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.

H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury/January, 1929

What Is Civilisation?

CIVILIZATION, by Clive Bell. New York: Harcourt, Brace

THE BUILDING OF CULTURES, by Roland B. Dixon. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

WHERE IS CIVILIZATION GOING? by Scott Nearing. New York: The Vanguard Press.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND MODERN LIFE, by Franz Boas. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

IN THE BEGINNING: The Origin of Civilization, by G. Elliot Smith. New York: William Morrow & Company.

POTS AND PANS: The Story of Ceramics, by H. S. Harrison. New York: William Morrow & Company.

FIRST PLAYER: The Origin of Drama, by Ivor Brown. New York: William Morrow & Company.

HOW WE GO ROUND: The Story of the Dance, by Evelyn Sharp. New York: William Morrow & Company.

ALL of these books deal with the complicated and mysterious thing called civilization. Dr. Dixon and Dr. Smith speculate upon its origins; Messrs. Brown, Harrison and Sharp discuss the beginnings of some of its more familiar manifestations; Mr. Bell tries to define what it is today; Dr. Boas shows how a study of its past history throws light upon its present problems; and Dr. Nearing essays to predict its probable course hereafter. The subject is of the first importance. Nothing, indeed, could be more important, not even the great question posited by religion. That question will never be answered rationally; monkeying with it is doomed to be the specialty, in the future as in the past, of mountebanks. But the problems presented by man’s life on this earth may be solved, in large part, by observation and reason, and to the business of solving them many men of high intelligence have applied themselves. In these volumes some of the fruits of that labor are set forth.

Dr. Dixon’s “The Building of Cultures” is an admirable summary of all that is known about early cultural history. After a discussion of the influence of environment upon man and of the forces underlying discovery and invention, he proceeds to a consideration of the diffusion of cultural traits, and is presently in the midst of an elaborate and devastatingly effective refutation of the diffusionist extremists. These extremists, who are led, at least in England, by another of the authors under review, Dr. G. Elliot Smith, hold that practically all the primary elements of civilization originated in one place, and spread thence to the rest of the world. Dr. Smith believes that this cultural Garden of Eden was ancient Egypt, and in “In the Beginning” he presents his evidence. It is shaky in itself, as a critical reading of his second chapter will sufficiently demonstrate; under Dr. Dixon’s sturdy blows it is completely demolished. It becomes, indeed, ridiculous—so much so that Dr. Dixon has to add some proof that diffusion, after all, is a reality—that cultural traits do actually move from people to people, and that some of them wander very far. His book is not easy reading, but it is packed with valuable matter. In no other volume in English are the fundamental facts of anthropology set forth so completely. And in no other volume is the importance of the science better argued than in Dr. Boas’s. The Smith, Harrison, Sharp “The Beginning of Things Series,” edited by Dr. Smith, seem trivial by comparison. There is sound stuff in some of them, but their authors differ widely in authority, and most of them are damaged by the extravagant diffusionist theories of their editor.

Mr. Bell’s book is one of extraordinary interest—in fact, I have found it downright fascinating. The author is, by trade, an art critic, and his chief interest lies in the moderns who have followed Cezanne. In consequence most of his writings are full of the vague and indignant rhetoric that the contemplation of green complexions and hexagonal heads seems to draw from even the best critical minds. But in “Civilization” he so far forgets his customary muttons that he writes smoothly, clearly, and oftentimes brilliantly. He studies civilization by the case method: his exhibits are the civilizations that flourished in the Athens of Pericles, in the Florence of the Renaissance, and in the Paris of the Eighteenth Century, before the French Revolution. What had they in common? In particular, what had they in common that was indubitably civilized, and hence completely unimaginable under lower forms of culture? What did they show that we should strive for today, if, as is usually assumed, modern man really wants to be civilized? Mr. Bell’s answer is too long and complicated to be summarized in a paragraph, but parts of it may be given. It is one of the fundamental characteristics of a true civilization, he says, that it provides means for the ready exchange of ideas, and encourages the process. There must be sufficient people with time to hear them and the equipment to comprehend them, and they must be extremely tolerant of novelty. The concept of heresy, says Mr. Bell, is incompatible with civilization, and so is the concept of impropriety. But the civilized man yet had his pruderies. He cannot be impolite. He cannot be gross. He cannot be cheap and vulgar. He cannot be cocksure. Facing what he regards as error, he assaults it with all arms, but he never mistakes error for crime. He is free from deadly solemnity, and cultivates his senses as well as his mind. A society made up wholly of philosophers would not be civilized, nor one made up only of artists; there must also be charming women and good cooks. Creation is necessary; there must be an urge to progress; but appreciation is quite as needful. Perhaps the finest flower of civilization is not the creator at all, but the connoisseur. His existence presupposes economic security. It is as essential to civilization as enlightenment. A poor society cannot be wholly civilized. Mr. Bell makes much of the difference between the civilized individual and a civilized society. The former may exist anywhere, and at any time. There may be men and women hidden in Oklahoma who would be worthy, if he were alive, to consort with Beethoven. It is not only possible; it is probable. But Oklahoma is still quite uncivilized, for such persons are extremely rare there, and give no color to the communal life. The typical Oklahoman is as barbarous as an Albanian or a man of Inner Mongolia. He is almost unaware of the ideas that engage the modern world; in so far as he has heard of them he is hostile to them. He lives and dies on a low plane, pursuing sordid and ridiculous objectives and taking his reward in hoggish ways. His political behavior is that of a barbarian, and his religious notions are almost savage. Of urbanity he has no more than a traffic cop. His virtues are primitive and his vices are disgusting. It is not, of course, by examining the populace that civilizations are judged. The mob is always inferior, and even under high cultures it may be ignorant and degraded. But there can be no civilization so long as its ideas are accepted and have the force of custom. A minority must stand above it, sufficient in strength to resist its corruption. There must be freedom for the superior man—economic freedom primarily, but also personal freedom. He must be free to think what he pleases and to do what he pleases, and what he thinks and does must be the standard of the whole community, the accepted norm. The trouble in Oklahoma, as in the United States as a whole, is that the civilized minority is still at the mercy of the mob. It is not only disdained as heretical and unsafe; it is despised as immoral. One of the central aims of the laws is to curb it. It is to be lifted up to the moral level of the mob. Thus civilization has hard sledding among us. The free functioning of those capable of it is deliberately impeded. But it resists that hampering, and in the fact lies hope for the future. The big cities, at least, begin to move toward genuine civilization. They will attain to it if, when and as they throw off the yoke of the rustic Biblesearchers. Their own mobs are become disciplined and quiescent, but they still face danger from the dunghill Goths and Huns. The history of the United States during the next century will probably be a history of a successful revolt of the cities. They alone are capable of civilization. There has never been a civilized yokel.

Dr. Nearing dissents from this view. The future he envisions in “Where is Civilization Going?” is marked by a general leveling. There will be no more unproductive leisure, and no more class distinctions. The common people, having more votes than their betters, will run everything. There will be no more injustice, no more poverty, no more exploitation, no more wars. It is a pretty picture, but I find myself unconvinced by it. Slaves are probably quite as necessary to civilization as men of genius. The human race seems incapable of becoming civilized en masse. Someone must milk the cows—and milking cows and being civilized appear to be as incompatible as drinking highballs and standing on one’s head. But Dr. Nearing is not to be dismissed as a mere vapid dreamer; he is actually a highly intelligent man, and under any genuine civilization he would be better appreciated than he is in the United States. When one hears of him it is commonly to the effect that some ass of a college president has forbidden him the campus, or some gorilla of What our third-rate snivelization fails to estimate at its real worth is the resolute courage and indomitable devotion of such a man. His virtues are completely civilized ones; he is brave, independent, unselfish, urbane and enlightened. If I had a son growing up I’d want him to meet Nearing, though the whole body of doctrine that Nearing preaches seems to me to be false. There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character. Nearing has it.

Men in Cages

LIFE AND DEATH IN SING SING, by Lewis E. Lawes. Garden City, L. I.: Doubleday, Page.

CHICAGO MAY: HER STORY, by May Churchill Sharpe. New York: The Mucaulay Company.

MR. LAWES is the warden at Sing Sing and has been in the New York prison service for many years. He is a man of kindly habit, and apparently suffers greatly under the cruelties that he sees about him every day, some of which he is compelled by law to inflict. Thus, in his introduction, he sets forth his attitude toward the criminal:

I see him as a man in prison. I live with this man; I eat with him; I talk with him; I read his mail; I supervise his visits; I know what he reads; I am with him when he is sick; I know how he bears up under sorrow; I see him as he goes to his death. . . . I believe I know him and understand him as few others do.

This experience convinces Mr. Lawes that the present prison system is fundamentally vain and foolish. It does not give society sufficient protection against the incorrigible criminal, for only too often it turns him loose after a time and virtually bids him resume his felonies, and it fails to give the needed support and guidance to the offender who shows possibilities of reform. Many a discharged convict, he says, is driven into fresh crimes on his release, not because he is incurably vicious, but simply because he hasn’t money enough to turn around and find himself in what has become a strange world. He needs capital to reestablish himself, and all the state hands him is $10 and a shoddy suit of clothes. Before he can get a job the money is gone, and there is nothing left for him to do save to snatch another purse or knock off another Thom McAn shoestore. Criminals seldom have any friends who are not themselves under suspicion. They bear no letters of recommendation. All the difficulties that confront an ordinary poor man are multiplied for them, and so they tend to succumb.

The author inclines toward the reforms advocated by the New York Commission on Prison Reform and approved by Al Smith when he was Governor. These reforms contemplate taking away the determination of punishments from the judges, who are commonly mere legalistic machines and hence deficient in prudence and imagination, and putting them in the hands of a permanent body of experts. Every convict would be sent to a house of detention, and there studied by these experts. If it turned out that he was insane, he would be clapped into a lunatic asylum, and kept there until he recovered or died. If it turned out that he was simply ignorant, he would be sent to school and an effort would be made to enlighten his mind, and on his graduation a place would be found for him in the world outside, commensurate with his native gifts. And if it turned out that he was really a bad egg, and insusceptible to any kind of reform, he would go to prison and stay there for life.

This scheme has a fine plausibility, but unluckily it is full of holes, and some of them are large enough to admit a horse and cart. Where is Warden Lawes going to find his experts ? Are they to be recruited at Columbia University, like the “general experts” that Bird S. Coler once found on the New York City payroll? Or are they to be nominated by Tammany? Or are they to be got by putting want-ads in the New York Times? No such experts, I fear, really exist in the world. Even in the narrow field of psychiatry those who pretend to existence are mainly quacks, and judges and juries who believe even policemen commonly laugh at them. For the rest of the job, I suppose, psychologists would be preferred—or maybe endocrinologists. But what rational man takes any stock in either?

Thus Warden Lawes will have to go a long way before he mans his board, and an even longer way before he convinces the public that it is to be trusted to put down crime. He constantly forgets, like most penologists, that retribution is still a motive in punishment, despite all the fine talk about reforming the criminal. The plain people, facing the criminals’ gross invasion of their security and trembling with fear, demand katharsis. They want to see him sweat and suffer. They feel cheated and uneasy until he is either broken or done to death. Why were nine out of ten New Yorkers so hotly in favor of the execution of Ruth Snyder and her dupe, poor Mr. Gray? Simply because the crime they stood guilty of was so inexcusable, so cold-blooded and so intolerably brutal that the public horror of it could be appeased only by drastic and ferocious measures. Sending them to prison seemed inadequate and unsatisfying, and with sound logic. To be sure, putting them to death was unpleasant to Mr. Lawes personally, but that was no argument against it. So is the office of the garbage-man unpleasant, and that of the proctologist, and that of the butcher, and that of the Federal judge under Prohibition. But society pays these men for doing what they do, and, until human nature is greatly changed, it will pay men for doing what Mr. Lawes does.

Like most sentimentalists, he frequently permits his theories to run away with his facts. “Have you ever heard,” he demands, “of a murder committed by a released murderer?” The answer is yes. I have heard of more than one. Not long ago, in Maryland Irredenta, where old fashioned notions prevail and murderers are still commonly put to death, one was foolishly released after serving an inadequate term, and committed another murder within six weeks. Two years ago, in the same ancient Commonwealth, I had the honor of attending the bandit Whittemore in his last moments: he had committed two murders, and maybe five or six, before he was brought to the rope at last. Six months ago two of his old colleagues in assassination, after escaping the noose once, were belatedly stretched for resuming their art. Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of. Life in Maryland is measurably safer since Whittemore and his friends were converted into angels. If they were alive today they would be slaughtering still, and if not outside prison walls, then within them. All three, in fact, were hanged for killing guards.

Mr. Lawes offers, as one of his arguments against capital punishment, that those who suffer it are frequently the victims of chance. Two bandits, let us say, attempt hold-ups, and each fires at his victim. One hits his man in the heart and goes to the chair. The other wings him in the arm and escapes with four years. But this is not an argument against capital punishment: it is simply proof that many criminals escape who ought to be executed at once, as security for the morrow. What reason, indeed, is there for letting any gunman live? If society has any right to interfere with criminals at all, then surely it has a right to dispatch that one who grounds his professional activity upon the axiom that life is worthless. The fact that he misses his victim’s heart is nothing; the only essential point is that he aimed at it.

The concrete felon, of course, is often an appealing fellow. The chances he takes give him a romantic aspect, and he not infrequently argues for himself very ingratiatingly. I confess that I have never met a criminal without developing a certain sympathy for him, and making some sort of effort to have his punishment ameliorated. At the present moment I have at least ten such enterprises under way. But what I feel about men I have come to know, and what Warden Lawes thinks about men he has dined with—this is not material evidence in the case of the criminal vs. society. Even Prohibition agents have their friends and are respected by their fellow Hoover men, especially if they are liberal with pre-war goods. But the fact remains that Prohibition agents and bandits, burglars and kidnapers, pickpockets and murderers, make their livings in ways that present an intolerable menace to the rest of us, and that they have no reasonable ground for complaint when our servants lay them by the heels and use them brutally. They set the rules of the game; we don’t. They take the chances. They are no more forced into crime than men are forced into aviation.

The punishments that we mete out to them, true enough, are often stupid, and even idiotic. It is a poor thing to lock men in cages like animals, and keep them there for long years, breaking their spirits and making them hopeless and useless. I have frequently advocated cleaner and more rational devices, that would dissuade them from crime or make them incapable of it, and yet leave free play for their courage and enterprise in useful fields, e.g., flogging for petty robbers and thieves, the amputation of the right forefinger for pickpockets, the pillory for such offenders as the Hon. Mr. Fall, the ducking-stool for Methodist bishops, deportation to the Dry Tortugas for Prohibition agents, and so on. In Chicago May’s instructive volume of reminiscences she says that one of her old associates, enraged against her for some private offense, threatened to disfigure her face, and so ruin her business as a blackmailer and prostitute. The fellow had sense. It would have stopped her far more effectively than her ten years in a barbarous English prison. When she got out at last she resumed her practice instantly. Now she has given up shaking down suckers and gone to work for Hearst. Beauty is not necessary in her new profession. She might have entered it years ago if her friend had carried out his threat.

Such punishments were once in vogue, and worked admirably. They not only gave society the katharsis that it demanded; they also reformed many criminals. But sentimentalism made war upon them, and, with characteristic imbecility, substituted the slow and irrational torture of imprisonment. Today every town in Christendom has a prison, and all of them are bulging. At least half of their inmates, on being turned loose, return to crime. But the sentimentalists would not consent to their abolition in favor of logical and effective punishments. They pity the criminal far too much to do anything sensible about him, either for his benefit or for that of society. The best they can think of is to convert him into a laboratory animal, and expose him to the experimentation of quacks.

The Nine Against Liberty

LOSING LIBERTY JUDICIALLY, by Thomas James Norton. New York: The Macmillan Company.

MR. NORTON is a railway lawyer in Chicago, and the author of a well-known work upon the Constitution. In the present volume he examines at length the process whereby the guarantees of that ill-starred instrument, and especially of the first ten amendments thereof, have been done to death by judicial interpretation. At the moment, as everyone knows, the Bill of Rights is on its last legs. Occasionally, as if stricken in conscience, the Supreme Court reaffirms some provision of it, but in the main it is now null and void. A lawyer who went into court protesting that his client’s right to a jury trial had been invaded, or his right to a reasonable security in his person and habitation, would be laughed at by his brethren of the bar. There is a decision vacating almost every such right. Step by step, at first cautiously but of late boldly, the learned justices have found reasons to sustain the wholesale destruction, first of individual rights, and then of State rights. Today the once free American citizen is a mere subject. Congress is at liberty to do almost anything it pleases to him, and what Congress is afraid or ashamed to do is done gaily by the prehensile bureaucrats of the executive arm.

Mr. Norton traces this gradual destruction of the Constitution at great length, and with much learning. Most of the assaults originated, not in the Federal courts, but in the State courts, especially of the Middle West. It was Kansas and Iowa judges who invented the devices whereby the Americano is now flogged and witchridden under the Volstead Act and other such preposterous statutes. But the eminent jurists at Washington, when outraged citizens appealed to them, obligingly furnished the casuistry which converted usurpation into law. At times, I daresay, the business strained them, but always, in the end, they were equal to it. Mr. Norton gives specimens of their reasoning, often in extenso. I commend them to all students of logic. They show a truly magnificent capacity for nonsense in its higher and gaudier forms. You will search the editorials of the New York Herald Tribune for many years before you find any nobler specimens of paralogy. Thus we stand, and what is to be done about it I don’t know. At almost every step a minority of the judges has protested against the slaughter, but of late that minority seems disposed to give it up. If Al had been elected there might have been a change, for he was pledged to nominate judges who took the Bill of Rights seriously, and in a few years, what with the high judicial death-rate, he might have got robes upon a majority of that variety. But it will be hopeless under Hoover. He owes too many debts to the Anti-Saloon League and to the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals to do anything in that direction. These great moral organizations will be intensely interested in the appointment of new judges, and you may be sure that they will pass no candidate who seems to be tainted with Bolshevism, i.e., who shows any sign of believing that the Bill of Rights means what it says. The ancient liberties wither and decay. They will be revived, if they are ever revived at all, as they were born: by epidemic hemorrhage.

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/April 5, 1926

Of the arguments against capital punishment that issue from uplifters, two are commonly heard most often, to wit:

1. That hanging a man (or frying him or gassing him) is a dreadful business, degrading to those who have to do it and revolting to those who have to witness it.
2. That it is useless, for it does not deter others from the same crime.

The first of these arguments, it seems to me, is plainly too weak to need serious refutation. All it says, in brief, is that the work of the hangman is unpleasant. Granted. But suppose it is? It may be quite necessary to society for all that. There are, indeed, many other jobs that are unpleasant, and yet no one thinks of abolishing them—that of the plumber, that of the soldier, that of the garbage-man, that of the priest hearing confessions, that of the sand-hog, and so on. Moreover, what evidence is there that any actual hangman complains of his work? I have heard none. On the contrary, I have known many who delighted in their ancient art, and practiced it proudly.

In the second argument of the abolitionists there is rather more force, but even here, I believe, the ground under them is shaky. Their fundamental error consists in assuming that the whole aim of punishing criminals is to deter other (potential) criminals–that we hang or electrocute A simply in order to so alarm B that he will not kill C. This, I believe, is an assumption which confuses a part with the whole. Deterrence, obviously, is one of the aims of punishment, but it is surely not the only one. On the contrary, there are at least half a dozen, and some are probably quite as important. At least one of them, practically considered, is more important. Commonly, it is described as revenge, but revenge is really not the word for it. I borrow a better term from the late Aristotle: katharsis. Katharsis, so used, means a salubrious discharge of emotions, a healthy letting off of steam. A school-boy, disliking his teacher, deposits a tack upon the pedagogical chair; the teacher jumps and the boy laughs. This is katharsis. What I contend is that one of the prime objects of all judicial punishments is to afford the same grateful relief (a) to the immediate victims of the criminal punished, and (b) to the general body of moral and timorous men.

These persons, and particularly the first group, are concerned only indirectly with deterring other criminals. The thing they crave primarily is the satisfaction of seeing the criminal actually before them suffer as he made them suffer. What they want is the peace of mind that goes with the feeling that accounts are squared. Until they get that satisfaction they are in a state of emotional tension, and hence unhappy. The instant they get it they are comfortable. I do not argue that this yearning is noble; I simply argue that it is almost universal among human beings. In the face of injuries that are unimportant and can be borne without damage it may yield to higher impulses; that is to say, it may yield to what is called Christian charity. But when the injury is serious Christianity is adjourned, and even saints reach for their sidearms. It is plainly asking too much of human nature to expect it to conquer so natural an impulse. A keeps a store and has a bookkeeper, B. B steals $700, employs it in playing at dice or bingo, and is cleaned out. What is A to do? Let B go? If he does so he will be unable to sleep at night. The sense of injury, of injustice, of frustration, will haunt him like pruritus. So he turns B over to the police, and they hustle B to prison. Thereafter A can sleep. More, he has pleasant dreams. He pictures B chained to the wall of a dungeon a hundred feet underground, devoured by rats and scorpions. It is so agreeable that it makes him forget his $700. He has got his katharsis.

The same thing precisely takes place on a larger scale when there is a crime which destroys a whole community’s sense of security. Every law-abiding citizen feels menaced and frustrated until the criminals have been struck down–until the communal capacity to get even with them, and more than even has been dramatically demonstrated. Here, manifestly, the business of deterring others is no more than an afterthought. The main thing is to destroy the concrete scoundrels whose act has alarmed everyone and thus made everyone unhappy. Until they are brought to book that unhappiness continues; when the law has been executed upon them there is a sigh of relief. In other words, there is katharsis.

I know of no public demand for the death penalty for ordinary crimes, even for ordinary homicides. Its infliction would shock all men of normal decency of feeling. But for crimes involving the deliberate and inexcusable taking of human life, by men openly defiant of all civilized order–for such crimes it seems, to nine men out of ten, a just and proper punishment. Any lesser penalty leaves them feeling that the criminal has got the better of society–that he is free to add insult to injury by laughing. That feeling can be dissipated only by a recourse to katharsis, the invention of the aforesaid Aristotle. It is more effectively and economically achieved, as human nature now is, by wafting the criminal to realms of bliss.

The real objection to capital punishment doesn’t lie against the actual extermination of the condemned, but against our brutal American habit of putting it off so long. After all, every one of us must die soon or late, and a murderer, it must be assumed, is one who makes that sad fact the cornerstone of his metaphysic. But it is one thing to die, and quite another thing to lie for long months and even years under the shadow of death. No sane man would choose such a finish. All of us, despite the Prayer Book, long for a swift and unexpected end. Unhappily, a murderer, under the irrational American system, is tortured for what, to him, must seem a whole series of eternities. For months on end, he sits in prison while his lawyers carry on their idiotic buffoonery with writs, injunctions, mandamuses, and appeals. In order to get his money (or that of his friends) they have to feed him with hope. Now and then, by the imbecility of a judge or some trick of juridic science, they actually justify it. But let us say that, his money all gone, they finally throw up their hands. Their client is now ready for the rope or the chair. But he must still wait for months before it fetches him.

That wait, I believe, is horribly cruel. I have seen more than one man sitting in the death-house, and I don’t want to see any more. Worse, it is wholly useless. Why should he wait at all? Why not hang him the day after the last court dissipates his last hope? Why torture him as not even cannibals would torture their victims? The common answer is that he must have time to make his peace with God. But how long does that take? It may be accomplished, I believe, in two hours quite as comfortably as in two years. There are, indeed, no temporal limitations upon God. He could forgive a whole herd of murderers in a millionth of a second. More, it has been done.

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Sun/January 31, 1916

The preparedness campaign is being carried forward in a manner typically American. That is to say, it is being carried forward chiefly by rogues and mountebanks, each with something to sell. In the front rank of the patriotic host, true enough, one discerns the faces of various earnest, intelligent and even self -sacrificing men and women, but that front rank Is only one file deep. Immediately to the rear, whooping for Old Glory in gargling, terrible tones, are the fly-by-night munitions dealers with damaged ammunition to sell, and the brave, knightly War Bride stock brokers with lemons to unload, and the dealers in embalmed beef, tin armor, paper shoes and condemned muskets with juicy contracts in sight, and the immemorial caravan of professional job holders with jobs in their eyes. My Washington agent sends me strange and ludicrous tales of the late convention of patriots at Washington, a convention discreetly turned into a Roosevelt meeting by wire-pullers disguised as fire-eaters. He even tells me that the pension agents, suddenly mobilizing, lent aid with their roars—an almost unmatchable instance of democratic delicacy. The thing ended in clown-play, with two great statesmen at fisticuffs on the public sidewalk. A list of the subscribers toward the cost of the buffoonery would tickle the hyphenated kidney.

2

Whether or not the verein ostensibly behind that grand exhibition was and is the same of which one Philip Roosevelt, a kinsman and retainer of the San Juan Hindenburg, is the chief shouter I do not know, but the two have a very suspicious family resemblance. The latter bears the name of the American Defense Society (or is it League?) and such affecting altruists as the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte are among its directors. Some time ago, thinking thus to establish a neutral character for it, Cousin Philip invited the Hon. George Sylvester Viereck, the editor of the Fatherland and a quenchless snorter for the Kaiser, to become a director. But George, for all his faults, was this time too much for Philip, and in the course of a brief exchange of letters he jockeyed the latter into a plain admission that the so-called American Defense Society (or League), far from being neutrally American, was actually pro-English. On which, having accomplished his foul purpose, he formally refused to have anything to do with it.

This organization, in brief, is bogus, just as Theodore himself is bogus. It represents the guess to which he proposes to commit himself in his forthcoming guessing match with the Hon. Woodrow Wilson. That guess is that the majority of Americans, by a skillful thumping of the tub-bottom, can be aroused to the point of demanding a share in the war; a consummation obviously to the advantage of a great military candidate, a blood-stained hero, a veteran of vermilion fields. The Wilson guess is that the majority of Americans are against going into the war, but in favor of preying upon those who are already in it. The Wilson guess was better than the Roosevelt guess in 1912. Let us see what happens in 1916.

3

My own guess—if one may guess about guessing—is that Woodrow will win a second time. He always has the great advantage, in any contest with Roosevelt, of being, at bottom, a far more typical American, and hence more sympathetic to the plain people. Roosevelt, true enough, is the better quack, the better ballyho man, the better fraud, but Wilson is incomparably the better Puritan, the better moralist. His notes to various participants in the war upon their moral duties and responsibilities have plucked and shivered the deepest bass strings in the American soul. They represent, naifly and almost exactly, the American ideal of what is noble, of what is virtuous, of what is indubitably true. For your genuine American, before he is anything else—even before he is a boaster, a waster or an ignoramus—is a moralist. He delights in moral crusades, in the discovery and description of new crimes, in the unearthing and pilloring of sinners. At this sweet national science, although Roosevelt clearly shows some talent, Wilson beats him with ease. Even the notes to England, relatively polite and deprecating though they be, are vastly more solemn and indignant, and hence vastly more satisfying to native connoisseurs, than the best efforts of Roosevelt. Roosevelt is so much the clown that he got a certain fine humor into the most frantic of his Presidential denunciations–e. g., of Harriman, of nature-fakers and of race suicide. A Gallic touch was here: the fellow, an admitted mongrel, must have some French blood. But Wilson is as wholly destitute of humor as a Methodist bishop. The world, to him, is a charnel house of sin, with himself and one or two others as its only righteous and trustworthy inhabitants. . . .

I often wonder if mirth will awaken in him during his second term, when he begins receiving the delayed replies to his moral encyclicals. . . .

4

But to return to the preparedness campaign. Already it produces a copious literature, mostly either plainly dishonest or joyously idiotic. But here and there one encounters a more or less intelligent statement and discussion of the problem, for example, in the little book called “The Writing on the Wall,” by one Eric Fisher Wood. This Wood is a college youth who happened to be in Paris when the war broke out, and who seems to have seen service—just how much, I don’t know—as a messenger for Ambassador Herrick. It is rather hard to believe some of his statements as to his sources of information—for example, he says that “a staff officer of the German Army” gravely discussed with him the means by which America could be invaded!—but these, after all, are details. What remains is a very intelligent and, in the main, very temperate exposition of the difficulties that would confront the country if a first-class power struck along the Atlantic seaboard. These difficulties would be partly due, as young Mr. Wood shows, to our lack of materials of war, but they would be even more due to our lack of competent and honest leaders. While the foe was bearing down upon us, our a a it a defense would be in the hands of such stupid and shifty hollow-heads as the Hon. Josephus Daniels and such self-seeking charlatans as the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt; and before they could be cleared away and good men found for their places, the whole region east of the Alleghenles would be conquered and under tribute.

5

Young Wood prints a map, alleged to have been drawn by that strangely expansive “staff officer of the German Army,” showing just what territory a hostile invader would aim for. He would first grab the four great ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, and then strike inland for the foothills of the Alleghenles. After a short, sharp campaign he would hold a line beginning at the Chesapeake capes, running along the Potomac to its headwaters; thence proceeding to Hagerstown, Gettysburg, Harrisburg, Scranton and the Catskills to the Hudson, and thence past Albany to Lakes George and Champlain and the Canadian border. This line would be 600 miles long, about the length of the present western battle front in Europe, but it would be much easier to defend, for 385 miles of it would consist of deep rivers and lakes. Young Wood says that this line could be “held by 400,000 trained troops against any army in the world.” Thus in possession of 100,000 square miles of the United States, including the capital, the chief city, three other great ports and the homes of 25,000,000 Americans, the commander of that army could force cruel and crushing terms upon the country, including a demand even for the hides of Judge Ben B. Lindsey, the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday and the Hon. Oswald Villard Garrison. A sad picture, to be sure!

6

For the rest, young Wood’s book consists chiefly of arguments for the so-called Swiss plan of universal military service, and solemn warnings against the German plan and the Germans. So far as he establishes any intrinsic differences between the Swiss plan and the German plan, he merely manages to raise a suspicion that the former would show very serious weaknesses in war. The notion that Switzerland was spared the invasion that Belgium suffered because her army was strong enough to intimidate the invader is, of course, no more than a part of that vast sentimental hallucination which now obscures the whole preparedness question. The Swiss were spared, not because they were invincible, but simply and solely because their country, being chiefly mountainous, presented Infinitely greater natural obstacles than Belgium. Anyone who has ever traveled from Switzerland into France knows how difficult it would be to march an army down those abysmal gullies without staggering losses. For the rest, it is surely too early to say that Switzerland is absolutely secure against invasion. She could no more keep out the Germans if they decided to occupy her soil tomorrow, than the French could keep them out.

What Wood and all other pro-English tear-squeezers forget is that militarism without the military spirit is not worth much—that the fostering of the military spirit, of the delight in war for its own sake, is militarism’s chief value. A nation that is thoroughly warlike can never be conquered by any means short of actual annihilation. The stupendous achievements of the Germans in the present war—achievements so colossal that the mind can scarcely grasp them—were not made possible by the mere accumulation of materials of war, but by implanting the military spirit in the young German breast. For nearly a year past England has had a much larger supply of materials of war than Germany, and yet England is quite unable to overthrow Germany today, and the longer the war lasts the more plain and humiliating her failure will become.

7

The fear of Germany so visible in young Wood’s book, as it is in the compositions of all the newspaper-kept patriots and viewers with alarm, is acutely amusing to every American of German blood. Alas, the poor Anglo-Saxon: what a spectacle he makes of himself before the world! How cruelly he is exposed by his so evident trembling and consternation. One discerns in his present paralyzing fear of the Germans a bit of bad conscience—for he will have a hard time explaining his neutrality when the time comes—but a good deal more of mere stupidity and poltroonery. He is afraid, in brief, of what he himself regards as a shadow. On the one hand, he professes a touching faith that England will dispose of the Germans, and on the other hand, be is shaken by a dread that the Germans will be at our gates before an army of defense can be made ready, and that they will pay us up with fearful interest for our shell-making, our thinly disguised submarine building, and our other transparent chicaneries a la Josephus Daniels.

What a mess the United States would be in if her safety depended upon the intelligence and courage of the Anglo-Saxon! Observe him as he quakes in his boots and then let your native humor play about his notion that God hath chosen him to run the world, and that men of all other races, including especially Americans of German blood, should be glad and proud to absorb his Kultur. . . . He passes from history a tragic comedian. The next twenty years will see him suffer barbarities vastly worse than any his pained imagination has lately conjured up. . . .

Fortunately, the safety of the United States is not dependent upon so grotesque a chevalier. There are the Irish, there are the Scandinavians, there are the Slavs and Jews. . . . There are, beyond all, the Germans. The gorgeous procession of events in Europe has awakened their ancient race spirit, and filled them with the most intense race consciousness and race pride. They are not in favor of a militarism which is a moral parlor sport for college youths and old maids. After the present buffoons and tremblers have departed they will be heard from. . . .

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Sun/January 11, 1916

That strange mixture of scientific accuracy of statement and sentimental looseness of inference which characterizes the Vice Report as a whole, and gives to it its peculiar beauty and mellowness, is especially conspicuous in the volume entitled “The Traffic in Babies,” a tome of 229 pages, of gruesome horrors and pious platitudes all compact. On the one hand, the facts it so persuasively sets forth are of a sort to raise the hair and freeze the spine, and on the other hand the moralizing in which they are soused and embalmed is of a variety to blue the nose and roll the right-thinking eye. The missing element, of course, is pornographic interest, and herein lies the failure of the volume to engage the newspapers and inflame the Sunday-schools. It is outdone in raciness by the other four volumes, and therefore it is forgotten already. But setting aside the volume which deals with venereal disease, it is, of all the five, the most original, and painstaking, and informing, and valuable. What is true in it is newly said, and surprising, and important. What is merely “moral” may be very comfortably and tolerantly disregarded.

2.

When I say that its facts are surprising, I mean not only to laymen, but also to the great majority of physicians, including, I dare say, many denounced by the learned commissioners for disregarding them. At all events, I tried some of them, just prior to the publication of the report, on a selected half-dozen medical men, all of good education and standing, and every one of them professed incredulity. Their guesses at the death rate among foundlings ranged from 33 1-3 to 50 per cent. Not one seemed to be aware, or even to suspect, that it ran up to 80 per cent, year in and year out, and that, at certain periods and for certain classes of children, it actually touched 100 per cent. These men, true enough, were not directly connected with either of the two big local foundling asylums, but three of them were in general practice and all of thorn were more or less interested in public medicine, and so their unfamiliarity with the exact facts may he accented as typical. There is, indeed, plenty of reason for believing that Dr. Walker himself was vastly surprised when he began studying the death lists. He expected, no doubt, a slaughter, but what he found was a massacre.

I pass over the worst horrors, and briefly summarize some of these exact facts. In Institution No. 1, excluding babies whose mothers were with them and those removed in less than a month after entrance, the death rate in 1913 was 95.55 per cent! In Institution No. 2, among babies 1 month old or less on being received, the death rale was 97.50! In Institution No. 2, during the eight months between January 1 and August 30, the average life of a baby (that is, of those who eventually died) was 1 month and 14 days! In Institution No. 1, during the whole of the year, it was a few days more than two months. In 1909, in the last-mentioned place, there were no fewer than 338 deaths! And of this number 88.16 per cent, were due to bad feeding, to the lack of mother’s milk!

3.

Well, what is to be done about it? Dr. Walker, after pointing out the carelessness frequently prevailing in both institutions in the preparation of the babies’ food and in the isolation of those suffering from infectious diseases, confines himself chiefly to solemn denunciations of the persons who send babies to them, that is, of the physicians, clergymen and uplifters who recommend them to expectant mothers, and so get them trade. But to what end? Even supposing that some of these persons derive a profit from the transactions that they arrange, and that most of those who do so know exactly what they are doing and are thus arrant knaves and hypocrites, even supposing all this to be true, does it follow that their retirement, whether voluntary or forced, would produce any appreciable reduction in the death rate among foundlings?

I think not. On the contrary, it seems to me that the only effect likely to be produced by driving these itchy-palmed humanitarians out of business and closing the two institutions aforesaid would be the effect of increasing the present death rate, perhaps to a flat and invariable 100 per cent. In other words, the babies that are now sent into barracks to die so copiously of malnutrition would then die even more copiously upon doorsteps and in ash barrels, or perhaps by the direct application of lethal doses and engines. This thing, at least, such places accomplish, for all their defects: they make infanticide unnecessary, and thus rare. If they were abolished forthwith, or if the present secrecy regarding their operations, and particularly regarding the identity of their patrons, were exchanged for that “pitiless publicity” which is the moralist’s dream, servant girls with fatherless babies would go back to the ancient custom of leaving them casually in inconvenient places, thus multiplying the scandals of the town without in any sense improving its morals.

4

Obviously, it was by some such consideration of the plain facts that the more honest of the philanthropists visited by the commission’s arrived at their willingness to arrange the separation of mother and child immediately after the birth of the latter, a cruel enough business in all conscience, even disregarding the dangers to the child. To depict them as heartless ghouls, deliberately seeking a profit out of the murder of babies, is grotesquely unjust, for in the cases of most of them it is not shown that they stood to make any personal profit at all. And in the cases of many it is highly probable that they exhausted every effort to dissuade the snouter who wept upon their necks (a he-sleuth representing himself to be the father of a girl in trouble) from his purpose.

The reports of these conferences in the report, indeed, are unpleasantly fragmentary, and there is always a suggestion that something essential has been left out. Moreover, there is sometime a very plain suggestion that the snouter has doctored the story to make it more shocking. This is obviously true of the report of an interview with a social worker so well known that his identity cannot be disguised, even by the ingenious code used by the commission. This man is represented as agreeing to take $100 or $125 as a private honorarium for his services, whereas it is notorious that he collects money only for the organization with which he is connected and that he has devoted a large part of his private means to its work. He tells me that he demanded nothing whatever, but that he told the agent provocateur that any reasonable donation would be gladly received by his society, and I believe him. More, I would believe his unsupported word in the face of sworn testimony, supported by dictographs and flashlight photographs, of all the snouters and snouteuses in Christendom.

5.

I am no admirer goodness knows, of many of the rev. clergy, but I am surely not one to deny that, taking one with another, they believe in and practice a morality that is considerably closer to the austere and impossible morality that they preach than the morality practiced by any other large class of men, or by the community in general. Even my learned brethren of the Methodist persuasion, whose floutings of decency I have frequently lamented in the past, are at least a great deal more decent, year in and year out, than the average lawyer, journalist, bartender, judge, doctor or honorary pallbearer. They represent not the lowest moral thought of the community, nor even the mean, but almost the highest. No class of men could beat them in a fair match, whether under catch-as-catch-can rules or those of the late Marquis of Queensbury.

If, then, one finds (as the Vice Report alleges) that twenty-nine out of thirty Baltimore clergymen picked at random, or 96.67 per cent., give their ready assent to the separation of an unmarried mother from her child immediately after birth, then it must be obvious to any sane man that such a separation, whatever its perils to the child, is not in violation of the prevailing morality—that, in any event, it appears appreciably less immoral than any readily imaginable alternative. This being the case, it is idle for Dr. Walker to shed tears over what goes on in foundling asylums. For good or for evil, that business is condoned by the mores of our place and time, just as many another dangerous and dirty thing—e.g., yellow journalism, snoutery, cornet-playing—is condoned. Rare men like Dr. Walker and myself, whose morality makes even that of a bishop seem licentious, may sorrowfully deplore the fact, but it does us no good to blubber over it, and it surely gets us nowhere to denounce the honest men who accept it and try to make the best of it.

6

What, then, is to be done about it? How cut down the present vast butchery of the newly born? Two ways suggest themselves, the one medical and the other moral. The first involves so great an improvement in nursing, and particularly in the concoction of artificial infant foods, that the baby in a foundling’s crib will have, to all intents and purposes, the same chances of life as the baby at its mother’s breast. At the moment the former dies nine times out of ten, whereas the latter dies but one time out of ten; but this ratio is by no means inevitable, nor even invariable today. The science of pediatrics is still at its beginning, but already it shows the way toward a great revolution in feeding. Perhaps the time will come when a baby fed artificially will be, not only as well off as a baby at the breast, but even better off. That, indeed, is not merely a possibility, it is a strong probability, for the ways of nature, particularly under civilization, are anything but perfect, and it is only a lingering theological superstition that makes us blind to the fact that her handiwork is often a sorry botch. The feeding of babies, as managed by nature, is so far a good deal better than the feeding of babies as managed by the doctors, but it is surely not as satisfactory as the feeding of adults by first-rate cooks, for a large number of babies die every year of their mother’s milk, and the charitable are constantly besought to save them. Maybe the day is not far distant when the way to favor and insure a baby will be to take it away from its mother and put it in a foundling asylum. If that day ever comes, then all the present causes and excuses for Dr. Walker’s indignation will fade away, and his report will lose all save academic interest.

7.

The moral change that I have alluded to is a possible change in our present barbarous attitude toward the unmarried mother. Nothing could be more cruel than the way she is now treated by society, and yet nothing could be plainer than the fact that her offense against it is purely artificial, and not only frowned upon by nature, but even desperately and irresistibly encouraged. The very worst that can be honestly said of a girl of 17 or 18 with an illegitimate child is that she has been foolish and unlucky, and yet society treats her with the most fearful rigors, and it is only the blest dullness of conscience of such persona as Dr. Walker denounces that ameliorates her lot in the slightest. To argue that she should keep her child will remain idiotic just so long as her public possession of it disqualifies her for all decent associations, and even for a respectable livelihood. The thing to do, if there is any actual desire abroad to save the babies now so cheerfully batted into Heaven, will be to make it not only possible, but also comfortable and profitable for their mothers to keep them and nurse them.

How? God knows! Maybe, in truth, the thing is unimaginable. Maybe the theological prejudice against the unmarried mother is too strong to be overcome. Maybe the odium she bears is inevitable demanded by the welfare of society. I’m sure I don’t know. But this I do know: that it is vain to denounce poor girls for farming out their fatherless infants so long as the social punishment for acknowledging and keeping them is worse than the penalty for robbing a bank. And it is vain, too, to howl down the foundling asylum so long as its only alternative is the ash can.

8

But meanwhile, it is good to know exactly how we stand, and exactly what we are doing. The greatest difficulty in the way of solving all such social problems is that they are approached as a rule in the light of insufficient knowledge. On this one, at least, Dr. Walker has thrown a very brilliant beam, and the facts revealed will well repay prolonged and sober consideration. I say facts, not opinions. Every opinion expressed in this report, even including the opinion that abortion is invariably wrong, has been attacked at some time or other by some man or woman of undoubted intelligence and good intent. This is always the defect in moralizing: it never gets us anywhere. But the discovery of a new fact always helps us toward the ultimate truth, however little; and in this report Dr. Walker has discovered and displayed a large number of novel and highly important facts.

Westbrook Pegler

The Weekly Guard (Council Grove, KS)/October 20, 1916

by J.W. Pegler

London, Oct. 17. (By Mail) Becoming an inmate of London an American has to take the police deep into his confidence. The searchlight of suspicion goes into his soul, probing its utmost recesses for possible pro-German sentiments.

He tells them whence he came and why and how long he has stay; he gives his ideas on religion, beer and the Freudian theory. If he is wearing a four-in-hand tie and the officer leans to bows he stands a good chance of being investigated further.

On the other mitt, if the inspector’s dyspepsia happens to be off watch, maybe the arrival is passed.

The first session of the third degree is staged in Liverpool when the ship warps up to the dock. Stewards go up and down the decks shooting the low-lived passengers into the roped-off part of the dining saloon. Uniformed gentlemen appear at the exits barring the way and the officers take their places at tables near each door, with long registration forms on which to enter the arrival.

Each passenger is given a number but the inspector gets it back before the official razooing is over.

A free-born, star-spangled reporter from Dallas was a typical victim before being suffered to land in the gloomy old burg.

A man called his number, the erstwhile passenger stepped forward with a deep genuflection and weighty misgivings. He showed his hand, a passport, and some kindred documents. The inspector showed nothing but suspicion.

“Ever been in Europe before?” asked the official.

“Never.”

“Never?”

“No, not ever.”

“Then, why are you coming here now?”

“To work.”

“Work?”

“Yes, work.”

“When were in Europe last?”

“I was never in Europe last.”

“Not last?”

“Yes, not last.”

This is very adroit cross-examination, sure to trap anyone trying to slip anything over.

The inspector looks the inspectee square in the eye while he’s talking, seeming to say “come out from behind that bush, I see you.”

Then he passes the candidate or sends him back to New York on the same ship.

Except for a few distinctive wrinkles of inquiry the London police duplicate the process. They want to know where you are going to live and how long and why you chose that place. And you’d better tell them. It all goes down in the book in the closest system of surveillance in the world.

With his documents the immigrant is free, not as the birds of the air but with the allowed freedom of a Iifer in an honor camp. He may roam the streets in comparative safety, showing his papers whenever he’s tackled by recruiting agents.

That word “comparative”—that’s the right word, in a place where the traffic rules were designed by a southpaw.

In London taxis and buses, big, grunting “caterpillars” locomotives and push-carts go prowling along the left-hand curbs. The party from Denver has fifty hair-raising jumps a day to avoid being bumped in the radiator, until he gets used to the game.

By that time he is doubly protected. He has crawled into an English suit, with cylindrical pants and cloth-covered buttons, which feels like a load of coal; he doesn’t brush his hat anymore and wears a half inch collar nine sizes too large for his 14 and 3-4 neck; he smokes a hay burner and locks like a native.

It is contrary to public policy to run over natives.

This is the process of busting in.

Westbrook Pegler

Walnut Valley Times (El Dorado, KS)/November 3, 1916

By J.W. Pegler

United Press Correspondent

London, Sept. 28. (By Mail.) It took a man from Chicago to see the way to distinction in London. His distinction is doubtful but nevertheless he is the only man in London afraid of Zeppelin bombs or the only man who isn’t a liar.

He never saw one in passive or active mood, and when he heard them recently his respect increased by several parasangs in one instantaneous bound.

He has no desire to quarrel with 500 pounds of cordite and scrap-iron. He doesn’t even want to argue with it.

He doesn’t want a darn thing to do with a Zeppelin bomb!

When Field Marshal Lord French issues a communiqué late at night saying “Zeppelins raided East Coast areas tonight and were engaged by our anti-aircraft guns and aeroplanes” the gent from Buena Park takes an intense interest in the location of subway stations.

If the communiqué adds “several bombs were dropped without military damage; the raid is progressing” our hero begins to feel canaries scampering up and down his spine.

Lord French did issue one of those nonchalant statements a few nights ago. The distinguished party sat at his desk on the night trick, handling news to New York and other points West. He had never been through a Zeppelin raid. He wondered what they really were like but of course he wouldn’t insist on a demonstration just for the sake of learning. Oh, no; the Zeppelins needn’t bother on his account.

The building is an old one with massive doors and long catacomb halls in which a footfall sounds like the report of a gun.

The news ticker before him drolled off routine news. Ho hum! It was a dull night; if something would only happen to make a story for the cable.

Even the ticker went silent. An hour passed. Gee, it was dull. The Chicagoan picked up that communiqué. “The raid is progressing.”

Suddenly the ticker had a spasm of coughing; it sputtered and jiggled and the type-roller made a few tentative jabs at the tape, threatening to print something.

Then it came.

“The special constables of the London District have been ordered to report to their stations at once,” said the ticker.

The canaries got busy playing tag, scampering with icy little feet up and down a liberal length of vertebrae.

Over near the black-mouthed fireplace the corpulent cable operator dozed in a chair. Maybe he would like to know about it; not that anyone wanted comforting words from a veteran of many raids but just maybe he would like to know.

The man afraid of Zeppelin bombs nudged him into wakefulness and handed him the slip off the ticker.

“They’ll probably come to London then,” he said, sleepily. “They’re hell—that’s what they are! Plain hell. I have been in a lot of raids and once a bomb dropped a block away from me.”

“ ’S that so? What did it do to you?” casually.

“Knocked me clean over. Those bombs are strong; zz-izz-snau-au-xx.” He was asleep again.

Somewhere way down the long hall a door slammed and the Zeppelin rookie looked around. It was only a door slamming. Pretty soon the slammer re-entered his room and the door banged again.

Five minutes later a gun boomed. There was no door about that. Like the flowers of spring the Zeps were here.

Splitting a crack in the atmosphere, the operator zipped down the hall and tumbled down the stairs three at a bound. The man afraid of Zeps made the basement in 15 minutes less than nothing flat, but found the cable operator there before him.

“I’m not afraid of those things but it’s best to be downstairs when they’re around.”

Boom-boo-oom! Boom-boo-oom!

The party was getting very rough.

A young fellow came through the basement corridor. He was so cold in the night air that his teeth chattered like castenets. He wasn’t afraid either.

The Zeppelins seemed to be keeping away from the main stem of London so the trio went into the street.

Out north the sky was afire and everywhere stars were bursting a deafening boom. A Zeppelin was framed in the crisscrossing lightshafts of half a dozen stations.

The booming died out. The Zeppelin had disappeared and one had been brought to earth.

And there is no contempt for the bombs.

Westbrook Pegler

Evening Missourian/September 19, 1916

One-Time Burglar Enlists Under Assumed Name and Pays with Life

KILLS A GUN CREW

Disciplined for Roughness Then Commended–He Dies a Hero

BY J. W. PEGLER

(United Press Staff Correspondent)

LONDON, Sept. 19. (By Mail) An ex-convict, veteran inmate of British prisons, today is mourned by his regiment and Scotland Yard alike as one of England’s war heroes. With a list of convictions behind his name he lied his way into the army, won the Victoria Cross and finally made the great atonement during the Big Push. The story was told here today.

As a tribute to the burglar-hero the War Office is shielding his name, but Scotland Yard remembers him of old. His bunkies in France recall him as a hollow cheeked man, slightly stooped, who took life and death as lightly as he did the prison sentences imposed from time to time by glowering judges. He had no relatives; his only friends, who took part in his forays against the law, are still in the game of cracking safes and evading arrest. Therefore his medal will become one of the treasurer of a crack regiment of fighters.

Goes Direct to Front From Prison

The dead Tommy had just been released from prison when the war broke out.

“Shaving water at nine,” he said with a grin as the turnkey slammed the door behind him the night before his release. “I’m leaving early for the front.”

“You’ll be back again in a month,” growled the case-hardened warden as he switched off the lights in the tier.

But the convict shed his name and police record with the prison greys and eased by a lax recruiting officer.

In a few months he was ankle deep in the icy slush of the trenches, sniping through a loophole and running-in with his officers for taking rash chances. He was used to taking chances and couldn’t see why they didn’t go over the parapet and mix it with the Germans.

He Kills an Entire Gun Crew

At last his opportunity came. The battalion went over with a howl and the burglar-Tommy yelled with glee as he ran firing his rifle from the hip. In the excitement of the fight he became separated from the battalion. A few yards away a German machine gun crew in a pit was pouring death into the charging ranks. Tommy ran to the brink of the pit and killed the crew.

When the lines were re-formed he was first disciplined for disobeying orders—he shouldn’t have gone astray—and then commended for his daring. Tommy merely smiled. Shortly later, he received the Victoria Cross and a furlough. The London police shook hands with him and bought him cigarettes.

Even a Detective Commends Him

Tommy went back to France and went over the parapets again in the Big Push. A big shell killed him.

“He was a real enthusiast,” said a detective who used to round up the dead hero in the old days. “He never went after a little job when we had dealings with him and he played the game to a finish in war.”

Westbrook Pegler

Knoxville News-Sentinel/May 2, 1942

NEW YORK May 1— Some of our best minds have been toying with a great brotherhood of peoples under a rule of justice to be enforced, of course, by us and our partners in the role of military victors and I would like to throw in my opinion that they are either crazy or just being politicians. If our side wins the war, Russia will plan the peace of the European continent, and on the basis of all Russia’s past performances we can confidently assume that in Germany it will be a peace not much different from that which Hitler has imposed on Poland. Russia will not be asking our advice or permission any more than she is consulting us now in the conduct of the war and our own people will pick up their marbles and come on home to be more nationalistic than ever but very militaristic, too.

As a nation we simply aren’t inclined to world brotherhood. We are strictly loners as we demonstrated after the last war when we turned our backs on Europe and Woodrow Wilson. Notwithstanding whatever it was that Mrs. Roosevelt said about what the American fighting men did when the other war was over, it was the whole American people who renounced Europe. The American Legion had very little influence except in lobbying up pensions and the bonus and annoying people with riotous goings-on at the national conventions.

Will Like Being Tough

THE people were fed up on “Europe’s endless wars” as the phrase went but made the mistake of rejecting Wilson’s alternative stated over and over in his dying effort to swing us into his dream league. The alternative was that we must become a nation in arms with more or less universal compulsory military service. We turned down his league because we felt sure that we always would be running to a hen-house fire in the Balkans with a leaky hose and a celluloid ladder, but we also got plastered on jake and jumpsteady and, as drunks will, thought we could lick any half-dozen you-know-whats in the house with no more training than a haircut and a shave.

In all this time our nationalism hasn’t diminished a tenth of a degree, but we surely have discovered in the last couple of years that we can learn to shoot and march and fly as well as anyone else when we put our mind to it, and I think we are going to enjoy the feel of being tough so much that we will keep in training indefinitely with plenty of divisions, planes, ships and war industry.

Furthermore we will have to keep tough because if our side wins that means Russia wins and there is a nation with no friends, brothers, or confidants, a mysterious, mighty giant who will be shoving Communism all over the place. If we can learn to be as single-minded and selfish as Russia about our national safety we will do very well, and we certainly should try to learn to keep our secrets about inventions, methods, supplies, capacities and so forth because Russia and Germany did that while we were showing off our toys with the vain silly pride of little kids.

Won’t Work Both Ways

ONE of our high aviation officers was saying recently that when those Russians flew over to drop in on us a few years ago and we showed them all our stuff which wasn’t much in bulk but rather special one of the Russian officers said he just couldn’t understand why we did this. He said we showed him things that he didn’t even ask to see, whereas, in Russia, they never showed us anything and our people knew it would be useless to ask.

Russia, like Germany, has rubber boundaries which stretch and contract, and wherever they stretch to, there Communism is. I just don’t believe our people ever will go for Communism or collaborate sincerely in a post-war world arrangement in which one of the dominant powers is Communism. Moreover, collaboration has got to be reciprocal and we won’t be willing to go on furnishing all the reciprocity while Russia just grunts.

You may say this is a very sordid and pessimistic writing and not an alternative plan. Of course, it is no plan, but no plan is at least as good as any plan which calls on us to share world responsibility with a nation which shares nothing but her troubles with anybody.

The situation permits of no planning. The immediate business is to lick Germany, which having been done, Japan will be a pushover. The future will have to be managed as it happens and the stronger we remain when the war is over the better we will manage it from the standpoint of the only country that should matter to Americans, of the U S A.

Did you ever hear of any nation wanting to protect us?

Westbrook Pegler

Knoxville News-Sentinel/April 22, 1942

NEW YORK, April 22—The so-called labor press of the country, consisting of many small and generally scurrilous publications, most of them conducted for the financial and political profit of the union bosses, has greeted with jubilation a decision by the New York Court of Appeals that unions may sue for libel. Up to now, however, I have seen no similar rejoicing in any of these sheets over another decision, by a state court in California, that unions and obviously also their publications may in turn be sued for libel by those whom they delight to defame. I venture to believe that this one will be stoutly resented as another low blow at labor’s rights.

The New York decision was no surprise to me because I had always assumed that a union had personality, so to speak, and could punish and obtain redress from anyone who slandered its fair name. That is why I have always been very careful to stay within the bounds of provable fact in my discussion of unions and those vicious personalities engaged in the union racket who exploit, persecute and rob the common American worker with the connivance of the national government

Businessman Was Libeled

I WEIGHED my facts well before I declared that the American Federation of Labor had among the roster of union officials in its component groups the nucleus of a first class rogues’ gallery and that it had become a front for thieves and underworld gangsters. For I was’ ready to prove that such crooks as Umbrella Mike Boyle of the Chicago Electricians, Browne Bioff and Scalise and the degenerate Brother Jones of Akron O., among many others, were members of the official family and powers in the organization; that Brother Will Green had publicly and officially defended Browne after this character had become notorious throughout the country and’ that he had vouched for Brother Scalise, a Capone gangster of the most obvious sort, knowing that Brother Scalise had done time for seducing and exploiting a young girl as her bargaining agent.

I have always held that responsibility accompanies the privilege of a free press and just naturally assumed that anyone who bore false witness against a union must be liable to punishment. Similarly I entertained a conviction or superstition that a union or its official publication should be held responsible for false and defamatory representations against innocent individuals but realized that, because the right to sue was never invoked, there must be some artificial verboten. In the California case an indignant businessman brought suit against a local union for falsely declaring that his place of business was unfair to labor and recovered $100, a nominal but significant victory.

Supreme Court and Unions

STILL I would not be confident that this decision would be sustained in the United States Supreme Court for I have just refreshed my memory on the famous Frankfurter decision in the so-called Carpenters’ Case and find no encouragement for victims of wanton injury at the hands of liars on the union side.

In that case as Justice Frankfurter blandly conceded the carpenters and machinists both reached an agreement with Anheuser-Busch of St Louis over the division of certain jobs among their respective memberships, promising to submit all disputes to arbitration. The carpenters, however, repudiated their treaty after the manner of aggressor nations, and when Anheuser-Busch, in turn, refused to repudiate its agreement with the machinists the carpenters not only struck but, by circulars and through their official journal, started an injurious boycott on the false representation that the company was unfair.

According to Justice Frankfurter’s own statement of the case, it was the Carpenters’ Union which plainly was unfair and the company is plainly acquitted of unfairness. Nevertheless Justice Frankfurter held that the picketing of Anheuser-Busch with signs to indicate that Anheuser-Busch was unfair to “organized labor” was a “familiar practice in these situations” and that “the facts here charged constitute lawful conduct under the Clayton Act.” In other, but not substantially different words, the highest court in the United States here pointedly refrains from condemning an injurious slander of an innocent victim by a union and holds that, in the Clayton Act at least, the United States Congress consciously intended to place in the hands of unions the weapon of defamation with which to beat into submission persons with whom they have already, and admittedly, broken faith

The Public Suffers

UNIONS and their publications are incomparably more guilty of vicious slanders and libel than their critics, while those who criticize unions generally may be said to err, when they do, only from lack of skill and caution in the presentation of facts It is the general public, candidates for political office and honest critics of criminality in unions who suffer by far the most from false witness in this equation but it is the purveyors of this abuse who claim protection and disclaim legal responsibility.

Possibly your congressman and senators would like to correct Mr. Frankfurter’s impression that it ever was the intention of Congress to legalize defamation of whomsoever by a special group.