Mr. Mencken on Liberty; G. H. Douglas

Mencken began his national ca reer as a literary critic, and his 709 710 THE FREEMAN December contributions to The Sma,rt Set, of which he was co-editor with George Jean Nathan between 1914 and 1923, fail to reveal more than the general drift of his political ideas. But during this same period Mencken came to see that his true vocation was as asocial and poli tical critic, and in 1924 he estab lished The American Mercury with that vocation in the forefront of his mind. Mencken had come to believe that the clue to the social ills in American life was to be found in the political domain, and he became convinced that Ameri cans had turned their backs on their country's. founding princi ples and abandoned the early American love of liberty. A Republic America, Mencken often pointed out, was established as a Repub lic, not a Democracy. The purpose of the American Revolution, as opposed to the French Revolution of a few years later, was to estab lish civil liberty, not rule by the masses. The founding fathers, the drafters of the Constitution, were in no wise convinced that the peo ple in the aggregate were suited to rule, and they built into our system of .government what they hoped were safeguards against the tyranny of the majority. The tyranny of the majority, after all, could be just as bad as any other kind of tyranny. In any case, it was an important part of Menck en's thinking that we must not confuse the theory and nature of democracy with the theory and na ture of liberty - a very common mental abberation in our history.

Democracy is a theory about sov ereignty, that is, a theory about who ought to rule. Its first princi ple is that all men are equal. Its second principle is that the power to rule belongs to a majority of the equal and undifferentiated hu man units. Democracy thus is a theory which asserts that the demos ought to rule. Therefore it is contrasted with autocracy, theocracy, aristocracy and other theories of who ought to rule. The first principle of liberty, on the other hand, is that there is no one who, of right, ought to rule. The theory of liberty is ~ot a theory of sovereignty at all. The early Americans were anxious to resist sovereignty, to resist au thority, and they were no more anxious to submit to the rule of their neighbors than they were to the rule of the English king and his appointed officials. In Mencken's thinking, America got off to a very strong start among the nations of the world because its revolution was unlike any of the other revolutions known to the modern world. Its main in tention was to secure independ1973 MR. MENCKEN ON LIBERTY 711 ence and self-reliance. None of the other so-called revolutions had that as their end. Most of the others, when subjected to careful scrutiny, are seen to be cast in the mold of the French Revolution.

They are what· Mencken calls re volts of the mob. And revolts of the mob are not struggles for lib erty but struggles for ham and cabbage. When the mob revolts it is simply because it wants to grab more of something for itself. "When it wins, its first act is to destroy every form of freedom that is not wholly directed to that end. And its second is to butcher all professional libertarians. If Thomas Jefferson had been living in Paris in 1793 he would have made an even narrower escape from the guillotine than Thomas Paine made."! A Unique Revolution The American revolution was not a revolution of the mob, said Mencken, and the philosophical ideals of liberty that stood behind it bear little relationship to the political ideals which were to de velop in America in the next two centuries. It is· true that for long after the .revolution the people continued to mouth phrases which seem to suggest a continuing· be.;.

lief in liberty. But the present-day American esteems what Mencken calls "false forms of liberty, for example, the right to choose be tween two mountebanks." In short, he has erroneously come to believe that liberty is somehow bound up with the magic of the franchise, with the right of the public to vote and choose among candidates in a popularity contest. The American democrat of more recent vintage is fretfully anxious to go about the act of choosing his statesman, to identify a hero from amongst the crowd, and then turn the running of the government over to him. The early republicans wanted government of. the people, which means not what it means today, freedom to pull a lever, but rather a form of government where people bear the responsi bility of government. The trouble is that the respon sibility of government is harsh and demanding, and the people want to be relieved of it. Liberty requires two qualities which the masses simply don't possess: it requires courage, that is, the will ingness to fight for one's rights, and it requires endurance. The man who loves liberty must be able to bear it. Unfortunately, the pursuit of liberty is difficult, stren uous, and mostly the people have no stomach for it.

Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enter prise, it means the capacity for doing 712 THE FREEMAN December without. The free man is one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him. All around him are enemies, and where he stands there is no friend. He can hope for little help from men of his own kind, for they have battles of their own to fight. He has made him self a sort of God in his little world, and he must face the responsibilities of a god, and the dreadful loneli ness. 2 Liberty. Requires Effort Liberty, as Nietzsche used to re mark, is too cold to be borne. It is hard, it requires effort - effort that the average man wants to shun. In the modern life there are few willing to endure the burdens of liberty. These burdens "make him uncomfortable, they alarm him; they fill him with a great loneliness. There is no high ad venturousness in him, but only fear. He not only doesn't long for liberty; he is quite unable to stand it. What he longs for is some thing wholly different, to wit, se curity. He needs protection. He is afraid of getting hurt."3 What we ·look for nowadays' from the government is comfort, security - things ·which under a system of liberty are not given but won. Accordingly, from the days of the early republic, when the government was considered at best to be a necessary evil, we have expanded the role of government in our life to grotesque proportions, and we tend to look on it as the great provider, not only in the ma terial sense, but in most spiritual ways as well-we look to the gov ernment to provide moral guid ance, we look to it as an agency of reform, we look to it for firm reso lution of all the problems and sor rows of the world. It was always something of a mystery and a puz zle to Mencken to discover how Americans, who, from the earliest times, and even throughout most of the nineteenth century, were suspicious of the authority of gov ernment, came to swallow with great docility the role of a big and powerful central government of proportions that would have seemed nightmarish, and even in sane, to a Washington or a Jef ferson.

Part of the answer to this mys tery is that a good many notions about government that persist are part of the heritage of thousands of years of absolutism, going back to ancient times where political leaders managed to convince the hordes that the state was an ex tension of the Godhead. Statecraft ever since has attempted to foist on the people a concept from those "black days of absolutism" that should have been tossed overboard with the notion of the divine right of kings, a concept, to wit, 1973 MR. MENCKEN ON LIBERTY 713 that government is something that is superior to and quite distinct from all other human institutions - that is, in its essence not a mere organi zation of ordinary men, like the Ku Klux Klan, the United States Steel Corporation or Columbia University, but a transcendental organism com posed of aloof and impersonal pow ers, devoid wholly of self-interest and not to be measured by merely human standards. . . . This concept, I need not argue, is full of error. The gov ernment at Washington is no more im personal than the cloak and suit business is impersonal. It is oper ated by precisely the same sort of men, and to almost the same ends.

When we say that it has decided to do this or that, that it proposes or aspires to do this or that - usually to the great cost and inconvenience of nine-tenths of us - we simply say that a definite man or group of men has decided to do it, or proposes or aspires to do it; and when we ex amine this group of men realistically we almost invariably find that it is composed of individuals who are not only not superior to the general, but plainly and depressingly inferior, both in common sense and common decency - that the act of government we are called upon to ratify and sub mit to is, in its essence, no more than an act of self-interest by men who, if no mythical authority stood be hind them, would have a hard time of ?.t surviving in the struggle for existence. 4 Needless to say, the founding fathers were under no illusions that governments were something other than governments of falli ble and occasionally corrupt hu ma~ beings, and they did their best to save the country from the unseemly proliferation of govern mental power. But still it is not easy to understand how it was that the very people who only two cen turies ago were determined to fight for liberty grew to one of the most over governed and over regulated peoples in the history of the world. (Mencken found Amer icans to be the most regimented people in the world except the Chinese.) In way of historical background, Mencken pointed out that not only in the early days, but throughout nearly all of the nine teenth century, most Americans resisted this development, and were aware, as twentieth century man is not, that government is invariably a government of men men looking for something.

In fact, as the nineteenth cen tury progressed, the American politician had not yet found the way to implant the delusion that the government was other than a concatenation of human wants and an exploitation of some individuals by others. Mencken noted that for fifty years after the inauguration of the spoils system under Jack son (the spoils system, ironically, was supposed to be itself a re form) the people generally held 714 THE FREEMAN December office seekers and office holders in very low esteem. "The job holder, once theoretically a freeman dis charging a lofty and necessary duty, was seen clearly to be no more than a rat devouring the communal corn." In the late nine teenth century the widely held view of the government and of politicians was not very far re moved from those gloomy prophe sies of Henry Adams which pre dicted that the United States would boil away in corruption.

When an English speaker ad dressed the students at a fashion able women's college during the 1870s and suggested that all of the ladies gathered there must be from the best of homes - the off spring of congressmen, and such like - h~ was greeted with peals of laughter. The public had few illusions about congressmen in the 1870s, and even fewer about job holders. Political Corruption and Civil Service Reform Naturally, such a situation couldn't be long tolerated, and the way out of this particular kind of governmental disrepute was through· Civil Service Reform. The civil servant was whitewaShed in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the public's distrust of him subsided. The only diffi cultywas that while Civil Service Reform was able to placate the public it was a sorry downfall for the politician. The job holder be came a mere slave, a bookkeeper. "His pay and emoluments were cut down and his labors were in creased. Once the proudest and most envied citizen of the Repub lic, free to oppress all other citi zens to the limit of their endur ance, he became at one stroke a serf groaning in a pen, with a pistol pointed at his head."5 Of course this dismal situation couldn't be endured for long either, "else politics would have tumbled into chaos and govern ment would have lost its basic character; nay, its very life." The public servant could no more re main a plodding bookkeeper or clerk than he could a leech or pec ulator. If politicians are not be lieved in, if the work has no stat ure or dignity, then it obviously can't continue to exist; no one will be drawn to governmental work.

The light and deliverance came in the twentieth century. The office holder no longer needed to be either an absconder or a drone, he could become, under newly fair and promising skies, a reformer, a doer of good, an expert in right thinking. Politics has survived in marvelous good health in our cen tury because it has managed to "suck reform into the govern mental orbit." The main business 1973 MR. MENCKEN ON LIBERTY 715 of the government is now reform, good works, uplift. And, unfortu nately, such activities are almost invincible, their Achilles' heel nearly impossible of detection. Now, the civil servant is not only secure in .a well-paid government job, but he offers himself to the world as "a prophet of the new enlightenment, a priest at a glit tering and immense shrine." How can anyone in good conscience take out after him as one could after the old-time office holder? In the days of the spoils system one could say of the office holder that although he had done his share in electing the ticket, he was obvi 0usly a loafer and deserved no place at the public trough.

But what answer is to be made to his heir and assign, the evangelist of Service, the prophet of Vision? He doesn't start off with a bald demand for a job; he starts off with a Mes sage. He has discovered the long sought cure for all the sorrows of the world; he has the infallible scheme for putting down injustice, misery, ignorance, suffering, sin; his appeal is not to the rules of a sinister and discreditable game, but to the burst ing heart of humanity, the noblest and loftiest sentiments of man. His job is never in the foreground; it is concealed in his Vision. To get at the former one must dispose of the lat ter. Well, who is to do it? What true born American will volunteer for the cynical office? Half are too idiotic and the rest are too cowardly. It takes courage to flaunt and make a mock of Vision - and where is· cour age?6 Something to Sell The bureaucrat twentieth cen tury style thus has something im portant and valuable to sell. He is either an expert or a man with a vision - more likely both.

He is the fellow who enforces the Volstead Act, the Mann Act, all the endless laws for putting down sin. He is the bright evangelist who tours the country teaching mothers how to have babies, spreading the latest in ventions in pedagogy, road-making, the export trade, hog-raising and vegetable-canning, waging an eternal war upon illiteracy, hookworm, the white slave trade, patent medicines, the foot and mouth disease, cholera infantum, adultery, rum. He is, quite often as not, female; he is a lady Ph.D., cocksure, bellicose, very well paid.7 The government thus becomes little more than a perpetuator of safe, convenient, and stereotyped ideas. The lady Ph.D. who dis penses information on infant care from some government office dis penses her wisdom not only with a sense of mission but from a posi tion of almost unbelievable au thority - the kind of authority once delegated only to archbishops.

The public naturally believes that 716 THE FREEMAN December the lady Ph.D. reformer is not only knowledgeable in the ex treme, but, because she is working for the government, disin.terested as well. Government becomes in our time a mother lode of techno logical expertise and assumes oracular authority on the base of it - the very kind of oracular au thority liberty-loving people would insist upon doing without. Needless to say, Mencken re jects both of these assumptions about modern civil servants - that they are knowledgeable and that they are disinterested. Both are mistaken for the same reason. Government bureaucracies are nothing other than individual power and pressure groups, like similar power and pressure groups in the private sector of society, similarly seeking to push them selves above the others in impor tance and authority. If you have a Bureau of Narcotics, let us say, the people who run it are going to be subject to a struggle for power among competing agencies and competing viewpoints, and will tend to develop a missionary zeal, a pathological belief in the im portance of "narcotics work."

They become intoxicated, so to speak, with the value of this nar cotics work, and can in no way de tach themselves from their mis sionary zeal, and can thus exer cise no independent judgment on their own activities, which is the same as saying that they are cer tain not to act intelligently on all matters of their own concern. To act intelligently one must be able to criticize one's own doings. Thus, when they pull for more and more power and recognition, we are foolish if we allow ourselves to be deluded into seeing it all as a search for truth and virtue; it is no more a search for truth and. virtue than we could expect from the advertising department of a used car dealership. Warring Factions In short, what we get from a government bureaucracy is what we get from any other special-in terest group - at worst, falsehood and deceit, at best, platitudes and half-truths. Actually, because of the multitude of reform or uplift factions in government in its twentieth century democratic form, what we get may actually be worse - it approaches a kind of mental unbalance or insanity since the various power groups cannot be easily reconciled; they tend to struggle and war against one an other for hegemony. Let us con sider an example from our own time rather than Mencken's. Since the appearance in the 1960s and 1970s of the ecology reform move ment it is only natural that cer tain factions of the government 1973 MR. MENCKEN ON LIBERTY 717 should take up the crusade to clean up the .environment. How ever, cleaning up the environment is expensive and is bound to come into conflict with other branches of the government committed to stemming the tide of inflation.

What happens when two such factions meet in a collision course, as they are assuredly bound to do? How is it possible, for example, to reconcile the desire to conserve petroleum when the anti-pollution devices on automobiles bring about shocking increases in the con sumption of gasoline? Of course these various demands result in conflict, a conflict which will invari ably be carried on not in intelli gent discourse but in a shouting or clamoring contest of a kind that is inevitable in a democracy, where the weaponry of the power groups is the weaponry of slogans, half-truths, simplistic formulas the winner being the side which for the moment can successfully enflame the passions of the multi tudes and cater to their immediate desires. Even if it were theoretically possible to keep all the power cen ters of a democracy in check it be comes increasingly difficult to do so practically because in our time bureaucracy, agencies of govern ment, have so proliferated that their very enormity prevents them from being held in check. There is no evidence in the twentieth cen tury that any sector of the gov ernment has decreased in size, or, at least, no evidence that any bu reau, department or office has will ingly and without a struggle given up its authority and prerogatives.

Every year some new area of re form can be expected to arise, but none of the" old ones die. We now have agencies to police the safety in automobile manufacture, none of which existed in 1925 and were not percei ved to be necessary. Similarly, we continue to have an unwieldy Agricultural Extension Service with an army of county agents prepared to advise the struggling farmer how to operate his tiny family farm at a profit at a time when the only farmers left are businessmen farmers who op erate large farm corporations for big profits and know more about farm business and operation than the government agent himself. Why, then, can't we get the county agricultural agent to vanish into the mist of history ? Well, obvi 0usly' because he has tenure, a strong grip on his position, he is secure in it and has no intention of giving it up without a struggle. So it is with every branch of government. Far from being im personal and toplofty as the pub lic believes, every office holder has a very personal and private reason for being. Thus we are completely 718 THE FREEMAN December deluded when we believe that pub lic servants are motivated by the common weal or the common good.

"These men, ·in point of fact, are seldom if ever moved by anything rationally describable as public spirit; there is actually no more public spirit among them than among so many burglars or street walkers. Their purpose, first, last, and all· the time, is to promote their private advantage, and to that end, and that end alone, they exercise all the vast powers that are in their hands."8 (Always keep in mind that Mencken is not only talking about pecuniary in terest; vested interests in ideas ca.nbe no less corrupting.) Mencken's view of life under a democracy is thus a rather bleak and pessimistic one. He thinks that democratic man, in forsaking the ideals and duties of civil lib erty, has committed himself to a kind of authoritarianism that is not really very different from that offered by the more outwardly au thoritarian or totalitarian regimes of the world. He was also pessi mistic in that he believed the present evangelical, Puritanical, reform-laden, expert-oriented form of government cannot be easily re versed, and he harbored no hope that it is possible to return to early American republicanism. But at times he was inclined to believe that democracy is a self-limiting disease, and that it is just possible that the disease may one day remit.

Mencken himself was a jovial and good-hearted man and he did point out that it is possible to of fer one simple consolation to those who live in a democracy. Demo cratic government is a good form of national entertainment. The government pitches from one out landish scandal or frenzy to an other, and most of these can be the source of some amusement to the intelligent man. "Politics un der a democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The states man becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting 'Fe, Fi, Fo. Fum.'''9 It all rnakes a good show, and the show may lighten the heart, ex cept in those hours when one can not stifle the nostalgic dreams of what America might have been. ~ • Footnotes • 1 Henry L. Mencken, Notes on Democ racy, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, p.44. 2 Ibid., p. 45.

3 Ibid., p. 49. 4 Henry L. Mencken, Prejudices, Fourth Series, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924, pp. 223-24. !'j Ibid., pp. 230-31. 6 Ibid., pp. 233-34. 7 Ibid., p. 232. 8 Ibid., pp. 224-25. 9 Notes on Democracy, po 22.