H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/January 31, 1921
I.
From the learned Memphis Commercial-Appeal of January 22 I extract the following comment upon a recent hearing before the House Committee on the Census:
“The public is aware that the notorious Society for the Advancement of Colored People appeared before the committee, and through its officials urged the reduction of Southern representation in Congress on the alleged ground of the practical disenfranchisement of the negro in the South. . . . The representatives of this organization who appeared before the committee were negroes of ability who presented their case impressively and with becoming dignity. But the manner in which they were bullied by Southern Congressmen, members of the committee, presents a humiliating contrast. . . . From this exhibition it seems quite clear that the South must improve the quality of its representation if it hopes to retain the respect of the nation. One cannot imagine Lamar, or George, or Isham G. Harris, or Garland playing the role that these men did.”
The eminent editor of the Commercial-Appeal, I regret to say, does not overstate the facts upon which he grounds his despair. I have examined at length the stenographic report of this hearing and find it very depressing indeed. On the one side there were two colored men, the Hon. James Weldon Johnson and the Hon. Walter F. White—polite, intelligent, calm, well-informed, dignified, self-respecting. On the other side were four Southern Congressmen, the Hon. M. M. Aswell, Larsen, Bee and Brinson—bullying, bulldozing, stupid, pettifogging, choleric, nonsensical. They cross-examined the witnesses exactly in the manner of eighth-rate lawyers in a police court—seeking to befog the issue, pressing idiotic points, setting up blathering contentions over words, making vast efforts to cover up their childishness with moral indignation. It was, in sober truth, a humiliating spectacle. One regrets that the whole report cannot be set before all the voters of the republic, that they may begin to understand what intolerable blockheads make their laws at Washington.
II.
But though I am surely no admirer of Confederate Kultur, it seems to me that the Commercial-Appeal goes too far when it assumes that this exhibition had anything peculiarly Southern about it—that Northern Congressmen, taking one with another, are appreciably more intelligent than those from the South. What leads him astray is the fact that the northern congressmen present at the hearing were polite to the witnesses, and conducted themselves, as he says, with “courtesy and ability.” Well, why not? They were Republicans, and the witnesses were giving evidence that pleased them quite as much as it horrified them. Suppose the boot had been on the other leg? Who believes that northern congressmen, fighting, as the Southerners were, for their party and hence for their jobs, would have been any more knightly or intelligent?
As for me, I am not one of those who so believe. On the contrary, it seems to me that the level of the House of Representatives in these days is almost mathematically horizontal, and that for every tin-horn political hack from South of the Potomac it is quite easy to find another tin-horn political hack from the North. In brief, they are practically all in the gutter, intellectually speaking. Now and then a man of ordinary sense and dignity pops up, but it is not often. I read the Congressional Record faithfully and have done so for years. In the Senate debates, amid oceans of tosh, one occasionally encounters a flash of wit or a gleam of sagacity; even more frequently one encounters sound information. But in the House there is seldom anything save balderdash. The discussion of measures of the utmost conceivable importance—bills upon which the security and prosperity of the whole nation depend—is carried on in a manner so imbecile and so degraded that one marvels that even politicians are capable of it.
The newspapers, unfortunately, give no adequate picture of the business. No American journal reports the daily debates in full, as the debates in the House of Commons are reported by the London Times, Daily Telegraph and Morning Post. All one hears of, as a rule, is the action taken, and too often the action taken is unintelligible without the antecedent discussion. If anyone who reads this elegy is eager for more light, then I advise him to go to some public library, ask for the Congressional Record for 1918 and read the House debate on the Volstead Act. It was, I believe, a fair average debate. It was, from first to last, almost obscene in its dishonesty and stupidity.
III.
What this clown show costs the taxpayers annually I do not know. A Congressmen is paid $7,500 a year and is allowed 20 cents a mile for traveling to Washington and then back home. He is allowed, I believe, about $3,000 a year for clerk hire—that is, for personal clerk hire. Sometimes it actually costs him more; sometimes, so it is charged, it costs him less, and he pockets the difference. In addition, he is served by a great horde of secretaries, stenographers, messengers, door-openers, coat-holders, spittoon-cleaners and inkwell-fillers, all paid by the government. He has a private office in a gaudy marble office building. Passing to and from it, he walks through a long tunnel, dug at public expense to protect him from the rain. The mails are free to him. If he would shine as a publicist, the government prints his puerile nonsense at cost. He has many other grafts, some of them more or less legal.
In brief, the life that he leads well represents a whisky drummer’s dream of heaven. He is comfortable, well-paid, surrounded by luxury, important. If he is lucky, there will be a junket or two during his term, and he will travel to far parts at government expense, and possibly on a battleship, or in some other such regal way. The theory behind all this is that the nation should reward its servants for their high services—that the halls of legislation should be thrown open to poor men as well as to rich men—that paying them well makes them honest. But the fact is that paying them well simply makes the House a magnet for every ninth-rate rabble-rouser in the land—for every loud-mouthed and indigent political lawyer, for every professional lodge-joiner, for every orator at farmers’ picnics, for all the submerged rabble of aspiring shysters. A man of good means and decent traditions may occasionally get in, but it is the pushing, bumptious hollowhead who is constantly fighting to get it—and only too often he succeeds. Go to “Who’s Who in America” and investigate the careers of the current members. You will find that fully a half of them are obscure lawyers, school-teachers and mortgage sharks out of almost anonymous towns. One and all the members of this majority are plastered with the brass ornaments of the more brummagem fraternal orders. One and all they are common and vulgar men, cut off sharply from every human influence and contact that makes for intelligence, dignity and sound information.
IV.
Such is the lower House in this 145th year of the Republic. Such are the gentlemen who make the laws that all of us must obey, and carry on the dealings of the nation with foreign peoples. Their general culture is admirably revealed by their debates. What they know of literature is what one may get out of McGuffey’s Sixth Reader. What they know of history is simply the childish nonsense taught in high schools. What they know of the arts and sciences is absolutely nil. Find me 40 men among the 435 in the House who have ever heard of Beethoven, or who know the difference between Cézanne and Bouguereau, or who could give an intelligible account of the Crimean War, and I’ll give you a framed photograph of the Hon. Josephus Daniels. Find me 10 who read an average of 20 good books a year, and I’ll give you two photographs.
The Archive 