Second Mencken Chrestomathy (32 page)

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Feb. 16, 1925

What makes New York so dreadful, I believe, is mainly the fact that the vast majority of its people have been forced to rid themselves of one of the oldest and most powerful of human instincts—the instinct to make a permanent home. Crowded, shoved about and exploited without mercy, they have lost the feeling that any part of the earth belongs to them, and so they simply camp out like hoboes, waiting for the constables to rush in and chase them away. I am not speaking here of the poor (God knows how they exist in New York at all!): I am speaking of the well-to-do, even of the rich. The very richest man, in New York, is never quite sure that the house he lives in now will be his next year—that he will be able to resist the constant pressure of business expansion and rising land values. I have known actual millionaires to be chased out of their homes in this way, and forced into apartments. Here in Baltimore, of course, the same pressure exists, but it is not oppressive, for the householder can meet it by yielding to it half-way. It may force him into the suburbs, even into the adjacent country, but he is still in direct contact with the city, sharing in its life, and wherever he lands he may make a stand. But on Manhattan Island he is quickly brought up by the rivers, and once he has crossed them he may as well move to Syracuse or Trenton.

Nine times out of ten he tries to avoid crossing them. That is, he moves into meaner quarters on the island itself, and pays more for them. His house gives way to a large flat—one offering the same room for his goods and chattels that his house offered. Next year he is in a smaller flat, and half of his goods and chattels have vanished. A few years more, and he is in three or four rooms. Finally, he lands in a hotel. At this point he ceases to exist as the head of a house. His quarters are precisely like the quarters of 50,000 other men. The front he presents to the world is simply an anonymous door on a gloomy corridor. Inside, he lives like a sardine in a can.

From the
Nation
, June 13, 1928, pp. 662–63

As a native and citizen of the Maryland Free State I am, of course, a subject of the United States—but that is about as far as it goes. For the Republic as a whole, I confess, I have very little affection: it amuses and delights me, but never touches me. If the Huns of Japan should launch themselves upon the Pacific Coast tomorrow and begin burning down the chiropractic hospitals and movie cathedrals of Los Angeles, the news would strike me as interesting but not poignant, for I have no investments in that appalling region, and few friends. (San Francisco, to be sure, is something else again, but the Japs are well aware of the fact: they would not burn it.) And if the Huns of the Motherland, assisted by the usual horde of chromatic allies, should take New York, or even Baltimore, it would not perturb me greatly, for the English scheme of things, when all is said and done, is far closer to the Maryland scheme than the American scheme. I was, no doubt, a patriot as a boy, just as I was a teetotaler; I remember glowing, or at all events yelling, when Dewey sank the tin fleet of the Spanish Huns in 1898. But since Good Friday of 1917 such thrills have missed me. It is difficult, indeed, for a man not born a Puritan to glow over the obscene, or even to yell. Moreover, the doctrine was promulgated in those gallant days that, as an American not of British
blood and allegiance, I had lost certain of my constitutional rights. I let them go without repining, and sent a flock of duties after them.

Today, whenever my thoughts stray to such lofty and occult matters, I think of myself as a Marylander, not as an Americano. My forebears for three generations lie buried in the Free State, and I was born there myself, and have lived there all my life. I like to dwell upon the fact, and am proud of it. So far as I have been able to find out, no man has ever been jailed in Maryland for his opinions—that is, in my time. Even during the late struggle for human freedom, with the rest of the country handed over bodily to the blacklegs of the Department of Justice, a reasonable liberty survived there. It survives to this day, and even tends to increase. The present Governor of the State is an enlightened and civilized man, and as far from the Fullers as he is from the McCrays. There is no Webster Thayer on the State bench, and there never has been. The Mayor of Baltimore is an honest Moose, and favors fewer laws and lower taxes. Even the State Legislature, though it is ignorant and corrupt, is less ignorant and corrupt than any other State Legislature that I know of, and immensely less so than Congress. There is no State Volstead act in the
Såorstat.
There is no Comstock society. There is no Methodist Board of Morals. The Klan survives only in a few mountain counties, and even there its only recorded tar party landed its whole local membership, along with the wives thereof, in the House of Correction. In the entire United States there are but five great newspapers that are liberal, wet, sinful and intelligent; two of them are in Baltimore.

I could go on thus for columns; maybe even for acres. But the sad, alas, must go with the sweet. The Maryland Free State, by its own misguided generosity, lies adjacent to the District of Columbia, and in the District of Columbia is the city of Washington, and in the city of Washington are gigantic factories for making chains. These chains rattle, ever and anon, over the boundary. They are fastened upon the legs and arms of free Marylanders. Hordes of mercenaries wearing Government badges tote them; it is a facile matter to cross the imaginary line. But the free man, despite the chains, manages somehow to remain a free man. He hopes, and he resists. The two Federal courts in Baltimore spend more and
more of their time rescuing Prohibition gunmen from the clutches of the State courts; on some blest tomorrow that benign evasion of the Fourteenth Amendment will break down, and there will be an old-time Maryland hanging, with fireworks in the cool of the evening. I must know thousands of Marylanders, old and young, rich and poor, virtuous and damned. I can recall but two who would honestly deplore that hanging. One is a bootlegger who is also a Quaker. The other is an elderly evangelist who professes to believe every word of the Bible, including the warning against witches, and who alleges that God once appeared to him personally, surrounded by glaring headlights.

The proximity of Washington, the citadel of scoundrels, only makes life in the Free State sweeter to the born and incurable Marylander. It throws up into tremendous relief the difference between the new
mores
of the United States and the traditional
mores
of Maryland. It makes him intensely conscious of his citizenship, and fills him with a vast satisfaction. He is an American legally, but not, thank God, by his own free act. Duties go with his predicament, and he discharges them, but where they end he stops. No heat of 100%. Americanism is in him. He harbors no great, brave urge to snout out, jail, and burn a Sacco and Vanzetti. He views the Klan and the I.W.W. with equal indifference, so long as they keep to rhetoric. There is no law in Maryland against red flags or red oratory. Birth-controllers are free of the air. Even during the war Socialists whooped from their soap-boxes, and went unscathed. Hearst reporters have been jailed in Baltimore for photographing, against his will, a gunman on trial for his life, but on the public street even Hearst reporters are safe, and the cops protect them in their ancient rights. I proceed to marvels: the American Legion, in the Free State, is polite, modest, intelligent, and soldierly. Its grand dragons are men who actually served in the war, and it has made but one attempt to blow up the Bill of Rights. That attempt ended in swift and ignominious disaster, and since then it has been tamer than a tabby cat.

In all this gabble of Maryland notions of the true and the good, of course, I allude to the notions entertained by those Marylanders whose IQ’s run well above the middle line. The nether brethren exist there, too, but it is not the Maryland tradition to pay too
much heed to them. If, assembled in the Legislature, they enact laws designed to convert Sunday into a day of woe and mourning, there is happily no disposition, save in a few remote and malarious counties, to enforce those laws. The city of Baltimore, as a body corporate, breaks them deliberately and officially, and the grand jury winks at the crime. The Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday was sent in to launch Prohibition, and the price of sound Scotch has been falling ever since. The town wowsers lead the dreary lives of town clowns. Evangelical pastors roar in tin tabernacles behind the railroad tracks, but there is not one of them whose public influence or dignity matches that of an imperial wizard of the Elks.

Do I limn Utopia? Well, why not? Utopia, like virtue, is a concept shot through with relativity. To men in jail, I daresay, the radio is a boon. To men doomed to be Americans the existence of such an asylum as the Free State ought to be comforting. How the more enlightened and self-respecting citizens of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Mississippi and California can sleep at night is more than I can make out. I always feel vaguely uneasy when my literary apostolate takes me into their ghastly States, as I feel uneasy when I have to go to Washington, or to Paterson, New Jersey, or down in a coal mine. What would follow if the Ohio
Polizei
got a sniff of my baggage? How would it fare, in Mississippi, with one who has publicly argued that Aframericans accused of felony should be tried before being hanged? It is a solace, I assure you, to reflect that numerous swift and swell trains are still running, and that the tariff even from California is less than the cost of trephining a skull, broken by agents of what the heroic open-shoppers out there call the law.

When I cross the line I feel safer and happier. The low moan of Methodist divines comes from the swamps of the Chesapeake littoral, but it is only a moan, not a bark of “Attention!” Even coming from New York, that great city, I notice a change of air. The cops grow polite, and hold their cavalry charges for cases of foreign invasion. The Governor writes his own state papers, disdaining the aid of the reverend clergy. When a still blows up, no one is alarmed. The very Babbitts walk lightly, with eager eyes upon their betters. It could be better, to be sure—but remember what country it is in.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Sept. 10, 1923

Why is it that architecture, the one art that none of us can escape, is so immune to public criticism? If an actor wholly without skill appears at one of the local theatres, even the dramatic critics revile him. If the Bentztown Bard rhymes
world
with
boiled
, his customers write in and call him a French spy. If the conductor of the Park Band gets drunk and beats four-four time for a waltz, his first cornetist takes his stick away from him and shoves him under the stand. But an architect is free to assault all of us with the most intolerable aesthetic obscenities without running any risk whatever. There are buildings in Baltimore, public and private, so abominably ugly that looking at them is as shocking as meeting a Tall Cedar of Lebanon in full armor. There are whole rows of houses, particularly in the jerry-built suburbs, that are affronts to every decent human feeling; to condemn poor people to live in them is as much a crime as to condemn them to wear stripes. Yet no one ever protests against such things. Even good architects are silent. Are good poets silent about bad poets? Are surgeons silent about the hawkers of cancer salves? Are honest men silent about burglars, child-stealers, Congressmen, lawyers, and Prohibition enforcement officers?

From E
SSAY
I
N
P
EDAGOGY
, P
REJUDICES:
F
IFTH
S
ERIES
, 1926, pp. 218–36

The novelists who write about Washington are partly recruited from the ranks of the Washington newspaper correspondents, perhaps the most naïve and unreflective body of literate men in Christendom, and for the rest from the ranks of those who read the dispatches of such correspondents, and take them seriously.
The result is a grossly distorted and absurd picture of life in the capital city. One carries off the notion that the essential Washington drama is based on a struggle between a powerful and corrupt Senator and a sterling young uplifter. The Senator is about to sell out the Republic to the Steel Trust or the Russians. The uplifter detects him, exposes him, drives him from public life, and inherits his job. The love interest is supplied by a fair stenographer who steals the damning papers from the Senator’s safe, or by an Ambassador’s wife who goes to the White House at 3 A.M., and, at the imminent peril of her virtue, arouses the President and tells him what is afoot. All this is poppycock. There are no Senators in Washington bold enough to carry on any such operations, and very few of them are corrupt: it is too easy to bamboozle them to go to the expense of buying them. The most formidable bribe that the average Senator receives from year’s end to year’s end is a case or two of very dubious Scotch, and that is just as likely to come from the agent of the South Central Watermelon Growers’ Association as from the Money Devils. Nor are there any sterling young uplifters in the town. The last was chased out before the Mexican War. There are today only gentlemen looking for something for themselves—publicity, eminence, puissance, jobs—especially jobs. Some take one line and some another. Further than that the difference between them is no greater than the difference between tweedledum and tweedledee.

Ideas count for nothing in Washington, whether they be political, economic or moral. The question isn’t what a man thinks, but what he has to give away that is worth having. Coolidge, while Harding was living, was an obscure and impotent fellow, viewed with contempt by everyone. The instant he mounted the throne he became a Master Mind. Harvey Fergusson got all of this into his “Capitol Hill,” the only good Washington novel ever written. It is not the story of a combat between the True and the False in politics; it is the simple tale of a typical Washingtonian’s struggle to the front—a tale that should be an inspiration to every larval Rotarian in the land. He begins as a petty job-holder in the Capitol itself, mailing congressional speeches to constituents on the steppes; he ends at the head of a glittering banquet table, with a Senator to one side of him and a member of the Cabinet to the
other—a man who has somehow got power into his hands, and can dispense jobs, and is thus an indubitable somebody. Everybody in Washington who has jobs to dispense is somebody.