Mencken's skepticism

 

“Speed knew, also, that as the constant dropping of water will wear away the hardest stone, so will the constant repetition of news propaganda and editorial comment, however silly, wear away the thin layer of common sense that surrounds the mind of the average human. He knew that the vast majority of people will believe anything if they hear it often enough.”

This is from Herbert Ashbury’s article about a short lived Hearst newspaper, the Georgian, that set itself up as the competition in Atlanta, Georgia, and failed in the end to oust the reigning Journal-Constitution.. The article appeared in Mencken’s American Mercury in 1926. This was the decade of the Mencken apogee – and Ashbury’s sentences casually nail down the credo under which Mencken ran up his flag. (sorry about the nailing down a raised flag, but what the hell).It was a credo that took as a given that the democratic premise, the public was enlightened enough to govern itself, was so much horse doodle, a rhetorical front for villains to loot the people and an entertainment industry to take them for a ride, for in their heart the public were 4/5 clown, and 1/5 sentimentalist. Outside that circle stood a few wiseasses who knew better, and who had to put up with the insufferable academics who denied the obvious.

Mencken, as someone once put it, was a whale – a uniquely American whale. The American Mercury was the great popular organ for discovering the American grain. It published the greats, from John Fante to William Faulkner. But underneath Mencken’s wisecracking persona and wonderous mixture of magniloquence and hard boiled attitude was a very very reactionary p.o.v. It was a wonder what Mencken could see and describe, and another wonder what he could not see and never bring himself, prejudices in head, to see.

There’s a great example of this in his review, in 1931, of Eugene Lavine’s The Third Degree. Here’s the terrific first graf:

“MR. LAVINE is a police reporter of long practise in New York. In a way his book proves it, for it is written in slipshod and often irritating journalese, but in another way it conceals the fact, for he deals with the police in a frank and objective manner that is very rare among men of his craft. Most of them, after a year or two at headquarters, become so coppish themselves that they are quite unable to discuss the constabulary art and mystery with any show of sense. They fade into what Mr. Lavine himself calls police buffs; that is, police enthusiasts, police fans. A headquarters detective, though he may present to the judicious eye only the spectacle of an ill-natured and somewhat thievish jackass, becomes a hero to them, and they regard an inspector with his gold badge in the wistful, abject fashion proper to the contemplation of the Holy Saints. Every American newspaper of any size has such a police reporter on its staff; there must be at least a thousand in the whole country. But they never write anything about cops that is either true or interesting, and so the literature of the subject is a blank.”

Lavine’s book is devoted, in part, to chronicling the confessions beat out of people unfortunate enough to be trapped by the thievish jackasses.

“As his title indicates, Mr. Lavine devotes a large part of his book to describing the so-called third degree. His accounts of it have the gaudy picturesqueness of good war correspondence. Blood not only flows in streams; it spouts and gurgles. He tells of criminals so badly beaten by police-station Torquemadas that they went mashuggah, and Sing Sing had to yield them to Matteawan. But he manages to get through his account without any show of moral indignation. It is very uncommon, he says, for an innocent man to be thus ill used. The cops seldom get out their rubber-hose shillelahs and lengths of automobile tire save when they have a clearly guilty man before them, and are trying to force something out of him—say the names of his accomplices—that will aid them in their art.”

Notice the shift, here, from the jackass to the discoverers of “clear guilt”.  Nowhere in the review does Mencken cast doubt on a conclusion that is ill assorted with his description of the low browed and thievish constable. If this is the general cast of the police character, you would expect (as crime statistics routinely indicate) that far from finding the guilty, from a quarter to half of crimes are not solved at all, up to and including murder. Rape, for instance, notoriously escapes their abilities, in part because the category is notoriously difficult for the male cop to get his mind around.

It is the idea that the police are able to recognize the “obviously guilty”  that makes Mencken go way off course. Like many sceptics, in fact like a whole American sceptical tradition, Mencken’s doubt goes away when it is a matter of protecting the hierarchy as it is. Which leads to the astonishing case he briefly makes for whipping criminals.

“There is here a hint for lawmakers. Let them restore the bastinado, as has been done in England, and they will not have to resort to Baumes laws and other such extravagant and desperate devices, most of which do not work. The English, when they take a tough boy in an assault with firearms, give him what, in America, would be regarded as a very short term of imprisonment, but they keep him jumping while he is behind the bars by cowhiding him at regular intervals. In consequence, there are very few gunmen in England. In the United States any such programme would bring loud protests from so-called humanitarians. But there is really no reason why whipping should be inhumane.”

Once Mencken flies off the handle, he jumps into the soup – to use the Americanese that he rather loved. In fact, of course, it is very hard to acquire firearms in Britain, whereas the tough boys in America in 1931 had an easy time acquiring tommyguns. Mencken’s scepticism combined with the idea that the guv’mint should not be banning a form of property gives birth to the humane whipping, a truly neat instance of a return to Medieval norms that Mencken would recognize if it was combined with gospel preaching in some anti-Darwinist Southern state.

Mencken and his opposite, Walter Lippman, sanctified the position of “columnist” in America: that history has still not been written. Mencken’s prose style is an American treasure, I think, but his “skepticism” has proved to be an American bane. Must be said, though, that in the twenties and through the thirties, the American Mercury was a great magazine. That it became a racist jackoff magazine in the late forties was a sad sign that the Jazz Age was truly dead.