fears of Hamilton have come to realization—and some of the fears of Jefferson to fill the measure. Minorities among us have no rights that the majority is bound to respect; they are dragooned and oppressed in a way that would make an oriental despot blush. Yet behind the majority, often defectively concealed, there is always a sinister minority, eager only for its own advantage and willing to adopt any device, however outrageous, to get what it wants. We have a puppet in the White House, pulled by wires, but with dangerous weapons in its hands. Law Enforcement becomes the new state religion. A law is something that A wants and can hornswoggle B, C, D, E and F into giving him—by bribery, by lying, by bluff and bluster, by making faces. G and H are therefore bound to yield it respect—nay, to worship it. It is something sacred. To question it is to sin against the Holy Ghost.

I wonder what Jefferson would think if he could come out of his tomb and examine the Republic that he helped to fashion. He was a man of towering enthusiasms, but he was also sharply intelligent: he knew an accomplished fact when he saw one. My guess is that, at the first Jefferson Day dinner following his emergence, he would make a startling and scandalous speech.