H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/March 16, 1920
The growing distrust of newspapers, grounded soundly upon their almost unanimous ignorance, stupidity, cowardice and dishonesty, is probably chiefly responsible for the current prosperity of the weeklies of opinion. All of them seem to be doing very well, if not commercially, then at least psychically and publicly. I hear from trustworthy sources that the Nation has a circulation of more than 50,000 a week, and that the New Republic is almost as widely read. The Freeman, which has just entered the field, will probably succeed quite as well. And on the other side there are Col. George Harvey’s Weekly and Dr. Fabian Franklin’s Review, both very widely circulated. The Review, indeed, threatens to match the success of the Nation. It is edited by two graduates of the Nation staff, is backed by a camorra of right-thinking profiteers and has very little direct competition.
All of these weeklies, in fact, are very well heeled. The Republic was established by the late Willard Straight, a member of J. P. Morgan & Co., and his widow is said in be behind it to this day. Straight, of course, was no Bolshevik, but he believed in free speech, and so he actually invested Morgan money in a journal that has become the chief spokesman of the anti-Morgan scheme of things. Such men occasionally show themselves in the world, even in a republic. The Nation is backed by the Villard family, for many years owners of the Evening Post. When the Post was sold to Tom Lamont, another Morgan partner, and turned into an organ of the extremist reaction, with a tame college professor as its editor, Oswald Garrison Villard took over the Nation and made a violently Liberal weekly of it. The Freeman also has plenty of money; its chief proprietor, an Englishman named Francis Neilson, married into the Swift family, of Chicago. The Weekly, of course, is financed by Colonel Harvey himself, and the Review, as I have said, is looked after by a committee of millionaires.
There is thus plenty of mazuma on both sides of the fence. But I see no evidence that the backers of these weeklies interfere to any great extent with their editors. The gentlemen of the New Republic, of course, would probably hesitate to print a piece advocating that the firm of J. P. Morgan & Co. be closed by the Polizei, or even hinting that its war profits and war intrigues ought to be looked into, but beyond that they seem to do pretty much as they please. So with the others. The Freeman, though rich, is published by B. W. Huebsch, a man who subscribes to the almost inconceivable heresy that Johannes Brahms was a greater man than Theodore Roosevelt, and its editor is A. J. Nock, late of the Nation and a notoriously independent fellow. Even the Review shows no visible ball and chain. Dr. Franklin, in truth, is a tame Liberal of the Godkin type, and it would be difficult to imagine any munitions patriot among his backers being more horrified by Bolshevism, or even by ordinary democracy, than he is. As for Harvey, he is his own boss, and so is Villard.
II.
As I say, the prosperity of all these weeklies, both right-thinking and wrong-thinking, is probably chiefly due to the rising suspicion of the newspapers, nine-tenths of which not only distort the news idiotically every day, but have actually sunk into such stupidity that they are quite unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood. They are principally owned by rich men who are trying to put something over on the boobs, and they are principally edited by men who have been so horribly beset by orders from above that they have sunk into cynicism. Worse, they are all at the mercy of agencies deliberately planned for the purpose of deluding the public—Government press-bureaux, unintelligible Government censorships, news associations dominated by commercial gents, propagandists for foreign nations, liars in infinite variety. A news editor, in these days, often has no more than a choice between lies, and an editorial writer must depend upon the same lies for his information.
Consider, for example, the so-called news from Russia that was printed in the American newspapers between the spring of 1917 and, say, three or four months ago, when a few honest stories began to come out. This news was not only grossly erroneous; it was deliberately mendacious; lies were fabricated out of the whole cloth; the truth was vigorously suppressed. Nevertheless, every newspaper in the United States printed it, and not only printed it, but accepted it as true. Most of it was manufactured in the interest of financiers stuck with Russian bonds and eager to overthrow the Bolsheviki and set up a government that would pay them. The roost, I suspect, was manufactured in the interest of French and British traders who were eager to get into Russia on the ground floor, and hence not disinclined to scare the Yankee off. The great press associations served these noble schemers with the utmost fidelity. They transmitted lies by the thousand and the newspapers duly printed them. So far as I know, not the slightest effort was ever made to investigate them. They were too juicy to go to waste.
Well, the public believed all that pishposh for a while and then it began to suspect—that is, its more intelligent minority began to suspect. This minority thereupon looked for better light in other directions, and that better light was presently found in the Nation, the New Republic and the rest of them. The foreign relations section of the Nation, in those days, became an absolute necessity to any man who desired to find out what was actually going on in Russia. His newspaper, with its imbecile Sisson documents, its daily reports of the fall of St. Petersburg and its vast mass of palpable lies about the murder of Gorki, the socialization of women and the burning down of whole towns, first irritated him and then disgusted him. Thus there grew up in his mind a concept of its utter unreliability, its chronic imbecility, its deliberate and vicious dishonesty—and that concept now flourishes tropically. It will take years for the newspapers to win back their old credit. Press-agenting, private and governmental, has ruined them.
III.
Here was the opportunity of the weeklies of opinion, and they made the most of it. The Nation, since the passing of Godkin, has been gradually dying. It was, perhaps, the dullest publication of any sort ever printed in the world. In content it consisted, on the one hand, of long editorials reprinted from the Evening Post, and, on the other hand, of appalling literary essays by such pundits as Paul Elmer More. Villard, when he took it over, threw out all that garbage and began printing the truth, The effect was instantaneous. His circulation increased four- or fivefold in a few months. His paper became a sort of super-newspaper. By the simple device of trying to be honest, he made an enormous success.
This success, of course, was not effected without difficulties. On one occasion the Nation was barred from the mails for printing an article sneering at Samuel Gompers, then a pet of the Administration. Dr. Wilson, hearing of this faux pas, ordered that it be restored at once—an act quite as tyrannical and extra-legal as the original exclusion. The New Republic had even worse difficulties. It evaded Dr. Burleson by becoming an ardent advocate of the ideals of Dr. Wilson—and then stepped out into space when Dr. Wilson put his ideals back into his hat. This contretemps still bedevils the New Republic. A former contributor, Harold Stearns, has lately published a book exposing its victimization in a very cruel manner. Worse, its reply, from the gifted pen of Dr. Walter Lippman, has only served to make its misfortune more patent and more pathetic.
But despite these and many similar adventures, both papers now seem to be in very healthy condition, and if the money holds out they should exercise a good deal of influence upon the politics of the next half dozen years. Both are commonly believed to be much more radical than they really are. What they actually argue for is not radicalism itself, but a fair hearing for radicalism—in brief, for free speech, now down with diabetes. I daresay the Freemen, just started, will follow the same path.
It is a cause that makes a powerful appeal to a certain very hopeful type of mind. In this case hope does not seem to be complicated with the martyr complex. I know of no one on either the Nation, the New Republic or the Freeman who thirsts for jail life with the intensity of the Liberator young men. Perhaps Francis Hackett, of the New Republic, does. But Hackett is an Irishmen, and hence an exception to all rules.
IV.
It is my belief, as an old practitioner of controversy, that all of these weeklies, and especially those on the radical side, weaken their effectiveness by keeping too much to the defensive. It is the offensive that counts, in controversy as in war; one has one’s opponent half beaten when one attacks him vigorously. The logic of events, of course, has forced both the Nation and the New Republic to do a great deal of defending—of Russian Bolsheviks accused of incredible crimes, of conscientious objectors mauled and tortured in military dungeons, of Socialists raided by the gallant boys of the American Legion, of men hounded for contumacy to Woodrow, of publications barred from the mails for vague and unintelligible offenses, of all sorts of victims of the current campaigns of organized hysteria and militant lying. All this, perhaps, has perhaps, has been necessary, but it has also been psychologically clumsy and journalistically unsound.
And why? Simply because it awakens an unpleasant emotion and fails to awaken an equally accessible pleasant one. Defenses of the downtrodden, pleas for the evilly used, eloquence in the cause of the murdered Bill of Rights—these things fill the reader with indignation, and indignation is always disagreeable. One reads on with mounting choler—and then one goes away with a profound feeling of discontent. It is a sad business—but let us think of something pleasant. That something pleasant is always easy to provide. Simply tackle some villain with a club, and the trick is done. Simply begin to crack a skull, and the crowd is at once full of the pleasantest of sentiments.
The Nation, of late, has shown signs of adopting the device, if not the underlying theory. That is to say, it has begun to neglect the Socialists rotting in far-flung jails and to devote itself to exposing the nefarious activities of various sinister fellows, especially A. Mitchell Palmer. As a reader who pays cash for his subscription and wants his money’s worth, I advocate an extension of this policy. Not a tenth of the truth about Palmer has been told. He is one of the most obnoxious mountebanks ever in public life in America, and at the same time one of the most vulnerable. Let the Nation begin telling the whole truth about him, and I shall be glad to renew my subscription. And when Palmer is finished, let it take up seriatim the five thousand other frauds who now flourish in the land.
Here, indeed, is a great opportunity—a chance neglected since the muckraking magazines of a decade ago got their candidates into office and so blew up. The public, I believe, is eager for a butchery on a colossal scale—and the newspapers are far too timorous and debauched to manage it. Worse, all of the Congressional investigations are petering out. The thieves who robbed us during the war were Republicans quite as often as they were Democrats, and so there is no likelihood that the truth will ever be brought out by politicians. But the way lies wide open for any independent gladiator with courage enough to tackle the big boys and money enough to pay for the show. The facts, I believe, would raise the national temperature to 150 degrees. The slaughter would make the most thrilling spectacle since the Becker trial.
V.
I often wonder why it is that the radical weeklies are so much better written than the conservative weeklies. Dr. Franklin’s Review is usually so painfully dull that only the great urge of patriotic duty can get a reader through it. The Nation and the New Republic are a hundred times livelier, though neither is quite free from the pontifical manner. What is the cause of this difference? Is it that radicalism loosens and stimulates the mind, or that all the good writers tend to be radicals? I have never been able to decide.
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