Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
– HL Mencken, US journalist. I would love to have seen him write about the likes of Bush, Blair and Gordon Brown.
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Are the specific men in the highest places really all that different? What is different is the Bureaucracy that’s been allowed to grow. The forced, unfunded interdepencies that have grown over the last century. The men are still the same. We just know more about them in this advanced information age.
It is amusing and alarming at the same time to read something from a half century ago deploring the government and its roll in people’s lives. Compared to today they were living in rather halcyon times. Their heads would explode exposed to today’s nonsense. Just shows how well the conditioning mechanisms have worked.
Some more on Mencken’s legacy and fan base in the United States.
Of course the man from the New York Times who Scott leads us to, did not know that Mencken thought the government under Warren Harding and Calivin Coolidge was too big not too small.
To use a term from Brad, H.L. Mencken’s head almost did explode when F.D.R. came along.
As for war and civil liberties:
Mencken was against World War One and World War Two because he was a German American and blamed a lot of the problems of the United States on the “Puritan” British (both the English and the Scots, and the Scots Irish).
Mencken did not have much of a problem with stern authority and wrote warmly of the power and internal power structure of pre First World War Imperial Germany.
This warmth towards this form of big government was in contradiction to Mencken’s generally anti big government views (although the circle could be squared if one remembered that the German Emperor and high officials were not elected – it was elected government that Mencken really hated with a passion, although in his better moments he opposed other forms of big government also).
H.L. Mencken even supported the licensing of doctors (State by State this rip off of the customers was going on in the early 20th century) – not because he supported ripping off customers, but because he longed for an aristocratic principle in American life and thought the A.M.A. (and the lawyers Bar Associations and the rest of this white collar unionism) might produce such an aritocratic principle.
There was quite a lot of Hegal in Menchen – in his attitude to what the state should be, and hence (as he was an honest man) disgust with what the American government (at all levels) actually was.
His error was to think (some of the time) that other governments were better (in fact they were just bigger, as a percentage of the economy, and sometimes in the nasty things they did).
On the point about respect for the state (as it should be in some authoritarian ideal as opposed to the corrupt democracy of the United States) being better than respect for God – the despised personal relationship with God of the “Puritans”.
Well the religious folk in the United States have done a lot of bad things.
But if I had to choose between people who put their faith in God (and were very wary of any institution that claimed to speak for God) and people who put their faith in some great unelected structure of human authority and power – well I know who I would rather have around.
Cromwell (to take the classic example of the Puritan dictator) did a lot of bad things and the rule of such folk (even if elected) is to be avoided – but there is another side.
A man who supports each individual (not just his own) relationship with God is going to be opposed to a State church (as Cromwell was opposed to the a new Church of England built on the model of the Calvinist Church of Scotland).
Cromwell was an “independent” to the core and not just in religion. Any man who appoints as Chief Justice a man who he knows regards his rule as unlawful (Chief Justice Hales) BECAUSE he regards his rule as unlawful – is not just a bad guy (although he may be a bad guy he is not JUST a bad guy), he is more complicated than that (this is NOT something a German Emperor or later German dictator would do).
And the nasty “Bible Belt” Christians that H.L.M. despised were complicated to.
Yes they did a lot of bad things (and were often off-the-chart violent), but they opposed setting up one big church (they were endlessly moving sects) because they believed each man must interpret the Bible himself – not trust anyone else to do it for him.
They believed the same thing about the Constitution of the United States.
These wild men (with all their contradictions, such as between their religion and their wildness, and flaws) were also the people who won battles like King’s Mountain and created the United States in the first place.
In the end the orderly, respectable and organized Germans did things far more evil than the wild country boys ever did – and it took the wild country boys to stop them.
As much as the guy makes some points which I am very much in agreement, the only way he impresses me is the extent of his simplistic foolishness. As far as his creed – we can all make a cozy self-serving list of ‘truths’ that look good until applied to the realities of a civilized society. He was his own god in his own mind and good for him but reality dictates its different for all of us and something I don’t think he respects. What he implies as ultimate governing philosophy is the reality that would never give him the opportunity to thrive off that universal quality with other journos: arrogance in security and comfort pointing the finger down.
Almost needless to say H.L.M hated elected judges to (especially if they were up for regular reelection with open contests) – one should trust institutions you see.
Whereas the people he disliked regarded institutions (whether Bar Associations or univerisities or whatever) as just groups of individuals – out to rip people off normally.
Cromwell was a good organizer (as close to a German as a Puritan can get), but he was still not a Lutherian not did he set up the system of the Frenchman John Calivin.
There was still too much of the fens in Cromwell for that. At bottom he was still a man with a bible in one hand and a firearm in the other who would not accept anyone telling him to do something he regarded as evil – and (in spite of the evil he himself did) respected those people who took the same attitude against him.
Organization yes – but not for organizations sake.
Order yes – but not just order.
And if any man placed him, Cromwell, above his own sense of right and wrong – he had no time for that man.
In case there is any doubt I would have OPPOSED Cromwell – but such people are a lot more complicated than H.L.M. tended to think they were (although at times, H.L.M. did see that).
In the end H.L.M. came to see that the people who wanted to set up great institutions and structures in the United States were not really creating an aristocratic principle – they were just setting up a big government, a government just as stupid as the old Republic but vastly larger (and thus capable of much greater harm).
And he came to see that his own beloved Germany and German princples were fatally flawed – as they put room for judgements good and evil outside the institutional structure.
The oddest thing of all was that H.M.L. was a determinist (odd as he is a libertarian hero).
He was a determinist because it was smart, it was what a proper philosophers thought – as opposed to country trash who thought they could choose to sin or not.
Remember that determinism (in its predestinationist form – a predestinationist does not always believe in determinism but the pressure is there) was one of the things that was left behind at the Cumberland gap.
But without a belief (and more than the belief the FACT) that one can really choose between good and evil the gate to Hell is opened – in more ways than one.
Mencken is my favourite author. Whatever his faults, his writing on politics and religion were hilarious. What he wrote about Roosevelt and the New Deal was top class.
On Roosevelt when he died in 1945:
Contrast this with what Mencken wrote about Coolidge when he died in 1933:
On the New Deal:
Mencken was also calling for help to be given to the Jews in Europe long before Roosevelt or Churchill gave a damn:
Of course, because Mencken hated FDR and never was enthusiastic about WW2, he has been denounced by the PC literati (left and right-wing) as an ‘anti-semite’, while FDR gets credited for ‘saving’ the Jews (after 6 million had died, and after FDR (and the British government too) had refused to allow many to flee Europe before the war started on the grounds of ‘immigration laws’ (FDR, the demagogue, was of course not going to risk his re-election in 1940 by standing up to the prejudices of the mob).
Knocking Bush, Blair, Brown is an old wheeze from the Sinsiter Side of the aisle… Seeing the exact same words from someone I respect makes wonder… “Why not details?’
Saying you’re disappointed is fine. Lots of people do that. Asking for specifics usually brings out the looney language… Those who were never reasoned into a position cannot be reasoned out of a position -Jonathan Swift said that. I have observed that they also cannot coherently explain how they arrived at their position or why I am wrong…
Asking what -SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE- usually briings the conversation to an end…
So… Why do you disparage them and what should they have done instead of the actions they did take-?
“To the average American or Englishman the very name of anarchy causes a shudder, because it invariably conjures up a picture of a land terrorized by low-browed assassins with matted beards, carrying bombs in one hand and mugs of beer in the other. But as a matter of fact, there is no reason whatever to believe that, if all laws were abolished tomorrow, such swine would survive the day. They are incompetents under our present paternalism and they would be incompetents under dionysian anarchy. The only difference between the two states is that the former, by its laws, protects men of this sort, whereas the latter would work their speedy annihilation.”
(H.L. Mencken, “Friedrich Nietzsche”, 1913; Transaction Publishers edition, 1993, pp. 196-197)
Because we have written almost 10,000 articles on Samizdata and a great many of them deal with precisely these subjects. It makes no sense to reiterate them every single time we feel like bitching.
All you have to do use the nifty ‘search’ option we provide to discover the details of JP’s discontentment.
Cynic and others – quite so.
As I said, H.L.M., in his better moments, opposed all big government – not just big democratic government. In his less good moments he supported doctor licensing, lawyer licensing (and all sorts of other stuff). But I agree that one should remember the good in a man and not the bad (my own cast of mind is a negative one – but that is not a virtue).
You are also right that H.L.M. denounced the “New Deal” and F.D.R. and the other “world saver” Herbert “The Forgotten Progressive” Hoover (falsely thought of as a free market man today). The left who love H.L.M.s attacks on Christians, or on Southerners, or on country folk (and so on), are quiet about his attacks on their sainted F.D.R. (and so on).
The quote about Warren Harding I think is unfair – but H.L.M. was not in the fairness business.
On race:
The normal trick of the P.C. crowd is to quote words from a person they wish to attack.
And H.L.M. indeed used nasty words about ethnic groups (all of them I think).
However, so did virtually everyone back then. The idea that there were certain banned words or that using these words was somehow similar to murdering people would not have occured to him.
Of course he we are talking about who actually saved Jews (as opposed to who said nice things about Jews when looking for votes in New York City) we get some people the left would not like.
For example, Franco of Spain (lots of Jews were allowed into Nationalist Spain). And Pope Pius XII – who personally ordered that thousands of Jews be hidden on Church property, including in the Vatican itself.
H.L.M. might well have pointed out that Franco and Pius XII were examples of unelected authority (well Pius was elected by the College of Cardinals, but that is hardly democracy).
The unelected authority of pre World War One (NOT pre World War Two) Germany was the only form of government H.L.M. ever had any kind words for. He opposed war with National Socialist Germany, but he never had any kind words for its government (an important distinction to make).
H.L.M.’s work with the Harlem black writers used to be so well known as to be not worth commenting on – but in these P.C. days I suppose knowledge of it is being crushed (“but he used nasty words, so how can he have helped black people”).