Morails

The American: His Morals Essay by H. L. Mencken, July 1913, The Smart Set (excerpts).
“More than any other people,” said Wendell Phillips, in one of his penetrating flashes, “We Americans are afraid of one another.” He might have added, as an obvious corollary, “and merciless to one another.” The national fear of giving offense, in truth, has the soundest of prudence in it: it is fed constantly by new evidence of what happens to the man who treads upon the communal corns. A scream of rage— and he is flat upon his spine. And swiftly upon the heels of that condign felling, before ever he can lift his voice in his defense, or even in apology and appeal for grace, the process continues as follows: 1. The removal of his liver and lights. 2. The deposit of a cake of ice in the cavity. 3. The burial of the corpse. A natural consequence, perhaps, of democracy. An inevitable symptom of that emotional mob-thinking which distrusts all genuine distincton on the one hand, and is eternally eager for an auto-da-fe on the other. Wherever and whenever the mob has ruled, it has leaned to like proceedings. You remember, of course, the program of Wat Tyler and his honest hinds— how they stopped each stranger they met on the road to London and demanded to know if he could read and write; and how, if he said yes, they bawled, “he confesses!” and forthwith hanged him to the nearest oak. So, again, in the French Revolution: if there was one thing more astounding than the mob’s fickleness, it was the mob’s senseless savagery. It killed men for crimes that were improbable and even incredible, and its favorite for killing was always some amateur messiah whose hand it had licked the day before. So, too, in the Rome of the First Triumvirate and in the English Commonwealth: Democracy is the same forever. It makes for an irrational, explosive, get-a-rope way of doing things. It puts the wayward passion and billiousness of the hour above all settled conviction and policy. Menaced everlastingly by the chance that the minority of today may become the majority of tomorrow, that black may turn suddenly white, that the wholly virtuous may become the wholly vile, it falls into the habit of striking from the shoulder while a nose is actually within reach. In other words, the majority heaps penalties upon the minority in the hope of crippling it beyond recovery as long as possible. And the method thus pursued in the field of purely political combat is used again in the field of morals. Immorality, in the abstract, is not frowned upon by democracy. On the contrary, democracy is itself immoral, and its highest rewards go to successful acts of immorality. Its central doctrine, indeed, is that all human valuations are subject to change overnight, and it holds that there is a positive merit in thus overturning them. But the man who makes the attempt and fails must pay a swift and staggering penalty for his failure. His sin is not against any ideal of abstract and immutable virtue, not against any jure divino or jus naturae, but against the security and amour-propre of the majority. And the punishment for that sin does not flow from any icy fountain of justice, but from the blind rage of a mob. Thus we find in the very constitution of the American commonwealth a reason for the strange timorousness which marks the American— a timorousness noted by [ various writers, including De Toqueville, Emerson, ] and many other anatomists of the national character . . . . The result, on the one hand, is a ceaseless buzzing and slobbering over moral issues, many of them wholly artificial and ridiculous, and on the other hand, an incessant snouting into private conduct, in the hope of bringing new issues to light. In brief, the result is puritanism. Under the Massachusetts theocracy, for example, the punishment for heresy was far heavier than the punishment for adultery, or even than the punishment for ordinary murder. But, by the time the constitution of the new republic came to be framed, this old snorting over the affairs of heaven had been eased, in a measure, by the pressing importance of the affairs of this earth, and so the hostile factions were ready to accept the compromise proposed by Thomas Jefferson and other such neutrals, declaring a permanent truceof God in religion. As Maurice Low points out, it was the bitter need of the hour and not any genuine toleration that lay at the bottom of this truce. The breach between Quaker and Catholic, churchman and dissenter, was still unspannable, but they chose to forget it in the face of common perils and a common hatred. Each faction held hunkerously to its own creed, but it was ready to abandon its right to damn and penalize the creeds of others. In politics appeared the same exaltation of moral issues and moral reasoning. There has been no great political movement in the United States since Jefferson’s day without some purely moral balderdash at its center. The long battle against slavery, for example, was led from first to last by men obsessed by the wickedness of the slaveowners, and eager to put it down at any cost in blood and sweat. The historians true enought show us that slavery was economically unsound, and that irresistable natural laws worked toward its destruction, but no one thought of its economical unsoundness during the two decades before the civil war. It was the moral unsoundness of the thing that inflamed the north and sent John Brown across the Potomac and provoked four years of unparalleled wrath and buchery. I need not point out how our political mountebanks have always given poignancy to their issues by the simple process of finding (or inventing) villains to denounce. The great heroes of the common people have seldom brought anything actually new to the problems they have presumed to solve. Jackson was not the author of the so-called Jacksonian scheme of mob rule, and Bryan was not the discoverer of the free silver panacea, and Roosevelt was not the father of any of his vast and irreconcilable brood of remedies. But Jackson did convince the chandala that their betters were robbing them, and Bryan did convince them there were vast, horrible and unintelligible conspiracies against them, and so these rabble-rousers got their ears and inflamed them to multitudinous follies. The touchstone, in every case, was their moral hyperesthesia, their weakness for reducing all ideas to terms of right and wrong, their eternal eagerness to burn a concrete and screaming sinner.

The American: His Morals
Essay by H. L. Mencken, July 1913, The Smart Set (excerpts).

“More than any other people,” said Wendell Phillips, in one  of his penetrating flashes, “We Americans are afraid of one another.” He might have added, as an obvious corollary, “and merciless to one another.” The national fear of giving offense, in truth, has the soundest of prudence in it: it is fed constantly by new evidence of what happens to the man who treads upon the communal corns. A scream of rage— and he is flat upon his  spine. And swiftly upon the heels of that condign felling, before ever he can lift his voice in his defense, or even in  apology and appeal for grace, the process continues as  follows:
1. The removal of his liver and lights.
2. The deposit of a cake of  ice in the cavity.
3. The burial of the corpse.
A natural consequence, perhaps, of democracy. An inevitable symptom of that emotional mob-thinking which distrusts all genuine distincton on the one hand, and is eternally eager for an auto-da-fe on the other. Wherever and whenever the mob has ruled, it has leaned to like proceedings. You remember, of course, the program of Wat Tyler and his honest hinds— how they stopped each stranger they met on the road to London and demanded to know if  he could read and write; and  how, if he said  yes, they bawled, “he confesses!” and  forthwith hanged him to  the nearest oak. So, again, in  the French Revolution: if there was one thing more astounding than the mob’s fickleness, it was the mob’s senseless savagery. It  killed men for  crimes that were improbable and even incredible, and its favorite for killing was always some amateur messiah whose  hand it  had licked the day before.
So, too, in the Rome of the First Triumvirate and in the English Commonwealth: Democracy is the same forever. It  makes for an irrational, explosive, get-a-rope way of doing things. It  puts the wayward passion and billiousness of the hour above all settled conviction and policy. Menaced everlastingly  by the chance that the minority of today may become the majority of tomorrow, that black may turn suddenly white, that the wholly virtuous may become the wholly vile, it falls into the habit of striking from the shoulder while a nose is actually within reach. In other words, the majority heaps penalties upon the minority in the hope of crippling it beyond recovery as long as possible. And the method thus pursued in the field of purely political combat is used again in the field of morals. Immorality, in the abstract, is not frowned upon by democracy. On the contrary, democracy is itself immoral, and its highest rewards go to successful acts of immorality. Its central doctrine, indeed, is that all human valuations are subject to change overnight, and it holds that there is a positive merit in thus overturning them. But the man who makes the attempt and fails must pay a swift and staggering penalty for his failure. His sin is not against any ideal of abstract and immutable virtue, not against any jure divino or jus naturae, but against the security and amour-propre of the majority. And the punishment for that sin does not flow from any icy fountain of justice, but from the blind rage of a  mob.
Thus we find in the very constitution of the American commonwealth a reason for the strange timorousness which marks the American— a timorousness noted by [ various writers, including De Toqueville, Emerson, ] and many other anatomists of the national character . . . .
The result, on the one hand, is a ceaseless buzzing and slobbering over moral issues, many of them wholly artificial and ridiculous, and on the other hand, an incessant snouting into private conduct, in the hope of bringing new issues to light. In  brief, the result is puritanism.
Under the Massachusetts theocracy, for example, the punishment for heresy was far heavier than the punishment for adultery, or even than the punishment for ordinary murder. But, by the time the constitution of the new republic came to be framed, this old snorting over the affairs of heaven had been eased, in a measure, by the pressing importance of the affairs of this earth, and so the hostile factions were ready to accept the compromise proposed by Thomas Jefferson and other such neutrals, declaring a permanent truceof God in  religion. As Maurice Low points out, it was the bitter need of the hour and  not any genuine toleration that lay at the bottom of this truce. The breach between Quaker and Catholic, churchman and dissenter, was still unspannable, but they chose to forget it in the face of common perils and a common hatred. Each faction held hunkerously to its own creed, but it was ready to abandon its right to damn and penalize the creeds of  others.
In politics appeared the same exaltation of moral issues and moral reasoning. There has been no great political movement in the United States since Jefferson’s day without some purely moral balderdash at its center. The long battle against slavery, for example, was led from first to last by men obsessed by the wickedness of the slaveowners, and eager to put it down at any cost in blood and sweat. The historians true enought show us that slavery was economically unsound, and that irresistable natural laws worked toward its destruction, but no one thought of its economical unsoundness during the two decades before the civil war. It was the moral unsoundness of the thing that inflamed the north and sent John Brown across the  Potomac and provoked four years of unparalleled wrath and  buchery.
I need not point out how our political mountebanks have always given poignancy to their issues by the simple process of finding (or inventing) villains to denounce. The great heroes of the common people have seldom brought anything actually new to the problems they have presumed to solve. Jackson was not the author of the so-called Jacksonian scheme of mob rule, and Bryan was not the discoverer of the free silver panacea, and Roosevelt was not the father of any of his vast and irreconcilable brood of  remedies. But Jackson did convince the chandala that their betters were robbing them, and Bryan did convince them there were vast, horrible and unintelligible conspiracies against them, and so these rabble-rousers got their ears and inflamed them to multitudinous follies. The touchstone, in every case, was their moral hyperesthesia, their weakness for reducing all ideas to terms of right and wrong, their  eternal eagerness to  burn a concrete and screaming sinner.