Libertarian Satirist H.L. Mencken on This Day in History

 

Today in History: American journalist and writer H.L. Mencken was born on this day in 1880. Though he was considered very controversial, Mencken earned respect as America’s foremost newspaperman and literary critic. He produced an estimated ten million words: some 30 books, contributions to 20 more books and thousands of newspaper columns. He wrote some 100,000 letters, or between 60 and 125 per working day. Mencken weighed in with wit on topics about politics, literature, food, health, religion, sports etc., and he ranks among the most frequently quoted American authors.

He had a way with words that can only be attributed to a man of letters. He once described the ugliness of the buildings during his trip on a train this way: "I am not speaking of mere filth. One expects steel towns to be dirty. What I allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight. From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five miles, there was not one insight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye."

H.L. Mencken also held governments and politicians in the lowest regard:

"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."

"The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression."

"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

"A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground."

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."

"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses."

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."

"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

"Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies."

"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier."

"All government, of course, is against liberty."

"When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before."

"A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable."

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable."

"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."

"Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven."

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

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The Gettysburg Address on This Day in History

 

This Day in History: The Gettysburg Address was delivered by Abraham Lincoln on this day in 1863.  

It is as follows:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Decades later, H.L. Mencken offered a sharp criticism to Lincoln's address: "The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost child-like perfection—the highest emotion reduced to one graceful and irresistible gesture. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.

But let us not forget that it is oratory, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination — 'that government of the people, by the people, for the people,' should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle an absolutely free people; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and vote of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that vote was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely any freedom at all. Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality of the Gettysburg address? If so, I plead my aesthetic joy in it in amelioration of the sacrilege."

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