On H.L. Mencken

Extra Review
December 12, 1926

When I had finished H.L. Mencken's new book, Notes on Democracy, I looked out of the window with a sort of halfway vague expectation that I would find tottering buildings, rows of groveling sinners, and other Judgment Day effects. But nothing had happened. All the inhabitants of the Mencken universe - the Boobs, the Morons, and the Yokels - were calmly and even gaily going about their business, totally unaware of large volcanic disturbances in the region of New York. Streetcars were running. A new building was going up across the street. The bricklayers' cars were parked at the curb. A billboard announced that Chesterfields satisfy. The clouds were ambling northward in a gentle southern sky. All was as usual. There were no signs of crumbling civilization, or even of a penitent civilization.

After all, I thought, until Mr. Mencken convinces the Morons that they are Morons and should hence be submissiver, how is he going to do the world much good? And since the Morons naturally haven't gumption enough to read his books, much less understand them, how is the convincing to be accomplished? Perhaps, however, he has no persuasive intentions. Let me try to understand Mr. Mencken, not to worship him or abuse him. After just consideration, I arrive at two possible views of his activity, as illustrated especially in his recent book. In one view he appears as a social philosopher or critic indulging in a rather destructive analysis, but, unlike the giddy reformers, proposing no panaceas; and in this view he must be taken seriously. The other view puts him up as a gargantuan humorist with an immense capacity for invective and ridicule, and this view requires him to be enjoyed for his own sake, like any other writer who knows the pyrotechnic possibilities of language.

Taking first the serious view, I must offer the opinion that in Notes on Democracy Mr. Mencken deals with the weightiest subject he has yet approached. And, although the book is to a certain extent a restatement of his now familiar ideas, it is, on the whole, new material. He divides his Notes into three principal sections: "Democratic Man," "The Democratic State," "Democracy and Liberty." There is also a "Coda," in which, surveying the general destruction, he disclaims any knowledge of the future and declares that he enjoys democracy immensely because "it is incomparably idiotic, and henc incomparably amusing." The treatment of these various topics is not very systematic. Each Note is of course a denunciation; but each denunciation is a separate volcano, erupting lava like its neighbors, but disposed and erected by whim rather than geometry or logic. There is some overlapping and likewise some contradiction, as is usual in Mr. Mencken's writings. But there is no carefully symmetrical arrangement, no neatly marching parade of thesis - data - proof - conclusion.

Mr. Mencken sets up in his first section the idea that democratic man, considered in the mass, is a congenital moron incapable of an intelligent act. He admits that there are a few superior beings, but most minds are capable only "of a sort of insensate sweating, like a kidney." This view of the mob he bolsters up with the intelligence tests, which he sees as outlining intellectual levels beyond which no advance can be made. Therefore education offers no hope, because the Moron mob, which has a low "I.W.," cannot be educated. Thus he knocks over the doundation of democratic theory which attributes some sort of mysterious (and Mencken would say, bogus) wisdom to the masses and exalts the Will of the People. The Will of the People, in his opinion, signifies simply the triumph of inferiority. And, since the mob is animated only by the savage motives of fear and envy, a government based on intelligence becomes an impossibility, for the masses are so stupid that they will oppose, and always have opposed, even sensible efforts to better their lumpish and besotted condition.


Furthermore, the democratic state, in Mr. Mencken's survey, becomes a travesty, simply because it is so thoroughly and nauseously democratic. The will of the people, if exerted, can accomplish any fool thing. The democratic mob "could extend the term of the president too life, or they could reduce it to one year, or even to one day. They could provide that he must shave his head, or that he must sleep in his underclothes." Politics, instead of a science, becomes a "combat between jackals and jackasses." Only demagogues can rule. Gentlemen stay out of politics. Instead we have a Harding, whole "notion of a good time was to refresh himself in the manner of a small-town Elk," or a Coolidge, of whom Mr. Mencken says: "There is no evidence that he is acquainted with a single intelligent man." The typical senator is "simply a party hack...His backbone has a sweet resiliency...it is quite impossible to forecast his action, even on a matter of the highest principle, without knowing what reards are offered by the rival sides." Bribery and corruption are the order of the day. Public servants become cowards.


And then the fair principle of liberty, what of that? Democratic man, says Mr. Mencken, doesn't want it. He wants only safety and peace: "The peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary." He wants laws, and especially laws that protect him against himself. Democracy "kills the thing it loves." It applauds mediocrity and pulls down superiority. Therefore puritanism is a natural accompaniment of democracy. For the puritan wants (1) "to punish the other fellow for having a better time"; (2) "to bring the other fellow down to his own unhappy level." It is typical of democracy that "Every district attorney goes to his knees every night to ask God to deliver a Thaw or a Fatty Arbuckle into his hands" - all because the mob delights in seeing rich persons browbeaten.


Thus Mencken! I have quoted freely but not as freely as I would like to, for every page is thickly sown with verbal torpedoes, exciting for their explosive vehemenc, however questionable their direction and effect. But ho shall Mr. Mencken's criticism of democracy be criticized? Mr. Mencken, who uses the South as the butt of his jokes and represents it as totally intolerant, would perhaps think that I would be in danger of assassination if I ventured to express any agreement with his ideas. But I do so venture, with a feeling of complete safety. The truth is that most of his excoriation of democracy is old stuff - at least as old as Thomas Carlyle, who also asserted that democracy sabotaged the superior man. Even the most ardent democrats must admit - and can admit with a tolerant smile - the bulk of Mr. Mencken's charges as to democracy's shortcomings. Furthermore, the influence Mr. Mencken wields and the whole secret of his method lie in the fact that he turbulently overstates what everybody knows. Nowhere, except in political editorials and the platitudes of orators, both of which are pretty generally received with skepticism, will you find the view that our present democracy is the absolute "summum bonum." Mr. Mencken's criticisms of democracy are paralledled by the jokes of Will Rogers, the bitingly satirical comic strips, and vaudeville patter, all of which we absorb with enormous gusto. Andy Gump's political campaign went over with a bang; but it was in its implication as destructively critical as Notes on Democracy. Goldberg's boobs are as savagely treated as Mencken's boobs. But this is true, also, that Mr. Mencken exceeds other critics in his ferocity and unscrupulousness. His exaggerations are not simply exaggerations; they are often studied distortions at plain variance with the truth; in fact, Mr. Mencken, who is as poetic as a tale-bearing child, cannot always be trusted to give the correct facts. In spite of his really powerful intellectual equiopment, he often draws on himself the just charge of malice because he is either too lazy or too prejudiced to separate truth from falsehood.

His criticism of democracy is, of course, full of holes and non sequiturs. We have not merely to make the charge that Mr. Mencken views democracy everywhere at its worst. His major premise, based on modern biology, behavioristic psychology, and the like, serves his purpose, but is shaky in its claim that inferior men can never become superior men. Mr. Mencken admits that some men are supeirior; he does not admit that the class can be enlarged; the best democratic theory might say that it could be. Furthermore, though Mr. Mencken makes much of the gullibility of the mob, he refuses to admit that superior men can do the gulling; and though he is raucously tolerant of bilogical evolution, he is quite intolerant of the idea of political evolution. In fact, his opinions dirive him, as he is frank enough to admit, directly toward anarchy; and in essence, we are forced to conclude that Mr. Mencken is sorry he was born, and that life offers him no pleasure except an occasional tickling, a sensual excitement, or sardonic laughter at the ridiculousness of the world. Even so, though Mr. Mencken may be sorry he was born, it is fortunate that he was born in the United States, which, with England, is the only country democratic enough to permit a confirmed and lowly misanthrope to rise to his present position of honor, wealth, and the power, or to tolerate his persistent rowdyism after he has arrived.

So, Mencken, the destroyer, necessary as he may be in his role as an occasional stimulant or a gadfly, is not to be trusted as a purveyor of ideas. Mencken as humorist is another thing. Others may imitate, but none can approach the vivacity and brilliance of his style: the sentences that crack like a hip, the phrases that fall and rebound like Thor's hammer, the surly laughter that revels in well-seasoned colloquialisms, ridiculous incongruities, sudden and vulgar paradoxes. Read Mr. Mencken for his ideas, and you will only hug the viper of melancholy to your bosom. Read him as you would read Mark Twain, you will not only escape the virus, but you will have a rare, indeed a unique, entertainment. You will have also the democratic (according to Menckent) pleasure of seeing the mighty ones biffed soundly; and you will only spoil the joke if you get angry because you are biffed yourself.

-Donald Davidson

from The Spyglass, Views and Reviews 1926-1930. Ed. by John Tyree Fain. Vanderbilt University Press. Nashville 1963. 126-31