by Jim Tully; from The American Mercury, September, 1928; transcribed by Kevin I. Slaughter

FOR years it has been the fashion with historians to explain the white cracker of the South as simply the product of degenerate blood-strains from Europe — the progeny of the convict-servants and redemptioners of Old Virginia. But the theory defies logic and the known facts.

Actually, the source of the cracker is identical with that of at least 90% of all other Southern whites. He stems, mainly that is, straight from the common Scotch-Irish, English, and German stock which from about 1740 on was slowly filling up the huge Southern wilderness lying between the thin sliver of coastal civilization built on tobacco, rice, and indigo. And in that backwoods of the eighteenth century, he was so little set apart from his neighbors that he married very much whom he pleased, became by 1800 related to nearly everybody within a radius of thirty miles about him, and so today boasts exactly the same names as the most pretentious Southern families.

What differentiated him, what created the type, was the invention of the cotton gin and the spread of the plantation to the back country. The plantation was inordinately greedy of land; the acreage adjudged suitable for the growing of cotton was limited; the number of possible units was small. And in the fierce competition thus engendered (a competition complicated by wildcat finance), these prizes fell swiftly and mainly to the strongest among the population; the weaker elements were driven back to the rejected lands and the estate of either the yeoman farmer or — on swamp and sand lands and in the pine barrens and red hills — of the poor-white. Nor were they only driven back. Because of the peculiar static quality of the Southern order, they were locked up and closed in — completely barred from any economic and social advance as a body.

The life to which the cracker was thus condemned was one of constant impoverishment. The plantation and his own waste had presently destroyed the forest. The hunter who had formerly foraged for the larder while his women hoed the corn now spent most of his time on his back, disdaining to do work which habit had fixed as effeminate, and consoling himself for the poorness of the shooting with a jug of what he himself had named “busthead.” His diet sank to a routine of cornpone, hog, and turnip greens. Nutritional disease, hookworm, malaria, indolence — all these joined hands to accentuate the lankiness, the boniness of head and feature, which the backwoods had already stamped upon him; conspired with the blistering sun of the land to give him the marked swarthiness or the odd colorlessness of skin and hair which distinguishes him.

But more important still was the fact that the plantation contrived, not deliberately, not consciously, yet with a great effectiveness, to see that he developed no ponderable resentment against his fate. Thus, if it had robbed him, the plantation had nevertheless nearly everywhere left him some sort of land, and, having no use for his labor, it nowhere directly exploited him. His independence was untouched. Thus again, if it had blocked him off from advance en masse, it had not closed the door on him as an individual. Always it was possible for the strong, sturdy lads, who still thrust up from the old root-stock, to make their way out and on. Thus once more, if it had introduced distinctions among white men, the plantation had also introduced that other all-dwarfing distinction between the white man and the black — at the very moment of the poor-white’s degradation, it had elevated him to a tremendous superiority that, come what might, he could never publicly lose. And finally, the coming of the plantation had definitely created the celebrated Southern manner — a genial, expansive, hand-on-shoulder manner which would be ideally calculated to draw the sting from the rising contempt for the cracker.

The upshot was certain. The cracker almost completely abandoned economic and social focus, failed wholly to develop class feeling, and, in the great leisure that was his, gave himself up cheerfully to elaborating the old backwoods pattern of amusement and distinction — became in his fashion a remarkable romantic and hedonist.

To fiddle, to dance all night, to down a pint of raw whiskey at a gulp, to bite off the nose or gouge out the eye of a favorite enemy, to father a brood of bastards to fight harder and love harder than the next man, to be known eventually far and wide as a hell of a fellow — such would be the pattern he would frame for himself. And if this left him a little uneasy, if it bred in him a sense of sin, well, there was escape in orgiastic religion.

But after the Civil War — in which he fought manfully to keep things just as they were — the cracker’s world was to be rudely upset. For the South, bled white and needing money imperatively, was to turn with increasing passion to the pursuit of that fata morgana, cotton. From 1870 to 1880 it doubled the production; in the next decade it tripled it. And that, mind, primarily by falling back on the lands which had once been held as of no account for the staple — the lands of the yeoman and the poor-white.

Growing cotton on such lands, however, required fertilizers. And to provide fertilizers there arose the credit-merchant, who normally demands 40% (sometimes 80%) interest for his services, an exaction before which the poor-white was hopelessly lost. Literally by the thousand he attempted to grow cotton, failed, and was sold out. Nor was he alone. Hundreds of those who had been yeoman farmers met the same fortune.

So there grew up in the South the white cropper and the white tenant — the head and font of the poor-white in our time. And this, of course, might naturally have been expected to restore economic and social focus and to beget class consciousness in him. For here, plainly, was an end to his freedom from direct exploitation and to his independence.

It was not to be, however. At the moment when so much of his heritage was crumpling, the remainder of that heritage was being greatly enhanced in value. Everywhere the South was engrossed in its great fight for white supremacy, everywhere preservation of superiority to the Negro was becoming the first thing. And in the poor-white, who had no other superiority to lose, this feeling was most intense of all. Hence, when he found himself falling to the status of cropper and tenant, what held his gaze to the exclusion of everything else was the spectacle of the grinning face of the ex-slave rising into his own.

Conceivably, of course, this fixation itself might have issued into hatred for the plantation order, in revolt against the whole social arrangement. But the cracker was habituated to thinking of his masters not as antagonists, but friends. And now these masters, seeing that there would not be room on the plantation for both the blacks and all this increasing crowd of whites, terrified at the imminent prospect of a life-and-death conflict between the two groups, a conflict that might easily upset the entire Southern fabric — now at last these masters were concerned with what was happening to the poor-white and were moving heaven and earth to find at least a partial sanctuary for him. Out of that, as much as anything else, came the Southern cotton mill.

Thus, the cracker, seeing hands everywhere reaching down to bear him up, seized them eagerly, grappled back with the pathetic passion of his heritage, and gave himself over fully to the purpose, not of making his own way up but of keeping the black man down. And there to this day he still stands, helplessly caught in his obsession.

Through the years, his status has swung steadily downward. Industry, if it saved him racially, has elsewhere merely heaped evil on evil. With its consort, commercialism, it has piled the banker on the credit-merchant and begot the cracker an army of new masters. Widening opportunity for a moment in the beginning, it has now all but closed it up. Spawning towns and shifting the center of social gravity, it has introduced and made well-nigh universal the vicious wrong of absentee landlordism. And in rolling up relatively immense wealth at the top, it has infinitely broadened the social gulf.

All of which means eventually that the cracker has been increasingly despised. Only the politicians treat him to the old easy manner now. For the rest, the treatment meted out to him daily assimilates itself more and more closely to that meted out to the black man.

Does he fail wholly to see this? Of course he doesn’t. It has been eating into him for years, making him bitter and sullen. But there is nothing he can do about it. For at the end of every possible road lies this implacable fact: to succeed in revolt he must join forces with the Negro. And rather than do that, he prefers to starve and to rot.

Accordingly, the cracker goes on steadily tumbling down the slope into degeneracy, waxing ever more shiftless, and perforce discharging his energies, in so far as they are not squeezed out of him, in the old channels — in striving at once to console and to amuse himself, to achieve dignity and value, by playing the hell of a fellow. In dancing and fiddling when his ministers will let him, in fantastic religion, in hard drinking and hard fighting and hard loving, but above all in violence — above all, in violence toward the Negro. And perforce, too, the ennui, the bitterness, the viciousness, bred in him by the always-narrowing conditions of his life, pour over to the elaboration of this pattern, to making him at his worst a dangerous neurotic, a hair-trigger killer, a man-burner, a pig quite capable of incest — in brief, everything that William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell have made him out to be, and perhaps something more.

______

The American Mercury, May 1935

by John Mitchell Henshaw

From the Spring, 1968 issue of The American Mercury. John Henshaw wrote this article shortly after Israel’s conquests in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF TINY Israel from a midget to a giant is in the making. The grand design of Judaic-Zionist expansionist doctrine is to seize all the oil-rich lands from the shores of the Euphrates to the banks of the Nile.

In defining the aims of Zionism, Hebrew scholar Levnoch Osman recently said: “In our eternal Book of Books (the Torah), the lofty ethical teachings of which are cherished by all mankind, the land of Israel is described not as a long, narrow strip of land with wavy, crooked borders, but as a state with broad natural borders. God has promised to Patriarch Abraham the following:

“I give unto them the land where they have sown their seed, from the river of Egypt unto the great river of Euphrates’ (Genesis 15:18). And so, in order to realize the words of this prophecy, the Israeli state had to continue, not in the borders it has today but within its broad historical boundaries.”

And as far back as 1952 Moshe Dayan, the present Israeli defense minister, declared:

“Our task consists of preparing the Israeli army for the new war approaching in order to achieve our ultimate goal, the creation of an Israeli empire.”

The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who served as an adviser on Near Eastern affairs to the British delegation at the Versailles Conference, in a newspaper article published in June last year stated the Zionist aims in these words:

We are Jews, the living representatives of Judah, one of the 12 tribes of Israel that conquered most of Palestine in the 13^th century B.C. We held Judah’s share of the conquered territory for seven centuries, till we were deported by Nebuchadnezzer in 587 B.C. We were back again within less than half a century, and we then held Judea, once more, for the next 773 years, till we were evicted by the Romans in A.D. 135. We have never renounced our claim to the land of Israel. We have always hoped, believed, and proclaimed that we shall get this land back again. It is our land, we contend.

After another 1,883 years we did recover a foothold there in 1918, and during the half-century since then, by devoted hard work, ability and military valor, we have built up our present national State of Israel, and have inflicted three smashing defeats on the Arabs, who have been trying to evict us again.

We want to have a country of our own again, like other peoples and like our own ancestors. We also need to have a country of our own, because, since the conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity in the fourth century A.D., we have been penalized and persecuted by the Western Christian majority among whom we have had to live.

The persecution has culminated in the unprecedented crime of genocide, which has been committed against us in our lifetime by a Western people, the Germans, in Europe. We are not going to let the Arabs commit the same crime of genocide against us here, in our own land of Israel.

Genocide in Six-day War

Apologist Toynbee omitted mentioning the fact that the Jews themselves are currently engaged in genocide. During the Six-Day War last summer, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan ordered Brig. Gen. Yesha’ahu Gavish, the Israeli commander of the Sinai campaign, to ruthlessly drive the hapless Egyptian troops into the Sinai Desert to die of thirst, hunger and heat. Temperature on the arid Sinai rise to more than 100 degrees during the day. For over two weeks thousands of wretched Egyptian stragglers wandered over the swirling wastes finally drop dead in their tracks.

U.S. reconnaissance planes flying on the perimeter of the Sinai Desert took hundreds of pictures of the stragglers and reported there were 50,000 Egyptians dead or dying on the desert at the time. The U.S. Air Force loaded 60,000 gallons of water in five-gallon jerry-cans on pallets and prepared to drop them in the area where stragglers were observed. However, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara ordered the projected mission of mercy halted after he received phone calls from White House foreign policy-planner Walt Rostow and UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg.

This flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war amounted to genocide, designed to destroy a whole nation.

Newspaper reporters visiting the war zones in Syria and Jordan, reported that if one sniper in a village fired on Israeli troops, the whole village was destroyed including the women and children. Napalm is frequently used.

This systematic extermination is an ideological doctrine of Zionism. The leading exponent of genocide is the chauvinist Moshe Dayan, whom the Zionists have proclaimed a Biblical “messiah” on a white horse. Arrogant, boastful Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, chief of the Israeli General Staff, who plotted and executed the Six-Day blitzkrieg last June, is in direct charge of the projected expansionist program from the Euphrates to the Nile.

The scope of this ambitious scheme of territorial seizures and exploitation has been recognized by at least a few of our American military strategists for years. This writer recalls that a dozen years ago an Army lieutenant colonel, who was a student at the War College, confined that some of his instructors believed the Zionist expansionist policy would provide the spark to ignite World War III.

(Incidentally, the then lieutenant colonel is now one of the top commanding generals in Vietnam.)

By guile, treachery and bloodletting, the Zionists plot to annex all of Jordan, virtually all of Syria, half of Iraq and a large part of Saudi Arabia and all of the rich cotton lands of the Nile Valley. It would be a simpler matter then to grab Yemen, Aden, Muscat, Qatar and Oman with their rich oil development. Israel is already well advanced in the development of its first nuclear warhead.

According to the Zionists’ schedule of operations, within a decade the Israeli empire be the master of the Middle East and take its place as a nuclear superpower on equal footing with the Soviet Union and the United States. David Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company will pay its royalties to the Israeli military usurpers instead of the Arab sheiks.

Fabulous Oil Reserves

The stakes are high in this traditionally British-protected region. The Persian Gulf and adjacent countries hold 70 percent of the non-communist world’s oil reserves and produce half of its oil output. British withdrawal from Aden creates a power vacuum that will inevitably be filled by Israel and the Soviet Union.

The British have expressed the pious hope that their withdrawal would galvanize the Arab rulers into dropping their feuds and really unite in a mutual defense pact. However, the spreading oil boom is intensifying the territorial ambitions of rival kingdoms, sultanates and sheikdoms. Iran is selling oil to Israel, another aggravating factor in Mideast tensions.

Like the tentacles of an octopus the Israeli armed forces struck out in all directions into Jordan, Syria and Egypt in Israel’s Six-Day aggression last June. Even when encountering no resistance, the Israeli armored forces abruptly halted at predetermined strategic terrain points; they had accomplished their mission in the first phase of the Zionist Grand Design of imperialistic conquest. It was time to stop and consolidate their gains rather than risk spreading their forces too thin.

Israeli leader Menachem Begin says:

“The return of even one bit of earth to the Arab would be a betrayal of the nation.”

The grandiose idea of an Israeli empire controlling the Middle East is now for the first time arousing great popular enthusiasm among Jews everywhere in the world.

Officially Israel is continuing the pretense of keeping the door open to negotiations that might result in return of the conquered territory, in exchange for Arab recognition of Israel and a peace treaty.

Jordan’s King Hussein has reportedly already made a secret and desperate offer to Israel: In exchange for the return of the West Bank of the Jordan River, Hussein agreed to demilitarize it, negotiate border adjustments and even waive his insistence upon regaining the Old City of Jerusalem. Israel rejected the offer. Israeli Minister of Labor Yigal Allon bluntly stated:

“The natural border of the country is the Jordan River — a border that would be established only if Israel kept the West Bank areas it took from Jordan.”

Gen. Aluf Ezer Weizmann, second highest-ranking officer in the Israeli army, is even more adamant: “We shall stay where we are and bring in Jews. We now have the unusual opportunity to consolidate the state for the Jewish people and help prevent future wars.”

“If there is a fourth war,” Defense Minister Moshe Dayan gloats, “we are in a position to win more decisively than ever.”

And he warned that in the “fourth war” the great cities of Cairo, Damascus and Amman will be annihilated. This is in conformity with the genocidal plan.

Eretz Israel

Israelis bitterly complain that along with the occupied territory that is three times the size of Israel, they have inherited its population of 1,330,000 Arabs.

Aliyah — voluntary relocation to Israel — has been a flop as far as Western Jews are concerned — few of them want to go to the Holy Land of their forefathers. The majority of Jews now in Israel are from Asia and Africa.

The System of government in Israel is a mixture of theocracy and gerontocracy. Full citizenship requires membership in the Jewish religion and Jewish ancestry. Israeli authorities refuse to accept Arabs or “Gentiles” (non-Jews) as full citizens with equal civil, political, and economic rights. Militant Zionists frankly admit that Israel and neighboring Arab nations cannot coexist. They claim that the incompatibility is due to ideological fanaticism. However, the Arab oil lands are fabulously rich.

“We must take steps leading to a long-range consolidation, lest we be considered a temporary, transient factor in the occupied areas,” declares Israel Galili, minister without portfolio in the Israeli Cabinet.

The Zionists have invented the term “coercive noninterference” in explaining how they force the subjugated Arabs to cooperate with their conquerors. When the mayor of Nablus announced that he would resign rather than front for the Jews, the Israeli military officers told him that no one would be appointed to replace him, which would result in utter chaos. They mayor had second thoughts, stayed and obeyed the Jewish military commanders. Hundreds of similar examples could be cited.

Arabs Fear Genocide

“The Middle East today is dominated by raw, naked, savage, animal fear. The Arab nations are driven by the fear of mass death, by the fear of Israel’s genocidal intentions toward them. Israel, by bringing in immigrants from all over the world, has upset the demographic balance of the Middle East.

“The first basic fact about populations is that they multiply. They population of Israel is increasing, and the populations of the Arab nations are increasing. In the conflict between populations, either Arabs or Jews must someday end up being driven into arid desert wastes which will not support them, where they will find relief only in the oblivion of death. Israel means to kill the Arab populations and to occupy their lands. The Arabs, driven by fear of death, react powerfully. They seek the protection of a powerful nation, Russia, to which they will become tributary in return for protection…

“For the free world, this is a practically irretrievable disaster,” says Benjamin H. Freedman.

We might well rationalize all this as strictly none of our business except that hundred of millions of American foreign aid dollars are being spent for the enrichment of the international Zionist network extending from Tel Aviv to Paris, London and New York. The Israelis are already pumping oil from Egyptian wells and splitting the profits with Rockefeller’s Standard Oil combine. This is only the prelude.

Now for the first time Soviet Russia is successfully penetrating the oil-rich Mideast countries. The Russians have made agreements to explore for oil in Iraq, Iran and Egypt. They have extended bids for cooperative ventures to Algeria, Syria and Kuwait. The agreement with Iraq provides for development of oil reserves in an area taken away from Western companies.

Most of the Arab oil countries are starting oil firms to give them a stronger hold on their petroleum reserves and a bigger percentage of profits. They have also recently hiked their royalties they get from the big Anglo-American oil firms.

The Soviets furnish the technical know-how to the Arab oil industry and work out world marketing agreements with the Arab rulers. The Soviet naval fleet is standing in the Mediterranean. The Kremlin has launched an aggressive campaign to establish a protectorate over the Mideast oil lands. Russia finally has a firm grip on Egypt. Syria is now totally dependent on Soviet weapons and the protective arm of Moscow. The Soviets have a facility in Latakia.

Yemen is receiving Soviet arms, Russian advisers are training its army, and Soviet armed forces are establishing base facilities in Yemen. After all the millions the U.S. gave Iran in foreign aid, the ungrateful Shah (who has $300 million stashed away in Swiss banks) is cooperating with the Soviets in construction of a natural gas pipeline that would feed Iranian gas to parts of Russia not easily served by Russian gas.

The sub-rosa partnership between Zionism and communism is still a fact. As Israel drives the Arabs into the arms of the Kremlin, Israel expands, fulfilling a grand design and an aggressive plan agreed upon years ago. And like the Arabs, Americans are helpless victims in this international crime.

The late John Henshaw was at one time chief “legman” for columnist Drew Pearson. He broke with Pearson after discovering that his own expenses were being paid by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a lobby for Israel, which had a “special relationship” with Pearson. Mr. Henshaw has seen Zionist power from both sides.

THERE IS ONLY ONE group of men whom the Nazis and the Fascists hate more than the Jews. They are the Freemasons. In Italy, indeed, the anti-Jewish feeling is of recent vintage and largely artificial, whereas the blackshirt hatred of Freemasonry is old and deep. In their own countries Hitler and Mussolini Inaugurated their respective reigns with outrages against Masons and Masonic institutions, and they have never relaxed the systematic persecution. Now Nazi conquests of other European nations — whether by invasion of forcible “persuasion” — are followed automatically by hostile measures against Freemasons. From Norway to the Balkans, the progress of the Swastika has brought outlawry, and often vandalism and death in its wake for all Masons. The anti-Semitic excesses have been widely reported, the anti-Catholic outrages have had considerable publicity, but the merciless totalitarian assaults on Freemasonry have not receive a tithe of the world-wide attention they richly merit. They are practically an unknown chapter.

Nazi and Fascist publications leave no doubt of their belief that all evil in the world, from the high mortality rate among the dinner guests of the Borgias down to the Versailles Treaty, has been the work of Freemasons, alone or with the help of Israel. In “Mein Kampf”, Hitler merges his twin phobias:

“The general pacifistic paralyzation of the national instinct of self-preservation, introduced into the circles of the so-called `intelligentsia’ by Freemasonry, is transmitted to the great masses, but above all to the bourgeoisie, by the activity of the great press, which today is always Jewish.”

And one of the first official statements made by Hermann Goering in his capacity as Prime Minister of Prussia, when the Nazis took over power in 1933, was that “in National Socialist Germany there is no place for Freemasonry.: That view was not news. It had run through all the Nazi propaganda and had been an intrinsic part of the Fascist attitude in Mussolini’s realm.

After the German debacle of 1918, the frustrated man who had been the virtual master of Germany’s destinies, General Erich Ludendorff, found an outlet for his bitterness in diatribes against Freemasonry. Right up to his death, Ludendorff devoted himself wholly to propaganda intended to prove that the war, the ensuing German revolution, and most other world ills had been the doing of the Masons. He published a pamphlet entitled “Annihilation of Freemasonry Through the Revelation of Its Secrets” wherein the so-called secrets of Freemasonry were “revealed” for the hundredth time since the foundation of the Order in 1717, without, however, annihilating Masonry. The senile general’s main thesis was that Freemasonry is a Jewish device intended to make “artificial Jews.” On one page the hand that had led Germany to disaster in 1918 wrote: “It is cheating the people to fight the Jew while allowing his auxiliary troop, Freemasonry … to function.”

The Nazis continued where Ludendorff left off. But others had preceded them in Mason-baiting. In 1917, as one of their acts, the Bolsheviks dissolved all lodges in Russia. In 1919, when Bela Kun proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat in Hungary, one of his first decrees ordered the dissolution of Masonic lodges. In 1925, Spain’s first dictator of this generation, General Primo de Rivera, ordered the abolition of Freemasonry in his country.

Benito Mussolini went about the same business more methodically. Having established his regime, Il Duce proceeded step by step to exterminate the lodges and the influence of Italian Freemasonry. Even the Nazi apostle, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, has admitted in his book “Masonic World Policies” that the Freemasons had been the creators of the united democratic Kingdom of Italy. But this did not win them any mitigation of horrors at the hands of ultra-patriotic Fascists. In 1924, Mussolini decreed that every member of his Fascist Party who was a Mason must abandon one or the other organization. Thereupon General Cappello, one of the most prominent Fascists, who had held the post of Deputy Grand Master of Grande Oriente, Italy’s leading Grand Lodge, gave up membership in Fascism rather than betray his Masonic ideals. He was to pay dearly for this loyalty. Less than a year later, he was charged with complicity in an attempt on Mussolini’s life. It was a palpable frame-up by an OVRA stoolpigeon name Quaglia, but General Cappello was sentenced to thirty years in prison, where he probably still lingers.

In the summer of 1925 Mussolini got around to dissolving Italian Freemasonry. In an open letter to Il Duce, the Grand Master of the Grande Oriente, Domizio Torrigiani, had the courage to stand up for democracy and freedom of thought. The price he paid was exile to the Lipari islands. After nearly going blind there, he died soon afterwards. Hundreds of other prominent Masons shared the harsh Lipari exile with him. At the peak of the anti-Mason agitation, in 1925-27, blackshirt strong-arm squads looted the homes of well-known Masons in Milan, Florence and other cities, and murdered at least 100 of them.

The Nazis acted more swiftly. Immediately on Hitler’s rise to power, the ten Grand Lodges of Germany were dissolved. Many among the prominent dignitaries and members of the Order were sent to concentration camps. The Gestapo seized the membership lists of the Grand Lodges and looted their libraries and collections of Masonic objects. Much of this loot was then exhibited in an “Anti-Masonic Exposition” inaugurated in 1937 by Herr Dr. Joseph Goebbels in Munich. The Exposition included completely furnished Masonic temples.

The persecution was carried over into Austria when the country was captured by the Nazis. The Masters of the various Vienna lodges were immediately confined in the most notorious concentration camps, including the horrible living hell at Dachau in Bavaria. The same procedure was repeated when Hitler took over Czechoslovakia, then Poland. Immediately after conquering Holland and Belgium, the Nazis ordered the dissolution of the lodges in those nations. It was also Point One on the agenda of Major Quisling in Norway. It may be taken as part of the same ugly picture that General Franco of Spain in 1940 sentenced all Freemasons in his realm automatically to ten years in prison. When France fell last June, the Vichy government caused the two Masonic bodies of France, the Grand Orient and the Grenade Loge to be dissolved, their property being seized and sold at auction.

The countries which are still ostensibly independent, but actually under the heel of Germany, must prove their conformity to the Nazi pattern by taking harsh measures against Masonry. In Hungary the dissolution of the lodges was unnecessary because they were never allowed to resume after Bela Kun was overthrown. Mason-baiting is one “principle” on which White Terrors and Red Terrors have always agreed. Rumania recently prohibited Freemasonry to prove its subservience to Germany. Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, inhabited by levelheaded and tolerant peasantry, were also obliged to enact the twin sets of laws — anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic — that demonstrate “friendship for Hitler”.

The summary does not begin to convey the full terror of the Calvary to which Freemasonry has been subjected wherever the totalitarians took power. Murder, imprisonment, economic looting, social outlawry have been the bitter lot of individual Masons. Rapine has been the fate of their organizations, their treasures, their institutions of charity.

II

Why does this implacable and fanatic hatred of the Order obsess the totalitarian mind? The answer is in the whole history and temper of Freemasonry. For more than two centuries its leaders have been consistently on the side of political freedom and human dignity, reaping a harvest of persecution at the hands of tyrants. Before going into that, however, we must distinguish clearly between two things: Freemasonry and Freemasons. The chief trick of mason-haters through the generations, a trick followed by the Nazis, is to direct their accusations not against Freemasons personally but against the whole Masonic Order.

Freemasonry is made up of Masonic bodies: lodges, Grand Lodges and other groupings. All of these scrupulously refrain from meddling in politics or any other subject not directly related to Masonic matters or charity. The Constitution of the Order stipulates that every member must be a loyal citizen of his country, and it professes adherence “to that religion in which all men agree” — that is, belief in a Divine power, in morality and in charity. In contrast to narrow nationalism, it believes in serving Humanity as a whole. That is all that the Masonic Order itself professes and is interested in. What individual Masons do as citizens of their respective countries to serve the ideals they personally believe is, is their own business.

This attitude is no subterfuge. On the contrary, the enlightened Freemason not only admits but prides himself in the fact that modern democracy and human progress owe so much to the heroism and idealism of individual Freemasons. Unless he is a very naive person he will also admit that the lodge is a place where congenial people meet to gather that moral strength which they need to stand up for the ideals of liberty and equality outside the lodge. At the same time, however, to true Masons the lodge is hallowed ground, and inside its gates politics and the other concerns of the market-place are taboo.

Some of the less critically-minded Masons like to trace the origins of the Order back to ancient Egypt. But in its present form, Freemasonry originated in England, probably in the Seventeenth Century, while the first Grand Lodge was founded in London in 1717 and the regulations, by-laws and constitutions of Masonry were laid down in what is known as Anderson’s Constitutions in 1722-23. The spiritual elements underlying these precepts were decidedly “advanced” for their time, emphasizing as they did tolerance for other men’s religions and the brotherhood of all human beings.

The intellectual and spiritual foundations of modern democracy, including the American Revolution and the American Constitution, are to be found in large part in the teachings of Jean Jacques Rousseau and in the ideas cemented into the great first Encyclopedia. And it is a fact that most of the authors of that epoch-making Encyclopedia — Diderot, D’Alembert, Condorcet, the famous Swiss philosopher Helvetius, etc. — were Freemasons. The envoy to France from the rebellious American colonies, Benjamin Franklin, also was an ardent Freemason. So were George Washington, sixty among his generals, John Hancock and a great many of his co-signers of the Declaration of Independence. Both Washington and Franklin long held the post of Grand Master.

The most distinguished among the Masonic lodges of Paris in the Eighteenth Century was the “Lodge of the Nine Sisters” — that is, the nine Muses — and its membership included the intellectual cream of France. When Voltaire paid a visit to Paris in the year of his death, at the age of 79, he was initiated into Freemasonry in this lodge. The climax of the ceremony came when Brother Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia handed to Voltaire the Masonic apron which the great Helvetius had worn before him. Voltaire raised the apron to his aged lips.

Six years before that memorable day, something even more memorable happened in Boston. It has come down in history as the Boston Tea Party. And it is no secret that the “Indians” who dumped the cargo on December 16, 1773, had emerged from the building which housed the St. Andrews Lodge, the leading Masonic body in Boston. Their job done, the “Indians” were seen to troop back to the lodge building — and no Indians ever again emerged from the lodge. Instead, a lot of prominent Bostonians, known to be Masons, did emerge. And in the book which used to contain the minutes of the lodge and which still exists, there is an almost blank page where the minutes of that memorable Thursday should be. Instead, the page bears but one letter — a large T. Can it have anything to do with Tea? It is perhaps the only instance in the History of Freemasonry were a lodge, as a body, has taken an active part in politics.

III

Practically everywhere, INDIVIDUAL Masons have thus been in the forefront in movements of liberation. Goethe, who considered himself a European more than a German and so often criticized his fellow-Germans, was a fervent Freemason, as was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute” is full of allusions and symbolism relating to Freemasonry. In fact, its theme is the search for truth and the victory of tolerance over the fanaticism that springs from ignorance, a theme which Mozart shared with his brother Masons. But few Masons today, listening to the delightful tunes of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro”, realize that they are enjoying a “revolutionary” play, set to music by a Mason who believed in the “revolutionary” principle of the equality of all men. Beaumarchais’ Figaro comedy was written and staged under Louis XV of France as an attack against the prevalent feudal social system. Mozart’s choice of this play, at a time when the success of the young American democracy was firing the imagination of the world, was not accidental.

Hebert, Andre Chenier, Camille Desmoulins and many other “Girondins” of the French Revolution were Freemasons. The Masonic ideal of freedom was strong in the heart of a Frenchman who became a Mason while in the youthful United States of America — the Marquis de Lafayette. He remained an enthusiastic Mason all his life, and was until his death in 1829 Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France.

And during the whole of the Nineteenth Century, to be a Freemason was tantamount to being a champion of democracy. Many of the leaders in the great year 1848, which saw so many uprising against feudal rule in Europe, were members of the Order; among them was the great Hungarian hero of democracy, Louis Kossuth, who found temporary refuge in America. Like Kossuth, another celebrated champion of democracy, Guiseppe Garibaldi, was a thirty-third degree Freemason and Grand Master of the Italian Freemasons. Most leaders of the Young Turkish Committee, which in 1908 forced Sultan Abdul Hamid “the Damned” to give his nation a parliamentary form of government, and who deposed the “Red Sultan” in the following year, were likewise Masons. In Latin America, too, the process of liberation from the Spanish yoke was the work of Freemasons, in large measure. Simon Bolivar was one of the most active of Masonry’s sons, and so were San Martin, Mitre, Alvear, Sarmiento, Benito Juarez — all hallowed names to Latin Americans.

Thus, while the Order as such kept out of politics, it attracted to itself the most democratically minded, the champions of human decencies — and won for itself the undying hatred of those who feared progress. Yet Masonry has never been a subversive movement. In countries where democracy is a reality, even Royalty belongs to the Order. Both King George VI and the Duke of Kent are Freemasons; so is the Duke of Windsor. His grandfather, Edward VII, was the chief of British Masonry, and he was succeeded in the post by the aged Duke of Connaught. King Gustav V heads the Freemasons of Sweden.

It is clear, consequently, why the Nazis and Fascist and Bolsheviks must hate an organization so steeped in humanitarian traditions. They know that Masons, as individuals, have founded a great number of modern democratic states, have drafted the Declaration of Independence and created liberal Constitutions the world over. But the totalitarian hatred for the Order is not merely emotional. It is clearly defined in the fundamental divergence between their creed and the Masonic ideal. In his book to which we have already referred, the Nazi Dr. Rosenberg writes:

“Without doubt the Masonic dogma of Humanity is a relapse into worlds of the most primitive conceptions; everywhere where it is put into practice it is accompanied by decadence, because it conflicts with the aristocratic laws of Nature”.

Thus in his own dogmatic terms he indicts Freemasonry for what is its greatest pride, its ideal of equality.

In 1938 Hitler’s own publishing house, which puts out both “Main Kampf” and the official “Volkischer Beobachter”, issed a volume on “Freemasonry, Its World View (Weltanschauung), Organization and Policies”. The preface is written by Herr Heydrich, second in command of the Gestapo, and hence an expert on oppression and violence, and hints openly at the seizure of libraries and property of German Freemasonry. The book itself, by one Dieter Schwarz, discloses that every new Nazi member must “confirm by his word of honor that he does not belong to a Masonic lodge.” In outlining the official Nazi on the subject, it says in part:

“Nordic is the Nazi conception of the world, Jewish-Oriental that of the Freemasons; in contrast to the anti-racial attitude of the lodges, the Nazi attitude is race conscious….”

“Masonic lodges are… associations of men who, closely bound together in a union employing symbolical usages, represent a supra-national spiritual movement, the idea of Humanity… a general association of mankind, without distinction of races, peoples, religions, social and political convictions.”

I have read several hundred books about Freemasonry and scores of original Masonic documents. But never have I seen masonry’s basic ideals expressed more clearly than by its mortal enemies in the passage above. Herr Heydrich and Herr Schwarz are right — the gulf between their “Weltanschauung” and the Masonic Ideals can never be bridged.

___________________

EDITOR’S NOTE: This 1941 Mercury article shows some signs of wartime passions, but is nonetheless quite educational. Masonry may indeed have been a necessary response to the “divine” tyranny of family dynasties, and many great men and movements were and are associated with it.

But it also shared the faults of the 18th century Enlightenment of which its rise was a part (though its earliest origins are, in my opinion, to be found in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Knights Templar):

1) a childlike faith in “democracy,” which is really just mob rule and can be just as tyrannical as any king or dictator; and

2) a belief in “equality” and universalism (that all human beings are essentially the same — an insane overreaction to the nonsense of hereditary aristocracy — and that there can be moral rules or governance for “all mankind”), concepts that tend to promote multiculturalism and world government, both of which are inimical to to self-determination and freedom.

It is easy to see why Masons were players (and sometimes pawns) in revolutions, both good and bad. They are men with noble instincts, but who use a flawed and confused pseudo-religious ideology to apply them.

— M.P. Shiel

by H.L. Mencken

THE RECURRENT EFFORT to eliminate criminal stocks by sterilizing criminals is opposed violently by sentimentalists, and also by the pseudo-scientists who argue fatuously that character is not inheritable. Common experience shows that it is, and all really scientific evidence supports the experience. The late Judge Frederick Bausman of Seattle (1861-1931) proposed after World War I that a sharp distinction be made between murderers whose crimes are of such a character that any normal persons, under the circumstances, might be imagined committing them, and murderers who kill strangers for gain. The former he proposed to treat tenderly, but for the latter he advocated certain death. This Bausman was an intelligent man – his book, “Let France Explain,” published in 1922, was one of the first effective challenges to the official theory as to the origins of World War I – but his proposals got very little notice.

The objection to sterilizing criminals is mainly theological, and hence irrational. On a more respectable level it is sometimes argued that a criminal may not transmit his evil traits to offspring, and in support thereof it is pointed out that he sometimes has quite respectable sibs. But this is begging the question, for no one proposes to sterilize his brothers and sisters, but only the man himself. Certainly the chances that he will produce criminal children are sufficiently strong to justify subjecting him to the trivial injury and inconvenience of sterilization. On the one hand the sentimentalists argue that crime is a disease, and on the other hand they deny that it runs in families. All human experience is against this. Nine out of ten professional criminals come from families that are plainly abnormal. Even if it be argued that their criminality is thus the product of environment rather than of heredity, it follows that the environment that they themselves provide for children is very likely to produce more criminals.

The theory that crime is caused by poverty is not supported by the known facts. The very poor, in fact, tend to be just as law-abiding as the rich, and perhaps more so. To argue otherwise is to libel multitudes of people who keep to decency under severe difficulties, and in the face of constant temptation.

— from H.L. Mencken’s notebooks

by H.L. Mencken

First published in The American Mercury, August 1937

DISCUSSING IN THE PLACE a few months ago the sorrows roweling the great Republic we live in, I ventured to throw out a double-headed suggestion. The first part of it was to the effect that an easy way to reduce those sorrows today, and almost obliterate them tomorrow, would be to sterilize large numbers of American freemen, both white and black, to the end that they could no longer beget their kind. The second part was that the readiest way to induce them to submit would be to indemnify them in cash.

The suggestion failed to fetch any appreciable faction of Uplifters, but it nevertheless had merit, and I accordingly renew it, with variations, by these presents. Not much argument is needed, I believe, the establish the prudence of the first half. We have far too many client of the New Deal in this country, and they multiply at a rate that must disquiet every solvent lover of the flag. In the sharecropper areas of the South, to cite a salient example, there is probably not a women between the ages of fourteen and forty-five who is not laboring, at this very moment, in one stage or another of the sorry physiological process whereby human souls acquire a habitation and a name. The birth rate down in those pious and malarious wastes is precisely what the traffic will bear, and if it were not for the fact that the death rate, especially among children, is also inordinate, the region would swarm like a nest of maggots.

The same mad rush to reproduce goes on in all the other backwaters of the nation, including the slums of the cities. The midwives, in such places, are worked as hard as the sommeliers at a college reunion, and huge gangs of clergy are kept busy baptizing the young. No one, so far as I am aware, argues that this excessive fecundity is a good thing, whether for the high contracting parties, for the poor children they are unable to feed, or for the community in general. Even the moral theologians of the Holy Church, though they still denounce birth control as accursed, have been monkeying of late with schemes to get round their own prohibition of it. The generality of jail wardens, police captains, mental hygienists, coroners, truant officers, and other such experts agree unanimously that it would be a good thing if we could reduce the statistical differential that now runs so heavily in favor of the unfit. If it is maintained indefinitely, there will be a wholesale degeneration of the American stock, and the average of sense and competence in the whole nation will sink to what it is now in the forlorn valleys of Appalachia.

There are, plainly enough, only two ways to get rid of this differential. One is for the people of the upper I.Q. brackets to develop a birth rate higher, or at least as high, as that prevailing among the economically and intellectually undernourished; the other is for the undernourished to reduce their birth rate to something approximating the smart and swell. The first device, for reasons only too apparent, is quite unfeasible. Putting aside the fact that people of active intelligence has too many things on their minds to devote all their leisure to multiplying, there is the further fact, supported by plenty of biological evidence, that easy living reduces fertility, and that, in consequence, the women of the upper classes, even assuming that they tried their damnedest, could not hope to match the records of their underprivileged sisters. The mechanism of this reduction is as yet not understood, but there can be no doubt that it exists. Whenever and wherever the standard of living rises, the birth rate declines, even in the complete absence of contraceptive enterprise. It may be because vitamins are poisonous to the germ plasm, or because soap and water suffocate it, or for some other unpleasant reason. So far, no one can say; but the statisticians are all sure that the decline is a reality, not only in Christendom but also among simple savages. Thus it is counsel of despair to urge the upper classes to exert themselves more assiduously. As well urge them to jump over the moon. Take away all the mechanical and chemical contrivances with which they now flout the mandate of Genesis I, xxii, and they would still lag behind the lowly.

We are therefore thrown back upon the device of bringing down the birth rate among the latter, if any rational equilibrium is ever to be established. How is it to be done? One way, as we have just seen, would be to raise the standard of living among them, and that way has been suggested, in fact, by more than one Uplifter, though not for the reason that we are here considering. There are many practical impediments to its execution. For one thing, it would cost an enormous amount of money – indeed, an amount so vast that even the non-Euclidean mathematicians now doing miracles at Washington would probably be unable to raise it. For another thing, there is some doubt that a lift sufficient to achieve the business would be endurable to its ostensible beneficiaries. Even assuming that it would make them less fecund, it might do it by wiping them out altogether. This is not hollow theorizing, but a deduction from actual experience. There is plenty of reason to believe that the sharecroppers of the South, if provided with decent food to eat, could not eat it and survive. They have been bred on hog meat and corn pone for so long that their systems have lost the capacity for assimilating better victuals. Whenever one of them lands in a Southern hospital with pellagra, which is very often indeed, the doctors teach him the use of those better victuals, and send him home with a diet list. But though it calls for only such foodstuffs as are easily obtainable in his native wildwood, he almost always goes back to his hog meat and corn pone, and in a year or two he is down with pellagra again. It may be, in fact, that the disease has become natural to him, and even necessary to his metabolism, as gout was natural and necessary to the five-bottle men of a century ago.

Moreover, the other changes in habit that go with becoming civilized are almost as unpleasant to the victim, and maybe almost as dangerous. It is the theory of the Uplift that everyone would be healthier and more comfortable in a better house, but experience proves that it is by no means invariably so. Some years ago a gang of wizards established a colony of model farms in Western Tennessee, and stocked it with bumpkins recruited from the adjacent wilderness. Every farm was seated on good land, and in every farmhouse there were all the conveniences of civilization, including electric lights, a telephone, a washing machine, a mayonnaise mixer, a bathtub, and a full set of annual reports of the Secretary of Agriculture. The idea was that these bumpkins, so outfitted, would gradually metamorphose into high-toned subsistence farmers, and become a credit to their country and one of its glories. What actually happened was that they quickly returned to their native barbarism. In a few years the hogs were rooting under every farmhouse, all the machinery in it was out of whack, the fields were given over to scrub corn and Jimpson weeds, and the annual family wash was being done again in the crick. It was a terrible experience for all concerned. The wizards saw one of their noblest enterprises knocked galley west, and its beneficiaries suffered a kind of torture comparable to that of going through a stone crusher. The more faint-hearted fled to the mountains at once, and there resumed their tribal way of life; the more resolute hung on until the colony had been reduced to something that met their ineradicable notions of the seemly, the comfortable and the beautiful.

In brief, trying to change the mores of morons is just as hazardous as trying to change the mores of actual savages. Every schoolboy knows what missionarying has done to the poor anthropophagi of Central Africa and the islands of the South Seas. By the power of the Gospel they have been dissuaded, in most cases, from going naked and devouring one another, but only at the cost of wrecking them. Once healthy and happy in their flimsy breech clouts, they now groan and pine away in the flannel union suits. Once well-fed upon a diet to their brutish taste, they now starve upon banal canned goods. The birth rate among them continues high, but the death rate equals it everywhere, and in most places exceeds it. Their souls have been saved, but their miserable carcasses will soon vanish from this earth.

II

Civilizing the sharecropper, white or black, would probably have the same effect on him, just as it has had the same effect on the Indian. But the process would not only be immensely costly, as I have argued, but also revoltingly cruel, as I have demonstrated. It would involve the slow and painful deaths of hundreds of thousands of poor persons who, however stupid they may be and however mephitic, are nevertheless God’s creatures, and what is more, free citizens of the United States. To have at them with machine-guns would be far more merciful, besides being cheaper. But having at them with machine-guns would shock the moral sensibilities of the whole human race, including Hitler and Stalin. Tender-hearted persons would rush into the courts asking for injunctions against it, and judges delicate enough to grant them would be readily found. Thus the enterprise would be tied up, and its discussion corrupted and made insane by politicians, theologians, labor leaders, and other such rogues.

The easy way out, and at the same time the humane way, would be to sterilize the males of the present generation, and so cut off the flow of their congenital and incurable inferiority. If a beginning were made with all the adults now alive, there would be an immediate and immense decrease in the production of subnormal children, and if the males now in infancy were tackled as they reached years of virility, there would be another decrease, amounting almost to 100 per cent. No damage, within their own definition of damage, would be done to these martyrs to elementary eugenics. The operation that is favored by the overwhelming preponderance of genito-urinary opinion would not give them any pain, it would not affect their potency in any degree, it would not incapacitate them for work, and it would carry no more risk of death or serious injury than the operation of pulling a milk tooth. Most important of all, it would not unfit them in the slightest for the exercise of their marital rights under the Corpus Juris Canonici and the Constitution of the United States. On the contrary, that exercise would be facilitated, if only be removing the fears which now harass and dissuade the parties of the second part.

That these fears are very real and very unpleasant must be well known to everyone who has taken the trouble to make discreet inquiries. The fact that the wives of the hillbillies of Appalachia are incessantly gravid is certainly not to be accepted as proof that they have an insatiable appetite for children. Their lives, in truth, are made miserable by the dread of pregnancy, and they devote a large part of their small ingenuity to trying to ward it off. To that end they resort to all sorts of dangerous practices, mostly of small effect. Every drugstore in the Bible and hookworm countries carries a heavy stock of abortificients, and the midwives of the region do as brisk trade in interfering with delivery as furthering it. The notion that only women who read Proust and drink vermouth try to evade maternity is sheer nonsense. There is quite as much effort in that direction, and perhaps a great deal harder effort, among women on the dole. More intelligent than their men, as all women are more intelligent than their men, the wives of Moronia shrink alike from the agonies of parturition without competent assistance, and from the brutality of bringing more and more children into a world that can only use them badly. If they had their way their contributions to the birth rate would be no greater than those of the graduates of Vassar, and maybe much less.

Unfortunately, there is no convenient and certain way for the to reduce their output. Abstinence is as difficult in Moronia as it is in Miami or Hollywood, and, despite the tall talk of the birth-controllers, there is no known contraceptive that will work every time, even in skillful hands. In the Southern mountains the favorite device is the prolongation of lactation, but there is a natural limit to it, and beside, it shows a high percentage of flat failures. There remains only sterilization. Should the women submit to it? For one, I think not. They have suffered enough already, without being exposed to laparotomies, with attendant pain and danger. In the male, sterilization is a simple and harmless operation, but in the female it is serious, and may produce very unpleasant results. Moreover, there is a biological – even, indeed, a eugenic – objection to any such wholesale obliteration of fecundity at its source, for the women of the lower orders, as every historian knows, occasionally benefit the human race by departing from the strict letter of their marriage vows. At least one very eminent President of the United States is said to have owed his existence to such a false step by one of his own grandmothers, and it is possible that, if the whole truth could be unearthed, he would be found to have colleagues. Adultery, in fact, has probably done the human race quite as much good as harm, despite the abhorrence with which it is necessarily viewed by all husbands and other chaste persons.

No, the extinguishing of the moronic strain should be confined to the males. Their potentiality for harm is vastly greater than that for the females, as anyone may discover by a resort to third-grade arithmetic. They escape all the unpleasantness ordained by Genesis III, xvi, they have only a small share in the nurture and policing of their children, and, as the law now begins to run, they even unload the support of their families upon the taxpayer. It would be impossible to imagine creatures whose cares and responsibilities were smaller; even a tomcat is hardly more free. Too stupid to make their way in the world, and having nothing to give in return for life save a heritage of incompetence and misery for endless generations, they may surely be called on without injustice to yield up their one indubitable talent. Surrendering it will leave them precisely as happy as they are today, and perhaps a great deal happier. And their betters will be relieved for all time of the burden of their diseased, stupid, wretched, and hopeless get.

III

In some of the States, laws have been passed providing for the sterilization of such polluters of the race, and those laws have been upheld by the Nine Old Villains of Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, they all fall short of disposing of the evil they are aimed at. In general, they apply only to persons who are defective in some gross and melodramatic way – idiots, the insane, habitual criminals, Communists, and so on; the vast majority of the inferior are beyond their reach. Plainly enough, they do little good. Idiots and criminals do not issue only from idiots and criminals; they issue also, and on a much larger scale, from the common run of nitwits. In California the authorities have sterilized thousands of the former, but the number of the latter appears to be undiminished; in truth, there is good reason for holding that it is larger than ever before. If all the lunatics in all the asylums of the country were sterilized hereafter, or even electrocuted, the sharecroppers of Mississippi alone would produce enough more in twenty-five years to fill every asylum to bursting. The one and only remedy is to strike at the source of all incompetence, whether social or economic, metal or physical. Let a resolute attack be made upon the fecundity of all the males of the lowest rungs of the racial ladder, and there will be a gradual and permanent improvement. It may not be noticed at once, for it will take some time to work off the damage they have already done, but in the course of two generations it will be brilliantly manifest.

Here, unluckily, we collide with another difficulty. What I have argued so far is subscribed by virtually all intelligent persons, though many of them, for one reason or another hesitate to say so. But when it comes to applying the obvious remedy, a large number of the discover impediments. We live, at least in theory, in a free country, and its people have a healthy aversion to laying violent hands on the citizen. The sharecropper, though he may appear to the scientist to be hardly human, is yet as much under the protection of the Bill of Rights as the president of Harvard. He may not be jailed unless he has perpetrated some overt act forbidden by law, and he may not be gelded unless his continuance at stud is plainly and undoubtedly dangerous to society. To grab him on the bald ground that he is an incurable jackass would be revolting the moral sensibilities of the American people. The theological doctrine of the equality of souls before God has been bred into them, and it would be impossible to induce a majority of them, or even any considerable minority, to repudiate all its implications today. In the long run they may do so, but certainly the time is not yet.

To get round this difficulty I have proposed that candidates for the scalpel be rounded up, not by sending sheriffs, United States marshals, or other such catchpolls after them, but by posting rewards for their voluntary submission. To be specific, I have suggested that the Federal government offer to pay $1000 to every adult American who will swear that, to the best of his knowledge and belief, God and Wall Street are both implacably against him, and that is willing to climb on the table under his own steam. Thus duress is avoided, and no customer will ever be able to complain that he was taken by chicanery or in violation of his inalienable rights under the last two strophes of the Fifth Amendment. What he does he will do as a free agent, and every attention will be given to due process and just compensation.

The one error I made was in setting the ante too high. I have since been informed by reliable correspondents in the sharecropper areas that an honorarium of as much as $1000 would cause riots and bloodshed in those parts. So many candidates would rush up, howling for the money, that the government surgeons would be swamped. Worse, the sudden appearance of so much cash in a region unaccustomed to it would dislocate all the normal processes of trade, and probably cause a local inflation of dangerous proportions. Yet worse, all the crooks in the country would flock down to practice their art on the beneficiaries, and in six weeks the latter would be stone broke and demanding more. In brief, I am told that to give a sharecropper $1000 in a single lump would be almost as hazardous as giving him a machine-gun. While it lasted, he would be on a lunatic jamboree, and when it was gone he would be incurably anti-social, and a menace to all orderly government. Even his pastors, so I am told, could not be trusted to keep him from engaging in disorders approaching the revolutionary, Indeed, most of his pastors would go to the barricades with him, bellowing for more and bigger operations, and in general kicking up a general mess.

I accordingly reduce the honorarium to $100, and am willing to reduce it further to $50 or even to $25 if the consensus of local opinion so advises. In Mississippi, where the annual cash income of a sharecropper is said to be but $32, $50 is a large sum, and will suffice to recruit many thousands. But it is not so large that it will certainly demoralize and ruin its recipient. Making him rich for the nonce, it will still leave him under the necessity of working, and after he has spent it he will return to the plow. Best of all, it will not so bedazzle him and his friends that they will overlook the real benefits flowing from his acquiescence. His popularity socially will not a function of his wealth only, but will be grounded also on his disappearance from the ranks of disease and sorrow carriers. His wife, in particular, will be relieved of her present uneasiness in his presence, and his family life will thus increase in peace and dignity. And if he has no wife he will find himself regarded with less fear and more respect by the generality of females. All in all, there will be a psychological gain to the community that will go far beyond the monetary benefit to the individual, and in that gain, of course, the individual will have a larger share. As the population gradually diminishes, the whole aspect of life will improve, and a happier people will not need the powerful stimulants – for example, lynchings, Holy Rolling, and the consumption of white mule – which now serve to take their minds of their troubles.

I add one more amendment. There is no reason why the cost of this great moral enterprise, at least while it remains experimental, should be thrown on the taxpayer. It is a proper subject for private philanthropy, and no legal impediment, so far as I know, stands in the way. Any American citizen is free at the minute to destroy his fecundity at will, and any other citizen is free to aid and encourage him to do so. I therefore suggest that some well-heeled lover of humanity come forward with a donation to start the campaign. Let him put up $50,000 to spread the news from end to end of the Bible country, and another $50,000 to indemnify the first 1000 or 2000 candidates. The birth-controllers already have an effective propaganda in operation, and it is possible that they may be induced to lend it for the purpose. All that is needed is a beginning. Once the first brave squad of bounty-men returns home, and reports begin to circulate through the Frauenzimmer, the pressure upon the laggards will become so enormous that only a few irreconcilables will be able to hold out. The experimental fund will suffice to purge and uplift half a county; ten or fifteen million dollars would be enough to rescue the whole of Arkansas.

Here is a constructive suggestion that meets the exacting standards of both Rotary and the Brain Trust. It promises to bring the blessings of the More Abundant Life to thousands of unhappy and despondent people, and the head off an infinitude of even worse unhappiness and despondency hereafter. Certainly it is cheap at the price – immensely cheaper on all counts than supporting an ever-increasing herd of morons for all eternity. I dedicate it to my country.

Original online article at H.L. Mencken Information

The American Mercury vol. 40 (1937)

THERE CAN be no question about the average American’s Americanism or his desire to preserve this precious heritage at all costs. Nevertheless, some insidious foreign ideas have already wormed their way into his civilization without his realizing what was going on. Thus dawn finds the unsuspecting patriot garbed in pajamas, a garment of East Indian origin; and lying in a bed built on a pattern which originated in either Persia or Asia Minor. He is muffled to the ears in un-American materials: cotton, first domesticated in India; linen, domesticated in the Near East; wool from an animal native to Asia Minor; or silk whose uses were first discovered by the Chinese. All these substances have been transformed into cloth by methods invented in Southwestern Asia. If the weather is cold enough he may even be sleeping under an eiderdown quilt invented in Scandinavia.

On awakening he glances at the clock, a medieval European invention; uses one potent Latin word in abbreviated form, rises in haste, and goes to the bathroom. Here, if he stops to think about it, he must feel himself in the presence of a great American institution; he will have heard stories of both the quality and frequency of foreign plumbing and will know that in no other country does the average man perform his ablutions in the midst of such splendor. But the insidious foreign influence pursues him even here. Glass was invented by the ancient Egyptians, the use of glazed tiles for floors and walls in the Near East, porcelain in China, and the art of enameling on metal by Mediterranean artisans of the Bronze Age. Even his bathtub and toilet are but slightly modified copies of Roman originals. The only purely American contribution to the ensemble is the steam radiator, against which our patriot very briefly and unintentionally places his posterior.

In this bathroom the American washes with soap invented by the ancient Gauls. Next he cleans his teeth, a subversive European practice which did not invade America until the latter part of the eighteenth century. He then shaves, a masochistic rite first developed by the heathen priests of ancient Egypt and Sumer. The process is made less of a penance by the fact that his razor is of steel, an iron-carbon alloy discovered in either India or Turkestan. Lastly, he dries himself on a Turkish towel.

Returning to the bedroom, the unconscious victim of un-American practices removes his clothes from a chair, invented in the Near East, and proceeds to dress. He puts on close-fitting tailored garments whose form derives from the skin clothing of the ancient nomads of the Asiatic steppes and fastens them with buttons whose prototypes appeared in Europe at the Close of the Stone Age. This costume is appropriate enough for outdoor exercise in a cold climate, but is quite unsuited to American summers, steam-heated houses, and Pullmans. Nevertheless, foreign ideas and habits hold the unfortunate man in thrall even when common sense tells him that the authentically American costume of gee string and moccasins would be far more comfortable. He puts on his feet stiff coverings made from hide prepared by a process invented in ancient Egypt and cut to a pattern which can be traced back to ancient Greece, and makes sure that they are properly polished, also a Greek idea. Lastly, he ties about his neck a strip of bright-colored cloth which is a vestigial survival of the shoulder shawls worn by seventeenth century Croats. He gives himself a final appraisal in the mirror, an old Mediterranean invention, and goes downstairs to breakfast.

Here a whole new series of foreign things confronts him. His food and drink are placed before him in pottery vessels, the proper name of which – china – is sufficient evidence of their origin. His fork is a medieval Italian invention and his spoon a copy of a Roman original. He will usually begin the meal with coffee, an Abyssinian plant first discovered by the Arabs. The American is quite likely to need it to dispel the morning-after effects of overindulgence in fermented drinks, invented in the Near East; or distilled ones, invented by the alchemists of medieval Europe.

Whereas the Arabs took their coffee straight, he will probably sweeten it with sugar, discovered in India; and dilute it with cream, both the domestication of cattle and the technique of milking having originated in Asia Minor.

If our patriot is old-fashioned enough to adhere to the so-called American breakfast, his coffee will be accompanied by an orange, domesticated in the Mediterranean region, a cantaloupe domesticated in Persia, or grapes domesticated in Asia Minor. He will follow this with a bowl of cereal made from grain domesticated in the Near East and prepared by methods also invented there. From this he will go on to waffles, a Scandinavian invention, with plenty of butter, originally a Near Eastern cosmetic. As a side dish he may have the egg of a bird domesticated in Southeastern Asia or strips of the flesh of an animal domesticated in the same region, which has been salted and smoked by a process invented in Northern Europe.

Breakfast over, he places upon his head a molded piece of felt, invented by the nomads of Eastern Asia, and, if it looks like rain, puts on outer shoes of rubber, discovered by the ancient Mexicans, and takes an umbrella, invented in India. He then sprints for his train – the train, not sprinting, being in English invention. At the station he pauses for a moment to buy a newspaper, paying for it with coins invented in ancient Lydia. Once on board he settles back to inhale the fumes of a cigarette invented in Mexico, or a cigar invented in Brazil. Meanwhile, he reads the news of the day, imprinted in characters invented by the ancient Semites by a process invented in Germany upon a material invented in China. As he scans the latest editorial pointing out the dire results to our institutions of accepting foreign ideas, he will not fail to thank a Hebrew God in an Indo-European language that he is a one hundred percent (decimal system invented by the Greeks) American (from Americus Vespucci, Italian geographer).

_________

It’s been said that this piece by Mercury writer Ralph Linton shows the “irrationality of ethnocentrism.” I’m not sure that a mild ethnocentricity is irrational — after all, it’s Nature’s way of ensuring that variation and speciation are preserved and indeed intensified over time — but the ignorant, jingoistic nationalism that has allowed us to be manipulated into hatred of innocents and endless wars (I see a yahoo with an “I’d walk a mile to smoke a camel jockey” pro-war t-shirt) certainly deserves to be lampooned, as Linton does masterfully. – Ed.

(This article by Ralph Linton, “One Hundred Percent American,” is from The American Mercury vol. 40 (1937): pp 427-29.)

This classic essay on freedom was published in The American Mercury in 1927.

I. The Majesty of the Law

When I was seven years old, playing in front of our house on the outskirts of Brooklyn one morning, a policeman stopped and chatted with me for a few moments. He was a kindly man, of a Scandinavian blonde type with pleasant blue eyes, and I took to him at once. He sealed our acquaintance permanently by telling me a story that I thought was immensely funny; I laughed over it at intervals all day. I do not remember what it was, but it had to do with the antics of a drove of geese in our neighborhood. He impressed me as the most entertaining and delightful person that I had seen in a long time, and I spoke of him to my parents with great pride.

At this time I did not know what policemen were. No doubt I had seen them, but not to notice them. Now, naturally, after meeting this highly prepossessing specimen, I wished to find out all I could about them, so I took the matter up with our old colored cook. I learned from her that my fine new friend represented something that was called the law; that the law was very good and great, and that everyone should obey and respect it. This was reasonable; if it were so, then my admirable friend just fitted his place, and was even more highly to be thought of, if possible.

I asked where the law came from, and it was explained to me that men all over the country got together on what was called election day, and chose certain persons to make the law and others to see that it was carried out; and that the sum total of all this mechanism was called our government. This again was as it should be; the men I knew, such as my father, my uncle George, and Messrs. So-and-so among the neighbors (running them over rapidly in my mind), could do this sort of thing handsomely, and there was probably a good deal in the idea. But what was it all for! Why did we have law and government, anyway! Then I learned that there were persons called criminals; some of them stole, some hurt or killed people or set fire to houses; and it was the duty of men like my friend the policeman to protect us from them. If he saw any he would catch them and lock them up, and they would be punished according to the law.

A year or so later we moved to another house in the same neighborhood, only a short distance away. On the corner of the block – rather a long block – behind our house stood a large one-story wooden building, very dirty and shabby, called the Wigwam. While getting the lie of my new surroundings, I considered this structure and remarked with disfavor the kind of people who seemed to be making themselves at home there. Someone told me it was a “political headquarters,” but I did not know what that meant, and therefore did not connect it with my recent researches into law and government. I had little curiosity about the Wigwam. My parents never forbade my going there, but my mother once casually told me that it was a pretty good place to keep away from, and I agreed with her.

Two months later I heard someone say that election day was shortly coming on, and I sparked up at once; this, then, was the day when the lawmakers were to be chosen. There had been great doings at the Wigwam lately; in the evenings, too, I had seen noisy processions of drunken loafers passing our house, carrying transparencies and tin torches that sent up clouds of kerosene smoke. When I had asked what these meant, I was answered in one word, “politics,” uttered in a disparaging tone, but this signified nothing to me. The fact is that my attention had been attracted by a steam calliope that went along with one of the first of these processions, and I took it to mean that there was a circus going on; and when I found that there was no circus, I was disappointed and did not care what else might be taking place.

On hearing of election day, however, the light broke in on me. I was really witnessing the august performances that I had heard of from our cook. All these processions of yelling hoodlums who sweat and stank in the parboiling humidity of the Indian-summer evenings – all the squalid goings on in the Wigwam – all these, it seemed, were part and parcel of an election. I noticed that the men whom I knew in the neighborhood were not prominent in this election; my uncle George voted, I remember, and when he dropped in at our house that evening, I overheard him say that going to the polls was a filthy business. I could not make it out. Nothing could be clearer than that the leading spirits in the whole affair were most dreadful swine; and I wondered by what kind of magic they could bring forth anything so majestic, good, and venerable as the law. But I kept my questionings to myself for some reason, though, as a rule, I was quite a hand for pestering older people about matters that seemed anomalous. Finally, I gave it up as hopeless, and thought no more about the subject for three years.

An incident of that election night, however, stuck in my memory. Some devoted brother, very far gone in whisky, fell by the wayside in a vacant lot just back of our house, on his way to the Wigwam to await the returns. He lay there all night, mostly in a comatose state. At intervals of something like half an hour he roused himself up in the darkness, apparently aware that he was not doing his duty by the occasion, and tried to sing the chorus of “Marching Through Georgia,” but he could never get quite through three measures of the first bar before relapsing into somnolence. It was very funny; he always began so bravely and earnestly, and always petered out so lamentably. I often think of him. His general sense of political duty, I must say, still seems to me as intelligent and as competent as that of any man I have met in the many, many years that have gone by since then, and his mode of expressing it still seems about as effective as any I could suggest.

II. Reformers, Noble and Absurd

When I was just past my tenth birthday we left Brooklyn and went to live in a pleasant town of ten thousand population. An orphaned cousin made her home with us, a pretty girl, who soon began to cut a fair swath among the young men of the town. One of these was an extraordinary person, difficult to describe. My father, a great tease, at once detected his resemblance to a chimpanzee, and bored my cousin abominably by always speaking of him as Chim. The young man was not a popular idol by any means, yet no one thought badly of him. He was accepted everywhere as a source of legitimate diversion, and in the graduated, popular scale of local speech was invariably designated as a fool – a born fool, for which there was no help.

When I heard he was a lawyer, I was so astonished that I actually went into the chicken court one day to hear him plead some trifling case, out of sheer curiosity to see him in action; and I must say I got my money’s worth. Presently the word went around that he was going to run for Congress, and stood a good chance of being elected; and what amazed me above all was that no one seemed to see anything out of the way about it.

My tottering faith in law and government got a hard jolt from this. Here was a man, a very good fellow indeed – he had nothing in common with the crew who herded around the Wigwam – who was regarded by the unanimous judgment of the community, without doubt, peradventure, or exception, as having barely sense enough to come in when it rained; and this was the man whom his party was sending to Washington as contentedly as if he were some Draco or Solon. At this point my sense of humor forged to the front and took permanent charge of the situation, which was fortunate for me, since otherwise my education would have been aborted, and I would perhaps, like so many who have missed this great blessing, have gone in with the reformers and uplifters; and such a close shave as this, in the words of Rabelais, is a terrible thing to think upon.

How many reformers there have been in my day; how nobly and absurdly busy they were, and how dismally unhumorous! I can dimly remember Pingree and Altgeld in the Middle West, and Godkin, Strong, and Seth Low in New York. During the nineties, the goodly fellowship of the prophets buzzed about the whole country like flies around a tar barrel – and, Lord! where be they now?

III. To Abolish Crime or to Monopolize It?

It will easily be seen, I think, that the only unusual thing about all this was that my mind was perfectly unprepossessed and blank throughout. My experiences were surely not uncommon, and my reasonings and inferences were no more than any child, who was more than halfwitted, could have made without trouble. But my mind had never been perverted or sophisticated; it was left to itself. I never went to school, so I was never indoctrinated with pseudo-patriotic fustian of any kind, and the plain, natural truth of such matters as I have been describing, therefore, found its way to my mind without encountering any artificial obstacle.

This freedom continued, happily, until my mind had matured and toughened. When I went to college I had the great good luck to hit on probably the only one in the country (there certainly is none now) where all such subjects were so remote and unconsidered that one would not know they existed. I had Greek, Latin, and mathematics, and nothing else, but I had these until the cows came home; then I had them all over again (or so it seemed) to make sure nothing was left out; then I was given a bachelor’s degree in the liberal arts, and turned adrift.

The idea was that if one wished to go in for some special branch of learning, one should do it afterward, on the foundation laid at college. The college’s business was to lay the foundation, and the authorities saw to it that we were kept plentifully busy with the job. Therefore, all such subjects as political history, political science, and political economy were closed to me throughout my youth and early manhood; and when the time came that I wished to look into them, I did it on my own, without the interference of instructors, as any person who has gone through a course of training similar to mine at college is quite competent to do.

That time, however, came much later, and meanwhile I thought little about law and government, as I had other fish to fry; I was living more or less out of the world, occupied with literary studies. Occasionally some incident happened that set my mind perhaps a little farther along in the old sequences, but not often. Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one’s conscience.

Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it – the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers – felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and conscientious men.

The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect – nay, would have wished to respect. This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from that time.

Presently I got acquainted in a casual way with some officeholders, becoming quite friendly with one in particular, who held a high elective office. One day he happened to ask me how I would reply to a letter that bothered him; it was a query about the fitness of a certain man for an appointive job. His recommendation would have weight; he liked the man, and really wanted to recommend him – moreover, he was under great political pressure to recommend him – but he did not think the man was qualified. Well, then, I suggested offhand, why not put it just that way? – it seemed all fair and straightforward. “Ah yes,” he said, “but if I wrote such a letter as that, you see, I wouldn’t be reelected.”

This took me aback a bit, and I demurred somewhat. “That’s all very well,” he kept insisting, “but I wouldn’t be reelected.” Thinking to give the discussion a semihumorous turn, I told him that the public, after all, had rights in the matter; he was their hired servant, and if he were not reelected it would mean merely that the public did not want him to work for them any more, which was quite within their competence. Moreover, if they threw him out on any such issue as this, he ought to take it as a compliment; indeed, if he were reelected, would it not tend to show in some measure that he and the people did not fully understand each other! He did not like my tone of levity, and dismissed the subject with the remark that I knew nothing of practical politics, which was no doubt true.

IV. The Prevalent Air of Cynicism

Perhaps a year after this I had my first view of a legislative body in action. I visited the capital of a certain country, and listened attentively to the legislative proceedings. What I wished to observe, first of all, was the kind of business that was mostly under discussion; and next, I wished to get as good a general idea as I could of the kind of men who were entrusted with this business. I had a friend on the spot, formerly a newspaper reporter who had been in the press gallery for years; he guided me over the government buildings, taking me everywhere and showing me everything I asked to see.

As we walked through some corridors in the basement of the Capitol, I remarked the resonance of the stonework. “Yes,” he said, thoughtfully, “these walls, in their time, have echoed to the uncertain footsteps of many a drunken statesman.” His words were made good in a few moments when we heard a spirited commotion ahead, which we found to proceed from a good-sized room, perhaps a committee room, opening off the corridor. The door being open, we stopped, and looked in on a strange sight.

In the center of the room, a florid, square-built, portly man was dancing an extraordinary kind of breakdown, or Kazakh dance. He leaped straight up to an incredible height, spun around like a teetotum, stamped his feet, then suddenly squatted and hopped through several measures in a squatting position, his hands on his knees, and then leaped up in the air and spun around again. He blew like a turkeycock, and occasionally uttered hoarse cries; his protruding and fiery eyes were suffused with blood, and the veins stood out on his neck and forehead like the strings of a bass-viol. He was drunk.

About a dozen others, also very drunk, stood around him in crouching postures, some clapping their hands and some slapping their knees, keeping time to the dance. One of them caught sight of us in the doorway, came up, and began to talk to me in a maundering fashion about his constituents. He was a loathsome human being; I have seldom seen one so repulsive. I could make nothing of what he said; he was almost inarticulate; and in pronouncing certain syllables he would slaver and spit, so that I was more occupied with keeping out of his range than with listening to him. He kept trying to buttonhole me, and I kept moving backward; he had backed me thirty feet down the corridor when my friend came along and disengaged me; and as we resumed our way, my friend observed for my consolation that “you pretty well need a mackintosh when X talks to you, even when he is sober.”

This man, I learned, was interested in the looting of certain valuable public lands; nobody had heard of his ever being interested in any other legislative measures. The florid man who was dancing was interested in nothing but a high tariff on certain manufactures; he shortly became a Cabinet officer. Throughout my stay I was struck by seeing how much of the real business of legislation was in this category – how much, that is, had to do with putting unearned money in the pockets of beneficiaries – and what fitful and perfunctory attention the legislators gave to any other kind of business. I was even more impressed by the prevalent air of cynicism; by the frankness with which everyone seemed to acquiesce in the view of Voltaire, that government is merely a device for taking money out of one person’s pocket and putting it into another’s.

V. The Unique Anomalies of the State

These experiences, commonplace as they were, prepared me to pause over and question certain sayings of famous men, when subsequently I ran across them, which otherwise I would perhaps have passed by without thinking about them. When I came upon the saying of Lincoln, that the way of the politician is “a long step removed from common honesty,” it set a problem for me. I wondered just why this should be generally true, if it were true. When I read the remark of Mr. Jefferson, that “whenever a man has cast a longing eye on office, a rottenness begins in his conduct,” I remembered the judge who had sentenced the boy, and my officeholding acquaintance who was so worried about reelection. I tried to reexamine their position, as far as possible putting myself in their place, and made a great effort to understand it favorably.

My first view of a parliamentary body came back to me vividly when I read the despondent observation of John Bright, that he had sometimes known the British Parliament to do a good thing, but never just because it was a good thing. In the meantime I had observed many legislatures, and their principal occupations and preoccupations seemed to me precisely like those of the first one I ever saw; and while their personnel was not by any means composed throughout of noisy and disgusting scoundrels (neither, I hasten to say, was the first one), it was so unimaginably inept that it would really have to be seen to be believed. I cannot think of a more powerful stimulus to one’s intellectual curiosity, for instance, than to sit in the galleries of the last Congress, contemplate its general run of membership, and then recall these sayings of Lincoln, Mr. Jefferson, and John Bright.[1]

It struck me as strange that these phenomena seemed never to stir any intellectual curiosity in anybody. As far as I know, there is no record of its ever having occurred to Lincoln that the fact he had remarked was striking enough to need accounting for; nor yet to Mr. Jefferson, whose intellectual curiosity was almost boundless; nor yet to John Bright. As for the people around me, their attitudes seemed strangest of all. They all disparaged politics. Their common saying, “Oh, that’s politics,” always pointed to something that in any other sphere of action they would call shabby and disreputable. But they never asked themselves why it was that in this one sphere of action alone they took shabby and disreputable conduct as a matter of course. It was all the more strange because these same people still somehow assumed that politics existed for the promotion of the highest social purposes. They assumed that the State’s primary purpose was to promote through appropriate institutions the general welfare of its members.

This assumption, whatever it amounted to, furnished the rationale of their patriotism, and they held to it with a tenacity that on slight provocation became vindictive and fanatical. Yet all of them were aware, and if pressed, could not help acknowledging, that more than 90 percent of the State’s energy was employed directly against the general welfare. Thus one might say that they seemed to have one set of credenda for weekdays and another for Sundays, and never to ask themselves what actual reasons they had for holding either.

I did not know how to take this, nor do I now. Let me draw a rough parallel. Suppose vast numbers of people to be contemplating a machine that they had been told was a plow, and very valuable – indeed, that they could not get on without it – some even saying that its design came down in some way from on high. They have great feelings of pride and jealousy about this machine, and will give up their lives for it if they are told it is in danger. Yet they all see that it will not plow well, no matter what hands are put to manage it, and in fact does hardly any plowing at all; sometimes only with enormous difficulty and continual tinkering and adjustment can it be got to scratch a sort of furrow, very poor and short, hardly practicable, and ludicrously disproportionate to the cost and pains of cutting it. On the other hand, the machine harrows perfectly, almost automatically. It looks like a harrow, has the history of a harrow, and even when the most enlightened effort is expended on it to make it act like a plow, it persists, except for an occasional six or eight percent of efficiency, in acting like a harrow.

Surely such a spectacle would make an intelligent being raise some inquiry about the nature and original intention of that machine. Was it really a plow? Was it ever meant to plow with! Was it not designed and constructed for harrowing? Yet none of the anomalies that I had been observing ever raised any inquiry about the nature and original intention of the State. They were merely acquiesced in. At most, they were put down feebly to the imperfections of human nature which render mismanagement and perversion of every good institution to some extent inevitable; and this is absurd, for these anomalies do not appear in the conduct of any other human institution. It is no matter of opinion, but of open and notorious fact, that they do not. There are anomalies in the church and in the family that are significantly analogous; they will bear investigation, and are getting it; but the analogies are by no means complete, and are mostly due to the historical connection of these two institutions with the State.

Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit – murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion, and connivance. On the other hand, we have all remarked the enormous relative difficulty of getting the State to effect any measure for the general welfare.

Compare the difficulty of securing conviction in cases of notorious malfeasance, and in cases of petty private crime. Compare the smooth and easy going of the Teapot Dome transactions with the obstructionist behavior of the State toward a national child-labor law. Suppose one should try to get the State to put the same safeguards (no stronger) around service income that with no pressure at all it puts around capital income: what chance would one have? It must not be understood that I bring these matters forward to complain of them. I am not concerned with complaints or reforms, but only with the exhibition of anomalies that seem to me to need accounting for.

VI. The Assumption of a Professional Criminal Class

In the course of some desultory reading I noticed that the historian Parkman, at the outset of his volume on the conspiracy of Pontiac, dwells with some puzzlement, apparently, upon the fact that the Indians had not formed a State. Mr. Jefferson, also, who knew the Indians well, remarked the same fact – that they lived in a rather highly organized society, but had never formed a State. Bicknell, the historian of Rhode Island, has some interesting passages that bear upon the same point, hinting that the collisions between the Indians and the whites may have been largely due to a misunderstanding about the nature of land tenure; that the Indians, knowing nothing of the British system of land tenure, understood their land sales and land grants as merely an admission of the whites to the same communal use of land that they themselves enjoyed.

I noticed, too, that Marx devotes a good deal of space in Das Kapital to proving that economic exploitation cannot take place in any society until the exploited class has been expropriated from the land. These observations attracted my attention as possibly throwing a strong side light upon the nature of the State and the primary purpose of government, and I made note of them accordingly. At this time I was a good deal in Europe. I was in England and Germany during the Tangier incident, studying the circumstances and conditions that led up to the late war. My facilities for this were exceptional, and I used them diligently. Here I saw the State behaving just as I had seen it behave at home.

Moreover, remembering the political theories of the 18th century, and the expectations put upon them, I was struck with the fact that the republican, constitutional-monarchical, and autocratic States behaved exactly alike. This has never been sufficiently remarked. There was no practical distinction to be drawn among England, France, Germany, and Russia; in all these countries the State acted with unvarying consistency and unfailing regularity against the interests of the immense, the overwhelming majority of its people.

So flagrant and flagitious, indeed, was the action of the State in all these countries, that its administrative officials, especially its diplomats, would immediately, in any other sphere of action, be put down as a professional-criminal class – just as would the corresponding officials in my own country, as I had already remarked. It is a noteworthy fact, indeed, concerning all that has happened since then, that if in any given circumstances one went on the assumption that they were a professional-criminal class, one could predict with accuracy what they would do and what would happen; while on any other assumption one could predict almost nothing. The accuracy of my own predictions during the war and throughout the Peace Conference was due to nothing but their being based on this assumption.

The Liberal Party was in power in England in 1911, and my attention became attracted to its tenets. I had already seen something of liberalism in America as a kind of glorified mugwumpery. The Cleveland Administration had long before proved what everybody already knew, that there was no essential difference between the Republican and Democratic parties; an election meant merely that one was in office and wished to stay in, and the other was out and wished to get in. I saw precisely the same relation prevailing between the two major parties in England, and I was to see later the same relation sustained by the Labour Administration of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald. All these political permutations resulted only in what John Adams admirably called “a change of impostors.”

But I was chiefly interested in the basic theory of Liberalism. This seemed to be that the State is no worse than a degenerate or perverted institution, beneficent in its original intention, and susceptible of restoration by the simple expedient of “putting good men in office.”

I had already seen this experiment tried on several scales of magnitude, and observed that it came to nothing commensurate with the expectations put upon it or the enormous difficulty of arranging it. Later I was to see it tried on an unprecedented scale, for almost all the governments engaged in the war were liberal, notably the English and our own. Its disastrous results in the case of the Wilson Administration are too well known to need comment; though I do not wish to escape the responsibility of saying that of all forms of political impostorship, liberalism always seemed to me the most vicious, because the most pretentious and specious. The general upshot of my observations, however, was to show me that whether in the hands of Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat, and whether under nominal constitutionalism, republicanism or autocracy, the mechanism of the State would work freely and naturally in but one direction, namely, against the general welfare of the people.

VII. The Origin of the State

So I set about finding out what I could about the origin of the State, to see whether its mechanism was ever really meant to work in any other direction – and here I came upon a very odd fact. All the current popular assumptions about the origin of the State rest upon sheer guesswork – none of them upon actual investigation. The treatises and textbooks that came into my hands were also based, finally, upon guesswork. Some authorities guessed that the State was originally formed by this or that mode of social agreement; others, by a kind of muddling empiricism; others, by the will of God; and so on. Apparently none of these, however, had taken the plain course of going back upon the record as far as possible to ascertain how it actually had been formed, and for what purpose. It seemed that enough information must be available; the formation of the State in America, for example, was a matter of relatively recent history, and one must be able to find out a great deal about it. Consequently I began to look around to see whether anyone had ever anywhere made any such investigation, and if so, what it amounted to.

I then discovered that the matter had, indeed, been investigated by scientific methods, and that all the scholars of the Continent knew about it, not as something new or startling, but as a sheer commonplace. The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes – an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. Such measures of order and justice as it established were incidental and ancillary to this purpose; it was not interested in any that did not serve this purpose; and it resisted the establishment of any that were contrary to it. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.[2]

This at once cleared up all the anomalies which I had found so troublesome. One could see immediately, for instance, why the hunting tribes and primitive peasants never formed a State. Primitive peasants never made enough of an economic accumulation to be worth stealing; they lived from hand to mouth. The hunting tribes of North America never formed a State, because the hunter was not exploitable. There was no way to make another man hunt for you; he would go off in the woods and forget to come back; and if he were expropriated from certain hunting grounds, he would merely move on beyond them, the territory being so large and the population so sparse. Similarly, since the State’s own primary intention was essentially criminal, one could see why it cares only to monopolize crime, and not to suppress it; this explained the anomalous behavior of officials, and showed why it is that in their public capacity, whatever their private character, they appear necessarily as a professional-criminal class; and it further accounted for the fact that the State never moves disinterestedly for the general welfare, except grudgingly and under great pressure.

Again, one could perceive at once the basic misapprehension which forever nullifies the labors of liberalism and reform. It was once quite seriously suggested to me by some neighbors that I should go to Congress. I asked them why they wished me to do that, and they replied with some complimentary phrases about the satisfaction of having someone of a somewhat different type “amongst those damned rascals down there.”

“Yes, but,” I said, “don’t you see that it would be only a matter of a month or so – a very short time, anyway – before I should be a damned rascal, too!”

No, they did not see this; they were rather taken aback; would I explain!

“Suppose,” I said, “that you put in a Sunday-school superintendent or a Y.M.C.A. secretary to run an assignation house on Broadway. He might trim off some of the coarser fringes of the job, such as the badger game and the panel game, and put things in what Mayor Gaynor used to call a state of ‘outward order and decency,’ but he must run an assignation house, or he would promptly hear from the owners.”

This was a new view to them, and they went away thoughtful.

Finally, one could perceive the reason for the matter that most puzzled me when I first observed a legislature in action, namely, the almost exclusive concern of legislative bodies with such measures as tend to take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another – the preoccupation with converting labor-made property into law-made property, and redistributing its ownership. The moment one becomes aware that just this, over and above a purely legal distribution of the ownership of natural resources, is what the State came into being for, and what it yet exists for, one immediately sees that the legislative bodies are acting altogether in character, and otherwise one cannot possibly give oneself an intelligent account of their behavior.[3]

Speaking for a moment in the technical terms of economics, there are two general means whereby human beings can satisfy their needs and desires. One is by work – i.e., by applying labor and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth, or to facilitating the exchange of labor-products. This is called the economic means. The other is by robbery – i.e., the appropriation of the labor products of others without compensation. This is called the political means. The State, considered functionally, may be described as the organization of the political means, enabling a comparatively small class of beneficiaries to satisfy their needs and desires through various delegations of the taxing power, which have no vestige of support in natural right, such as private land ownership, tariffs, franchises, and the like.

It is a primary instinct of human nature to satisfy one’s needs and desires with the least possible exertion; everyone tends by instinctive preference to use the political means rather than the economic means, if he can do so. The great desideratum in a tariff, for instance, is its license to rob the domestic consumer of the difference between the price of an article in a competitive and a non-competitive market. Every manufacturer would like this privilege of robbery if he could get it, and he takes steps to get it if he can, thus illustrating the powerful instinctive tendency to climb out of the exploited class, which lives by the economic means (exploited, because the cost of this privilege must finally come out of production, there being nowhere else for it to come from), and into the class which lives, wholly or partially, by the political means.

This instinct – and this alone – is what gives the State its almost impregnable strength. The moment one discerns this, one understands the almost universal disposition to glorify and magnify the State, and to insist upon the pretence that it is something which it is not – something, in fact, the direct opposite of what it is. One understands the complacent acceptance of one set of standards for the State’s conduct, and another for private organizations – of one set for officials, and another for private persons. One understands at once the attitude of the press, the Church and educational institutions, their careful inculcations of a specious patriotism, their nervous and vindictive proscriptions of opinion, doubt, or even of question. One sees why purely fictitious theories of the State and its activities are strongly, often fiercely and violently, insisted on; why the simple fundamentals of the very simple science of economics are shirked or veiled; and why, finally, those who really know what kind of thing they are promulgating, are loath to say so.

VIII. After the Revolution, Napoleon!

The outbreak of the war in 1914 found me entertaining the convictions that I have here outlined. In the succeeding decade nothing has taken place to attenuate them, but quite the contrary. Having set out only to tell the story of how I came by them, and not to expound them or indulge in any polemic for them, I may now bring this narrative to an end, with a word about their practical outcome.

It has sometimes been remarked as strange that I never joined in any agitation, or took the part of a propagandist for any movement against the State, especially at a time when I had an unexampled opportunity to do so. To do anything of the sort successfully, one must have more faith in such processes than I have, and one must also have a certain dogmatic turn of temperament, which I do not possess. To be quite candid, I was never much for evangelization; I am not sure enough that my opinions are right, and even if they were, a second-hand opinion is a poor possession.

Reason and experience, I repeat, are all that determine our true beliefs. So I never greatly cared that people should think my way, or tried much to get them to do so. I should be glad if they thought – if their general turn, that is, were a little more for disinterested thinking, and a little less for impetuous action motivated by mere unconsidered prepossession; and what little I could ever do to promote disinterested thinking has, I believe, been done.

According to my observations (for which I claim nothing but that they are all I have to go by) inaction is better than wrong action or premature right action, and effective right action can only follow right thinking.

“If a great change is to take place,” said Edmund Burke, in his last words on the French Revolution, “the minds of men will be fitted to it.”

Otherwise the thing does not turn out well; and the processes by which men’s minds are fitted seem to me untraceable and imponderable, the only certainty about them being that the share of any one person, or any one movement, in determining them is extremely small. Various social superstitions, such as magic, the divine right of kings, the Calvinist teleology, and so on, have stood out against many a vigorous frontal attack, and thrived on it; and when they finally disappeared, it was not under attack. People simply stopped thinking in those terms; no one knew just when or why, and no one even was much aware that they had stopped. So I think it very possible that while we are saying, “Lo, here!” and “Lo, there!” with our eye on this or that revolution, usurpation, seizure of power, or what not, the superstitions that surround the State are quietly disappearing in the same way.[4]

My opinion of my own government and those who administer it can probably be inferred from what I have written. Mr. Jefferson said that if a centralization of power were ever effected at Washington, the United States would have the most corrupt government on earth.

Comparisons are difficult, but I believe it has one that is thoroughly corrupt, flagitious, tyrannical, oppressive. Yet if it were in my power to pull down its whole structure overnight and set up another of my own devising – to abolish the State out of hand, and replace it by an organization of the economic means – I would not do it, for the minds of Americans are far from fitted to any such great change as this, and the effect would be only to lay open the way for the worse enormities of usurpation – possibly, who knows! with myself as the usurper! After the French Revolution, Napoleon!

Great and salutary social transformations, such as in the end do not cost more than they come to, are not effected by political shifts, by movements, by programs and platforms, least of all by violent revolutions, but by sound and disinterested thinking. The believers in action are numerous, their gospel is widely preached, they have many followers.

Perhaps among those who will see what I have here written, there are two or three who will agree with me that the believers in action do not need us – indeed, that if we joined them, we should be rather a dead weight for them to carry. We need not deny that their work is educative, or pinch pennies when we count up its cost in the inevitable reactions against it. We need only remark that our place and function in it are not apparent, and then proceed on our own way, first with the more obscure and extremely difficult work of clearing and illuminating our own minds, and second, with what occasional help we may offer to others whose faith, like our own, is set more on the regenerative power of thought than on the uncertain achievements of premature action.

Notes

[1] As indicating the impression made on a more sophisticated mind, I may mention an amusing incident that happened to me in London two years ago. Having an engagement with a member of the House of Commons, I filled out a card and gave it to an attendant. By mistake I had written my name where the member’s should be, and his where mine should be. The attendant handed the card back, saying, “I’m afraid this will ‘ardly do, sir. I see you’ve been making yourself a member. It doesn’t go quite as easy as that, sir – though from some of what you see around ‘ere, I wouldn’t say as ‘ow you mightn’t think so.”

[2] There is a considerable literature on this subject, largely untranslated. As a beginning, the reader may be conveniently referred to Mr. Charles A. Beard‘s Rise of American Civilization and his work on the Constitution of the United States. After these he should study closely – for it is hard reading – a small volume called The State by Professor Franz Oppenheimer, of the University of Frankfort. It has been well translated and is easily available.

[3] When the Republican convention which nominated Mr. Harding was almost over, one of the party leaders met a man who was managing a kind of dark-horse, or one-horse, candidate, and said to him,

You can pack up that candidate of yours, and take him home now. I can’t tell you who the next President will be; it will be one of three men, and I don’t just yet know which. But I can tell you who the next Secretary of the Interior will be, and that is the important question, because there are still a few little things lying around loose that the boys want.

I had this from a United States Senator, a Republican, who told it to me merely as a good story.

[4] The most valuable result of the Russian Revolution is in its liberation of the idea of the State as an engine of economic exploitation. In Denmark, according to a recent article in The English Review, there is a considerable movement for a complete separation of politics from economics, which, if effected, would of course mean the disappearance of the State.