I have been reading H. L. Mencken’s Notes on Democracy, for the primary reason that it is now out of copyright and thus appeared through a link from Lapham’s Quarterly on my computer, along with other works of 1926. I have commented on ol’ Henry before, an almost unpigeonhole-able character who broadcast his humor-laced misanthropy far and wide and in perhaps the most brilliant razor-edged English prose of the 20th century. He was congenitally of no political party or social improvement organization; he skewered 99% of America with courage and abandon and bile; he was atheist; and he was as obstreperously anti-democracy as any Louis XVI facing the National Razor. He was also, as I have noted elsewhere, a vicious torturer of Wilson, and in later works FDR and Truman for their alleged demagoguery and what he appears to consider their unwarranted war-mongering and unjustified participation in two wars against the nation of his origin. Despite such vilification, and to his discredit, I wrote then, he never offers even a sotto voce critique of the genocidal uber demagogue Hitler. He is a Germanophile, dangerously close to a Nazi in sentiment, but temperamentally incapable of joining the Party.
But could he write! It is not just his immense vocabulary, sending the intrepid reader to the dictionary on almost every page, but the blistering portraits of the braying, self-important, mentally deficient, cowardly “homo vulgaris” whom he depicts in language sardonic, ironic, and humorous. To a modern reader he bears—to use a metaphor he himself used with others—most of the stigmata of racism, sexism, classism, elitism, and any other ism that contemporaries, and especially liberals, would apply to all those with anti-egalitarian dispositions. There is a chapter here on liberty and democracy, but not a whiff of comment about equality—except to excoriate it as the reductio ad nauseum of democracy, advocated by those incapable of honor, character, courage, or good sense. But he entertains, even occasionally when he offends, and there are intimations of truth if one can penetrate the dense foliage of his vituperation. So let the man speak:
“The Puritan is surely no ascetic. Even in the days of the New England theocracy it was impossible to restrain his libidinousness: his eyes rolled sideways at buxom wenches quite as often as they rolled upward to God. But he is incapable of sexual experience upon what may be called a civilized plane; it is impossible for him to manage the thing as a romantic adventure; in his hands it reduces itself to the terms of the barnyard. Hence the Mann Act. So with dalliance with the grape. He can have experience of it only as a furtive transaction behind the door, with a dreadful headache to follow. Hence prohibition. So, again, with the joys that come out of the fine arts. Looking at a picture, he sees only the model’s pudenda. Reading a book, he misses the ordeals and exaltations of the spirit, and remembers only the natural functions. Hence comstockery” (p. 156). Do Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Franklin Graham come to a contemporary’s mind?
“Yet both [Senators], 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” (p. 128). How can we not immediately think of McConnell, Graham, and Kevin McCarthy, who ignominiously “flopped” from condemning Trump after January 6 to embracing Trumpism as the heat of that day slightly cooled? Of course one must be careful in assuming there was any “private rectitude” among those three to begin with.
“But now and then there appears one [a loser in an election] whose wounds are too painful for such devices, or for whom no suitable [post defeat] office can be found. This majestic victim not infrequently seeks surcease by a sort of running amok. That is to say, he turns what remains of his influence with the mob into a weapon against the nation as a whole and becomes a chronic maker of trouble” (p. 139). Who could possibly read those lines and not consider it the very definition of Donald Trump, whom Mencken would have considered both the epitome of homo vulgaris and simultaneously the pinnacle of what he considered a debased political system, democracy, would produce?
“The truth is that the common man’s love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary. . . . He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd” (p. 157). Along with a proclivity for violence, doesn’t that pretty well capture the January 6th insurrectionists?
I will forever wince at many of his judgments, but I will continue to smile at his decapitative humor and wicked misanthropy. The alleged last words of this good atheist were “Bring on the angels!”
John Rachal's Blog
Notes on Mencken
January 21, 2022 at 7:53 pm (Literary Criticism, Political Commentary)
I have been reading H. L. Mencken’s Notes on Democracy, for the primary reason that it is now out of copyright and thus appeared through a link from Lapham’s Quarterly on my computer, along with other works of 1926. I have commented on ol’ Henry before, an almost unpigeonhole-able character who broadcast his humor-laced misanthropy far and wide and in perhaps the most brilliant razor-edged English prose of the 20th century. He was congenitally of no political party or social improvement organization; he skewered 99% of America with courage and abandon and bile; he was atheist; and he was as obstreperously anti-democracy as any Louis XVI facing the National Razor. He was also, as I have noted elsewhere, a vicious torturer of Wilson, and in later works FDR and Truman for their alleged demagoguery and what he appears to consider their unwarranted war-mongering and unjustified participation in two wars against the nation of his origin. Despite such vilification, and to his discredit, I wrote then, he never offers even a sotto voce critique of the genocidal uber demagogue Hitler. He is a Germanophile, dangerously close to a Nazi in sentiment, but temperamentally incapable of joining the Party.
But could he write! It is not just his immense vocabulary, sending the intrepid reader to the dictionary on almost every page, but the blistering portraits of the braying, self-important, mentally deficient, cowardly “homo vulgaris” whom he depicts in language sardonic, ironic, and humorous. To a modern reader he bears—to use a metaphor he himself used with others—most of the stigmata of racism, sexism, classism, elitism, and any other ism that contemporaries, and especially liberals, would apply to all those with anti-egalitarian dispositions. There is a chapter here on liberty and democracy, but not a whiff of comment about equality—except to excoriate it as the reductio ad nauseum of democracy, advocated by those incapable of honor, character, courage, or good sense. But he entertains, even occasionally when he offends, and there are intimations of truth if one can penetrate the dense foliage of his vituperation. So let the man speak:
“The Puritan is surely no ascetic. Even in the days of the New England theocracy it was impossible to restrain his libidinousness: his eyes rolled sideways at buxom wenches quite as often as they rolled upward to God. But he is incapable of sexual experience upon what may be called a civilized plane; it is impossible for him to manage the thing as a romantic adventure; in his hands it reduces itself to the terms of the barnyard. Hence the Mann Act. So with dalliance with the grape. He can have experience of it only as a furtive transaction behind the door, with a dreadful headache to follow. Hence prohibition. So, again, with the joys that come out of the fine arts. Looking at a picture, he sees only the model’s pudenda. Reading a book, he misses the ordeals and exaltations of the spirit, and remembers only the natural functions. Hence comstockery” (p. 156). Do Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Franklin Graham come to a contemporary’s mind?
“Yet both [Senators], 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” (p. 128). How can we not immediately think of McConnell, Graham, and Kevin McCarthy, who ignominiously “flopped” from condemning Trump after January 6 to embracing Trumpism as the heat of that day slightly cooled? Of course one must be careful in assuming there was any “private rectitude” among those three to begin with.
“But now and then there appears one [a loser in an election] whose wounds are too painful for such devices, or for whom no suitable [post defeat] office can be found. This majestic victim not infrequently seeks surcease by a sort of running amok. That is to say, he turns what remains of his influence with the mob into a weapon against the nation as a whole and becomes a chronic maker of trouble” (p. 139). Who could possibly read those lines and not consider it the very definition of Donald Trump, whom Mencken would have considered both the epitome of homo vulgaris and simultaneously the pinnacle of what he considered a debased political system, democracy, would produce?
“The truth is that the common man’s love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary. . . . He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd” (p. 157). Along with a proclivity for violence, doesn’t that pretty well capture the January 6th insurrectionists?
I will forever wince at many of his judgments, but I will continue to smile at his decapitative humor and wicked misanthropy. The alleged last words of this good atheist were “Bring on the angels!”
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