Second Mencken Chrestomathy (13 page)

Mr. Bowersr’s book is a long one and in parts it is painfully dull; nevertheless, I’d be glad to second a motion to compel every Federal judge in America, every member of the W.C.T.U. and the D.A.R., every Rotarian and Kiwanian, and every self-confessed hero of the late war to memorize it on penalty of the bastinado. For it is a magnificent antidote to the whole rumble-bumble of Law Enforcement, with side swipes at all the other varieties of pious nonsense which now delude the American people. It deals with a period when “idealism” was loose upon the land as never before or since, and the tale it has to tell is one of almost unmitigated oppression, corruption and false pretenses. Then, as now,
politicians, theologians and stock-jobbers combined to bring in the Millennium, and then, as now, the fruits were only extortion and excess. It is difficult, reading the record, to believe it. It seems a sheer impossibility that such things could have happened in a country pretending to be civilized. Yet happen they did, and not all the scouring and polishing of prostitute historians can ever erase the damning facts.

The period, of course, was that of the two Grant administrations. Ignorant, stupid, plebeian and uncouth, with the tastes of a village drunkard and the pathetic credulity of a yokel at a county fair, Grant staggered through his eight years of disgrace and dishonor. He had an instinct for trusting scoundrels which almost amounted to genius. So long as Lincoln lived the influence of that vast and mystical personage held him in leash, and in his final dealings with Lee the orders that came from above even got him some reputation as a humane and sensible man. But once old Abe was in the boneyard, his native imbecility developed rapidly and brilliantly. By 1866 he was already lined up with the harpies and fanatics who sought to destroy Andrew Johnson, and thereafter, until his second term ended in a blast of horrible stenches, he was the stalking-horse of every infamy. There is no record, after the first year or two, that he ever so much as suspected that most of his friends were scoundrels. In the midst of it all he believed that they were virtuous, and marvelled that their patriotic inspirations could be challenged. Today, appropriately enough, the largest American city does honor to his
manes.
It is sad, but it is fitting.

Mr. Bowers’s eye is cast mainly below the Potomac. In his discussions of the sordid abominations of Reconstruction he piles up documents with relentless industry, but when it comes to what went on simultaneously in the North he is not so copious. Such half-fabulous frauds as Henry Ward Beecher get only a few tart words, and there is next to nothing about the thieveries and oppressions which begat the industrialism of today. The South, in the long run, will probably suffer as unpleasantly under that industrialism as it ever suffered under Reconstruction: the signs of that effect are already numerous and striking. But Mr. Bowers has no time or steam for the subject: he is concerned primarily with the robbery and debauchery which went on in the conquered States
immediately after the war. There are few parallels to the story in the history of civilized man. The ancients, butchering their defeated foes out of hand, were relatively humane. It remained for 100% Americans to invent the scheme of first disarming them and then starving and looting them, of setting savages upon them, of cruelly and deliberately reducing them to desperation and despair. It was American soldiers in uniform who carried out that chivalrous business, and it was the most glorious of American captains who bossed the job. Let the fact be remembered by exuberant patriots whenever the flag goes by.

Mr. Bowers unearths some curious and sardonic details. When, at the height of the saturnalia, certain tender-minded Northerners protested against it on grounds of humanity, the Northern Methodist bishops demanded that the whip be laid on with unabated ferocity. From the learned jurists of the Federal judiciary came support no less hearty: they were always ready with decisions justifying the suspension of the writ of
habeas corpus
, the confiscation of private property, the stealing of elections, the waste of the public funds. History repeats itself in our own day, but the denizens of the New South are too stupid to read its lessons. Mr. Bowers makes no vain pretense to judicial impartiality. He is frankly against the Sumners, Thaddeus Stevenses and other such appalling sadists of the era, and apparently hopes that they are now in Hell. The ground he covers has been covered before, but his documentation is largely new. He makes heavy use of the files of the New York
World
, the paper he now serves as an editorial writer. He also dredges a lot of interesting stuff out of contemporary manuscripts, notably the unpublished diary of George W. Julian of Indiana, a follower of Stevens who gagged at what went on, and ended his career as a Democrat. The book, as I have said, has some dullness; Mr. Bowers is not a brisk writer. But the tale he has to tell is one that every American should study on his knees.

From P
REJUDICES
: T
HIRD
S
ERIES
, 1922, pp. 193–200.
First printed in
Issues of Today
, March 11, 1922

L
ET US
suppose that you are a peaceful citizen on your way home from your place of employment. A police sergeant, detecting you in the crowd, approaches you, lays his hand on your collar, and informs you that you are under arrest for killing a trolley conductor in Altoona, Pa. Amazed by the accusation, you decide hastily that the officer has lost his wits, and take to your heels. He pursues you. You continue to run. He draws his revolver and fires at you. He misses you. He fires again and fetches you in the leg. You fall and he is upon you. You prepare to resist his apparently maniacal assault. He beats you into insensibility with his espantoon, and drags you to the patrol box.

Arrived at the watch house you are locked in a room with five detectives, and for six hours they question you with subtle art. You grow angry—perhaps robbed of your customary politeness by the throbbing in your head and leg—and answer tartly. They knock you down. Having failed to wring a confession from you, they lock you in a cell, and leave you there all night. The next day you are taken to police headquarters, your photograph is made for the Rogues’ Gallery, and a print is duly deposited in the section labeled “Murderers.” You are then carted to jail and locked up again. There you remain until the trolley conductor’s wife comes down from Altoona to identify you. She astonishes the police by saying that you are not the man. The actual murderer, it appears, was an Italian. After holding you a day or two longer, to audit your income tax returns and investigate the pre-marital chastity of your wife, they let you go.

You are naturally somewhat irritated by your experience and perhaps your wife urges you to seek redress. Well, what are your remedies? If you are a firebrand, you reach out absurdly for those of a preposterous nature: the instant jailing of the sergeant, the dismissal of the police Commissioner. But if you are a 100% American and respect the laws and institutions of your country, you send for your solicitor—and at once he shows you just how far your rights go, and where they end. You cannot cause the arrest of the sergeant, for you resisted him when he attempted to arrest you, and when you resisted him he acquired an instant right to take you by force. You cannot proceed against him for accusing you falsely, for he has a right to make summary arrests for felony, and the courts have many times decided that a public officer, so long as he cannot be charged with corruption or malice, is not liable for errors of judgment made in the execution of his sworn duty. You cannot get the detectives on the mat, for when they questioned you you were a prisoner accused of murder, and it was their duty and their right to do so. You cannot sue the turnkey at the watch house or the warden at the jail for locking you up, for they received your body, as the law says, in a lawful and regular manner, and would have been liable to penalty if they had turned you loose.

But have you no redress whatever, no rights at all? Certainly you have a right, and the courts have jealously guarded it. You have a clear right, guaranteed to you under the Constitution, to go into a court of equity and apply for a mandamus requiring the police to cease forthwith to expose your portrait in the Rogues’ Gallery among the murderers. This is your inalienable right, and no man or men on earth can take it away from you. You cannot prevent them cherishing your portrait in their secret files, but you can get an order commanding them to refrain forever from exposing it to the gaze of idle visitors, and if you can introduce yourself unseen into their studio and prove that they disregard that order, you can have them hailed into court for contempt and fined by the learned judge.

Thus the law, statute, common and case, protects the free American against injustice.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Feb. 12, 1923

Whenever the liberties of the average citizen are grossly invaded and made a mock of, as happened, for example, in the United States during the late war, there are always observers who marvel that he bears the outrage with so little murmuring. There is, however, no real reason for wondering at it. The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty—and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies. It is, indeed, only the exceptional man who can even stand it. The average man doesn’t want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.… Nietzsche achieved something when he changed Schopenhauer’s will-to-live into a will-to-power. But he didn’t go far enough—or maybe he went
too
far, and in the wrong direction. He should have made it will-to-peace. What the average man wants in this world is the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace—the peace of a trusty in a humane penitentiary, of a hog in a comfortable sty. That is why he has such a superstitious regard for policemen. A policeman is one who protects him (
a
) from his superiors, (
b
) from his equals, and (
c
) from himself. This last service is the most esteemed of them all; theoretically, it keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, insurance collectors and other such morons from smoking opium, ruining themselves at champagne orgies, and travelling all over the country with Follies girls. It is a democratic invention.

From the
American Mercury
, Feb., 1931, pp. 162–63

The basic trouble with the American
Polizei
, it seems to me, is that they are badly chosen for their work, and even worse trained for it. The rule almost everywhere in the country is that a recruit for the force must start at the bottom, and spend years pounding a beat before he is eligible to aspire to the higher ranks. This is a good way, perhaps, to train competent night watchmen and traffic regulators, but certainly it is an idiotic way to train detectives. The young man with intelligence enough to be a good detective simply refuses to waste the best years of his youth tagging automobiles parked in the wrong place, and stealing peanuts. He declines to take orders from a sergeant who, in nine cases out of ten, is an illiterate ignoramus, fit only for clubbing Communists and boozing in speakeasies. He is revolted by the thought of associating for years with men who, whatever their natural charm and virtue, are at best only a gang of truck-drivers and trolley motormen outfitted with shields, revolvers and shillelaghs. So he never goes upon the force at all, and his perhaps highly useful services are lost to law and order, and the subtle and difficult art of catching criminals falls to men who are truck-drivers and trolley motormen still, though every bootlegger bows to them and they are hymned by the newspapers, when a murderer accidentally walks into their hands, as the peers of Sherlock Holmes.

Imagine a Sherlock Holmes in real life, and at the beginning of his career. Naturally enough, he is aware of his gifts, and eager to display them, so he applies for a post on the constabulary. First he is examined by doctors to make sure that he is as strong as an ox, and then he is examined by other quacks to determine whether he can read and write. Having passed both tests, he becomes a probationer and is sent out with an older cop to learn the secrets of the profession. The first is a way of standing first on one foot and then on the other, so that mounting guard while a five-hour parade passes laboriously along the street will not result in varicose veins.
The second is a method of guessing under oath how long a given automobile has been parked at a given spot, without actually timing it. The third is a way of stealing three naps a night in a garage without getting caught by the roundsman. The fourth is a scheme of oral deodorization whereby an hour’s earnest guzzling in a speakeasy will not arouse the suspicions of the captain. And so on, and so on. Sherlock stands it for a couple of weeks, and then turns in his equipment—to enter, perhaps, the investment securities business, to take holy orders, or to turn criminal himself. Hundreds and thousands of youngsters are thus lost to the police every year, and many of them belong to the most intelligent five per cent of recruits.