Latest / Educational Book Collection / American Credo - H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan

Transcript

American Credo - H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan · Educational Book Collection

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Chapter one of The American Credo. This is a LibriVox recording.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Read
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: by Audrienne Prevost. The American Credo, A Contribution toward the
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: interpretation of the National Mind by H. L. Mankin and
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: George gene Nathan. Chapter one preface the superficial. No doubt
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: will mistake this little book for somewhat laborious attempts at jococity,
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: because incidentally to its main purpose it unveils occasional ideas
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: of so inordinate an erroneousness that they verge upon the ludacrous.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: It will be set down a piece of spoofing, and
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: perhaps denounced as in bad taste. But all the while
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: that main purpose will remain clear enough to the judicious.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: It is, in brief, the purpose of clarifying the current
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: exchange of rhetorical gas bombs upon the subject of American idea,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: deals and the American character, so copious, so cocksure, and
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: withal so ill informed and inconclusive, by putting into plain
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: propositions some of the notions that lie at the hearts
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: of those ideals and enter into the very substance of
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: that character. For as he thinketh in his heart, said Solomon,
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: so is he. It is a saying, obviously, that one
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: may easily fill with fantastic meanings, as the prevailing gabble
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: of the mental healers, new thoughters, efficiency engineers, professors of
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: scientific salesmanship, and other such Mountebanks demonstrates. But nevertheless, it
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: is one grounded at bottom upon an indubitable fact. Deep
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: down in every man there is a body of congenital attitudes,
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: a corpus of ineradicable doctrines and ways of thinking, that
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: determines his reactions to his ideational environment as surely as
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: his physical activity is determined by the length of his
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: tibii and the capacity of his lungs. These primary attitudes,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: in fact, constitute the essential man. It is by recognition
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: of them that one arrives at an accurate understanding of
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: his place and function as a member of human society.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: It is by a shrewd reckoning and balancing of them
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: one against another, that one forecasts his probable behavior in
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: the face of unaccustomed stimuli. All the arts and sciences
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: that have to do with the management of men in
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: the mass are founded upon a proficient practice of that
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: sort of reckoning. The practical politician, as every connoisseur of
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: a clocracy knows, is not a man who seeks to
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: inoculate the innumerable caravan of voters with new ideas. He
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: is a man who seeks to search out and prick
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: into energy the basic ideas that are already in them,
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: and to turn the resultant effervescence of emotion to his
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: own uses. And so with the religious teacher, the social
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: and economic reformer, and every other variety of popular educator,
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: down to and including the humblest press agent of a
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: fifth Assistant Secretary of State, moving picture actor, or YMCA
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: boobsweezing committee. Such adept professors of conviction and enthusiasm in
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: the true sense, never actually teach anything new. All they
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: do is to give new forms to beliefs already in ping,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: to arrange the bits of glass onyx, horn ivory, porphyry,
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: and corndum in the mental kaleidoscope of the populace into
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: novel permutations. To change the figure. They may give the
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: medulla abungata, the cerebral organ of the great masses of
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: simple men, a powerful diuretic or emetic, but they seldom,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: if ever, add anything to its primary supply of fats, protides,
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: and carbohydrates. One speaks of the great masses of simple men,
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: and it is of them, of course, that the ensuing
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: treatise chiefly has to say. The higher and more delicately
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: organized tribes and sects of men are susceptible to no
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: such ready anatomising for the body of beliefs upon which
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: their ratiocination grounds itself is not fixed but changing, and
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: not artless and crystal clear, but excessively complex and obscure.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: It is, indeed the chief mark of a man emerged
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: from the general that he has lost most of his
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: original certainties, and is full of a skepticism which plays
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: like a spray of acid upon all the ideas that
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: come within his purview, including a specially his own. One
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: does not become surer as one advances in knowledge, but
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: less sure no article of faith is proof against the
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: disintegrating effects of increasing information. One might almost describe the
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: acquirement of knowledge as a process of dissolution. But among
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: the humbler ranks of men, who make up the great
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: bulk of every civilized people, the increase of information is
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: so slow and so arduous that this effect is scarcely
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: to be discerned. If in the course of long years
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: they gradually lose their old faiths, it is only to
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: fill the gaps with new faiths that restate the old
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: ones in new terms. Nothing, in fact, could be more
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: commonplace than the observation that the crazes which periodically ravage
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: the proletariat today are in the main no more than
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: distorted echoes of delusions cherished centuries ago. The fundamental religious
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: ideas of the lower orders of Christendom have not changed
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: materially in two thousand years, and they were old when
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: they were first borrowed from the heathen of Northern Africa
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: and Asia. Minace the Iowa Methodist of today, imagining him
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: competent to understand them at all, would be able to
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: accept the tenets of Augustine without changing more than a
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: few accents and punctuation marks. Every Sunday, his raucous ecclesiastics
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: batter his ears with diluted and debased filches from the Chiwitati.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: They and almost every article of his practical ethics may
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: be found clearly stated in the eminent bishop's ninety third Epistle.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: And so in politics, the Bolsheviki of the present not
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: only pulparrot the balderdash of the French demagogues of seventeen
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: eighty nine. They also mouth what was gospel to every
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: betty blonde in the Teutonic forest of the fifth century.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamond. Its
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: aspect is never precisely the same at too successive instants,
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: but error flows down the channel of history like some
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: great stream of lava or infinitely lethargic glacier. It is
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: the one relatively fixed thing in a world of chaos.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: It is perhaps the one thing that gives human society
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: the small stability that it needs amid all the oscillation
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: of a gelatinous cosmos, to save it from the wreck
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: that ever menaces. Without their dreams, men would have fallen
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: upon and devoured one another long ago. And yet every
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: dream is an illusion, and every illusion is a lie. Nevertheless,
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: this immutability of popular ideas is not quite perfect. The
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: main current, no doubt, goes on unbrokenly, but there are
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: many eddies along the edges, and many small tempests on
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: the surface. Thus the aspect changes if not the substance.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: What men believe in one century is apparently abandoned in
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: some other century, and perhaps supplanted by something quite to
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: the contrary, or at all events to the contrary. In appearance,
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then bit by
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: bit the face of freedom hardens, and by and by
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: and another. But under the play of all these opposites
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: there is something fundamental and permanent, the basic delusion that
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: men may be governed and yet be free. It is
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: only on the surface that there are transformations, and these
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: we must study and make the most of, for of
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: what is underneath men are mainly unconscious. The thing that
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: colors the upper levels is largely the instinctive functioning of
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: race and nationality, the ineradicable rivalry of tribe and tribe,
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: the primary struggle for existence. At bottom, no doubt, the
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: plain men of the world are almost indistinguishably alike. A
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: learned anthropologist, professor doctor Boas, has written a book to
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: prove it. But collected into herds, they gather delusions that
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: are special to herds. Beside the underlying mass thinking, there
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: is a superimposed group thinking, a sort of unintelligent class consciousness.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: This we may prod into. This, in the case of
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: the Homo Americanus, is what is prodded into in the
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: present work we perform. It seems to us a useful pioneering. Incomplete,
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: though our data may be, it is at least grounded
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: upon a resolute avoidance of a priori methods, an absolutely
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: open minded effort to get at the facts. We pounce
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: upon them as they bop up, convinced that even the
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: most inconsiderable of them may have its profound significance, that
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: the essential may be hidden in the trivial. All we
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: aim at is a first marshaling of materials, an initial
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: running of lines. We are not architects, but furnitures of bricks, nails,
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: and laughs. But it is our hope that what we
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: thus rake up and pile into a rough heap may
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: yet serve the purposes of an organizer, and so help
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: toward the establishment of the dim and vacillating truth, and
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: rid the scene of, at all events, the worst and
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: most obvious of its present accumulation of errors. End of
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: chapter one, Chapter two of the American Credo by H. L.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Mankin and George Gene Nathan. This LibriVox recording is in
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: the public domain. In the case of the American of
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: the multitude, that accumulation of errors is of astounding bulk
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: and consequence. His ideas are not only grossly misapprehended by
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: all foreigners, they are often misapprehended by his own countrymen
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: of superior education, and even by himself. This last, at
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: first blush may seem a mere effort at paradox, but
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: its literal truth becomes patent on brief inspection. Ask the
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: average American what is the salient passion in his emotional armamentarium?
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: What is the idea that lies at the bottom of
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: all his other ideas? And it is very probable that
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: nine times out of ten he will nominate his hot
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: and unquenchable rage for liberty. He regards himself, indeed, as
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: the chief exponent of liberty in the whole world, and
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: all its other advocates as no more than his followers,
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: half timorous and half envious. To question his ardor is
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: to insult him, as grievously as if one questioned the
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: honour of the Republic, or the chastity of his wife.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: And yet it must be plain to any dispassionate observer
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: that this ardor, in the course of a century and
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: a half, has lost a large part of its old,
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: burning reality and descended to the estate of a mere
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: phosphorescent superstition. The American of today, in fact, probably enjoys
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: less personal liberty than any other man of Christendom, and
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: even his political liberty is fast succumbing to the new
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: dogma that certain theories of government are virtuous and lawful
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: and others abhorrent and felonious, laws, limiting the radius of
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: his free activity multiply year by year. It is now
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: practically impossible for him to exhibit anything describable as genuine individuality,
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: either in action or in thoughts, without running a foul
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: of some harsh and unintelligible penalty. It would surprise no
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: impartial observer if the motto in God we Trust were
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: one day expunged from the coins of the Republic by
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: the junkers at Washington, and the far more appropriate word
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: were botn substituted. Nor would it astound any save the
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: most romantic, if, at the same time the Goddess of
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: for a vast relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet. Moreover,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: this gradual and of late rapidly progressive decay of freedom
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: goes almost without challenge. American has grown so accustomed to
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter openers, informers,
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: and agents provocateurs, that he no longer makes any serious protest.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: It is surely a significant fact that, in the face
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: of the late almost incredible proceedings under the so called
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: Espionage Act and other such laws, the only objections heard
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: of came either from the persons directly affected, nine tenths
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: of them socialists, pacifists, or citizens accused of German sympathies
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: and hence without any rights whatever in American law and equity,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: or from a small group of professional libertarians, chiefly naturalized aliens.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: The American people as a people acquiesced docile in all
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: these tyrannies, both during the war and after the war,
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: just as they acquiesced in the invasion of their common
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: rights by the Prohibition Amendment. Worse, they not only acquiesced docile,
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: they approved actively. They were quite as hotly against the
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: few Protestants as they were against the original victims, and
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: gave their hearty approbation to every proposal that the former
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: be punished to. The really startling phenomenon of the war, indeed,
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: was not the grotesque abolition of liberty in the name
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: of liberty, but the failure of that usurpation to arouse
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: anything approaching public indignation. It is impossible to imagine the
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: men of Jackson's army, or even of Grant's army, submitting
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: to any such absolutism without a furious struggle. But in
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: these latter days it is viewed with the utmost complacency.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: The descendants of the Americans who punished John Adams so
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: melodramatically for the Alien and Sedition Acts of seventeen eighty
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: nine failed to raise a voice against the far more
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: drastic legislation of nineteen seventeen. What is more, they failed
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: to raise a voice against its execution upon the innocent
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: as well as upon the guilty, engross violation of the
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: most elemental principles of justice and rules of law. Thus,
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: the Americano put to the test gave the lie to
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: what is probably his proudest boast, and reveals the chronic
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: human incapacity for accurate self analysis. But if he thereby
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: misjudged and misjudges himself, he may find some consolation for
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: his error in the lavishness with which even worse misjudgment
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: is heaped upon him by foreigners. To this day, despite
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: the intimate contact of five long years of joint war,
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: the French and the English are ignorant of his true character,
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: and show it in their every discussion of him, particularly
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: when they discuss him in camera. It is the secret
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: but general view of the French. We are informed by
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: confidential agents that he is a fellow of loose life,
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: and not to be trusted with either a wine pot,
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: a virgin, or a domestic fowl, an absurdly inaccurate generalization
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: from the aberrations of soldiers in a far land, cut
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: off from the moral repressions that lie upon them and
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: color all their acts at home. It is the view
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: of the English, so we hear, upon equally reliable authority,
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: that he is an earnest but extremely inefficient oath, incapable
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: of either the finer technique of war or of its
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: machine like discipline. Another thumping error, for the American is
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: actually extraordinarily adepts and a genius in the very art
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: that modern war chiefly makes use of. And there is,
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: since the revolts of the Prussian, no other such a
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: rigidly regimented man in the world. He has indeed reached
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: such a pass in the latter department that it has
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: become almost impossible for him to think of himself save
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: as an obedient member of some vast, powerful and unintelligibly
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: despotic organization a church, a trades union, a political party,
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: a tin pot fraternal order, or what not. And often
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: he is a member of more than one, and impartially
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: faithful to all. Moreover, as we have seen, he lives
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: under laws which dictate almost every detail of his public
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: and private conduct, and punish every sign of bad discipline
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: with the most appalling rigor. And these laws are enforced
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: by the police, who supply the chance gaps in them
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: extemporary and exercise that authority in the best manner of
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: prison guards, animal trainers, and drill sergeants. The English and
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: the French beside these special errors have a full share
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: in an error that is also embraced by practically every
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: other foreign people. This is the error of assuming, almost
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: as an axiom beyond question, that the Americans are assorted
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: money grubbing people with no thought above the dollar. You
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: will find it prevailing everywhere on the continent of Europe.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: To the German, the United States is Dolahika, and the
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: salient American personality next to the policeman who takes bribes
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: and the snuffling moralist in office is the Dolla Princessen
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: to the Italian, the country is a sort of savage
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: wilderness in which everything else, from religion to beauty, and
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: from decent repose to human life, is sacrificed to profit.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: Italians cross the ocean in much the same spirit that
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: our runaway schoolboys used to go off to fight the Indians.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: Some lucky return home in a few years with fortunes
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: and gaudy tales. Others, succumbing to the natives, are butchered
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: at their labor and buried beneath the cinders of hideous
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: and god forsake. In mining towns, all carry the thought
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: of escape. From beginning to end. Every Italian hopes to
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: get away with his takings as soon as possible to
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: enjoy them on some hillside where life and property are
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: reasonably safe from greed. So with the Russian, the Scandinavian,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: the Balkan hill man, even the Greek and Armenian. The
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: picture of America that they conjure up is a picture
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: of a titanic and merciless struggle for gold, with the
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: stakes high and the contestants correspondingly ferocious. They see the
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: American as one to whom nothing under the sun has
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: any value save the dollar, not truth or beauty, or
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: philosophical ease, or the common decencies between man and man.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: This view, of course, is full of distortion and misunderstanding,
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: despite the fact that even Americans, by hearing it stated
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: so often, have come to allow it a good deal
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: of soundness. The American's concept of himself, as we have seen,
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: is sometimes anything but accurate. In this case, he errs
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: almost as greatly as when he venerates himself as the
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: prince of free men, with guideless wrists and flashing eyes.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: As for the foreigner, what he falls into is the
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: typically Freudian blunder of projecting his own worst weakness into another.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: The fact is that it is he and not the
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: Native American who is the incorrigible and unimaginative money grubber.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: He comes to the United States in search of money,
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: and in search of money alone, and pursuing that single
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: purpose without deviation. He makes the mistake of assuming that
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: the American is at the same business and in the
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: same fanatical manner. From all the complex and colorful life
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: of the country, save only the one enterprise of money making.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: He is shut off, almost traumatically, and so he concludes
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: that the one enterprise embraces the whole show. Here, the
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: unreliable promptings of his subconscious passion are helped out by
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: observations that are more logical. Unfamiliar with the language, excluded
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: from all free social intercourse with the Native, and regarded
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: as if actually human at all, then at least a
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: distinctly inferior member of the species, he is forced into
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: the harshest and most ill paid labor, and so he
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: inevitably sees the American as a pitiless taskmaster and describes
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: the exploitation he has made a victim of to a
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: fabulous exaggeration of his own avarice. Moreover, the greater success
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: and higher position of the Native seem to bear out
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: this notion. In a struggle that is free for all
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: and to the death, the native grabs all the shiniest
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: stakes ergo, he must love money even more than the immigrant.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: This logic we do not defend, but there is, and
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: out of it grows the prevailing foreign view of America
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: and the Americans. For the foreigner who stays at home
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: does not derive his ideas from the glittering, lascivious phrase
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: of doctor Wilson, or from the passionate idealism of such
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: superior Americans as Otto H. Khan, Adolph S. Oakes, S Stanwood, Manken,
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: Jacob H. Schiff, Marcus Lowe, Henry Morgenthau, Abram Elkis, Samuel Goldfish,
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: Louis D. Brandeis, Julius Rosenwald, Paul Warbug, Judge Otto Rissalsky,
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: Adolf Suker, the Honorable Julius Khan, Simon Guggenheim, Stephen S. Wise,
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: and Barney Baruk. But from the hair raising tales of
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: returned Americans, i e. Fellow peasants who, having braved the dragons,
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: have come back to the fatherland to enjoy their booty
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: and exhibit their wounds. The Native as we say, has
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: been so far influenced by this error that he cherishes
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: it himself, or more accurately, entertains it with shame. Most
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: of his windy idealism is no more than a reaction
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: against it, an evidence of an effort to confute it
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: and live it down. He is never more sweetly flattered
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: than when some politician eager for votes, or some evangelist
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: itching for a good plate tells him that he is
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: actually a soaring altruist and the only real one in
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: the world. This is the surest way to fetch him.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: He never fails to swell out his chest when he
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: hears that buncom In point of fact, of course, he
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: is no more an altruist than any other healthy mammal.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: His ideals, one and all, are grounded upon self interest
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: or upon the fear that is at the bottom of it.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: His benevolence always has a string tied to it. He
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: could no more formulate a course of action to his
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: certain disadvantage than an Englishman could, or a Frenchman, or
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: an Italian or a German. But to say that the
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: advantage he pursues is always, or even usually a monetary one.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: To argue that he is avaricious, or even in these
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: later years, a sharp traitor is to spit directly into
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: the eye of truth. There is probably indeed no country
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: in the world in which mere money is held in
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: less esteem than in these United States, Even more than
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: the Russian bolshevik. The American democrat regards wealth with suspicion
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: and its too eager amassment with a bilious eye. Here alone,
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: west of the Vina, rich men are ipso facto scoundrels
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: and ferai nathurai with no rights that any slanderer is
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: bound to respect. Here alone, the possession of a fortune
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: puts a man automatically upon the defensive, and exposes him
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: to special legislation of a rough and inquisitorial character, and
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: to the special animosity of judges, district attorneys, and juries.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: It would be a literal impossibility for an Englishman worth
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: a billion dollars to avoid public office and public honor.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: It would be equally impossible for an American worth a
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: billion dollars to obtain either. Americans true enough enjoin average
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: of prosperity that is above that witnessed in any other country.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: Their land with less laiter, yields a greater usufruct than
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: other land they get more money for their industry, they
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: jingle more coin in their pockets than other peoples. But
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: it is a grievous error to mistake that superior opulence
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: for a sign of money hunger, For they actually hold
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: money very lightly, and spend a great deal more of
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: it than any other race of men, and with far
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: less thought of values. The normal French family, it is
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: often said, could live very comfortably for a week upon
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: what the normal American family wastes in a week. There
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: is among Americans not the slightest sign of the unanimous
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: French habit of biting every franc, of calculating the cost
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: of every luxury to five places of decimals, of utilizing
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: every scrap, of sleeping with the bank book under the pillow.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: Whatever is showy gets their dollars, whether they need it
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: or not, even whether they can afford it or not.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: They are so to speak constantly on a bust, their
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: eyes alert for chances to get rid of their small change. Consider,
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: for example, the amazing readiness with which they succumb to
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: the imbecile baits of advertising. An American manufacturer finding himself
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: with a stock of unsaleable goods or encountering otherwise a
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: demand that is less than his production. Does not have
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: to look like his English or German colleague for foreign
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: dumping grounds. He simply packs his surplus in gaudy packages,
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: sends for an advertising agent, joins an honest advertising club,
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: fills the newspapers and magazines with lying advertisements, and sits
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: down in peace while his countrymen fight their way to
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: his counters. That they will come is almost absolutely sure,
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: no matter how valueless the goods they will leap to
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: the advertisements. Their one desire seems to be to get
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: rid of their money. As a consequence of this almost
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: pathological eagerness, the advertising bill of the American people is
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: greater than that of all other peoples taken together. There
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: is scarcely an article within the range of their desires
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: that does not carry a heavy load of advertising. They
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: actually pay out millions each year to be sold such
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: commonplace necessities as sugar, towels, callers, lead, pencils, and cornmeal.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: The business of thus bamboozling them and picking their pockets
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: enlists thousands and thousands of artists, writers, printers, sign painters,
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: and other such parasites. Their towns are be adopted with
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: chromatic eyesores and made hideous with flashing lights. Their countryside
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: is polluted, their newspapers and magazines become mere advertising sheets.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: Idiotic slogans and apathems are invented to enchant them. In
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: some cities they are actually taxed to advertise the local
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: makers of witten nutmegs. Multitudes of swindlers are naturally induced
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: to adopt advertising as a trade, and some of them
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: make great fortunes at it. Like all other men who
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: live by their wits, they regard themselves as superior fellows,
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: and every year they hold great conventions for each other,
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: with learned papers upon the psychology of their victims, speak
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: of one another as men of genius, have themselves photographed
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: by the photographers of newspapers, eager to curry favor with them,
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: denounce the government for not spending the public funds for advertising,
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: and some in United States senators eminent Chautauquans and distinguished
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: vaudeville stars to entertain them. For all this, the plain
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: people pay the bill, and never a protest comes out
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: of them. As a matter of fact, the only genuinely
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: thrifty folks among us in the sense that a Frenchman,
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: a Scot or an Italian is thrifty. Are the immigrants
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: of the most recent invasions. That is why they oust
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: the native. Wherever the two come into contact, say in
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: New England and in the Middle West, they acquire bit
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: by bit the best lands, the best stock, the best barns,
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: not because they have the secret of making more money,
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: but because they have the resolution to spend less. As
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: soon as they become thoroughly Americanized, they begin to show
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: the national prodigality. The old folks wear homemade clothes and
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: stick to the farm. The native born children order their
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: garments from mail order tailors and expose themselves in the
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: chattaquas and the great orgies of Calvinism and Wesleyanism. The
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: old folks but every dollar they can wring from a
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: reluctant environment into real property or the banks. The young
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: folks put their inheritance into phonographs, fords, boiled shirts, yellow shoes,
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: cuckoo clocks, lithographs of the current mount banks, oil stock,
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: automatic pianos, and the works of Harold Bell Wright, Gerald
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: Stanley Lee, and O. Henry. End of Chapter two, Chapter
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: three of the American Credo by H. L. Mankin and
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: George Gene Nathan. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: But what then, is the character that actually marks the
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: American that is in chief? If he is not the
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: exalted monopolist of liberty that he thinks he is, nor
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: the noble altruist and idealist he slaps upon the chest
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: when he is full of rhetoric, nor the degraded dollar
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: chaser of European legend, than what is he? We offer
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: an answer in all humility, for the problem is complex,
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: and there is but little illumination of it in literature. Nevertheless,
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: we offer it in the firm conviction, born of twenty
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: years incessant meditation, that it is substantially correct. It is,
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: in brief this that the thing which sets off the
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: American from all other men, and gives a peculiar color
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: not only to the pattern of his daily life, but
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: also to the play of his inner ideas, is what,
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: for once, a more exact term may be called social aspiration.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: That is to say, his dominance passion is a passion
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: to lift himself by at least a step or two
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: in the society that he is a part of, a
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: passion to improve his position to break down some shadowy
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: barrier of caste to achieve the countenance of what. For
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: all his talk of the quality he recognizes and accepts
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: as his betters, the American is a pusher. His eyes
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: are ever fixed upon some round of the latter that
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: is just beyond him reach, and all his secret ambitions,
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: all his extraordinary energies, group themselves about the yearning to
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: grasp it. Here we have an explanation of the curious
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: restlessness that educated foreigners, as opposed to mere immigrants, always
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: make a nottive in the country. It is half aspiration
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: and half impatience, with overtones of dread and timorousness. The
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: American is violently eager to get on and thoroughly convinced
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: that his merits entitle him to try and to succeed.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: But by the same token he is sickeningly fearful of
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: slipping back and out of the second fact, as we
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: shall see spring some of his most characteristic traits. He
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: is a man vexed at one and the same time
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: by delusions of grandeur and an inferiority complex. He is
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: both egotistical and subservient, assertive and politic blatant, and shy.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: Most of the errors about him are made by seeing
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: one side of him and being blind to the other.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: Such a thing as a secure position is practically unknown
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: among us. There is no American who cannot hope to
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: lift himself another notch or two. If he is good.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: There is absolutely no hard and fast impediment to his progress.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: But neither is there any American who doesn't have to
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: keep on fighting for whatever position he has. No wall
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: of caste is there to protect him if he slips.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: One observes every day the movement of individuals, families, whole
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: groups in both directions. All of our cities are full
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: of brummagem aristocrats. Aristocrats at all events in the view
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: of their neighbors, whose grandfathers or even fathers were day
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: laborers and working for them, supported by them, heavily patronized
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: by them, are clerks whose grandfathers were lords of the soil.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: The older societies of Europe, as everyone knows, protect their
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: caste lines a great deal more resolutely. It is as
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: impossible for a wealthy pork packer or company promoter to
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: enter the nobless of Austria even today, as it would
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: be for him to enter the boudoir of a queen.
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: He is barred out absolutely, and even his grandchildren are
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: under the ban. And in precisely the same way, it
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: is as impossible for account of the old Holy Roman
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: Empire to lose caste as it should be for the
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Dalai Lama. He may sink to an utiable depths within
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: his order, but he cannot get himself out of it,
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: nor can he lose the peculiar advantages that go with membership.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: He is still a graph, and as such above the herd.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: Once in a Madrid cafe, the two of us encountered
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: a Spanish marquis who wore celluloid cuffs, suffered from peticulosis,
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: and had been drunk for sixteen years. Yet he remains
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: a marquis in good standing, and all lesser Spaniards, including socialists,
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: envied him and deferred to him. None would have dreamed
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: of slapping him on the back. Knowing that he was
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: quite as safe within his ancient order as a dog
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: among the Canida. He gave no thought to appearances, but
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: in the same way he knew that he had reached
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: his limit, that no conceivable effort could lift him higher.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: He was a grandee of Spain, and that was all
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: above glimmered royalty and the hierarchy of the Saints, and
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: both royalty and the hierarchy of the Saints, whereas much
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: beyond him as Grandeism was beyond the polite and well
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: educated headwaiter who laved him with ice water when he
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: had mania a pothoux. No American is ever so securely lodged.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: There is always something just ahead of him, beckoning him
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: and tantalizing him, And there is always something just behind him,
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: menacing him and causing him to sweat. Even when he
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: attained to what may seem to be security, that security
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: is very fragile. The English soap boiler, brewer, shyster, attorney,
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: or stock chopper, once he has got into the house
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: of lords, is reasonably safe, and his children after him.
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: The possession of a peerage connotes a definite rank, and
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: it is as permanent as anything can be in this world.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: But in America there is no such harbor. The ship
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: is eternally at sea, money vanishes, official dignity is forgotten.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: Cast lines are as full of gaps as an ill
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: kept hedge. The grandfather of the Vanderbilts was a bounder
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: the last of the Washingtons is a petty employer in
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: the law library of Congress. It is this constant possibility
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: of rising, this constant risk of falling, that gives a
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: barbaric picturesqueness to the panorama of what is called fashionable
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: society in America. The chief character of that society is
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: to be found in its shameless self assertion, its almost
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: obscene display of its importance, and of the shadowy privileges
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: and acceptances on which that importance is based. It is
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: assertive for the simple reason that immediately it ceased to
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: be assertive, it would cease to exist. Structurally, it is
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: composed in every town of a nucleus of those who
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: have laboriously arrived and a chaotic mass of those who
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: are straining every effort to get on. The efforts must
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: be made against great odds. Those who have arrived are
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: eager to keep down the composition of newcomers on their exclusiveness,
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: as the phrase is, breasts the whole of their social advantage. Thus,
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: the candidate from below, before horning in at last, must
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: put up with an infinity of rebuff and humiliation. He
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: must sacrifice his self respect today in order to gain
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: the hope of destroying the self respect of other aspirants tomorrow.
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: The result is that the whole edifice is based upon
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: fears and abasements, and that every device which promises to
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: protect the individual against them is seized upon eagerly fashionable
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: society in America therefore has no room for intelligence within
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: its fold. An original idea is dangerous. It carries regimentation
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: in dress, in social customs, and in political and even
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: religious doctrines. To the last degree, in the American cities,
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: the fashionable man or woman must not only maintain the
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: decorums seen among civilized folks everywhere. He or she must
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: also be interested in precisely the right sports, theatrical shows
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: and opera singers, show the rights, political credulities and indignations,
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: and have some sort of connection with the right church.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: Nearly always, because of the aping of English custom that
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: prevails everywhere in America, it must be the so called
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: Protestant episcocopal church, a sort of outhouse of the Church
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: of England, with ecclesiastics who imitate the English sacerdotal manner,
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: much as small boys imitate the manner of imminent baseball players.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: Every fashionable Protestant Episcopal congregation in the land is full
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: of ex Baptists and ex Methodists who have shed Calvinism
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: total immersion and the Hollelujah hymns on their way up
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: the latter. The same impulse leads the Jews whenever the
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: possibility of invading the citadel of the Christians begins to
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: bemuse them, as happened during the Late War, for example,
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: when Patriotism temporarily adjourned the usual taboos to embrace Christian
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: science as a sort of half way station, so to speak,
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: more medical than Christian, and hence secure against ordinary derisions.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: And it is an impulse, but little difference which lies
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: at the bottom of the much discussed title hunt. A title, however,
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: paltry is of genuine social value, more especially in America.
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: It represents a status that cannot be changed overnight by
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: the rise of rivals, or by personal derelictions, or by
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: mere accident. It is a policy of insurance against dangers
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: that are not to be countered as effectively in any
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: other manner. Miss g. The daughter of an enormously wealthy
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: scoundrel may be accepted everywhere, but all the while she
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: is insecure her father may lose his fortune tomorrow, or
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: be jailed by newspaper outcry, or marry a prostitute and
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: so commit social suicide himself and murder his daughter. Or
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: she herself may fall victim to some rival's superior machinations,
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: or stoop to fornication of some forbidden variety, or otherwise
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: get herself under the ban. But once she is a duchess,
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: she is safe. No catastrophe short of divorce can take
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: away her coronet, and even divorce will leave the purple
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: marks of it upon her brow. Most valuable boon of all.
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: She is now free to be herself, a rare, rare
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: experience for an American. She may, if she likes, go
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: about in a mother Hubbard, or join the Seventh day Adventists,
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: or declare for the Bolsheviki, or wash her own lingerie,
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: or have her hair bobbed, and still she will sane
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: a duchess, and as a duchess, irremovably superior to the
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: gaping herd of her political equals. This social aspiration, of course,
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: is most vividly violent and idiotic on its higher and
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: more gaudy levels, but it is scarcely less earnest below.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: Every American, however obscure, has formulated within his secret recesses
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: some concepts of advancement. However, meager, if he doesn't aspire
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: to be what is called fashionable, then he at least
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: aspires to lift himself in some less gorgeous way. There
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: is not a social organization in this land of innumerable
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: associations that hasn't its waiting list of candidates who are
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: eager to get in but have not yet demonstrated to
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: their fitness for the honor. One can scarcely go low
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: enough to find that pressure absent. Even the tin pot
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: paternal orders, which are constantly caging for members and seem
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: to accept anyone not a downright felon, are exclusive in
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: their fantastic way, And no doubt there are hundreds of
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: thousands of proud American freemen, the heirs of Washington and Jefferson,
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: their liberty safeguarded by a million guns, who pine in
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: secrets because they are in elgible's membership in the Masons,
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: the Odd Fellows, or even the Knights of Pytheas. On
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: the distaff side, the thing is too obvious to need exposition.
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: The patriotic societies among women are all machines for the
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: resuscitation of lost superiorities. The plutocracy has shouldered out the
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: old gentry from actual social leadership. That gentry indeed presents
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: a prodigious clinical picture of the insecurity of social rank
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: in America. But there remains at least the possibility of
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: insisting upon a dignity which plutocrats cannot boast and may
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: not even buy. Thus, the country judge's wife in Smithville,
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: or the Methodist pastor's daughter in Jonestown consoles herself for
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: the lack of an opera box, with the thoughts constantly
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: asserted by badge and resolution that she had a nobler grandfather,
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: or at all events, a decent one than the Astors,
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: the Vanderbilts, and the Golds. End of Chapter three, Chapter four,
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: Part one of the American Credo by H. L. Mankin
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: and George Gene Nathan. This LibriVox recording is in the
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: public domain. It seems to us that the genuine characters
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: of the normal American, the characters which set him off
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: most saliently from the men of other nations, are the
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: fruits of all this risk of and capacity four change
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: in status that we have described, and of the dreads
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: and hesitations that go therewith. The American is marked, in
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: fact by precisely the habits of mind and act that
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: one would look for in a man insatiably ambitious and
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: yet incurably fearful to wit. The habits on the one
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: hand of unpleasant assertiveness, of somewhat boisterous braggartism, of incessant pushing,
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: and on the other hand of conformity, caution, and subservience.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: He is forever talking of his rights as if he
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: stood ready to defend them with his last drop of blood,
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: and forever yielding them up at the first demand. Under
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: both the pretension and the fact is the common motive
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: of fear, in brief, the common motive of the insecure
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: and uncertain man, the average man at all times and everywhere,
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: but especially the motive of the average man in a
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: social system so crude and unstable as ours. More than
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: any other people, said Wendell Phillips one blue day, we
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: Americans are afraid of one another. The saying seems harsh.
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: It goes counter to the national delusion of uncompromising courage
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: and limitless truculent. It wars upon the national vanity. But
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: all the same, there is truth in it. Here, more
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: than anywhere else on the earth, the status of an
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: individual is determined by the general consent of the general
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: body of his fellows. Here, as we have seen, there
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: are no artificial barriers to protect him against their disapproval
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: or even again their envy. And here, more than anywhere else,
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: the general consent of that general body of men is
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: colored by the ideas and prejudices of the inferior majority.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: Here there is the nearest approach to genuine democracy, the
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: most direct and accurate response to mob emotions. Facing that
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: infinitely powerful, but inevitably ignorant and cruel corpus of opinion,
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: the individual must needs adopt caution and fall into timorousness.
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: The desire within him may be bold and forthright, but
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: its satisfaction demands discretion, prudence, a politic and ingratiating habit.
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: The walls are not to be stormed. They must be
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: wooed to a sort of jericho and fall. Success thus
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: takes the form of a series of waves of protective coloration.
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: Failure is a succession of unmaskings. The aspirant must first
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: learn to imitate exactly the aspect and behavior of the
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: group he seeks to penetrate. There follows notice, there follows toleration,
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: there follows acceptance. Thus the hog murderer's wife picks her
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: way into the society of Chicago, the proud aristocracy of
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: the Abbatoir, And thus no less the former whiskey drummer
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: insinuates himself into the elks, and the rising retailer wins
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: the imprimater of wholesalers, and the rich peasant becomes a
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: planter and the father of doctors of philosophy, and the
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: servant girl enters the movies and acquires the status of
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: a princess of the blood, and the petty attorney becomes
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: a legislator and statesman, and Schmidt turns to Smith, and
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: the newspaper reporter becomes a litte dieu on the staff
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: of the Saturday Evening Post, and all of us Yankees
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: creep up, up up. The business is never to be
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: accomplished by headlong assaults. It must be done circumspectly, insidiously,
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: a bit apologetically pianissimo. There must be no flaunting of
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: unusual ideas, no bold prancing of an unaccustomed personnel. Above all,
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: it must be done without exciting fear lest the portscullis
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: fall and the whole enterprise go to pot. Above all,
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: the manner of a Jenkins must be got into it.
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: That manner, of course, is not incompatible with a certain
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: superficial boldness, nor even with an appearance of truculence. But
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: what lies beneath the boldness is not really an independent spirit,
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: but merely a talent for crying with the pack. When
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: the American is most dashingly assertive, it is a sure
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: sign that he feels the pack behind him, and hears
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: its comforting baying, and is well aware that his doctrine
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: is approved. He is not a joiner for nothing. He
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: joins something, whether it be a political party, a church
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: of fraternal order, or one of the idiotic movements that
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: incessantly ravage the land, because joining gives him a feeling
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: of security, because it makes him a part of something
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: larger and safer than he is himself, because it gives
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: him a chance to work off steam without running any risk.
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: The whole thinking of the country thus runs down the
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: channel of mob emotion. There is no actual conflict of ideas,
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: but only as accession of crazes. It is inconvenient to
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: stand aloof from these crases, and it is dangerous to
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: oppose them. In no other country in the world is
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: there so ferocious a short way with dissenters. In none
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: other is it socially so costly to heed the inner
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: voice and to be one's own man. Thus encircled by taboos,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: the American shows an extraordinary timorousness in all his dealings
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: with fundamentals, and the fact that many of these taboos
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: are self imposed only adds to their rigor. What every
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: observant foreigner first notices canvassing the intellectual life of the
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: land is the shy and gingery manner in which all
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: the larger problems of existence are dealt with. We have,
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: for example, positive laws which make it practically impossible to
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: discuss the sex question with anything approaching honesty. The literature
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: of the subject is enormous, and the general notion of
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: its importance is thereby made manifest. But all, save a
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: very small parts of that literature is produced by quacks
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: and addressed to an audience that is afraid to hear
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: the truth. So in politics, almost alone among the civilized
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: nations of the world, the United States pursues critics of
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: the dominant political theory with medieval ferocity, condemning them to
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: interminable periods in prison, proceeding against them by clamor and perjury,
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: treating them worse than common black legs, and at times
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: conniving at their actual murder by the police. And so
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: above all in religion, this is the only country of
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: Christendom in which there is no anti clerical party, and
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: hence no constant and effective criticism of clerical pretension and corruption.
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: The result is that all of the churches reach out
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: for tyranny among us, and that most of them that
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: show any numerical strength already exercise it in half a
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: dozen of our largest cities. The Catholic Church is actually
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: a good deal more powerful than it is in Spain
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: or even in Austria. Its acts are wholly above public discussion.
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: It makes and breaks public officials, It holds the newspapers
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: in terror, It influences the public and the courts. It
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: is strong enough to destroy and silence any man who
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: objects to its polity. But this is not all. The
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: Catholic Church, at worst is an organization largely devoted to
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: perfectly legitimate and even laudable purposes, and it is controlled
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: by a class of men who are largely above popular
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: passion and intelligent enough to see beyond the immediate advantage.
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: More important, still, its international character gives it a detached
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: and superior point of view, and so makes it stand
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: aloof from some of the common weaknesses of the native mob.
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: This is constantly revealed by its opposition to prohibition, vice, crusading,
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: and other such crazes of the disinherited and unhappy. The
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: rank and file of its members are ignorant and emotional,
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: and are thus almost ideal canon fodder for the bogus
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: reformers who operate upon the proletariat. But they are held
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: back by their clergy, to whose superior interest in genuine
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: religion is added a century's old heritage of worldly wisdom.
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: Thus the Church of Rome in America at least is
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: a civilizing agency, and we may well overlook its cynical
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: alliance with political corruption in view of its steady enmity
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: to that greater corruption which destroys the very elements of liberty, peace,
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: and human dignity. It may be a bit too intelligently
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: selfish and harshly realistic, but it is assuredly not swinish.
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: This adjective, however, fits the opposition as snugly as a
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: coat of varnish. And by the opposition we mean the
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: group of Protestant churches commonly called Evangelical, to wit the Methodist,
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: the Baptists, the Presbyterian, and their attendant imitators and inferiors.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: It is out of this group that the dominating religious
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: attitude of the American people arises, and in particular is
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: from this group that we get our doctrine that religious
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: activity is not to be challenged, however flagrantly it may
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: stand in opposition to common honesty and common sense. Under
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: cover of that artificial toleration, the product not of a
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: genuine liberalism, but simply of a mob distrust of descent,
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: there goes on a tyranny that it would be difficult
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: to match in modern history, save in a few large cities.
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: Every American community lies under a sacerdotal despotism whose devices
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: are disingenuous and dishonorable, and whose power was magnificently displayed
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: in the campaign for prohibition. A despotism exercised by a
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: body of ignorant, superstitious, self seeking, and thoroughly dishonest men.
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: One may without prejudice reasonably defend the Catholic clergy. There
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: are men who, at worst pursue an intelligible ideal and
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: dignify it with a real sacrifice. But in the presence
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: of the Methodist clergy, it is difficult to avoid giving
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: way to the weakness of indignation. What one observes is
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: a horde of uneducated and inflammatory underheads, eager for power,
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: intolerant of opposition, and full of a childish vanity. A
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: mob of holy clerks, but little raised in intelligence and
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: dignity above the forlorn half wits whose souls they chronically rack.
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: In the whole United States, there is scarcely one among
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: them who stands forth as a man of sense and information.
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: Illiterate and all save the elementals, untouched by the larger
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: currents of thought. Drunk with their power of adults crazed
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: by their immunities. A challenge by their betters, they carry
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: over into the professional class of the country the spirit
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: of the most stupid peasantry, and degrade religion to the
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: estate of an idiotic phobia. There is not a village
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: in America in which some of such preposterous jackass is
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: not an eruption. Worse, he is commonly the leader of
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: its opinion, its pattern in reason, morals, and good taste.
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: Yet worse, he is ruler as well as pattern. Wrapped
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: in his sacerdotal cloak, he stands above any effective criticism.
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: To question his imbecile ideas is to stand in contumacy
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: of the revelation of God. A number of years ago,
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: while engaged in journalism in a large American city, one
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: of us violated all journalistic precedents by printing an article
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: denouncing the local evangelical clergy, as with few exceptions, a
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: pack of scoundrels, and offered in proof their brisk and
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: constant trade in contraband marriages, especially the marriages of girls
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: under the age of consent. He showed that the offer
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: of a two dollar fee was sufficient to induce the
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: majority of these ambassadors of Christ to marry a girl
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: of fourteen or fifteen to a boy a few years older.
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: There followed a great outcry from the accused, with the
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: usual demands that the offending paper print of attraction and distance,
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: charged the guilty writer from its staff. He thereupon engaged
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: a clipping bureau to furnish him with clippings from the
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: newspapers of the whole country showing the common activities of
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: the evangelical clergy elsewhere. The result was that he received
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: and reprinted an amazing mass of putrid scandal, greatly to
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: the joy of that moral community. It appeared that these
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: eminent Christian leaders were steadily engaged northeast, south and west
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: in doings that would have disgraced so many ward healers
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: or oyster shuckers, shady financial transactions, gross sexual irregularities, all
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: sorts of minor crimes. The publication of this evidence from
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: day to day gave the chronicler the advantage of the offensive,
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: and so got him out the tight place. In the end,
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: as if tickled by his assault, the hierarchy of Heaven
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: came to his aid. That is to say, the Lord
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: God Jehovah, arranged it that one of the leading Methodist
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: clergymen of the city, in fact, the chronicler's chief opponent,
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: should be taken in an unmentionable sectional perversion at the
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: headquarters of the Young Men's Christian Association, and so be
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: forced to leave town between days. This catastrophe, as we say,
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: the chronicler ascribes to divine intervention. It was clearly unexpected.
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: He knew that the fellow was a liar and a rogue,
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: but he had never suspected that he was also a hog.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: The episode demoralized the defense to such an extent that
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: it was impossible in decency to go on with the war.
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: The chronicler was at once, in fact forced into hypocritical
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: efforts to prevent the fugitive ecclesiastics pursuit, extradition, trial and imprisonment,
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: and these efforts, despite their disingenuous character, succeeded under another name.
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: He now preaches Christ and him crucified in the Far West,
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: and is we dare say, a leading advocate of prohibition,
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: vice crusading, and the other Methodist reforms. But here we
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: depart from the point. It is not that an eminent
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: Wesleyan should be taken in criminal conversation with a member
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: of the YMCA. It is that the whole Wesleyan scheme
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: of things, despite the enormous multiplication of such incidents, should
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: still stand above all direct and devastating criticism. In America.
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: It is an ignorant and dishonest cult of ignorant and
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: dishonest men. And yet no one has ever had at
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: it from the front. All the newspaper clippings that we
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: have mentioned were extraordinarily discreet. Every offense of a clergyman
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: was presented as if it were an isolated phenomenon and
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: of no general significance. There was never any challenge of
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: an ecclesiastical organization which bred and sheltered such men and
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: carried over their curious ethics into its social and political activities.
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: That careful avoidance of the main issue is always observable
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: in these states. Prohibition was saddled upon the country against
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: the expressed wish of at least two thirds of the people,
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: by the political chicanery of the same organization, and yet
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: no one during the long fight thought to attack it directly.
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: To have done so would have been to buy the
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: taboo describes. So when the returning soldiers began to reveal
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: the astounding chicaneries of the Young Men's Christian Association, it
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: was marveled at for a few weeks, as Americans always
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: marvel as successful pocket squeezings, But no one sought the
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: cause in the character of the pious brethren primarily responsible.
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: And so again, when what is called liberal opinion began
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: to revolt against the foreign politics of doctor Wilson, and
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: in particular against his apparent repudiation of his most solemn
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: engagements and his complete insensibility in the presence of a
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: moral passion to the most elementary principles of private and
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: public honour. A thousand critics, friendly and unfriendly, sought to
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: account for his amazing shifts and evasions on unintelligible logical grounds.
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: But no one, so far as we know, ventured to
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: point out that his course could be accounted for in
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: every detail, and without any mauling of the fact whatsoever,
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: upon the simple ground that he was a Presbyterian. We
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: sincerely hope that no one will mistake us here for
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: anas anarchists who seek to hold the Presbyterian Code of Ethics,
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: or the Presbyterians themselves up to derision. We confess frankly
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: that as private individuals, we are inclined against the Code,
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: and that all our prejudices run against those who subscribe
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: to it, which is to say, in the direction of toleration,
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: of open dealing and even of a certain mild snobbishness.
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: We are both opposed to moral enthusiasm, and never drink
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: with a moral man if it can be avoided. The
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: taboos that we personally subscribe to are taboos upon the
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: very things that Presbyterians hold most dear, for example, moral certainty,
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: the proselyting, appetite, and what may be described as the
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: passion of the policemen. But we are surely not fatchious
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: enough to cherish our ideas to the point of fondness.
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: In the long run, we freely grant. It may turn
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: out that the Presbyterians are right and we are wrong,
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: in brief, that God loves a moral man more than
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: he loves an amiable and honorable one. Stranger things indeed
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: have happened. One might even argue, without absurdity that God
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: is actually a Presbyterian himself. Whether he is or is not,
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: we do not presume to say. We simply record the
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: fact that it is our present impression that he is not,
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: and then straightway admit that our view is worth no
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: more than that of any other pair of men. End
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: of Chapter four, Part one, Chapter four, Part two of
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: the American Credo by H. L. Mankin and George gen Nathan.
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Meanwhile, however,
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: it is certainly not going too far to notice the
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: circumstance that there is an irreconcilable antithesis between the two
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: sorts of men that we have described. But a great
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: moral passion is fatal to the gentler and more caressing
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: amenities of life, and vice versa. The man of morals
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: has a certain character, and the man of honor has
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: a quite different character. No one, not an idiot, fails
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: to differentiate between the two, or to order his intercourse
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: with them upon an assumption of their disparity. What we
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: know in the United States as Presbyterian is preeminently of
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: the moral type, perhaps more than any other man among us.
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: He regulates his life and the lives of all who
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: fall under his influence, upon a purely moral plan. In
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: the main, he gets the principles underlying that plan from
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: the Old Testament. If he is to be described succinctly,
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: it is as one who carries over into the modern life,
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: with its superior complexity of sin, the simple and rigid
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: ethical concepts of the ancient Jews, And in particular he
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: subscribes to their theory that it is virtuous to make
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: things hot for the sinner, by which word he designates
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: any person whose conduct violates the ordinances of God as
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: he himself is aware of them and interprets them. Sin
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: is to the Presbyterian the salient phenomenon of this wobbling
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: and nefarious world, and the pursuit and chastisement of sin,
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: the one avocation that is permanently worthwhile. The product of
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: that simple doctrine is a character of no little vigor
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: and austerity, and one much esteemed by the great masses
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: of men, who are always uneasily conscious of their own
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: weakness in the face of temptation, and thus have a
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: sneaking veneration for the man apparently firm, and who are
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: always ready to believe, furthermore, that any man who seems
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: to be having a pleasant time is a rascal and
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: deserving of the fire. The Presbyterian likewise harbors this latter suspicion.
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: More he commonly erects it into a certainty. Every single
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: human act, he holds, must be either right or wrong,
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: and the overwhelming majority of them are wrong. He knows
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: exactly what these wrong ones are. He recognizes them instantly
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: and infallibly by a sort of inspired intuition, and he
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: believes that they should all be punished automatically and with
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: the utmost severity. No one ever heard of a Presbyterian
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: overlooking a fault or pleading for mercy for the air.
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: He would regard such an act as the weakness of
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: one ridden by the devil from such harsh judgments and retributions,
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: It must be added, in fairness, he does not accept himself.
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: He detects his own aberration almost as quickly as he
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: detects the aberration of the other fellow. And though he
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: may sometimes seek, being after all human, to escape its consequences,
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: he by no means condones it. Nothing, indeed, could exceed
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: the mental anguish of a Presbyterian who has been betrayed
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: by the foul arts of some lascivious wench, into any
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: form of adultery, or by the treason of his senses,
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: in some other way, into a voluptuous yielding to the
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: lure of the other bazar. It has been our fortune,
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: at various times to be in the confidence of Presbyterians
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: thus seduced from their native virtue, and we bear willing
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: testimony to their sincere horror. Even the least pious of
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: them was as greatly shaken up by what to us
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: on our lower plane seems a mere pegadillo, perhaps in
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: bad taste, but certainly not not worth getting into a
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: sweat about, as we ourselves would have been by a
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: gross breach of faith. But as has been before remarked,
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: the bitter must go with the sweet. In the face
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: of so exalted a moral passion, it would be absurd
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: to look for that urbane habit which seeks the well
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: being of one's self and the other fellow, not in
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: exact obedience to harsh statutes, but an ease, dignity, and
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: the more delicate sort of self respect. That is to say,
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: it would be absurd to ask a thoroughly moral man
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: to be also a man of honor. The two, in fact,
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: are eternal enemies. Their endless struggle achieves that happy mean
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: of philosophies which we call civilization. The man of morals
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: keeps order in the worlds, regimenting its lawless hordes and
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: organizing its governments. The man of honor mellows and embellishes
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: what is thus achieved, giving to duty the aspect of
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: a privilege, and making human intercourse a thing of fine
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: faiths and understandings. We trust the former to do what
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: is righteous. We trust the latter to do what is seemly.
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: It is seldom that a man can do both. The
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: man of honor inevitably exalts the punctilio above the law
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: of God. One may trust him if he has eaten
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: one's salt, to respect one's daughter as he would his own.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: But if he happens to be under no such special obligation,
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: it may be hazardous to trust him with even one's
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: charwoman or one's mother in law. And the man of morals,
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: confronted by a moral situation is usually wholly without honor.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: Put him on the stand to testify against a woman,
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: and he will tell all he knows about her, even
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: including what he has learned in the purple privacy of
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: her boudoir. More, he will not tell it reluctantly, shamefacely, apologetically,
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: but proudly and willingly, in response to his high sense
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: of moral duty. It is simply impossible for such a
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: man to lie like a gentleman. He lies, of course,
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: like all of us, and perhaps more often than most
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: of us on the other side, But he does it
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: not to protect sinners from the moral law, but to
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: make their punishment under the moral law more certain. Swift, facial,
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: and spectacular. By this long route we get to our
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: apologia for doctor Wilson, a man from whom we both
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: differ in politics, in theology, in ethics, and in epistemology,
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: but one whose great gifts, particularly for moral endeavor in
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: the grand manner, excite our sincere admiration. Both his foes
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: and his friends, it seems to us, do him a
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: good deal of injustice. The former, carried away by that
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: sense of unlikeness which lies at the bottom of most
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: of the prejudices of uncritical men, denounce him out of
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: hand because he is not, as they are. A good
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: Many of these foes, of course, are not actually men
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: of honor themselves. Some of them, in fact belong to
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: sects and professions, for example, that of intellectual socialists and
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: that of member of Congress, in which no authentic man
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: of honor could imaginably have a place. But it may
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: be accurately said of them, nevertheless, that if actual honor
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: is not in them, then at least they have something
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: of the manner of honor, that they are moving in
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: the direction of honor there not yet arrived. Few men, indeed,
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: may be said to belong certainly and irrevocably in either category,
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: that of the men of honor or that of the
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: men of morals. Doctor Wilson perhaps is one such man.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: He is as palpably and exclusively a man of morals,
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: as say George Washington was a man of honor. He
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: is in the one category a great beacon burning almost blindingly.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: He is in the other no more than a tallow dip,
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: guttering asthmatically. But the majority of men occupy a sort
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: of twilight zone, and the most that may be said
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: of them is that their faces turned this way, or
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: that such is the case with doctor Wilson's chief foes.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: Their eyes are upon honor as upon some new and
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: superlatively sweet enchantment, and bemused to starboard. They view the
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: scene to port with somewhat extravagant biliousness. Thus, when they
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: contemplate his excellencies long and perhaps unmatchable series of violations
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: of his troth in the matter of keeping us out
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: of the war, in the matter of his solemn promises
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: to China, in the matter of his statements of war
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: aims and purposes, in the matter of his shifty dealings
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: with the Russian question, in the matter of his repudiation
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: of the armistice terms offered to the Germans, in the
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: matter of his stupendous lying to the Senate Committee on
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: Foreign Relations, and so on ad infinitum. When they contemplate
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: all that series of evasions, dodgings, hypocrisies, double dealings, and
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: plain medacities, they succumb to an indignation that is still
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: more than half moral, and denounce him bitterly as a pecksniff,
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: a tartuff, and a pinto in that judgment. As we
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: shall show, there is no save a stupid incapacity to
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: understand an unlike man in brief, no more than the
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: dunderheadedness which makes a German regard every Englishman as a
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: snuffling poltroon hiding behind his vassals, and causes an Englishman
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: to look upon every German as a fiend in human
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: form up to his head in blood. But one expects
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: a man's foes to misjudge him, and even to libel
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: him deliberately. A good deal of their enmity, in fact,
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: is often no more than a product of their uneasy
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: consciousness that they have dealt unfairly with him. One is
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: always most bitter not toward the author of one's wrongs,
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: but towards the victim of one's wrongs. Unluckily, doctor Wilson's
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: friends have had at him even more cruelly when seeking
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: to defend what they regard as his honor. They account
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: for his incessant violation of his pledges to the voters
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: in nineteen sixteen, to the soldiers drafted for the war,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: to the Chinese on their entrance, to the Austrians, when
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: he sought to get them out, to the Germans, when
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: he offered them his fourteen points to the country in
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: the matter of secret diplomacy. When his friends attempt to
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: explain his cavalier repudiation of all these pledges on the
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: ground that he could not have kept them without violating
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: later pledges, they achieve, of course, only an imbecility, obvious
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: and dea. For it must be plain that no man
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: is permitted in honor to make antagonistic engagements, or to
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: urge his private tranquility or even the public welfare, as
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: an excuse for changing their terms without the consent of
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: the parties of the second part. A man of honor
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: is one who simply does whatever he says he will do.
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: Provided the other party holds to the compact, too. One
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: cannot imagine him shifting, trimming, and making excuses. It is
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: his peculiar mark that he never makes excuses, that the
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: need of making them would fill him with unbearable humiliation.
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: The moment a man of honor faces the question of
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: his honor, he is done, for it can no more
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: stand investigation than the chastity of a woman can stand investigation.
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: In such a character, doctor Wilson would have been bound
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: irrevocably by all his long series of solemn engagements from
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: the first to the last, without the slightest possibility of
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: dotting an eye or of cutting off the tail of
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: a comma. It would have been as impossible for him
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: to have repauty a single one of them at the
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: desire of his friends or in the interest of his
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: idealistic enterprises, as it would have been for him to
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: have repudiated it to his own private profit. But here
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: is where both foes and friends go aground. Both attempt
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: to inject concepts of honor into transactions, predominatingly and perhaps exclusively,
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: colored by concepts of morals. The two things are quite distinct,
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: as the two sorts of men are quite distinct. Beside
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: the obligation of honor, there is the obligation of morals,
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: entirely independent and often directly antagonistic. And beside the man
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: who yields to the punctilio, the man of honor, the
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: man who keeps his word, there is the man who
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: submits himself, regardless of his personal engagements and the penalties
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: that go therewith to the clarion call of the moral law.
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: Doctor Wilson is such a man. He is, as has
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: been remarked, a Presbyterian, a Calvinist, a militant moralist. In
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: that rouge devoted to that high cast, clad in that
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: white garment, he was purged of all obligations of honor
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: to any merely earthly power. His one obligation was to
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: the moral law, in brief, to the ordinance of God
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: as determined by Christian pastors. Under that moral law, specifically,
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: he was charged to search out and to determine its
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: violations by the accused in the dock, to wit by
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: the German nation according to the teaching of those pastors
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: and the light within, and to fix and execute a
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: punishment that should be swift, terrible, and overwhelming. To this business.
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: It must be granted by even his most extravagant opponents.
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: He addressed himself with the loftiest resolution and singleness of purpose,
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: excluding all puerile questions of ways and means. He was,
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: by the moral law, no more bound to take into
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: account the process whereby the accused was brought to book
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: and the weight of retribution brought to bear, than a
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: detective is bound to remember how any ordinary prisoner is
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: snared for the mill of justice. The detective himself may
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: have been an important factor in that process. He may
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: have taken the prisoner by some stratagem involving the most
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: gross false pretenses. He may have even played the agent provocateur,
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: and so actually suggested, planned, and supervised the crime. But
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: surely that should be a ridiculous critic who would argue
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: thereby that the detective should forthwith forget the law violated
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: and the punishment justly provided for it, and go over
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: to the side of the defense, on the ground that
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: his dealings with the prisoner involved him in obligations of honor.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: The world would laugh at such a moral moron if
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: it did not actually destroy him as an enemy of society.
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: It recognizes the two codes that we have described, and
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: it knows that they are antagonistic. It expects a man
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: sworn to the service of morality to discharge his duty
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: at any cost to his honor, just as it expects
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: a man publicly devoted to honor to keep his word
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: at any cost to his or to the public morals. Moreover,
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: it inclines when there is a conflict toward the side
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: of morals, the overwhelming majority of men are men of morals,
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: not men of honor. They believe that it is vastly
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: more important that the guilty should be detected, taken into custody,
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: and exposed to the rigor of the law, than that
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: the honour of this or that man should be preserved.
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: In truth, there are frequent circumstances under which they positively
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: esteem a man who thus sacrifices his honour or even
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: their own honour. A man of dishonour may actually take
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: on the character of a public hero. Thus, in nineteen
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: o three, when the late Major General Roosevelt, then President,
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: tore up the Treaty of eighteen forty six, whereby the
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: United States guaranteed the sovereignty of Columbia in the Isthmus
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: of Panama. The great masses of the American plain people
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: not only at once condoned this grave breach of honor,
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: but actually applauded doctor Roosevelt, because his act furthered the
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: great moral enterprise of digging the canal. These distinctions, of course,
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: are familiar to all men who devote themselves to the
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: study of the human psyche. That morals and honor are
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: not one and the same thing, but two very distinct
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: and even antithetical things is surely no news to the judicious.
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: But what is thus merely an axiom of ethics, politics,
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: or psychology is often kept strangely secret. In the United States,
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: we have acquired the habits of evading all the facts
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: of life, save those that are most superficial. By long disuse,
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: we have almost lost the capacity for thinking analytically and accurately.
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: A thing may be universally known among us, and yet
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: never get itself so much as mentioned. Around scores of
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: elementary platitudes. There hangs a shuddering silence as complete as
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: that which hedges in the sacred name of a Polynesian
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: chief at every election time. In our large cities, most
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: of the fundamental issues are concealed, particularly when they happen
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: to take on a theological color, which is very often.
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: It is, for example, the timorous public theory born of
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: the sphere of the forthright fact that when a man
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: sets up as a candidate for say, a judgeship, the
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: question of his private religious faith is of no practical importance,
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: that it makes no difference whether he is a Catholic
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: or a Methodist. The truth is, of course, that his
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: faith is often of the very first importance, that it
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: will color his conduct of the forensic combats before him,
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: even more than his politics, his capacity to digest protides,
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: or the social aspirations of his wife. One constantly notes
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: an American jurisprudence the effects of theological prejudices. On the bench.
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: There are at least a dozen controlling decisions, covering especially
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: the new moral legislation, which might almost be mistaken by
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: a layman for sermons by the reverend doctor Billy Sunday.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: The Prohibitionists, during their long and very adroit campaign, shrewdly
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: recognized the importance of controlling the judiciary. In particular, they
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: threw all their power against the election of Camre, who
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: were known to be Catholics, or Jews or freethinkers. As
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: a result, they packed the bench of nearly every state
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: with Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian judges. And these gentlemen at
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: once upheld all their maze of outrageous statutes. That they
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: would do so if elected was known in advance, And
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: yet so far as the record shows, it was a
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: rare thing for anyone to attack them on the ground
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: of their religion, and rarer still for any such attack
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: to influence many votes. The taboo was working. The majority
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: of voters were eager to avoid that issue. They felt,
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: in some vague and unintelligible way, that it was improper
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: to raise it. So with all other primary issues. There
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: is certainly no country in the world in which the
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: marriage relation is discussed more copiously than in the United States,
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: and yet there is no country in which its essentials
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: are more diligently avoided. Some years ago, seeking to let
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: some sagacity into the prevailing exchange of platitudes, one of
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: us wrote a boo upon the subject, grounding it upon
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: the obvious doctrine that women have much more to gain
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: by marriage than men, and that the majority of men
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: are aware of it. And would never marry at all
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: if it were not for women's relentless efforts to bring
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: them to it. This banality the writers supported by dint
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: of great painstaking in a somewhat novel way. That is
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: to say, he put upon himself the limitation of employing
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: no theory, statement of fact, or argument in the book
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: that was not already embodied in a common proverb in
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: some civilized language. Now and then it was a bit
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: hard to find the proverb, but in most cases it
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: was very easy, and in some cases he found not one,
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: but dozens. Well, this laborious pastiche of the obvious made
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: such a sensation that it sold better than any other
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: book that the author had ever written, and the reviews
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: unanimously described it, either with praise or with blame, as
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: an extraordinary collection of heresies, most of them almost too
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: acrid to be bruted about in other wors. This mass
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: of platitudes took Americans by surprise and somehow shocked them.
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: What was commonplace to even the peasants of the European
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: continent was so unfamiliar to even the literate minority over
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: here that the book acquired a sort of sinister repute
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: and the writer himself came to be discussed as a
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: fellow with the habit of arising in decorous society and
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: indelicately blowing his nose. There is, of course something of
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: the same, shrinking from the elemental facts of life. In
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: England it seems to run with the Anglo Saxon. This
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: accounts for the shuddering attitude of the English to such
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: platitude monging foreigners as George Bernard Shaw, the Scotsmen disguised
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: as an Irishman, and G. K. Chesterton, who shows all
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: the physical and mental stigmata of a Bavarian Shah's plays,
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: which once had all England by the ears, were set
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: down as companions of the self evidence by the French,
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: a realistic and plain spoken people, and were sniffsat in
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: Germany by all save the middle classes, who corresponded to
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: the intelligentsia of Anglo Saxondom. But in America, even more
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: than in England, they were viewed as genuinely satanic. We
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: shall never forget, indeed, the tremulous manner in which American
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: audiences first listened to the feeble rattling of the palpable
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: in such pieces as Man and superman, and you never
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: can tell. It was precisely the manner of an old
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: maid devouring what every girl of forty five should know
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: behind the door. As for Chestertown, his banal arguments in
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: favor of alcohol shocked the country so greatly that his
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: previous high services to religious superstition were forgotten, and today
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: he is seldom mentioned by respectable Americans. End of Chapter four,
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: Part two, Chapter five of the American Credo by H. L.
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: Mankin and George gen Nathan. This LibriVox recording is in
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: the public domain. It is necessary to repeat that we
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: rehearse all these facts not in indignation, nor indeed in
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: any spirit of karpang whatever, but in perfect serenity, and
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: simply as descriptive sociologists. This attitude of mind is but
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: little comprehended in America, where the emotions dominate all human reactions,
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: and even such dismal sciences as paleontology, pathology, and comparative
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: philology are gaudily colored by patriotic and other passions. The
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: typical American learned man suffers horribly from the national disease.
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: He is eternally afraid of something. If it is not
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: that some cheesemonger among his trustees will have him cashiered
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: for receiving a picture postcard from Professor doctor Scott Nearing.
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: It is that some sweating and scoundrelly German or front
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: men will discover and denounce his cribs. And if it
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: is not that the foreigner will have at him, it
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: is that he will be robbed of his step from
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: associate to full professor by some rival whose wife is
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: more amiable to the president of the university, or who
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: is himself more popular with the college athletes. Thus, surrounded
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: by fears, he translates them, by a familiar psychological process
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: into indignations. He announces what he has to say in
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: terms of raucous dudgeon. As a Negro having to go
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: past a medical college at night intones some belicose Gospel hymn.
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: He is, in brief vociferously correct. During the late War,
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: at a time of unusual suspicions and hence of unusual hazards,
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: this eagerness to prove orthodoxy Bychollar was copiously on exhibition. Thus,
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: one of the leading American zoologists printed a work in which,
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: after starting off by denouncing the German naming of new
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: species as ignorant, dishonest, and against God. He gradually worked
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: himself up to the doctrine that any American who put
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: a tooth into a slab of rinderbrus mit mechthig or
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: peep set simply Sisimus with the blinds down, or bought
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: his children German made jumping jacks, was a traitor to
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: the Constitution and a secret agent of the Wilheims Thraus.
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: And thus there were American pathologists and bacteriologists who denounced
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: Professor doctor Paul Erlich as little better than a quack
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: hired by the Crups to poison Americans, and who displayed
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: their pious horror of the late Professor Doctor Robert Coch
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: by omitting all acknowledgment of obligation to him from their monographs.
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: And finally there was the posse of two thousand American
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: historians assembled by mister Creole to instruct the plain people
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: in the new theory of American history, whereby the Revolution
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: was represented as a lamentable row in an otherwise happy family,
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: deliberately instigated by German intrigue, a posse which reached its
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: greatest height of correct indignation in its approval of the
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: celebrated Sissin documents, to the obscene delight of the British
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: authors thereof. As we say, we are devoid of all
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: such lofty passions, and hence must present our observations in
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: the flat, unimaginative, unemotional manner of a dentist pulling a tooth.
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: It would not be going too far, in fact, to
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: call us emotional idiots. What ails us is a constitutional
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: suspicion that the other fellow, after all, may be right,
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: or in any event, partly right. In the present case,
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: we by no means reprehend the avoidance of issues that
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: we have described. We merely record it. The fact is
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: that it has certain very obvious uses, and is probably
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: inevitable in a democratic society. It is commonly argued that
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: free speech is necessary to the prosperity of a democracy,
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: but in this doctrine we take no stock. On the contrary,
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: there are plain reasons for holding that free speech is
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: more dangerous to a democracy than to any other form
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: of government, and no doubt these reasons, if only unconsciously,
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: were at the bottom of the extraordinary body of repressive
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: legislation put upon the books during the late war. The
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: essential thing about a democracy is that the men at
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: the head of the states are wholly dependent for a
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: continuance of their power upon the good opinion of the
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: popular majority while they are actually in office. True enough,
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: they are theoretically almost completely irresponsible, but their terms of
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: office are usually so short that they must give constant
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: thought to the imminent canvassing of their acts, and this
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: threat of being judged and turned out commonly greatly conditions
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: their exercise their power, even while they hold it to
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: the full of late. Indeed, there has actually arisen the
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: doctrine that they are responsible at all times and must
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: respond to every shift in public sentiment, regardless of their
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: own inclinations, and there has even grown up the custom
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: of subjecting them to formal discipline, as by what is
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: called the recall. The net result is that a public
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: officer under a democracy is bound to regard the popular
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: will during the whole of his term in office, and
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: cannot hope to carry out any intelligible plan of his
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: own if the mob has been set against it. Now,
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: the trouble with this scheme is that the mob reaches
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: its conclusions not by logical steps, but by emotional steps.
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: And that its information upon all save a very small
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: minority of the questions publicly at issue, is always scant
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: and inaccurate. It is thus constantly liable to inflammation by
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: adroit demagogues or rabble rousers. And inasmuch as these rabble
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: rousers are animated as a sole motive by the hope
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: of turning out the existing officers of state and getting
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: the offices for themselves, the man in office must inevitably
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: regard them as his enemies, and the doctrines they preach
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: as subversive of good government. This view is not altogether selfish.
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: There is in fact sound logic in it, for it
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: is a peculiarity of the mob mind that it always
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: takes in most hospitably. What is intrinsically most idiotic that
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: between two antagonistic leaders, it always follows the one who
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: is longest on vague and brilliant words and shortest on sense.
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: Thus the man in office, if you would be free
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: to carry on his due in anything approaching freedom and comfort,
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: must adopt measures against that tendency to run amuck. Three
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: devices at once present themselves. One is to take steps
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: against the rabble rousers by seeking to make it appear
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: that they are traitors, and so arousing the bob against them,
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: in brief to deny them their constitutional right to free
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: speech under color of criminal statutes. The second is to
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: combine this plan with that of flooding the country with
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: official news by a corps of press agents, Chatauquans, and
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: other such professors of deception. The third is to meet
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: the rabble rousers on their own ground, matching their appeals
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: to the emotions with appeals even more powerful, and outdoing
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: their vague and soothing words with words even more vague
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: and soothing. All three plans have been in operation since
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: the first days of the Republic. The early Federalists employed
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: the first two with such assiduity that the mob of
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: that time finally revolted. All three have been brought to
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: the highest conceivable point of perfection by doctor Wilson, a
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: man whose resolute fidelity to his moral ideas is matched
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: only by his magnificent skill at playing upon every prejudice
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: and weakness of the plain people. But men of such
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: exalted and varied gifts are not common. The average head
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: of a democratic state is not ipso facto the best
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: rabble rouser within that state, but merely one of the best.
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: He may be able on fair terms to meet any
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: individual rival, but it is rare for him to be
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: able to meet the whole pack, or even any considerable group.
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: To relieve him from that difficulty, and so prevent the
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: incessant running a muck of the populace, it is necessary
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: to handicap all the remaining rabble rousers, and this is
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: most effectively done by limitations upon free speech, which originate
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: as statutes and gradually take on the form and potency
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: of national customs. Such limitations arose in the United States
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: by precisely that process. They began in the first years
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: of the Republic as definite laws. Some of those laws
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: were afterward abandoned, but what was fundamentally sound in them
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: remained in force as custom. It must be obvious that
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: even doctor Wilson, despite his tremendous gift for the third
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: of the devices that we have named, would have been
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: in sore case during his second administration if it had
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: not been for his employment of the other two. Imagine
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: that the United States during the summer of nineteen seventeen,
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: with absolute free speech the order of the day, the
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: mails would have been flooded with socialist and pacifist documents.
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: Every street corner would have had its screaming soapbox orator.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: The newspapers would have shaken the very heavens with colossal alarms,
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: and conscientious objection would have taken on the proportions of
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: a national frenzy. In the face of such an avalanche
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: of fears and balderdash, there would have been no work
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: at all for the German propagandists. In fact, it is
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: likely that a great many of them, under suspicion on
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: account of their relative moderation, would have been lynched as
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: agents of the American munition's patriots. For the mob, it
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: must be remembered infallibly inclines not to the side of
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: the soundest logic and loftiest purpose, but to the side
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: of the loudest noise. And without the artificial aid of
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: a large and complex organization of press agents and the
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: power to jail any especially effective opponent forthwith, even a
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: president of the United States would be unable to ball
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: down the whole fraternity. That it is a matter of
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: the utmost importance in time of war to avoid any
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: such internal bals reign of terror must be obvious. Even
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: the most fanatical advocate of free speech, there must be
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: in such emergencies a resolute pursuit of coherent policies, and
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: that would be obviously impossible with the populace turning distractedly
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: to one bogus messiah after another, and always seeking to
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: force its latest craze upon the government. Thus, while one
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: may perchance drop a tear or two upon the socialists
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: jailed by a sort of lynch law for trying to
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: exercise their plain constitutional rights, and upon the pacifists tarred
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: and feathered by mobs led by government agents, and upon
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: the conscientious objectors starved and clubbed to death in military dungeons,
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: it must still be plain that such barbarous penalties were
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: essentially necessary. The victims, in the main were half wits,
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: suffering from the martyr complex. It was their admitted to
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: death desire to sacrifice themselves for the larger good. This
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: desire was gratified, not in the way they hoped for,
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: of course, but nevertheless in a way that must have
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: given any impartial observer a feeling of profound, if discreditable satisfaction.
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: What a republic has to fear, especially, is the rabble
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: rouser who advocates giving an objective reality to the gaudy
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: theories which lie at the foundations of the prevailing scheme
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: of government. He is far more dangerous than a genuine revolutionist,
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: for the latter comes with ideas that are actually new,
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: or at all events new to the mob, and so
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: he has to overcome its congenital hostility to novelty. But
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: the reformer, who under a democracy bases his case upon
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: the principles upon which democracy is founded, has an easy road,
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: for the populace is familiar with those principles and eager
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: to see them put into practical effect. The late Cecil Chesterton,
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: in his penetrating History of the United States, showed how
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: Andrew Jackson came to power by that route. Jackson, he said,
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: was simply a man so naive that he accepted the
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: lofty doctrines of the Declaration of Independence without any critical
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: questioning whatever, and really acted as if they were true.
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: The appearance of such a man, he goes on, was
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: appalling to the political aristocrats of eighteen twenty five. They themselves,
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: of course, enunciated those doctrines daily and based their whole
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: politics upon them, but not to the point of really
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: executing them. So when Jackson came down from the mountains
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: with the same sonorous words upon his lips, but with
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: the addition of a solemn promise to carry them out.
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: When he thus descended upon them, he stole their thunder
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: and spiked their guns, and after a brief struggle, he
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: had disposed of them. The socialists, free speech fanatics, anti conscriptionists,
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: anti militarists, and other such democratic maximalists of nineteen seventeen
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: and nineteen eighteen were, in essence, nothing but a new
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: and formidable horde of Jackson's. Their case rested upon principles
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: held to be true by all good Americans and constantly
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: reaffirmed by the highest officers of state. It was thus
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: extremely likely that if they were permitted to woo the
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: public ear they would quickly amass a majority of suffrages
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: and so get the conduct of things into their own hands.
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: So it became necessary, in order that the great enterprises
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: then under weigh might be pushed to a successful issue,
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: that all these mar plots be silenced, and it was
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: accordingly done. This proceeding, of course, was theoretically violative of
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: their common rights, and hence theoretically Unamerican. All the theory,
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: in fact was on the side of the victims. But
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: wartime is no time for theories, and a man with
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: war powers in his hand is not one to parley
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: with them. As we have said, the menace presented by
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: such unintelligent literalists is probably a good deal more dangerous
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: to a democracy than to a government of any other form.
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: Under an aristocracy, for example, such as prevailed in one
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: form or another in England, Germany, Italy and France before
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: the war, it is possible to give doctrinaires a relatively
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: free reign, for even if they succeed in converting the
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: mob to their whimwham, there remain insuperable impediments to its
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: adoption and execution as law. In England, as everyone knows,
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: the impediment was a ruling cast highly skilled in the
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: governmental function and generally trusted by a majority of the populace,
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: a ruling cast firmly entrenched in the Head of Lords
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: and scarcely less powerful in the House of Commons. In France,
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: it was a bureaucracy so securely protected by law and
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: custom that nothing shorts of a political cataclysm could shake it.
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: In Germany and Italy, it was an aristocracy buttressed by
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: laws cunningly designed to nullify the numerical superiority of the mob,
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: and by a monarchical theory that set up a heavy
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: counterweight to public opinion. In the face of such adroit
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: checks and balances, it is a matter of relative indifference
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: whether the mob blows scalding hot or freezing cold. Whatever
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: the extravagance of its crazes, there remains effective machinery for
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: holding them in check until they spend themselves, which is
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: usually soon enough. Thus, the English government, though theoretically as
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: much opposed to anarchists as the American government, gave them
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: cheerful asylum before the war and permitted them to preach
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 1: their lamentableas notions almost without check, whereas in America they
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: early aroused great fears and were presently put under such
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: disabilities that their propaganda became almost impossible. Even in France,
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: where they had many converts and were frequently in eruption,
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: there was far more hospitality In the Germany of Bismarck's day.
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: The Socialists, after a brief and a barrant attempt to
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: suppress them, were allowed to run free, despite the fact
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: that their doctrine was quite as abhorrent to German official
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 1: doctrine as anarchism was to American official doctrine. The German
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: ruling cast of those days was sheltered behind laws and
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: customs which enabled it to pull the teeth of socialism
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: even in the face of enormous socialist majorities. But under
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: a democracy it is difficult, and often downright impossible, to
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: oppose the popular craze of the moment with any effect,
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: and so there must be artificial means of disas sciplining
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: the jake fetchers who seek to set such enthusiasms in motion.
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 1: The shivering fear of Bolshevism visible of late among the
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: capitalists of America is based upon a real danger. These
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: capitalists have passed through the burning fires of Rooseveltian trust
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: busting and Bryanistic populism, and they know very well that
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: half a dozen Lenins and Trotsky's turned loose upon the
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: plain people would quickly recruit a majority of them for
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 1: a holy war upon capital, and that they have the
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: political power to make such a holy war devastating. The
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: amateur of popular psychology may wonder why it is that
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: the mob, in the face of their oppressions constantly practiced
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: in the United States, does not occasionally rise in revolt
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: and so get back its right to be wooed and
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: ravished by all sorts of mountebanks. Theoretically, it has that right,
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: and what is more, it has the means of regaining it.
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: Nothing could resist it if it made absolute free speech
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 1: an issue in a national campaign and voted for the
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: candidates advocating it. But something is overlooked here, and that
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: is the fact that the mob has no liking for
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: free speech per se. Some of the grounds of its
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: animosity we have rehearsed, others are not far to seek.
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: One of them lies in the mob's chronic suspicion of
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: all advocates of ideas, born of its distaste for ideas themselves.
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: The mob man cannot imagine himself throwing up his job
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: and deserting his home, his lodge, and his speakeasy to
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: carry a new gospel to his fellows, and so he
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: is inclined to examine the motives of any other man
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: who does so. The one motive that is intelligible to
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: him is the desire for profit, and he commonly concludes
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 1: at once that this is what moves the propagandist before him.
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: His reasoning is defective, but his conclusion is usually not
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: far from wrong. In point of fact, idealism is not
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: a passion in America, but a trade. All the salient
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: idealists make a living at it, and some of them,
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: for example, Doctor Bryan and the Reverend Doctor Sunday, are
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: commonly believed to have amassed large fortunes. For an American
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: to advocate a cause without any hope of private usufruct
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: is almost unheard of. It would be difficult to find
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: such a man who is not plainly insane. The most
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: eloquent and impassioned of American idealists are candidates for public office.
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: On the lower levels. Idealism is no more than a
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: handmaiden of business, like advertising or belonging to the Men
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: and Religion forward movement. Another and very important cause of
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: the proletarian's failure to whoop for free speech is to
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: be found in his barbarous delight in persecution. Regardless of
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: the merits of the cause, the spectacle of a man
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: exercising the right of free speech yields intrinsically no joy,
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: for there is seldom anything dramatic about it. But the
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: spectacle of a man being mobbed, jailed, beaten, and perhaps
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: murdered for trying to exercise it is a good show
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: like any other good show, and the populace is thus
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: not only eager to witness it, but even willing to
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: help it along. It is therefore quite easy to set
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: the mob upon, say the Bolsheviki, despite the fact that
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: the Bolsheviki have the professed aim of doing the mob
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: an incomparable service. During the late hijinks of the Post
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: Office and the Department of Justice, popular opinion was always
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: on the side of the raiding parties. It applauded every
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: descent upon a socialist or pacifist meeting. Not because it
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: was very hotly in favor of war. In fact, it
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: was lukewarm about war and resisted all efforts to heat
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: it up until overwhelming swarms of yokel yancors were turned
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: upon it. But because it was in favor of a
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: safe and stimulating form of rough house, with the police
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: helping instead of hindering. It never stopped to inquire about
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: the merits of the matter. All it asked for was
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: a melodramatic raid followed by a noisy trial of the
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: accused in the newspapers, and the daily publication of sensational
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: and usually bogus evidence about the discovery of compromising literature
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: in his wife's stockings, including records of his receipt of
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: one hundred thousand dollars from von Bernsdorf, Caranza or some
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 1: other transient hobgoblin. The celebrated O'Leary trial was typical. After
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: months of blood curdling charges in the press, it turned
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: out when the accused got before a court that the
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: evidence against him him on which it was sought to
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: convict him of a capital offense, was so feeble that
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: it would have scarcely sufficed to convict him of an
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: ordinary misdemeanor, and that most of this feeble testimony was
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: palpably perjured. Nevertheless, public opinion was nearly unanimously against him
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: from first to last, and the jury which acquitted him
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: was almost apologetic about its inability to give the populace
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: the crowning happiness of a state hanging under cover of
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: the war. Of course, the business of providing such shows
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 1: prospered extraordinarily, but it is very active even in time
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 1: of peace. The surest way to get on in politics
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: in America is to play the leading part in a
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: prosecution which attracts public notice. The list of statesmen who
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: have risen in that fashion includes the names of many
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: of the highest dignity e g. Hughes, Folk, Whitman, Penny, Baker,
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: and Palmer. Every district attorney in America. Praise knightly that
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: God will deliver into his hands some Thaw or Becker
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: or O'Leary, that he may get upon the front pages,
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: and so become a governor, a United States Senator, or
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: a justice of the Supreme Courts of the United States.
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: The last crusade against W. R. Hurst, which appeared to
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: the public as a great patriotic movement, was actually chiefly
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: managed by a subordinate prosecuting officer who hoped to get
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: high office out of it. This last aspirant failed in
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: his enterprise largely because he had tackled a man who
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: was himself of superb talents as a rouser of the proletariat.
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: But nine times out of ten the thing succeeds. Its
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: success is due almost entirely to the factor that we
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: have mentioned to wit to the circumstance that the sympathy
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: of the public is always on the side of the prosecution.
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: This sympathy goes so far that it is ready to
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: and down the most outrageous conduct in judges and prosecuting officers,
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: providing only they give good shows. During the late War
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: upon socialists, pacifists, anti conscriptionists, and other such heretics, judges
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: theoretically employed to ensure fair trials engaged in the most
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: amazing attacks upon prisoners before them, denouncing them without hearing them,
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: shutting out evidence on their side, and making stump speeches
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: to the jury against them. That conduct aroused no public indignation.
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: On the contrary, such judges were frequently praised in the newspapers,
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: and a good many of them were promoted to higher courts.
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: Even in time of peace, there is no general antipathy
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: to that sort of thing. At least two thirds of
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: our judges, federal, state and municipal, color their decisions with
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: the newspaper gabble of the moment. Even the Supreme Court
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: has shown itself delicately responsive to the successive manias of
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: the Uplift, which is at bottom no more than an
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: organized scheme for inventing new crimes and making noisy pursuit
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: of new categories of criminals. Some time ago, an intelligent Mexican,
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: after studying our courts, told us that he was surprised that,
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: in a land ostensibly of liberty, so few of the
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: notorious newspaper wooers and black legs upon the bench were assassinated.
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: It is, in fact rather curious. The thing happens very seldom,
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: and then it is usually in the South, where the
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: motive is not altruistic but political. That is to say,
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: the assassin merely desires to remove one black leg in
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: order to make a place for some other black leg.
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: He has no objection to systematized injustice. All he desires
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: is that it be dispensed in favor of his own side.
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: End of Chapter five, Chapter six of the American Credo
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: by H. L. Mankin and George Gene Nathan. This LibriVox
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: recording is in the public domain. The mob delight in
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: melodramatic and cruel spectacles, thus constantly fed and fostered by
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: the judicial arm in the United States, is also at
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: the bottom of another familiar American phenomenon, to wit, lynching.
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: A good part of the enormous literature of lynching is
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: devoted to a discussion of its causes, but most of
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: that discussion is ignorant, and some of it is deliberately mendacious.
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: The majority of Southern commentators argue that the motive of
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: the lynchers is a laudable yearning to protect Southern womanhood,
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: despite the plain fact that only a very small proportion
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: of the blackamoores hanged and burned are even so much
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: as accused of molesting Southern womanhood. On the other hand,
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: some of the negro intellectuals of the North ascribe the
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: recurrent butcheries to the southern white man's economic jealousy of
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: the Southern black, who is fast acquiring property and reaching
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: out for the prerogatives that go therewith. Finally, certain white
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: Northerners seek a cause in mere political animosity, arguing that
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: the southern white hates the negro because the latter is
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: his theoretical equal at the polls, though actually not permitted
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: to vote. All of these notions seem to us to
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: be fanciful. Lynching is popular in the South simply because
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: the Southern populace, like any other populace, delights in thrilling shows,
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: and because no other sort of show is provided by
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: the backward culture of the region. The introduction of prize
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: fighting down there, or baseball on a large scale, or
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: amusement places like Coney Island, or amateur athletic contests or
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: picnics like those held by the more truculent Irish Fraternal Organisation,
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 1: or any other such wholesale devices for shocking and diverting
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: the proletariat would undoubtedly cause a great decline in lynching.
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: The artists practiced, and the overwhelming main in remote and
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: god forsaken regions in which the only rival entertainment is
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 1: offered by one sided political campaigns, third rate chautaquas and
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: Methodist revivals. When it is imitated in the North, it
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: is always in some drab factory or mining town. Genuine
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: race riots, of course, sometimes occur in the larger cities,
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: but these are always economic in origin and have nothing
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 1: to do with lynching properly so called. One could not
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: imagine an actual lynching at say, Atlantic city, with ten
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: or fifteen bands playing blind pigs in operation up every alley,
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: a theater in every block or two, and the boardwalk
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: swarming with ladies of joy. Even a Mississippian transported to
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: such scenes succumbs to the atmosphere of pleasure, and so
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 1: has no seizures of moral rage against the poor darkie.
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 1: Lynching in brief is a phenomenon of isolated and stupid communities,
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: a mark of imperfect civilization. It follows the hookworm and
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: malaria belt. It shows itself in inverse proportion to the
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: number of shoot the chutes, symphony orchestras, roof gardens, theaters,
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: horse races, yellow journals, and automatic pianos. No one ever
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: heard of a lynching in Paris, at Newport, or in London.
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: But there are incessant lynchings in the remoter parts of Russia,
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: in the backwoods of Serbia, Bulgaria and Herzegovina, in Mexico
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: and Nicaragua, and in such barbarous American states as Alabama, Georgia,
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: and South Carolina. The notion that lynching in the South
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: is countenanced by the gentry, or that they take an
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: actual hand in it, is libelous and idiotic. The well
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: born and well bred Southerner is no more a savage
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: than any other man of condition. He may live among savages,
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 1: but that no more makes him a savage than an
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: English gentleman is made one by having a place in
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: Wales or a Russian by living on his estate in
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 1: the Ukraine. What northern observers mistake for the gentry of
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: the South when they report the participation of leading citizens
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: in a lynching is simply the office holding and commercial bourgeoisie,
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: the offspring of the poor white trash who sulked at
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: home during the Civil War, robbing the widows and orphans
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: of the soldiers at the front, and so laying the
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: foundations of the present industrial prosperity of the section, i e.
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 1: Its conversion from a region of large landed estates and
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: urbane life into a region of stinking factories, filthy mining
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: and oil towns, child killing cotton mills, vociferous chambers of commerce,
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 1: and other such swineries. It is, of course a fact
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: that the average lynching party in Mississippi or Alabama is
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: led by the mayor, and that the town judge climbs
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: down from his bench to give it his official support.
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 1: But it is surely not a fact that these persons
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: are of the line of such earlier public functionaries as pickens, troops,
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: and pettis. On the contrary, they correspond to the lesser
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: sorts of tammany office holders and to the vermin who
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: monopolize the public functions in such cities as Boston and Philadelphia.
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: The gentry, with few exceptions, have been forced out of
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 1: the public service everywhere south of the Potomac, if not
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: out of politics. The Democratic victory in nineteen twelve flooded
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: all the governmental posts at Washington with Southerners, and they
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: remain in power to this day, and some of them
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: are among the chief officers of the nation. But in
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: the whole vast corps, there are we believe, but ten
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: who would be accepted as gentlemen by Southern standards, and
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 1: only three of these are in posts of any importance.
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: In the two houses of cong there is but one.
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: It is thus absurd to drag the gentry of the South,
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: the Bourbons of New England legend, into a discussion of
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: the lynching problem. They represent, in fact, what remains of
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 1: the only genuine aristocracy ever visible in the United States,
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 1: and lynching, on the theoretical side, is far too moral
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: a matter ever to engage. In aristocracy. The true lynchers
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: are the plain people, and at the bottom of the
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: sport there is nothing more noble than the mobman's chronic
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: and ineradicable pultroonery, cruel by nature, delighting in sanguinary spectacles,
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: and here brought to hatred of the negro by the
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: latters increasing industrial, not political, capitalistic, or social rivalry. He
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: naturally diverts himself in his moments of musing with visions
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: of what he would do to this or that more
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: if he had the courage. Unluckily he hasn't, and so
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 1: he is unable to execute his dream a cappella. If
• 1:51:01
  Speaker 1: inflamed by liquor, he attempts it, the more commonly gives
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: him a beating or even murders him. But what lies
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: beyond his talents as an individual at once becomes feasible
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: when he joins himself with other men in a like situation.
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: This is the genesis of a mob of lynchers. It
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: is composed primarily of a few men with definite grievances,
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: sometimes against the negro lynched, but often against quite different negroes.
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: It is composed secondarily of a large number of fifth
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: rate men eager for a thrilling show involving no personal danger.
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 1: It is composed in the third place, of a few
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: rabble rousers and politicians, all of them hot to exhibit
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: themselves before the populace as a moment of public excitement
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: and an attitude of leadership. It is the second element
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: that gives life to the general impulse. Without its ardent
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: appetite for a rough and shocking spectacle, there would be
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: no lynching. Its influence is plainly shown by the frequent
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: unintelligibility of the whole proceeding. All Its indignation over the
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: crime alleged to be punished is an afterthought. Any crime
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: will answer once its blood is up. Thus, the most
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: characteristic lynchings in the South are not those in which
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: confessed criminal is done to death for a definite crime,
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 1: but those in which, in sheer high spirits, some convenient
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: African is taken at random and lynched. As the newspapers
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: say on general principles, that sort of lynching is the
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: most honest and normal, and we are also inclined to
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 1: think that it is the most enjoyable, for the other
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 1: sort brings moral indignation with it, and moral indignation is disagreeable.
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: No man can be both indignant and happy. But here,
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: seeking to throw a feeble beam or two of light
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: into the mental processes of the American proletarian, we find
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: ourselves entering upon a discussion that grows narrow and perhaps
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: also dull. Lynching, after all, is not an American institution,
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: but a peculiarly Southern institution, and even in the South,
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: it will die out as other more seemly recreations are introduced.
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: It would be quite easy, we believe, for any Southern
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 1: community to get rid of it, by establishing a good
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: brass band and having concerts every evening. It would be
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: even easier to get rid of it by borrowing a
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: few professional scoundrels from the Department of Justice, having them
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: rade the study of the local Methodist archdeacon, and forthwith
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 1: trying him publicly with the candidates for governor as prosecuting
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 1: officer for seduction under promise of salvation. The trouble down
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: there is not a special viciousness. The southern poor white
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: taking him, by and large, is probably no worse and
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: no better than the anthropoid proletarian of the North. What
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: ails the whole region is Philistinism has lost its old
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: aristocracy of the soil and has not yet developed an
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 1: aristocracy of money. The result is that its cultural ideas
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: are set by stupid and unimaginative men, Southern equivalents of
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 1: the retired Iowa steer staffers and grain sharks who pollute
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: Los Angeles, American equivalents of the rich English nonconformists. These men,
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 1: though they have accumulated wealth, have not yet acquired the
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: capacity to enjoy civilized recreations. Worse, most of them are
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: still so barbarous that they regard such recreations as immoral.
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: The dominating opinion of the South is thus against most
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: of the devices that would diminish lynching by providing substitutes
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: for it. In every Southern town, some noisy clown of
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: a Methodist or Presbyterian clergyman exercises a local tyranny. These
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 1: men are firmly against all divertisements of more cultured regions.
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: They oppose prize fighting, horse racings, baseball, and games of chance.
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 1: They are bitter prohibitionists. By their incessant vice crusades. They
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: reduce the romance of sex to furtiveness and piggishness. They
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 1: know nothing of music or the drama, and view a
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: public library merely as something to be rigorously censored. We
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: are convinced that their ignorant moral enthusiasm is largely to
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 1: blame for the prevalence of lynching. No doubt they themselves
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: are sneakingly conscious of the fact, or at least aware
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: of it subconsciously, for lynching is the only public amusement
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: that they never denounce. Their influence reveals strikingly the readiness
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: of the inferior American to accept ready made opinions. He
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: seems to be pathetically eager to be told what to think,
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 1: and he is apparently willing to accept any instructor who
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: takes the trouble to tackle him. This also was brilliantly
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: revealed during the late War. The powers which controlled the
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: press during that fevered time swayed the populace as they pleased,
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: so long as the course of doctor Wilson was satisfactory
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: to them. He was depicted as a second Lincoln, and
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: the plain people accepted the estimate without question. To help
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: reinforce it, the country was actually flooded with the lithographs
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: showing Lincoln and Wilson wreathed by the same branch of Laurel,
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: and copies of the prince got into millions of humble homes.
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: But immediately doctor Wilson gave offense to his superiors. He
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 1: began to be depicted as an idiot and a scoundrel,
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: and this judgment promptly displaced the other one in the
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: popular mind. The late Major General Roosevelt was often a
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: victim of that sort of boob bumping. A man of
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: mercurial temperament, constantly shifting his position on all large public questions,
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 1: he alternately gave great joy and great alarm to the
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: little group of sagaciously wilful men which exerc Size's genuine
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: sovereignty over the country. And this alternation of emotions showed
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 1: itself by way of the newspapers and other such body agencies.
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: In the vacillation of public opinion, the fundamental platitudes of
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 1: the nation were used both for him and against him,
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 1: and always with immense effect. One year he was the
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: last living defender of the liberties fought for by the fathers.
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: The next year he was an anarchist. Roosevelt himself was
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: much annoyed by this unreliability of the mob. Now and
• 1:57:34
  Speaker 1: then he sought to overcome it by direct appeals, but
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: in the long run he was usually beaten. Toward the
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: end of his life he resigned himself to a policy
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 1: of great discretion, and so withheld his voice until he
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 1: was sure what him was being lined out. The newspapers
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: and press associations, of course, do not impart the official
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: doctrine of the moment in terms of forthright instructions. They
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 1: get over as the phrase is, in the form of
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: delicate suggestions, most of them under cover of the fundamental
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: platitudes aforesaid. Their job is not to inspire and inform
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 1: public discussion, but simply to color it, And the task
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: most frequently before them is that of giving a patriotic
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 1: and virtuous appearance to whatever the proletariat is to believe.
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: They do this, of course, to the tune of deafening
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 1: Protestations of their own honesty and altruism. But there is
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: really no such thing as an honest newspaper in America.
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: If it were set up tomorrow, it would perish within
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 1: a month. Every journal, however rich and powerful, is the
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: trembling slave of higher powers, some financial, some religious, and
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: some political. It faces a multitude of censorships, all of
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: them very potent. It is censored by the Post Office,
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 1: by the Jewish advertisers, by the Catholic Church, by the Methodists,
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: by the Probitionists, by the banking oligarchy of its town,
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: and often by even more astounding authorities, including the shin Fein.
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: Now and then a newspaper makes a valiant gesture of revolt,
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: but it is only a gesture. There is not a
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: single daily in the United States that would dare to
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 1: discuss the problem of Jewish immigration. Honestly, nine tenths of them,
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 1: under the lash of snobbish Jewish advertisers, are even afraid
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 1: to call a Jew a Jew. Their orders are to
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: call him a Hebrew, which is regarded as sweeter. During
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: the height of the Bolshevist scare, not one American paper
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 1: ventured to direct attention to the plain and obtrusive fact
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 1: that the majority of Bolshevists in Russia and Germany, and
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 1: at least two thirds of those taken in the United States,
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: were of the faith of Moses, Mendelssohn and Gimbal. But
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 1: the Jews are perhaps not the worst the Methodists in
• 1:59:59
  Speaker 1: all all save a few big cities, exercise a control
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 1: over the press that is far more rigid and bailful.
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 1: In the Anti Saloon League. They have developed a machine
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: for terrorising officeholders and the newspapers that is remarkably effective,
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: and they employed it during the long fight for prohibition,
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: to throttle all opposition save the most formal. In this
• 2:00:23
  Speaker 1: last case, of course, the idealists who thus forced the
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: speak easy upon the country, had an easy task, for
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: all of the prevailing assumptions and prejudices of the mob
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: were in their favor. No doubt, it is true, as
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: has been alleged, that a majority of the voters of
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: the country were against prohibition and would have defeated it
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: as a plebiscite. But equally, without doubt, a majority of
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 1: them were against the politicians so brutally clubbed by the
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 1: Anti Saloon League, and ready to believe anything evil of them,
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: and eager to see the man handled. Moreover, the league
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 1: had another thing in its favour. It was operated by
• 2:01:01
  Speaker 1: strictly moral men, oblivious to any notion of honor. Thus
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 1: it advocated and procured the abolition of legalized liquor selling
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: without the slightest compensation to the men who had invested
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 1: their money in the business under cover of and even
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 1: at the invitation of the law, a form of repudiation
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: and confiscation unheard of in any other civilized country. Again,
• 2:01:27
  Speaker 1: it got through the Constitutional Amendment by promising the liquormen
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 1: to give them one year to dispose of their lawfully
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 1: accumulated stocks, and then broke its promise under cover of
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 1: alleged war necessity, despite the fact that the war was
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 1: actually over. Both proceedings, so abhorrent to any man of honor,
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: failed to arouse any indignation among the plain people. On
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 1: the contrary, the plain people viewed them as in some
• 2:01:54
  Speaker 1: vague way smart and creditable, and as in any case
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: thoroughly justified by the superior moral obligation that we have
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 1: hitherto discussed. Thus the bubis americanus is led and watched
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 1: over by zealous men, all of them highly skilled at
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 1: training him in the way that he should think and act.
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: The Constitution of his country guarantees that he shall be
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 1: a free man, and assumes that he is intelligent. But
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 1: the laws and customs that have grown up under that
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: constitution give the lie to both the guarantee and the assumption.
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: American law, in fact, that the average citizen is half witted,
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: and hence not to be trusted to either his own
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: devices or his own thoughts. If there were not regulations
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: against the saloon, it seems to say he would get
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: drunk every day, dissipate his means, undermine his health, and
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: beggar his family. If there were not postal regulations as
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: to his reading matter, he would divide his time between
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 1: Bolshevist literature and pornographic literature, and so become at once
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 1: an anarchist and a guinea pig. If he were not forbidden,
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 1: under heavy penalties, to cross a state line with a wench,
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 1: he would be chronically unfaithful to his wife. Worse, if
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 1: his daughter were not protected by the statutes of the
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: most draconian severity, she would succumb to the first Italian
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 1: she encountered, yield up her person to him, enroll herself
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 1: upon his staff, and go upon the streets. So runs
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: the course of legislation in this land of freemen. We
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: could pile up example upon example, but will defer the
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: business for the present. Perhaps it may be resumed in
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 1: a work. One of us is now engaged upon a
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 1: full length study of the popular mind under the Republic,
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 1: But that work will take years. End of Chapter six
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 1: seven of The American Credo by H. L. Mankin and
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 1: George gen Nathan. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 1: No doubt we should apologize for writing even so so
• 2:04:16
  Speaker 1: long a preface to so succinct a book. The one
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: excuse we can think of is that, having read it,
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 1: one need not read the book. That book, as we
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 1: have said, may strike the superficial as jocular, but an
• 2:04:32
  Speaker 1: actual fact, it is a very serious and even profound composition,
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: not addressed to the casual reader, but to the scholar.
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: Its preparation involves a great diligence, and its study is
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: not to be undertaken lightly. What the psychologist will find
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 1: to admire in it, however, is not its learning and painstaking,
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 1: its laborious erudition, but its compression. It establishes, we believe,
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: a new and clearer method for a science long run
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 1: to trigidity and flatulence. Perhaps it may even be said
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 1: to set up an entirely new science to wit, that
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: of descriptive sociological psychology. We believe that this field will
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 1: attract many men of inquiring mind hereafter and yield a
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 1: valuable crop of important facts. The experimental method, intrinsically so
• 2:05:31
  Speaker 1: sound and useful, has been much abused by orthodo psychologists.
• 2:05:37
  Speaker 1: It inevitably leads them into a trackless maze of meaningless
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 1: tables and diagrams. They keep their eyes so resolutely upon
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: the intellectual process that they pay no heed to the
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 1: primary intellectual materials. Nevertheless, it must be obvious that the
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: conclusions that a man comes to, the emotions that he harbours,
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 1: and the crazes that sway him, are of much less
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: significance than the fundamental assumptions upon which they are all based.
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: There has been, indeed, some discussion of those fundamental assumptions
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: of late. We have heard, for example, many acute discourses
• 2:06:17
  Speaker 1: upon the effects produced upon the whole thinking of the
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: German people, peasants and professors alike by the underlying German
• 2:06:25
  Speaker 1: assumption that the late Kaiser was anointed of God and
• 2:06:29
  Speaker 1: hence above all ordinary human responsibility. We have heard talk
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 1: too of the curious Irish axiom that there is a
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 1: mysterious something in the nature of things giving the Irish
• 2:06:41
  Speaker 1: people an indefeasible right to govern Ireland as they please,
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: regardless of the safety of their next door neighbors. And
• 2:06:50
  Speaker 1: we have heard many outlandish principles of the same sort
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 1: from political theorists e g. Regarding the inalienable right of
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 1: democracy to prevail over all other forms of government, and
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: the inalienable right of all national groups, however small, to
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 1: self determination. Well, here is an attempt to assemble, in
• 2:07:11
  Speaker 1: convenient form, without comment or interpretation, some of the fundamental
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 1: beliefs of the largest body of human beings now under
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 1: one flag in Christendom. It is but a beginning. The
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 1: field is barely platted. It must be explored to the
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 1: last furlong, and all its fantastic and fascinating treasures unearthed
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: and examined, before ever there can be any accurate understanding
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: of the mind of the American people. George gen Nathan, H. L. Mankin,
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 1: New York, nineteen twenty. End of chapter seven read by
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: Audrienne Prevost. End of the American Credo by H. L.
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 1: Mankin and George gen. Nathan