Ambrose Bierce

San Francisco Enquirer/January 28, 1900

WASHINGTON, January 26.—Said Mr. Andrew Carnegie in an address to a young men’s bible clans:

“The cry goes up to abolish poverty, but it will Indeed be a sad day when poverty is no longer with- us. Where will your inventor, your artist, your philanthropist, your reformer, in fact, anybody of note, come from then? They all come from the ranks of the poor. God does not call his great men from the ranks of the rich.”

That is not altogether true. The notable men do not all come from the ranks of the poor, though Mr. Carnegie does, and that gives him the right to point out the sweet “uses of adversity,” as did Shakespeare and many others. The rich supply their quota of men naturally great, but through lack of a sufficiently sharp incentive many of these give us less than the best that is in them. When God is giving out genius he does not study the assessment rolls.

As to the rest, Mr. Carnegie is quite right A world without poverty would be a world of incapables. Poverty may be due to one or more of many causes, but in a large, general way it is nature’s punishment for incapacity and improvidence. Paraphrasing the poet, we may say that some are born poor, soma achieve poverty and some have poverty thrust upon them—“by the the wicked rich,” quoth the demagogue. Dear, delicious, old demagogue!—whatever should we do if all were too rich to support him, and his voice were heard no more in the land?

I dare say Mr. Carnegie was not unaware, Scot though he is, that his views on poverty lent themselves felicitously to the purposes of the vigilant humorist and invited the ridicule which they would have escaped had he uttered them while he himself was poor; for, in popular appraisement of the value of what is said a detaining factor is the character or condition of the person who says it. When the devil is dead that matter will be ordered otherwise. Frequently a curse to the individual, poverty is a blessing to the race, not only because by effacing the unfit (Heaven rest them!) it aids in survival of the fit; not only because it is a school of fortitude, industry, perseverance, ingenuity and many another virtue, but because it directly begets such warm and elevating sentiments as compassion, generosity, self-denial, thoughtfulness for others—in a word, altruism. It does not beget enough of all this, but think what we should be with none of it! If there were no helplessness there would be no helpfulness. That pity Is akin to love Is sufficiently familiar to the ear, but how profound a truth it is no one seems to suspect. Why, pity is the sole origin of love. We love our children, not because they are ours, but because they are helpless; they require our tenderness and care, as do our domestic animals and our pets. Man loves woman because she Is weak; woman loves man, not because he is strong, but because, for all his strength, he is needy; he needs her. Minor affections and good will have a similar origin. Friendship came of mutual protection and assistance. Among the well-to-do hospitality is vestigial; primarily it was compassion for the wayfarer, the homeless, the hungry. If among our “rude forefathers” none had needed food and shelter we should have today no “entertaining,” no social pleasures of any kind. Modern life would be barren of all the social graces and sentiments distinguishing it from existence in Kansas. Russell Sage would be the typical American gentleman, and the Bradley-Martins, who were driven from their country for pouring money into the pockets of their industrious countrymen and countrywomen, would be with us, inhospitably popular and meanlv safe.

Poverty is one kind of helplessness. It is an appeal to what within us is “the likest God.” In its relief we are made acquainted with ingratitude. Ingratitude, like spanking, or ridicule, or disappointment in love, hurts without harming. It is a bitter tonic, but wholesome and by habit agreeable. Look at Mr. Carnegie himself, “after taking.” Is he the worse for it? No; with each successive dose he grows visibly stronger to endure another. Obviously he has learned to like the stuff—pays out millions a year for it—has paid some ten millions already and seems only to have begun; (True, there is a good deal of dissatisfaction with the form of his benevolence, and he ought, I suppose, to give to the poor of this generation only, and give them nothing but what they can eat up.) This, therefore, is how we demonstrate one of the advantages of poverty: Without poverty there could be no benevolence; without benevolence no ingratitude—whereby human nature would lack its crowning glory and supreme credential.

I go further than Mr. Carnegie; not only do I think poverty necessary to progress and civilization, but I am persuaded that crime, too, is indispensable to the moral and material welfare of the race. In the ever needful effort to limit and suppress it, in the immemorial and incessant war between the good and the evil forces of this world, in the constant vigilance necessary to the security of life and property, in the strenuous task of safeguarding the young, the weak and the unfortunate against the cruelty and rapacity ever alurk to prey upon them—in all these forms and phases of the struggle for existence are generated and developed such higher virtues and capabilities as we have. A country without crime would breed a population without sense. In a few generations of security its people would suffer a great annual mortality by falling over their own feet. They would be devoured by their cows and enslaved by their dogs.

The knowledge of how to go in when it rains would be a lost art. In brief, all that is malign in human nature is as wholesome, as needful, as “educational”‘ as all that is malign in our physical environment. Poverty, crime, vice, folly, storm, fire, earthquake, inundation, cold, wild beasts and snakes—all are teachers in nature’s great training echool. Does it follow that we should cease to resist them—should encourage and promote them? Not at all; their best beneficence is found in our struggle to suppress, overcome or evade them. The hope of eventual success is itself a spiritual good of no mean magnitude. Let all the chaplains of our forces encourage and hope and pray for that success. But for my part, if I thought victory imminent or possible I should sneak away into the bush and put up a petition for a serious but indecisive reverse.

Believing himself a victim of religious persecution, polygamist Roberts willnot accept the decision of the Gentile House of Representatives, but declares that he will carry his case to the Supreme Court. Very well; that is his undoubted right, but has he intelligently canvassed the situation? Does he think that the justices of that court are Mormons?

One may hold, with Senator Beveridge that, having acquired the Philippine Islands (by what means I would rather not say), it is our duty to keep them, yet not hold with Senator Beveridge that our right to do so is derived from a divine mandate. It must comforting and fine to think that way, but some of us are willing that Americans shall forego the spectacular advantage of strutting and swelling as a new Chosen people. An inflated turkey-cock is not the most pleasing type of expansionist.

When an American is heard in loud and hot advocacy of the cause of the Boers—“the sacred cause of liberty,” and the rest of it—ask him some of the following questions:

When did the Boers first come under British rule?

How?

Was it with their own consent?

What were the circumstances of their secession?

Was it because Great Britain abolished negro slavery among them?

After their “great trek” (mention date) upon lands known to them to be claimed, by what nation did they settle?

Upon whom did they afterward call to save them from anarchy, bankruptcy and eventual extermination by the natives?

Did they then voluntarily renounce their independence, and return to a former allegiance?

To whom?

Having been rescued at a great expenditure of blood and treasure (whose) did they, or did they not, repudiate their solemn pledges, set up negro slavery again and surprise and slaughter small garrisons of their deliverers?

On what conditions were they given virtually a new independence?

In whom, by solemn treaty, was it then agreed that the government should be vested in themselves or in the “inhabitants” of the country?

What proportion of the inhabitants of the country six months ago were Boers?

What proportion of the land did the Uitlanders own by purchase from then?

What proportion of the taxation was borne by the Uitlanders?

Had they, as “inhabitants of the country,” any part in its government?

Where and what is the evidence of the British Government’s or any British officials’ connivance in the Jameson raid?

In the course of peaceful and orderly negotiations, did either party to the present war suddenly issue an impossible and insulting ultimatum, and, almost before the other could reject it, invade and “annex” the other’s territory?

Which party, if either, was the less prepared for war, and therefore, presumably, the less desirous of it?

I do not say that any, or all, the foregoing questions, if answered truthfully, would “fix” the blame for the South African war; I only say that the person who cannot, or will not, answer them is intellectually or morally incompetent to discuss the matter, or hold any “sympathies” either way. Popular “sympathies” have no basis in worth. They are the feeling of the average man, who, not having been taught to think, cannot be trusted to feel. When one’s heart gets in to one’s head it is the sole tenant. As a distinguished writer has pointed out, we recently sympathized with the modern “Greeks” (a scurvy race) because the ancient Greeks, to whom they are nowise related, produced great works of art. We had this justification—their enemies, the Turks, have another religion than ours, and we had so long vilified them that we had come to believe in our own calumnies. If a nation would preserve the purity of its convictions it should not tell the same set of lies for more than a century at a time. Excessive calumniation deceives no one but the calumniator. Nothing is less perilous than moderation in lying; no one is overcome by the strength of his own restraint.

I should like to ask the audible brotherhood of Boerophiles a few questions of another sort, irrelevant to their own convictions, but closely related to their “sympathies”:

What Is a Boer?

Are the Boers a pure race, or a mixed?

Are any of them Dutch?

What proportion of them has negro blood?

What proportion can read and write?

They are religious—are they also moral?

Are they kind masters to their slaves, or do they cruelly mistreat them?

Are they, like other isolated peoples, insupportably conceited, believing themselves the salt of the earth, and others scum?

Are they the Kalmucks of Africa?

I should not advise the rising young Boerophile to answer these questions off-hand; he is likely to go wrong if he does. The best way would be to wait until some veteran of his faith newly pitchforked into Congress, with a smell of the woods and templed hills in his hair, proposes a resolution of sympathy with the “embattled farmers.”Then ask the questions and let him do the answering. It will be merry to note the star-spangled stammer of that worthy man.

The Rev. Mr. Sheldon, author of a book whose influence is felt hither and yawn, has undertaken to conduct for six days a Topeka secular newspaper “as Christ would do it.” The main thing is to remove it from Topeka. He will first take it out on the prairie, and then on the man that got up the scheme.

The following anecdote has not the distinction of engaging my belief: Mr. Richard Harding Davis, the illustrious author )who prudently ducks his head in passing beneatgh the Dewey arch), recently visited Asheville, N.C. One day he was strolling along a road with a friend when an enormous meteorite shot smoking from the skies, “with hideous ruin and combustion down,” and struck the earth somewhere with an impact that shook the entire frame of things and a thunderous explosion which it required the better part of a minute for Mr. Davis to reach. His companion was speechless with terror, not so the hero of Santiago de Cuba. He simply fashioned his visage to the cut of his contempt, and, looking upwards, said “Never touched me.”

More successfully directed it would have deprived the world of a most charming writer.

Brigadier-General (of volunteers) James H. Wilson, commanding a military department in Cuba, has been revisiting the earth and uttering his mind anent the Tropicans over whom he holds dominion. According to him two-thirds of the Cubans are white, and all are saints excepting those that are angels. In a mixed population like that there must be, one would suppose, elements of discord and contention. If the two classes are nearly equal in numbers they will naturally fight for supremacy as soon as our troops are withdrawn. With a view to preventing “the effusion of blood” (dear, familiar old disaster), it may be as well to occupy the island with mortals for a long time. By the way, which of the two Cuban factions does a good man join who dies in Puerto Rico?

It matters very little whether the wealthy Mr. Clark of Montana be given a seat in the United States Senate or not, but investigation of his claim to it has brought out two “definitions” of capital importance. Two witnesses confessed to having said “the thing which is not,” but in acknowledging their indiscretion they did not admit that they lied. “A lie,” said one, “is a false statement made to one who has a right to know the truth.” Said the other: “A statement is not a lie if made with the understanding that it is false,” he means when both stater and statee so understand it. To a delinquent discernment it might seem that in this latter case the moral character of such a statement is of no consequence, for it is easy to refrain from telling an untruth by which nobody is deceived. But is it easy? Do the masters and apprentices of fiction find it easy to refrain from writing stories that are not true? Could Mr. Kipling stop if he tried? If Mr. Marlon Crawford did not turn out a regular two novels a year would he not be sick? For the life of her could Gladys Imogen Jukes stay her red right hand from fabrication of love tales for “the salesladies’ delight?” Lives there a man with soul so dead as to write untrue stories which fool nobody if he could help it? Driven by some imperious necessity of his nature, man must say the thing that is not. Those of us who are not in trade, politics or the professions naturally take to writing fiction and history.

As to the first of these two negative definitions of the verb “to lie” I am in entire agreement with it, having myself many times in speech and print urged that truth is too rare and precious to be wasted on the unworthy. Seasonably and unseasonably I have acclaimed this gospel of moral economy and pounded the pulpit in its propagation. Vox in deserto! None would heed. Now that a co-apostle has formally declared it before a committee of the United States Senate, I am not without a hope that it will prosper in the hearts of men; that its light will crown them like a visible benediction and be as a lamp to their feet; that eventually it may supersede all others and inferior religions, binding the whole race into one holy brotherhood—the Universal Church of Judicious Inveracity.

Count Boni—nay, we’ve no counts here,

   (In democratic ways we’re schooled)

They cannot breathe our atmosphere—

You’re simply Mr. Anna Gould.

So, Mr. Anna Gould, is’t not

   A most peculiar circumstance

That curiosity is hot

   About your loss in games of chance?

Six hundred thousand dollars gone?

   Why, that’s a trifle which

You’d scorn. Yet all this roar is on

   Because you are so reeking rich.

This world’s a crazy little ball;

   We worship Mammon, lip and lung.

If soma poor wretch had lost his all

  No ear would open to his tongue.

To rank we never, never do

   Bow down. But when the fires have cooled

On Sycophancy’s altars you

   Can still be Mr. Anna Gould.

Westbrook Pegler

Indianapolis Star/May 15, 1956

NEW YORK William Randolph Hearst Jr. and his two sidekicks, Joe Kingsbury Smith and Frank Conniff, have won a Pulitzer award for drilling a hole in the Iron Curtain on their trip to Moscow last spring. The Rover boys took some ribbing because they didn’t know what it was all about, but neither did anyone else, including our State Department and that still goes today. All we all know is that my leader and his task force discovered something, the scope and meaning of which have been spreading, meandering and deepening ever since. Eisenhower was emboldened recently to insinuate that if the Kremlin should start anything we would belt the bums through the transom, and this new confidence on our side dotes from the experience of our wide-eyed Rover boys. The repudiation of Stalin and of the weird Moscow, trials, which paper-collar Joe Davies found tolerable, and the political rehabilitation of the Reds who died against the wall are further developments of the story which they undeniably discovered.

Occupation of Paris

A cub reporter happened to pass the Opera station of the Paris subway one morning in 1940 as a platoon of German soldiers hustled up the stairs. This kid had an exclusive piece on the actual occupation of Paris although he did not quite know this at the moment. The Germans had taken to the subway at an outlying station to save shoe leather and avoid pestiferous fighting with rear-guards and reckless civilians on the way in. So our boys, Will and Joe and Frank, have dealt themselves into a circle, more like a rabble, if you will permit me, of those who are referred to as “Pulitzer-prize-winner so-and-so” and this will set Will’s old man to chuckling because Pulitzer was his enemy, with no holds barred. It is not immodest of me to say that I got one of those baubles some years ago. But, as I remarked to my leader in my address to the throne congratulating him on his recognition, I wasn’t a Hearst hand then and probably would have been passed over in favor of the New York Times if I had been. Any Hearst man who gets it makes it the hard way and our Will made it the hardest way of all because of his name.

Some of The Winners

I was discussing this proposition with some veteran misanthrope the other day and the prevailing opinion was that the Pulitzer awards always were a publicity gag primarily for the Pulitzer papers and secondarily for papers which string along with European ideologies. The United Press has had great reporters including Lyle Wilson, commanding the Washington bureau, and, in the days way back, Karl Bicker, who knew move about Soviet Russia than the whole American corps together. But the U.P. has never smelled a Pulitzer award. The International News can run rings around the A. P. most of the time and the A. P. never has had a writer-reporter who could carry Hob Considine’s machine. But neither has the INS ever been bidden into the circle of the roses although the A. P. got three nods in eight years for “International reporting;” three in six years for “telegraphic reporting;” three in 18 years for “reporting” and one in “national reporting,” a score of 10 to 0 against outfits which always are at least at last accurate and truthful.

The preponderance of New York Times men in the roster of these celebrities is grotesque although Arthur Krock of the Times, who got two awards, is readily acknowledged one of the best of our time. Still, the Times has 2t awards, including three “special citations” and this year’s bauble to Arthur Daley, the sport page columnist, who “covers” nothing, for his “coverage” of sports. Furthermore, Charles Bartlett of the Chattanooga Times, an outpost of the New York Times, got one for a good but routine job on Harold Talbott, who resigned as secretary of the Air Force on a petty issue of conflict of interest. Under Truman or Roosevelt, Talbott would have stuck it out, Bartlett’s undertaking would have been unsuccessful and the story would have amounted to nothing. So actually, Eisenhower deserves an assist here and a cut of the check which goes with the prize. One year, a Washington man for the Times got an award on general principles for no specific feat of reporting, writing or biting his nails.

Pulitzers Last Survivor

The Post-Dispatch, Pulitzer’s last surviving paper, holding the fort for the Roosevelt myth and morality in St. Louis, has 13 awards, including one to an old defender of the faith which was tentatively voted to another and then withdrawn at Joe Pulitzer Jr.’s entreaty and conferred on his man because the guy was getting on in years. Pulitzer’s old World and Evening World, now extinct, got nine, but they conked out 25 years ago. The World-Telegram, which carries on the name and a good deal of Pulitzer’s politics, has had five. The Herald Tribune has had nine awards including one for a handout from a law office on behalf of a client accused of communism who was convicted and went to prison. Some, at least, of the Pulitzer board knew or had wind of the facts when the prize was granted to a favored political organ.

The Pulitzer awards have become political salutes and Bill, Joe and Frank of the Hearst outfit would be well advised to take their bottle caps to some assay office for analysis and report. Nevertheless, congratulations!

Westbrook Pegler

Indianapolis Star/May 14, 1956

NEW YORK Quaint, homespun Carl Sandburg, the high-split Swede from Galesburg, Ill., went philosophical a few days ago and, in an interview over breakfast at the Waldorf-Astoria on squalid, crime-haunted Park Avenue, where orange juice is only 75 cents, observed that the American people are in danger from our “fat-dripping prosperity.” Choosing a quote from Albert Einstein to express himself, Sandburg said, “To make a goal of happiness has never appealed to me!” Furthermore, “All these things in the advertisements—any time the main goal of life is to get them so that they override your other motives, there’s danger.”

Sandburg is a prosperous commercial biographer of Abraham Lincoln, whom he resembles in the length of his legs and the close proximity of his buckle to his collar button. He has dabbled in doggerel music of the type which insinuates that the best people are the lowest, and has caught the brass ring riding a winged horse named Pegasus. He is the foremost American poet except Ezra Pound of Idaho, another inveterate and indomitable professional hick who is locked up for life in the national booby-hatch in Washington for the simple reason that if the federal government should dare to give him a trial he would surely be acquitted. That would mean that he had been confined in a lunatic asylum for about 11 years merely because when in Rome he sometimes brandished his walking stick at kids who hooted at his 10-gallon Idaho hat and floppy poetical necktie. In brandishing his stick he evinced insanity, and that is why the best poet we ever produced has been imprisoned in a bedlam for 11 years.

Bryan Also Valued Dollar

To comprehend Mr. Sandburg’s true attitude toward “fat-dripping prosperity” we would have to look at his accounts and his correspondence with his publishers. William Jennings Bryan, who shared some of Sandburg’s outwards and was known as The Commoner, had an eagle eye for a dollar. The man who hired him for $5,000 a Sunday to preach the word to prospective customers for real estate at Coral Gables recalled that, toward the burst of the bubble, The Commoner always demanded his fee in currency. He had to have the money in his fat. sweaty fist before he would so much as spread his wings above the pulpit invoking God’s blessing on all those good people who were about to invest their savings in those beautiful bargains.

Mr. Sandburg’s agent and his publishers, were they free to speak, might enlighten us on bis attitude toward the profit motive and material riches. As it is, however, when a man deplores “fat-dripping prosperity” and repudiates happiness as a desirable goal from a breakfast table in the Waldorf, he leaves gaps in our understanding of his message.

This is the first time I have known any person pretending to superior intelligence to attack happiness as a debilitating agent. Mr. Sandburg seems here to repudiate one-third of the purpose stated by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the motive of our religion and much of our poetry. The “things in the advertisements” include the finest automobiles ever made, a proletarian conquest of the horse and buggy, so I find my poor sightless feet fumbling to follow his line.

Antithesis Of Squalor

“These things in the advertisements” provide the jobs which provide the money to provide the rose-embowered ranch-style houses with radiant heating and refrigerated air and freezers and royalties for Carl Sandburg. That prosperity is the antithesis of the squalid condition which Lincoln surmounted, thus providing, free of charge to Sandburg, the raw stuff for that professional success which strokes the vanity from which he derives the happiness which he now affects to despise lest happiness undo him.

Einstein, himself, never seemed unhappy, and the late Ben Stolberg tossed off .a phrase fit for his epitaph when he wrote that Einstein had a happy knack of backing bashfully into the limelight. He was always doing it, and so does Sandburg now. However, Einstein seemed happy to affect an appearance of humble poverty denoted by his frazzled old sweater jacket, and here he was not quite loyal to his professed concern for his fellow-men. For if all of us should make a sweater jacket Iast until the last ravelings, the knit-goods trade would go bankrupt and gaunt mothers clutching rickety babies in ragged shawls would pick at garbage cans as Einstein saw them in Vienna. I understood that he deplored this, but I am darned if I quite know. Maybe he thought this a good condition lest happiness corrupt Madonna and Child. Maybe Sandburg did, too, there over his orange juice in the squalor of the Waldorf, though, again. I say, a look at his balance sheet would put things in sharper focus.

Ambrose Bierce

San Francisco Examiner/January 17, 1900

Favorable Reports on Hepburn’s Nicaragua Waterway Bill in Congress Are the Country’s Answer to the Impudent and Disingenuous Proposal of the Conspirators Who Would Block the Scheme.

Only Obstacle to the Speedy Construction of the Canal Is the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, Which Provides That Britain Must First Give Consent, but Uncle Sam May Arrange for Its Abrogation.

WASHINGTON, January 16. The several sorts of disreputables that have been antagonizing the Nicaragua Canal project appear to have played the last effective card which they have dealt themselves from the bottom of the pack. By deciding to report the Hepburn bill, the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce has assured its consideration early enough in the session to bring it to a vote, which is all that can be asked by any supporter generously willing to give the devil a chance. In this vale of tears, nothing but Senator Stewart of Nevada is absolutely inevitable, but to the bright band of gentlemen interested in the Straits of Magellan I commend an affirmative vote in both Houses on the Hepburn bill as a fairly good example of the foregone conclusion without a visible string to it. It is pretty well known who these persons are.

By a remarkable coincidence most of them are connected with transcontinental and transisthmian railroading. Quite recently, however, their quickened consciences persuaded them to atone for their sins against the Nicaragua Canal by promoting the one at Panama. They arranged a deal with the French stockholders by which the scheme was to be “Americanized,” and then patriotically asked that it be given a “hearing” by the government. The “hearing,” they figured, would last a matter of five years, and by due diligence might be prolonged to ten. During that period the overland railways would strive to please by handling their traffic between east and west, as at present. The favorable report on the Hepburn bill is the country’s answer to this impudent and disingenuous proposal and the conspirators are left lamenting. The venerable C. P. Huntington, I am told, is of the solemn conviction that it serves them right. This great and good man finds nothing so little to his taste as any kind of badness. It was he who wrote the glowing lines:

“Am I a soldier of the Cross, a follower of the Lamb?”

Over wide regions accessible to the contagion of his own belief it is thought that he is.

Defeat of the domestic obstructionaries does not, unfortunately, assure immediate construction of the canal on the passage of the bill. There is still a lion in the path—and it happens to be the British lion. The beast is dispositioned rather amicably toward us just now, and somewhat preoccupied with matters elsewhere; but he will have to be reckoned with. Under the Hepburn bill the canal is to be constructed, owned, controlled and defended by the United States; under the Clayton-Bulwer treaty the United States are pledged not to construct, own, control and defend any such canal without the consent of Great Britain. Great Britain has not consented. She once intimated her willingness to abrogate the treaty if we would neutralize the canal, but the fact remains that the treaty is not abrogated, nor would neutralization of the canal abrogate it. Its validity baa been recognized by every administration since its ratification. Congress cannot expunge it by ignoring it, as the Senate—a part of the treaty-making power—has once actually done by passing this very bill. There Is no hope of a President of the United States signing the Hepburn bill, or any bill like it, until the Clayton-Bulwer treaty has been formally abrogated by mutual assent.

Divided among a multitude of men in Congress, responsibility is to each a light affliction, and does not always deter from folly; centered upon the shoulders of one man in the White House, it makes itself felt. This was illustrated in the days immediately preceding the Spanish war. Under two administrations Congress was “ready” a long time before the army and navy were. It would have begun the fighting with a light heart and without other equipment when we had neither powder nor shot enough to fight a battle with. Two presidents of different policies and characters strained their authority to the breaking stress to keep the merry gentlemen at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue from cutting the throat of their country. It is be urged against these incidents that they are an imperfect foundation for an argument against the dreaded One-Man Power, I confess in all humility that they are open to that serious objection; but at the same time I crave leave to explain that I had nothing to do with the cause that brought them about.

If the Hepburn bill force the hand of the Administration in securing abrogation of the inhibiting treaty it will have accomplished something good which, it is to be feared, its authors and advocates have not in mind. Its advocacy by men believed to be in the Administration’s confidence seems indeed to indicate that abrogation is already assured. Let us hope so, for certainly the American people will never consent to forego the advantage of controlling any trans-Isthmian canal that may exist, even if it should happen to have been “made in France.”

Ambrose Bierce

San Francisco Examiner/January 13, 1900

WASHINGTON, January 12. Tuesday’s debate in the Senate between Messrs. Beveridge and Hoar appears to have set a number of persons reviewing their convictions on “expansion.” The leading newspapers have “defined their positions” again, fortifying them with such new arguments as the debate suggested, or with the old ones stated in new ways. It is not likely that anybody’s convictions have been overthrown, or even enfeebled. Amongst the benefits of discussion and controversy persuasion of error is not included. Heaven has still a monopoly of miracles. In the Congress of the future debates will probably be forbidden by law as unfavorable to a good understanding.

The line upon which we are to fight out this matter of colonial extension (and the Philippine question means no less than that) are beginning to harden and define themselves. “Protagonists of expansion” are wasing little strength in showing how very constitutional and moral it is to hold on to what we have and take more, and their opponents are not as loud as once they were in declaring that in Filipino we have caught a Tartar and in his insular habitat accepted a white elephant. That may be true; we have not yet subdued the former nor accurately appraised the value of the latter. It may be true, too, that it was wicked and unamerican of us to extend out sway over a dissenting people, if, as a people, they do dissent, which remains to be seen. What is obvious is a visibly growing disposition in each party to this dispute to ignore the arguments of its adversary, while actively building up its own. The one party serves a moral principle, the other a material interest. If an experienced observer were going to back the moral principle he would expect long odds.

In point of fact, the right-and-wrong of the matter is not so simple and obvious a proposition as it seems; gentlemen who favor retention of our conquest without regard to the feeling of the Filipinos or other than commercial considerations have a good deal to say for themselves. Admitting (for the sake of peaceful contention) that the seven or eight millions of intellectual delinquents inhabiting the known and unknown islands of the archipelago are bitterly opposed to American rule and devoutly attached to the golden principles expounded in our Declaration of Independence, it by no means follows that we are sinners for taking them into camp and subduing them to our sweet will. At one time I was myself of the opinion that it did follow; and I was ready to shed ink in support of that conviction. I don’t think that way any more—at least I find that American rapacity has a good deal more to say for itself than I was willing to hear. The proverbial zeal of the new convert is unknown to me. I can still tolerate in another the faith that I once embraced, but it no longer serves me in place of a religion. I doubt if it altogether satisfies the fine spiritual yearning of Senator Hoar, or even the rude requirements of Colonel Bryan.

The world’s large practical affairs are not ordered in a way to meet the views of clergymen and the angels. Commands for progress to progress are not issued from the quarter-deck of a Sunday-school. Yet progress does manage somehow to get ahead. If such civilization and enlightenment as we have are desirable and their extension devoutly to be wished it is unwise to quarrel with the only practical method of extending them. We should not acclaim the end and denounce the means. Down to the present time the human race has found the incomparably best promoter of civilization to be the sword. That serviceable implement spreads the light on earth as a table knife spreads butter on a child’s bread. The missionary can do something, the pedagogue a little more, the trader more than both; but it is to the soldier that they must look for their opportunity. The history of the spread and enlightenment is a history of military conquest. It was thus that Greece and Rome handed the torch to nation after nation before their own fires grew too cold to kindle it. It is thus that the mighty empire of Great Britain is girdling the world with great democracies, happy in her sway, and with autocracies whose conquered peoples enjoy, all unconsciously, the rights and liberties to which long privation has blinded their discernment. Wherever her flag goes civil and religious liberty, security of life, person and property, art, education, science and commerce follow and set up their benign reign. And It may be confidently predicted that if Dutch pretensions to dominance in South Africa be extinguished in blood the misguided peoples now so courageously seeking to avert their good fortune will find under the flag of their conquerors a prosperity, enlightenment and contentment which, under the grotesque tyranny of their own so-called republican governments, they have never known and never will know.

If a backward or savage people have in it the possibilities of clvlllzatlon and enlightenment nothing better can occur to it than subjugation by any of the great military powers of to-day. The most powerful nations are the most advanced in all that we hold to be best for mankind, and in their own Interest they impart to subject races as fast as these are fitted to receive it. Conquest for spoliation is a dead and discredited political faith; the great nations no longer hold colonies for the purpose of plundering them. The awful example of Spain is ever before their eyes like a finger lifted in warning. England attempted it in the case of her American colonies, and, losing them, has never attempted it again. Never since then has the Imperial treasury heard the chink of a penny exacted by colonial taxation.

But not all the breeds of men have possibilities of civilization—a truth which the most advanced of them are curiously slow and reluctant to recognize. We understand easily enough that we cannot make a homing pigeon out of a tumbler or pouter; that we cannot train a Percheron horse to win races open to all horses; that all the education possible will not teach a bulldog to retrieve nor a dachshund to herd sheep; but we still believe, or try to believe, that we can “elevate” the negro, civilize the red Indian and Christianize the Chinaman. Can any one who knows the futility of all that, and of all the sentiment that clusters about it, doubt that the extinction of the incapable races distinctly augments the sum of human happiness? Is it not obvious to an attentive intelligence that the benign principle of the survival of the fittest implies and depends upon the effacement of the unfit?

We do not know what possibilities of civilization may inhere in the various mongrel races inhabiting the Philippine islands. Some have given evidence of a certain degree of susceptibility to enlightenment. Others appear to be hopeless, and of many we know nothing whatever. Of all it may safely be said that their only hope lies in subjugation by a master race. Such advancement as they may be capable of is not to be effected by suggestion and advice. Like all backward peoples, they fight against the light and will accept it, if at all, only when it is flashed upon them by the sword. To all such civilization is a bitter draught; to administer it we must catch them, hold their nose and spoon it into them despite their squirming and sputtering. Maybe it will kill them, as for example, it is killing the Hawaiians, a noble and blameless race lamented by all who know them. Maybe It will do them good—let us hope that it will. In either case it will enlarge the area of enlightenment—increase its acreage—open up to higher and better influence another of the dark corners of the earth—augment the sum of human happiness.

We should remember that it is not a question of good or evil to a single generation. We are dealing with a matter of vital importance to “millions yet to be.” Directly and indirectly it concerns the interests of so incalculable a multitude of human beings that the effect upon the present generation of Filipinos and the present generation of Americans may be treated almost as a negligible factor in the stupendous problem. If our conquest should result in impoverishing and depopulating the entire archipelago, with whatever of mischief and demoralization that might entail upon ourselves, it yet might well be that there would be an enormous balance of general advantage before the inevitable day when our own civilization shall follow its predecessors into oblivion, leaving not a vestige behind.

Ambrose Bierce Writes of the Masterly Oration of Beveridge in Advocacy of Making the Archipelago a Part of the United States

Ambrose Bierce

San Francisco Examiner/January 10, 1900

WASHINGTON, January 9.—The fight is on. To-day Senator Beveridge of Indiana set the trumpet to his lips and uttered the war-cry of expansion to its ultimate note. He had a great audience; not only was every Senator in his seat, but all were attentive. Nobody wrote letters and the port pages had a rest. The galleries were full to the brim, and even the press gang forgot to assume that air of languid indifference that serves to distinguish the Washington newspaper correspondent from all other creations. One might almost have said that the gentlemen of the press were alive.

It was Senator Beveridge’s maiden speech. He is young and (I assure you, Madam), very good-looking. A certain interest attaches to him from the fact that he is the hero of a mysterious disappearance; and even in these days, when everybody is a hero of some kind, that counts. Senator Beveridge once sailed away in a gallant ship, and for a weary space was lost to sight in the red Orient, while his countrymen, particularly those in Indiana, whispered with white lips all manner of awful conjectures. It turned out that at some Oriental port his ship had been quarantined for bubonic plague. I believe he did not have it himself, but you see how it can confer a certain distinction on a man without actually decorating him.

Mr. Beveridge’s speech was made in support of his own resolution declaring that “the Philippine islands are territory belonging to the United States,” and that “it is the intention of the United States to retain them as such and to establish and maintain such governmental control throughout the archipelago as the situation may demand.”

Upon this theme he made a notable argument to a sympathetic audience—in the galleries. It is not my intention to report that speech, but he made a few points rather better worth attention than most of those with which we are all familiar by repetition.

For example:

“This island empire is the last land left in all the oceans. If it should prove a mistake to abandon it, the blunder once made would be irretrievable. If it proves a mistake to hold it, the error can be corrected when we will; every other progressive nation stands ready to relieve us.”

I don’t know if that is new, but it is neat, and if one do not think too much about it, entirely convincing. If it have a fault it is that it will be as cogent after our occupation of the islands has lasted a thousand years as it is to-day. It can be always invoked to justify retention—perhaps that is its chief strength.

As to the climate of the Philippines, Mr. Beveridge is quite sure it is comfortable and salubrious, and as he has been there and tried it in its several moods and tenses, his testimony is entitled to consideration as is his estimate of the surprising fertility of the soil and the possibilities of agricultural and commercial development. These things are now commonly conceded; there is no longer much debate as to the profit of retaining our conquest. Mr. Beveridge’s antagonists prefer to argue the matter as a question of morality. In fact Senator Hoar, who followed with an opposition speech, lifted the matter to so high a plane of ethics that he could himself hardly breathe its attenuated atmosphere.

I dare say that is the right view to take of it. I am sure it must be wrong for nations to be wicked. But in the larger politics of this worst of all possible worlds it does seem as if ethical considerations had not more weight and influence to which their beauty entitles them. According to the principles so dear to the hearts of the worthy gentlemen who lift protesting hands when the rights of weak nations are invaded by strong ones, not a people on earth today has a right to be there. All have dispossessed some other people.

As the nations having the most advanced civilization are stronger than the others, and as their civilization follows them into the dark corners of the earth which they penetrate uninvited, there is seen to be a certain rough truth in the saying that “might makes right”—that is, if civilization and enlightenment are themselves right and desirable. I am not saying that they are, but I gather from Mr. Beveridge’s speech that he thinks them so. And I should not be surprised to learn that Messrs. Hoar, Bryan and Atkinson are of that way of thinking. If so, it would be interesting to hear them explain how civilization is to be enlarged in the future.

Heretofore it has usually walked over the Decalogue; perhaps they have a vision of the time to be when the good missionary will be able to “spread the light” without assistance from the soldier and the trader. Possibly they rely, not even altogether upon the Bible, but upon the silk hat. Certainly wherever the silk hat is worn there we have the highest and ripest civilization; and whenever it penetrates a region where it was previously unknown, religion, art, justice and education follow and set up their benign reign. Will it please the gentlemen if we order home our troops from the Philippines and present the Tagalogs with silk hats?

Stephen Crane

New York World June 13, 1898

ON BOARD THE WORLD DISPATCH BOAT TRITON, OFF GUANTANAMO, VIA PORT ANTONIO, JAMAICA, June 12.—For thirteen hours the marines, under Lieut.-Col. Huntington, who landed from the Panther and raised Old Glory over the battered fortifications of the Spanish at the mouth of Guantanamo harbor, sustained an attack made by the Spaniards.

Four of our men were killed and one wounded. The killed are: Assistant Surgeon JOHN BLAIR GIBBS, of Richmond, Va. Sergt. CHARLES H. SMITH, of Smallwood. Private WILLIAM DUNPHY, of Gloucester, Mass. Private JAMES McCOLGAN, of Stoneham, Mass.

Corporal Glass was slightly wounded on the head.

The advance pickets under Lieuts. Neville and Shaw are thought to be prisoners.

The attack began at 3 o’clock Saturday afternoon. It lasted with almost continuous skirmishing until this morning.

It is not known how great was the Spanish loss. Their dead and wounded were carried off. It is thought from blood splashes found after the fighting that their loss was heavy.

The Spaniards advanced upon our outposts through thick tropical underbrush and began firing.

Sergt. Smith, who was at the extreme picket post relieving the guard, fell at the first fire.

The firing at first was desultory. The Spaniards drove in the outposts, a part of Capt. Spicer’s company.

They fell back upon the camp, where the fighting was continued until 5 o’clock, when the Spaniards were repulsed.

Capt. McCalla landed reinforcements from the marines of the Marblehead in the launch. Ensign Sullivan afterward went close to the shore in the launch trying to draw the enemy’s fire, but failed to accomplish this.

The bodies of Privates McColgan and Dunphy were found in the brush. Both were shot in the head. The large cavities caused by the bullets, which inside a range of 500 yards have a rotary motion, indicate that they were killed at close range. Their bodies were stripped of shoes, hats and cartridges and horribly mutilated.

The marines received the attack upon the camp formed into three sides of a hollow square. The country about was craggy, cut with ravines and covered with a tropical thicket. The Spaniards up to midnight attacked from the cover of this undergrowth.

The afternoon was cloudy and the night windy. After sunset it grew very dark. At night the enemy was discoverable only by the flashes of their arms, save when occasionally the searchlights of the ships sweeping along the deep foliage discovered a party of the Spaniards.

Whenever this happened the guns of the marines lined along the camp and the machine gun of the launch of the Marblehead volleyed at the assailants.

The launch pushed up the bay along the shore firing upon the Spaniards with her gun. It is believed that her fire was deadly.

About midnight the Spaniards charged up the hill from the southwest upon the camp. Under repeated volleys of bullets they broke and retreated. So close did they come that revolvers were used.

Three Spaniards got to the edge of the camp, where Col. Jose Campina, the Cuban guide, fired upon them. They turned and ran helter-skelter down the hills.

It was during this assault that Assistant Surgeon Gibbs was killed. He was shot in the head in front of his own tent. He fell into the arms of Private Sullivan and both dropped. A second bullet threw dust in their faces. Surgeon Gibbs lived ten minutes, but did not regain consciousness.

Firing was kept up by small squads of Spaniards. The marines had lain upon their arms, and some of them, worn out with the fatigue of two days of labor and fighting almost without rest, had fallen asleep. At dawn all were aroused in anticipation of a second assault, but one was not made.

When daylight made it possible to use field guns three twelve-pounders opened upon the few Spaniards then visible, who fled.

Our men behaved well and are praised by their officers. The great majority of them had never before been under fire, and though a night attack is especially trying not one of them flinched.

They themselves give credit for courage to the Spaniards, whom they express a desire to meet again.

It is thought that most of the attacking party were guerillas.

It is not known how large the force of Spaniards were. They are said to be 3,000 strong in the vicinity of Guantanamo.

Three hundred Cubans were expected to occupy today the point opposite the camp.

Dr. John Blair Gibbs, who was killed at Guantanamo harbor, was known in New York.

His friends here say that he was highly courageous. He was forty years old, of medium height and strongly built. When war was imminent he was one of the first to offer his services to the government. Two months ago he was ordered to the Surgeon-General of the Navy at Washington, and his friends understood he was appointed acting Assistant Surgeon. Later he was ordered to the transport Panther.

Dr. Gibbs had been practicing in this city for four years. He was in partnership with Dr. Parker Syms, at No. 60 West Forty-seventh Street. He had marked ability in his profession.

He came of two old Virginia families, the Blairs and the Gibbses. His father is dead, his mother is in Virginia, his brother lives at Altoona, Pa., and a cousin, Mrs. Roosevelt, in this city.

Dr. Gibbs was graduated from Rutgers College in 1878, and was a member of the University Club, the Southern Society and the Rutgers Alumni Association.

Stephen Crane

Boston Globe/June 16, 1898

CAMP McCALLA, GUANTANAMO BAY, June 14, 6 PM VIA KINGSTON.—The story of the mutilation of the bodies of the two young privates of Captain Spicer’s company of marines, which was sent in on Saturday last, is now found to be entirely untrue. The officers and men of the party which recovered the bodies were misled by the frightful tearing effect of the Mauser bullets when deflected by anything like brushwood, or from close range. The men had apparently been fired on by guerillas at a distance of fifteen feet. One body had eight bullet wounds, causing dreadful havoc. Surgeon Edgar states positively that the wounds were due to bullets only. Lieutenant Ingrate today took out a party to try and get the body of Sergeant Smith, killed on Saturday. The party was composed of twelve marines and ten Cubans. The body of Sergeant Smith had been lying within the enemy’s lines nearly two days, and consequently any mutilating by the Spaniards could easily have been accomplished. The body, however, was found divested only of the rifle and accouterments. There was positively and distinctly no barbarity whatever. Lieutenant Ingrate’s force reached the American lines in safety.

H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury/February, 1929

NOT only Babbitt won last November, but also Gantry. We are in for four (and maybe eight) years of high pressure Christian endeavor, with a consecrated Quaker playing the hose, and sturdy Methodists and Baptists, all of them free from sin, manning the pump. What Quakers are capable of, once their moral libido is loosed, was exemplified charmingly during the reign of the Hon. A. Mitchell Palmer as Attorney-General. What Methodists and Baptists run to is on view throughout the land, and especially in the Bible country, and more especially in the beleaguered State of Virginia, where, having aroused the hookworm carriers to Christian fury, they now plan to seize, not only the State government and all the local governments, but also the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. If Jefferson were alive today, and living in his old diocese, he would be on his way to jail. His principles are in abeyance there, as they are everywhere else in the United States.

Just how far the brethren will attempt to go, once they get their fatter and softer Coolidge into the White House, remains to be seen. The hints they throw out from their camp at Washington are surely dark enough. We are not only to have a new and worse Volstead Act, with teeth six inches long; we are also to have a national movie censorship and a censorship of books, magazines and newspapers. Would the last collide with the Bill of Rights? Then damn the Bill of Rights! Here I venture into no treason: I simply echo the Supreme Court of the United States, though, to be sure, with a certain tightening of phraseology. That great sanhedrin has already disemboweled the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments and set them out to dry; it will not boggle, I predict, at the First. If it does so, then the brethren will know how to deal with it. They already count audibly, in fact, upon the high mortality among the loftier varieties of jurists, due to hard study and bad air. It was a selling point in the campaign. Al, they alleged, planned to put radicals upon the bench, i.e., judges disposed to take the Bill of Rights literally. The Pope, it appeared, had issued orders to that effect, countersigned by the Beer Trust, the Elders of Zion, and the Bolsheviki. They assured their customers that Dr. Hoover could be trusted to refrain from any such malicious mischief: his judicial nominations, they let it be known delicately, would be satisfactory to the Anti-Saloon League. No doubt they knew what they were talking about, for they had their agents at his G. H. Q., and what they said was also said by the beauteous Mrs. Willebrandt, the official Joan of Arc of the campaign.

Thus the Republic of Jefferson’s humane hallucinations gives way to a very real and highly efficient Polizeiffaat, with laws for every moral purpose and plenty of bashibazouks to enforce them. The Liberals are doomed to more moaning, and the rest of us had better watch out. Bishop Cannon will be far more influential at Washington after March 4 than ever the Hon. Harry Micajah Daugherty was in the days of Harding. The course of legislation will be determined, to a large extent, by his prayers, which are powerful and long. He knows what he wants, and his episcopal blood is steaming. Thus I counsel all bootleggers to arrange their affairs, and all Liberals to get out their red ink. It may be that the boozeart, before a year has gone, will have its Sacco and Vanzetti. We may be headed toward capital punishment for carrying a bottle of wine to the sick. At the least, we shall see a docile judiciary packing the jails, so that there’ll be scarcely room left in them for home-brewing. Some juicy decisions are in the offing. Once the First Amendment has gone the way of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth, there will be little left of the Bill of Rights save the Third, which prohibits quartering soldiers upon citizens in time of peace. Even that may yield up the ghost when the Methodist Terror begins using the army and navy to reinforce the corps of Prohibition agents.

There is nothing in Dr. Hoover’s record to indicate any formidable opposition to this programme. If he has any leanings toward Liberalism, in any of its multitudinous forms, he has kept them pretty diligently concealed. As an archpriest of the New Efficiency, he probably inclines very strongly the other way. Moreover, he is said to cherish grudges, and the advocates of the Bill of Rights, during the campaign, surely gave him some to cherish. Upon the embarrassing question of his relations to the Klan, the Anti-Saloon League, the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, and other such organizations they pushed him cruelly hard, and no doubt there are still scars upon his surface. Yet more, he is an active candidate for reelection in 1932.—and is precisely aware how and by whom he was elected in 1928.

II

But the love of liberty, as Nietzsche long ago pointed out, flourishes best, not where liberty is free for the asking, but where men can only hope for it and fight for it. It has never had such splendid partisans in the United States as it had in the darkest days of the Revolution, nor so many of them. The false appearance of it, without the substance, is fatal, disarming its friends and reinforcing the indifference of the indifferent. Something of the sort has been going on in the United States ever since the Civil War, when the Bill of Rights first tasted the judicial snickersnee. The superficial of liberty have been here, but not always the essentials. Now that even the superficial begin to disappear, it may be that a new struggle for the essentials will begin. Tiring at last of the bald and hollow liberty to make good livings, Americans may demand again the greater liberty to live good lives.

At all events, there is ground for hope in that direction, and hope is all that any chronic Libertarian asks for. He sees the laws growing more and more oppressive, and the advocates of still greater oppressions put into high places, but at the same time, searching eagerly and perhaps a bit romantically, he also sees signs of revolt. The people give their votes to the side of yielding, but their profoundest instincts prompt them to resist. Thus we have Prohibition officially, and no Prohibition actually. Thus we labor under censorships, but still manage to obtain access to new ideas. Thus religious intolerance increases, but religion itself seems to lose force. However the scene is viewed, it becomes obvious that a battle is joined. What the ultimate issue of that battle will be the gods do not reveal, but it may quite as well be the restoration of liberty as its complete and final destruction.

The late election helped to clear the ground. It gave the enemies of liberty everything they asked for, and even more. If Dr. Hoover was elected, then so was the Anti-Saloon League elected. Its exultant claim that it shared his triumph and is entitled to its share of his power is well grounded in the facts. He can no more get rid of it now than he can get rid of the Vare Gang, the remnants of the Ohio Gang, the corps of kleagles and goblins, and the boughten blackamoors from the broken South. He must give it, in gratitude and fellowship, the clear chance that it demands, with all the new laws that go therewith, and all the blacklegs needed to “enforce” them. Getting what it wants, it will grasp, I suspect, a series of red-hot pokers. If it actually thrusts Prohibition upon us there will be uproars everywhere, and especially in those areas where its votes came from; if it fails with every weapon in its hands, then Prohibition will start along the via dolorosa of mesmerism, Free Silver, a tariff for revenue only, and the Single Tax.

Thus the proponents of the Noble Experiment find themselves brought to book at last, and with a large gallery assembled to see them do their stuff. They have got everything they have been bawling for. Whatever else they want is theirs for the asking. They have a grateful disciple ready for the White House, they have the Senate and House in their pockets, and they know how to handle the courts. Now let them prove it.

Ill

Liberty, at bottom, is a simple thing, whatever its outward forms. It is common faith in man, common good will, common tolerance and charity, common decency, no less and no more. Translated into political terms, it is the doctrine that the normal citizen of a civilized state is actually normal—that the decency which belongs naturally to Homo sapiens, as an animal above the brutes, is really in him. It holds that this normal citizen may be trusted, one day with another, to do the decent thing. It relies upon his natural impulses, and assumes them to be reasonably sound. Finally, it is the doctrine that if these assumptions are false, then nothing can be done about it—that if human beings are actually so bad, then none is good enough to police the rest.

The pious brethren who now prepare to run us take a different line. They have a low opinion of mankind, and believe that even the most elemental decency is obtainable only by force. They hold that every man who has access to alcohol is a potential drunkard, and very likely, on some near tomorrow, to beat his wife and murder his friend. They hold that there is no natural human buttress against evil ideas —that the minute they are presented they are translated into acts—that the girl who reads a naughty book will presently be walking the streets, inviting ruin. They hold that the safe and sound ideas are all known, and may be inculcated by clergymen and policemen—that everything else is dangerous, and ought to be put down.

This antithesis, cast into the form of a drama in the grand manner, is now to be played out before us. I am not sure what the verdict of the gallery will be, but I have some confidence about the votes of the younger spectators, and especially those who are completely literate. They will be quick to detect, I believe, the rationality of liberty; they will see that it is only common decency. They will revolt against the assumptions of its enemies. They will recognize those assumptions as false, hateful and abominable. Undeceived by the pother of the opposition, with its Bibles and its guns, they will go for liberty as the young have gone for it from times immemorable, to the gain and glory of the human race. Find me a young man who swallows the blather of the Anti-Saloon League, and I will show you a young man who is somehow sick.

H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury/February, 1929

Portrait of an Immortal

MEET GENERAL GRANT, by W. E. Woodward. New York: Horace Liveright.

THE dreadful title of this book is not the least of its felicities. If they had been saying such things in his day it seems unquestionable that Grant would have said, “Meet the wife.” He was precisely that sort of man. His imagination was the imagination of a respectable hay and feed dealer, and his virtues, such as they were, were indistinguishable from those of a police sergeant. Mr. Woodward, trying to be just to him, not infrequently gives him far more than he deserves. He was not, in point of fact, a man of any great competence, even as a soldier. All the major strategy of the war, including the final advance on Richmond, was planned by other men, notably Sherman. He was a ham as a tactician, and habitually wasted his men. He was even a poor judge of other generals, as witness his admiration for Sheridan and his almost unbelievable under-rating of Thomas and Meade. If he won battles, it was because he had the larger battalions, and favored the primitive device of heaving them into action, callously, relentlessly, cruelly, appallingly.

Thinking was always painful to Grant, and so he never did any of it if he could help it. He had a vague distaste for war, and dreamed somewhat boozily of a day when it would be no more. But that distaste never stayed his slaughters; it only made him keep away from the wounded. He had no coherent ideas on any subject, and changed his so-called opinions overnight, and for no reason at all. He entered the war simply because he needed a job, and fought his way through it without any apparent belief in its purposes. His wife was a slaveholder to the end. At Appomattox he showed a magnanimity that yet thrills schoolboys, but before he became President he went over to the Radical Republicans, and was largely to blame for the worst horrors of Reconstruction. His belief in rogues was cogenital, touching and unlimited. He filled Washington with them, and defended them against honest men, even in the face of plain proofs of their villainy. Retired to private life at last, he sought out the worst scoundrel of them all, gave the fellow control of his whole modest fortune, and went down to inglorious bankruptcy with him. The jail gates, that time, were uncomfortably close; if Grant had not been Grant he would have at least gone on trial. But he was completely innocent. He was too stupid to be anything else.

Mr. Woodward, as I have said, is very generous to him. There is, on almost every page of this book, an obvious effort to make the best of his good impulses, and to gloss over his colossal imbecilities. Sometimes the thing comes close to special pleading: Freud and the unconscious have to be hauled in to make out a plausible case. There is some excuse for that attitude, for Grant, for all his faults and follies, was at least full of honest intentions. Like Almayer, he always wanted to do the right thing. The trouble with him was that he could seldom find out what it was. Once he had got beyond a few elemental ideas, his brain refused to function. Thereafter he operated by hunches, some of them good ones, but others almost idiotic. Commanding his vast armies in the field, he wandered around like a stranger, shabby, uncommunicative and only defectively respected. In the White House he was a primeval Harding, without either the diamond scarf-pin or the cutie hiding in the umbrella closet. He tried, in his dour, bashful way, to be a good fellow. There was no flummery about him. He had no false dignity. But he was the easiest mark ever heard of. It was possible to put anything over on him, however fantastic. Now and then, by a flash of what must be called, I suppose, insight, he penetrated the impostures which surrounded him, and struck out in his Berserker way for common decency. But that was not often. His eight years were scarlet with scandal. He had a Teapot Dome on his hands once a month.

Mr. Woodward’s portrait, despite its mercies, is an extraordinarily brilliant one. The military automaton of the ‘ ‘Memoirs” and the noble phrase-maker of the schoolbooks disappears, and there emerges a living and breathing man, simple-minded, more than a little bewildered, and infinitely pathetic. Grant went to the high pinnacles of glory, but he also plunged down the black steeps of woe. I don’t think that his life was a happy one, even as happiness is counted among such primitive organisms. He was miserable as a boy, he was miserable at West Point, and he was miserable in the old army. The Mexican War revolted him, and he took to drink and lost his commission. For years he faced actual want. The Civil War brought him little satisfaction, save for a moment at the end. He was neglected in its early days in a manner that was wormwood to him, and after luck brought him opportunity he was surrounded by hostile intrigue. He made costly and egregious blunders, notably at Shiloh and Cold Harbor; he knew the sting of professional sneers; he quailed before Lee’s sardonic eye. His eight years in the White House were years of tribulation and humiliation. His wife was ill-favored; his only daughter biological and in-law, harassed and exploited him. He died almost penniless, protesting that he could no longer trust a soul. He passed out in gusts of intolerable pain. It is hard to imagine harder lines.

If, in this chronicle, he sometimes recedes into the background, and seems no more than a bystander at the show, then it is because he was often that in life. Other men had a way of running him—John A. Rawlins during the war, Hamilton Fish at Washington, Ferdinand Ward afterward. His relations to the first-named are discussed in one of Mr. Woodward’s most interesting chapters. Rawlins was the Grant family lawyer at Galena, and had no military experience when the war began. Grant made him his brigade adjutant, and thereafter submitted docilely to his domination. Rawlins was a natural pedagogue, a sort of schoolma’am with a beard. He supervised and limited Grant’s guzzling; he edited Grant’s orders; he made and unmade all other subordinates. “I have heard him curse at Grant,” said Charles A. Dana, “when, according to his judgment, the general was doing something that he thought he had better not do. . . . Without him Grant would have not been the same man.” Gossip in the army went even further; it credited Rawlins with actually sharing command. “The two together,” said James H. Wilson, “constituted a military character of great simplicity, force and singleness of purpose, which has passed into history under the name of Grant.”

Rawlins gets his due in Mr. Woodward’s story, and so do many of the other great characters of the time, most of them already grown fabulous. The book shows hard study and great shrewdness. It would be hard to surpass, for sound sense, the analysis of Andrew Johnson’s vexed and murky personality in the twenty-fourth chapter, or the picture of the Negro freedman which follows it. Here is not only good writing; here is also a highly enlightened point of view. Mr. Woodward is a man of Southern birth and grew up in the midst of the Confederate katzen jammer, but there is no sign of it in his narrative. He is magnificently impartial. The fustian of the Federal patrioteers does not deceive him, but neither is he deceived by the blather of their opponents. He knows how to be amusing without departing from the strict letter of history. He conceals erudition beneath a charming manner. He has written a biography of great merit. It more than fulfills the promise of his “Washington.”

The Origin of Life

WHAT IS LIFE? by Augusta Gaskell.  Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas.

WHO Mrs. Gaskell may be I don’t know. In an introduction to her book Dr. Karl T. Compton, professor of physics at Princeton, certifies that “her discussion of modern atomic physics is accurate, well balanced and worth reading for its own sake,” and in another introduction Dr. Raymond Pearl, director of the Institute of Biology at the Johns Hopkins, lets it be known (somewhat more cautiously) that her ‘ ‘discussions of biological problems, particularly that of evolution, have a refreshing novelty and shrewdness which gives them a value by no means negligible.” But “Who’s Who in America” is silent about her, and I can find no news of her in any other reference book, nor do my spies bring in anything more, save the vague report that she lives somewhere in New Jersey.

Whatever may be said against her theory of the origin and nature of life, it at least has two merits: it posits no force outside the range of atomic physics, and its truth or falsity may be conceivably determined (I say conceivably, not probably) by experiment. Life, as she sees it, is born of the meeting of “a hydrogen ion . . . and an atom or ion of electropositive tendency, crowded together and with their domains overlapping.” What follows is complicated, but the end is a union of a positive electron and a negative electron—”not as a hydrogen atom, but as a new and different unit.” This unit is the basis of life. “It cannot enter chemical combinations, nor become a charge on an atom,” but it can “capture both negative and positive electrons and build up a new structure.” And then:

This new unit that can neither become a charge on an atom nor enter into chemical combination with atoms becomes an intraatomic quantity, by reason of its peculiar constitution, its erratic path, and its peculiar electromagnetic properties. There has then been formed a dual system, a system that is made up of two systems, one of which is material, built up of atoms; the other of which is immaterial, that is, not patterned after the manner of the chemical elements. The immaterial system is intraatomic, and is the determining system: it organizes the material system.

As I hint, it is possible that the atomic physicists, who now talk very confidently about the paths of electrons and even draw diagrams of them, may be able to determine experimentally whether this unnatural marriage of electrons really takes place, but I confess that I’d not like to take the contract to do it, nor even engage myself to read the report of him who does. The physicists have swallowed metaphysics and launch gaily into the highest realms of fancy; their tracts become as hard to read as the monographs of astrologers and theologians. But Mrs. Gaskell does not wait for them. Having set forth her theory, she proceeds to run down its implications. Obviously, one of them is that the creation of life is going on all the time—that new protoplasm is being formed all about us, where the conditions are favorable for electrons to run amuck. Such conditions, the author believes, are to be found in what the surgeons call pre-cancerous lesions. Here there is “indifferent cell material that constitutes a solution of great chemical complexity and contains free ions, and in which a critical concentration of ions develops.” The result is a neoplasm. But just how the new “intraatomic system” organizes itself into the highly complicated cells which pathologists recognize—this is not explained.

However, Mrs. Gaskell does not seem to believe that the world’s population of higher organisms is reinforced by any such process. The existing species, she says, do not belong to series that are still evolving, but represent series that have reached the limit of their evolution. All of them were started in the remote past, and each was foreordained, from the beginning, to stop at a certain point. Every one of them, it appears, reached that point long ago, and today we have only completed series. The chimpanzee cannot hope to evolve into a Tennessee Baptist. He must remain a chimpanzee forever, as the Baptist must remain a Baptist. You and I are completed works—botched but completed.

Mrs. Gaskell’s tome is not easy reading. The first part of it, a miniature treatise on atomic physics, may seem simple to Professor Compton, but I confess that it strained my seams very badly. However, the book may be mastered by diligence. It is full of cocksure and saucy stuff, but it is also full of genuine novelty. The author has made a wholly new approach to an old problem. Whether or not the physicists will ever be able to put her theory to the test of experiment I don’t know. They talk very cheerfully of splitting atoms and heaving electrons about, but I suspect that much of it is mere talk. But if they can really do such things, then Mrs. Gaskell shows them how to do it to some purpose. If she is right, the day it is proved will be a sad day for Genesis.

A Good Man Gone Wrong

DOOMED SHIP, by Judd Gray. New York: Horace Liveright.

MR. GRAY went to the chair in Sing Sing, on January 11, 1928, for his share in the butchery of Mrs. Ruth Snyder’s husband. The present book was composed in his last days, and appears with the imprimatur of his devoted sister. From end to end of it he protests pathetically that he was, at heart, a good man. I believe him. The fact, indeed, is spread all over his singularly naive and touching record. He emerges from it as the almost perfect model of the Y. M. C. A. alumnus, the conscientious husband and father, the Christian businessman, the virtuous and God-fearing Americano. It was his very virtue, festering within him, that brought him to his appalling doom. Another and more wicked man, caught in the net of La Snyder, would have wriggled out and gone on his way, scarcely pausing to thank God for the fun and the escape. But once poor Judd had yielded to her brummagem seductions, he was done for and he knew it. Touched by sin, he shriveled like a worm on a hot stove. From the first exchange of wayward glances to the final agony in the chair the way was straight and inevitable.

All this sounds like paradox, but I offer it seriously, and as a psychologist of high gifts. What finished the man was not his banal adultery with his suburban sweetie, but his swift and overwhelming conviction that it was mortal sin. The adultery itself was simply in bad taste: it was, perhaps, something to be ashamed of, as stealing a taxi driver’s false teeth would be something to be ashamed of, but it was no more. Elks and Shriners do worse every day, and suffer only transient qualms. But to Gray, with his Presbyterian upbringing and his idealistic view of the corset business, the slip was a catastrophe, a calamity. He left his tawdry partner in a daze, marveling that there could be so much sin in the world, and no belch of fire from Hell to stop it. Thereafter his demoralization proceeded from step to step as inexorably and as beautifully as a case of Bright’s disease. The woman horrified him, but his very horror became a kind of fascination. He resorted to her as a dry United States Senator resorts to the jug, protestingly, tremblingly and helplessly. In his blinking eyes she became an amalgam of all the Loreleis, with the Rum Demon peeping over her shoulder. Whatever she ordered him to do he did at once, like a man stupified by some diabolical drug. When, in the end, she ordered him to assassinate her oaf of a husband, he proceeded to the business almost automatically, wondering to the last instant why he obeyed and yet no more able to resist than he was able, on the day of retribution, to resist his 2,000 volts.

In his narrative he makes much of this helplessness, and speculates somewhat heavily upon its cause. That cause, as I hint, is clear enough: he was a sincere Presbyterian, a good man. What is the chief mark of such a good man? That he cannot differentiate rationally between sin and sin—that a gnat gags him as badly as a camel. One hears members of the fraternity arguing quite seriously that bootleggers ought to be hanged—that it is quite as bad to supply the wine for a wedding feast as it is to burn down an orphan asylum. One hears of others chasing fancy women with the fury appropriate to mad dogs, and damning Darwin as a man as bad as Jack the Ripper. So with poor Gray. His initial sin shocked him so vastly that he could think of himself thereafter only as a sinner unspeakable and incorrigible. In his eyes the step from adultery to murder was as natural and inevitable as the step from the cocktail-shaker to the gutter in the eyes of a Methodist bishop. He was rather astonished, indeed, that he didn’t beat his wife and embezzle his employers’ funds. Once the conviction of sin had seized him he was ready to go the whole hog.

He went, as a matter of record, somewhat beyond it. His crime was of the peculiarly brutal and atrocious kind that only good men commit. An Elk or a Shriner, persuaded to murder Snyder, would have done it with a certain decency. Moreover, he would have demanded a plausible provocation. But Gray, being a good man, performed the job with sickening ferocity, and without asking for any provocation at all. It was sufficient for him that he was full of sin, that God had it in for him, that he was hopelessly damned.

His crime, in fact, was a sort of public ratification of his damnation. It was his way of confessing. If he had any logical motive it was his yearning to get into Hell as soon as possible. In his book, to be sure, he speaks of Hell under the name of Heaven. But that is mere blarney, set down for the comfort of his family. He was too good a Presbyterian to have any illusions on the point: he was, in fact, an amateur theologian of very respectable attainments. He went to the chair fully expecting to be in Hell in twenty seconds.

There are some confusions in his story, and not unnaturally, for it was written mainly in the death-house and its last pages were done less than an hour before his execution. His sister has deleted certain “matter without meaning” and “occasional hysterical religious expressions,” but the narrative, we are assured by the publisher, is otherwise unmolested. It seems to me that it is a human document of immense interest and value, and that it deserves a great deal more serious study than it will probably get. Its moral is plain. Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone. Run a boy through Sunday-school and you must police him carefully all the rest of his life, for once he slips he is ready for anything.