Post 163

This comes from an essay written by H. L. Mencken in 1936. It's called "The New Deal Mentality," and it really is very timely (also, I really love the language used; why don't people write like this anymore? Nevermind--it's because people wouldn't give the effort to read it). The moral of the story is beware the quick fix! (And if you can't take time to read the whole thing, at least take a gander at the second to last paragraph--though it'll make a good deal more sense in context, so I'd like you to read the whole excerpt--especially since I'm taking the time to type it by hand!) This was originally published in The American Mercury (whatever the crap that was); I am copying it from a book called the Anxious Years, edited by Louis Filler:

At every time of stress and storm in history one notes the appearance of wizards with sure cures for all the sorrows of humanity. They flourished, you may be certain, in Sumer and Akkad, in the Egypt of all the long dynasties, and in the lands of the Hittites and Scythians. They swarmed in Greece, and in Rome some of them actually became Emperors. For always the great majority of human beings sweat and fume under the social system prevailing in the world they live in--always they are convinced that they are carrying an undue share of its burdens, and getting too little of its milk and honey. And always it is easy to convince them that by some facile device, invented by its vendor and offered freely out of the bigness of his heart, all these injustices may be forced to cease and desist, and a Golden Age brought in that will give every man whatever he wants, and charge him nothing for it.

There is thus no actual newness in the so-called New Deal. Its fundamental pretension goes back to the dark abysm of time, and even its most lunatic details are not novel to students of world-saving. If it differs from the other current panaceas--for instance, Communism, Fascism, and Nazi-ism--it is only in its greater looseness and catholicity, its more reckless hospitality to miscellaneous nonsense. It is a grand and gaudy synthesis of all the political, economic, social, socio-political, and politico-economic quackeries recorded in the books, from the days of Wat Tyler to those of Bryan, the La Follettes, Lloyd George, Borah, Norris, and Debs. Indeed, it goes far beyond Wat to the Republic of Plato, and on the way down the ages it sucks in the discordant perunas of Augustine, Martin Luther, J. J. Rousseau, Robert Owen, Claude Henri Saint-Simon, Karl Marx, Sockless Jerry Simpson, Thorstein Veblen, and Henry George. This mess, boiling violently in a red-hot pot, is now ladled out to the confiding in horse-doctor's doses, to the music of a jazz band. Let them swallow enough of it, so they are assured, and all their sorrows will vanish. Let them trust the wizards manning the spoons, and they will presently enter upon fields of asphodel, where every yen that is native to the human breast will be realized automatically, and all the immemorial pains of doing-without will be no more, and what goes up need never come down again, and two and two will make five, five and a half, six, ten, a hundred, a million, [sic]

It is hardly necessary to rehearse the constituent imbecilities of this grandiose evangel--its proposal to ease the privations of the poor by destroying food and raising the cost of living, its proposal to dispose of the burden of debt by laying on more and more debt, its proposal to restore the impaired common capital by outlawing and demolishing what is left, and so on and so on. The details are of no more significance that they were when an oldtime doctor sat down to write a shotgun prescription. It is, in fact, only by accident that this or that crazy device gets out in front. Each wizard roots with undeviating devotion for his own, and a large part of the money wasted so far has gone into helping Wallace to prevail against Hopkins, and Hopkins to upset and flabbergast Ickes. Whenever one of the brethren gets a new hunch, there is a sharpening of activity, and the taxpayer goes on the block for another squeeze. And whenever one of them comes to grief, which is almost every day, the others rush into the gap with something worse.

That under all this furious medication there lies a sub-stratum of veritable pathology may be accepted without argument. Even the dumbest yokel does not succumb to even the most eloquent hawker of snake-oil on days when his liver and lights are ideally quiescent. It takes a flicker of pain along the midrifff [sic] to bring him up to the booth, and something more than a flicker to make him buy. In the present case there are qualms and tremors all over the communal carcass, for the whole world was lately mauled by a long, wasteful, and fruitless war, and the end of that war saw many millions of people reduced to poverty, terror, and despair. Immeasurable values had been destroyed, and the standard of living had declined everywhere. There was, of course, only one way to restore what had been lost, and that was for all hands to return to work, and earn it over again by patient industry. But in the post-war years any such scheme seemed too slow and painful, especially to romantic Americans, so resort was had to what appeared to be quicker contrivances. One of them, as everybody knows, was the anticipation of income by credit buying, and another was the accumulation of bogus values by gambling. These contrivances appeared to work for a while, and we were assured by high academic authority that a New Economy had come in; but suddenly they ceased to work, and there ensued a great bust, with the losses of the war multiplied two or three times, and every participant in the joy-ride rubbing his pocket, his occiput, and his shins. Nor did the spectators fare much better. Indeed, some of them were hurt even worse than the joy-riders.

What to do? The old prescription was still indicated--patience, industry, frugality. A few austere souls began to preach it, albeit somewhat timorously, and some even ventured to take it, but for the majority it was far too unpalatable to be endured. They craved a master elixir taht would cure them instantly and without burning their gullets, a single magical dose whose essences would run up and down their legs like electricity, and purge them of all their malaises at one lick, and waft them whole and happy to the topmost towers of Utopia. In brief, what they craved was quackery, and that is precisely what they got. Fro all points of the compass "the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers" came galloping--some from near and some from far, some from college classrooms and some from chicken-farms, some from the voluptuous dens of Rotary and Kiwanis and some from the chill crypts of the Y.M.C.A., some in glittering military uniforms and some in the flapping chemises of prophets and martyrs--but all busting with enlightened self-interest, all eager to grab favorable spots and loose their spiels.

For a while it was very confusing, but gradually something resembling order began to emerge from chaos. Upon the troubled face of the waters there appeared the shine of a serene and benignant Smile, the calming influence of a Master Mind. Why should inspired men fight like cats and dogs? Why should the Uplift be pulled to pieces on the very day of Armageddon, with an unparalleled chance for Service in front of it? Why not gang the suckers, and take them en masse? Why not, in Hopkins' immortal words to his stooge Williams, "give everyone a job"? To see the way was to consummate the dizzy deed. There and then the New Deal was born.