H.L. Mencken on Congressmen

H.L. Mencken
The New Liberty

[This essay appeared in the book “Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans” By Harold Stearns published in 1922. This is a particularly scathing criticism of members of the House of Representatives. (just as bad if not worse today) You’ll notice Mencken’s accurate foreboding that the same was to happen to the Senate as “direct elections have not yet done their work”. There is also an excellent explanation of “the process whereby prohibition was foisted upon the nation by constitutional amendment, to the dismay of the solid majority opposed to it and to the surprise of the minority in favour of it.” (Beware those single issue lobbyists) -Editor, The New Liberty]

♣ ♣ ♣

POLITICS

● No person shall be a Representative who … shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.
● No person shall be a Senator who … shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

SPECIALISTS in political archaeology will recognize these sentences: they are from Article I, Sections 2 and 3, of the constitution of the United States. I have heard and forgotten how they got there; no doubt the cause lay in the fierce jealousy of the States. But whatever the fact, I have a notion that there are few provisions of the constitution that have had a more profound effect upon the character of practical politics in the Republic, or, indirectly, upon the general colour of American thinking in the political department. They have made steadily for parochialism in legislation, for the security and prosperity of petty local bosses and machines, for the multiplication of pocket and rotten boroughs of the worst sort, and, above all, for the progressive degeneration of the honesty and honour of representatives. They have greased the ways for the trashy and ignoble fellow who aspires to get into Congress, and they have blocked them for the man of sense, dignity, and self-respect. More, perhaps, than any other single influence they have been responsible for the present debauched and degraded condition of the two houses, and particularly of the lower one. Find me the worst ass in Congress, and I’ll show you a man they have helped to get there and to stay there. Find me the most shameless scoundrel, and I’ll show you another.

No such centripedal mandate, as far as I have been able to discover, is in the fundamental law of any other country practising the representative system. An Englishman, if ambition beads him toward St. Stephen’s, may go hunting for a willing constituency wherever the hunting looks best, and if he fails in the Midlands he may try again in the South, or in the North, or in Scotland or Wales. A Frenchman of like dreams has the same privilege; the only condition, added after nineteen years of the Third Republic, is that he may not be a candidate in two or more arrondissements at once. And so with a German, an Italian, or a Spaniard. But not so with an American. He must be an actual inhabitant of the State be aspires to represent at Washington. More, he must be, in all save extraordinary cases, an actual inhabitant of the congressional district-for here, by a characteristic American process, the fundamental law is sharpened by custom. True enough, this last requirement is not laid down by the constitution. It would be perfectly legal for the thirty-fifth New York district, centring at Syracuse, to seek its congressman in Manhattan, or even at Sing Sing. In various iconoclastic States, in fact, the thing has been occasionally done. But not often; not often enough to produce any appreciable effect. The typical congressman remains a purely local magnifico, the gaudy cock of some small and usually far from appetizing barnyard. His rank and dignity as a man are measured by provincial standards of the most puerile sort, and his capacity to discharge the various and onerous duties of his office is reckoned almost exclusively in terms of his ability to hold his grip upon the local party machine.

If he has genuine ability, it is a sort of accident. If he is thoroughly honest, it is next door to a miracle. Of the 430-odd representatives who carry on so diligently and obscenely at Washington, making laws and determining policies for the largest free nation ever seen in the world, there are not two dozen whose views upon any subject under the sun carry any weight whatsoever outside their own bailiwicks, and there are not a dozen who rise to anything approaching unmistakable force and originality. They are, in the overwhelming main, shallow fellows, ignorant of the grave matters they deal with and too stupid to learn.

If, as is often proposed, the United States should adopt the plan of parliamentary responsibility and the ministry should be recruited from the lower house, then it would be difficult, without a radical change in election methods, to fetch up even such pale talents and modest decencies as were assembled for their cabinets by Messrs. Wilson and Harding. The better sort of congressmen, to be sure, acquire after long service a good deal of technical proficiency.

They know the traditions and precedents of the two houses; they can find their way in and out of every rathole in the capitol; they may be trusted to carry on the legislative routine in a more or less shipshape manner. Of such sort are the specialists paraded in the newspaper – on the tariff, on military affairs, on foreign relations, and so on. They come to know, in time, almost as much as a Washington correspondent, or one their own committee clerks. But the average congressman sets himself to no such heights sagacity . He is content to be led by the fugelmen and bellwethers. Examine him at leisure, and you will find that he is incompetent and imbecile, and not only incompetent and imbecile, but also incurably dishonest . The first principles of civilized law-making are quite beyond him; he ends, as he began, a local politician, interested only in jobs. His knowledge is that of a third-rate country lawyer—which he often is in fact. His intelligence is that of a country newspaper editor, or evangelical divine. His standards of honour are those of a country banker—which he often is. To demand sense of such a man, or wide and accurate information, of a delicate feeling for the public and private proprieties, is to strain his parts beyond endurance.

The constitution, of course, stops with Congress, but its influence is naturally powerful within the States, and one finds proofs of the fact on all sides. It is taking an herculean effort everywhere to break down even the worst effects of this influence; the prevailing tendency is still to discover a mysterious virtue in the office-holder who was born and raised in the State, county, or city, or ward. The judge must come from the bar of the court he is to adorn; the mayor must be part and parcel of the local machine; even technical officers, such as engineers and health commissioners, lie under the constitutional blight. The thing began as a belief in local self-government, the oldest of all the sure cures for despotism. But it has gradually taken on the character of government by local politicians, which is to say, by persons quite unable to comprehend the most elemental problems of State and nation, and unfitted by nature to deal with them honestly and patriotically, even if they could comprehend them. Just as prohibition was forced upon the civilized minorities collected in the great cities against their most vigorous and persistent opposition, so the same minorities, when it comes to intra-state affairs, are constantly at the mercy of predatory bands of rural politicians. If there is any large American city whose peculiar problems are dealt with competently and justly by its State legislature, then I must confess that twenty years in journalism have left me ignorant of it.

An unending struggle for fairer dealing goes on in every State that has large cities, and every concession to their welfare is won only at the cost of gigantic effort. The State legislature is never intelligent; it represents only the average mind of the county bosses, whose sole concern is with jobs. The machines that they represent are wholly political, but they have no political principles in any rational sense. Their one purpose and function is to maintain their adherents in the public offices, or to obtain for them in some other way a share of the State funds. They are quite willing to embrace any new doctrine, however fantastic, or to abandon any old one, however long supported, if only the business will promote their trade and so secure their power.

This concentration of the ultimate governmental authority in the hands of small groups of narrow, ignorant, and unconscionable manipulators tends inevitably to degrade the actual office-holder, or, what is the same thing, to make office-holding prohibitive to all men not already degraded. It is almost impossible to imagine a man of genuine self-respect and dignity offering himself as a candidate for the lower house—or, since the direct primary and direct elections brought it down to the common level, for the upper house—in the average American constituency. His necessary dealings with the electors themselves, and with the idiots who try more or less honestly to lead them, would be revolting enough, but even worse would be his need of making terms with the professional politicians of his party—the bosses of the local machine. These bosses naturally make the most of the constitutional limitation; it works powerfully in their favour. A local notable, in open revolt against them, may occasionally beat them by appealing directly to the voters, but nine times out of ten, when there is any sign of such a catastrophe, they are prompt to perfume the ticket by bringing forth another local notable who is safe and sane, which is to say, subservient and reliable. The thing is done constantly; it is a matter of routine; it accounts for most of the country bankers, newspaper owners, railroad lawyers, proprietors of cement works, and other such village bigwigs in the lower house. Here everything runs to the advantage of the bosses. It is not often that the notable in rebellion is gaudy enough to blind the plain people to the high merits of his more docile opponent. They see him too closely and know him too well. He shows none of that exotic charm which accounts, on a different plane, for exogamy. There is no strangeness, no mysteriousness, above all, no novelty about him.

It is my contention that this strangle-hold of the local machines wood be vastly less firm if it could be challenged, not only by rebels within the constituency, but also by salient men from outside. The presidential campaigns, indeed, offer plenty of direct proof of it. In these campaigns it is a commonplace for strange doctrines and strange men to force themselves upon the practical politicians in whole sections of the country, despite their constant effort to keep their followers faithful to the known. All changes, of whatever sort, whether in leaders or in ideas, are opposed by such politicians at the start, but time after time they are compelled to acquiesce and to hurrah. Bryan, as every one knows, forced himself upon the Democratic party by appealing directly to the people; the politicians, in the main, were bitterly against him until further resistance was seen to be useless, and they attacked him again the moment he began to weaken, and finally disposed of him. So with Wilson. It would be absurd to say that the politicians of his party—and especially the bosses of the old machines in the congressional districts—were in favour of him in 1912. They were actually against him almost unanimously. He got past their guard and broke down their resolution to nominate some more trustworthy candidate by operating directly upon the emotions of the voters. For some reason never sufficiently explained he became the heir of the spirit of rebellion raised by Bryan sixteen years before, and was given direct and very effective aid by Bryan himself. Roosevelt saddled himself upon the Republican party in exactly the same way. The bosses made heroic efforts to sidetrack him, to shelve him, to get rid of him by any means short of homicide, but his bold enterprises and picturesque personality enchanted the people, and if it had not been for the extravagant liberties that he took with his popularity in later years he might have retained it until his death.

The same possibility of unhorsing the machine politicians, I believe, exists in even the smallest electoral unit. All that is needed is the chance to bring in the man. Podunk cannot produce him herself, save by a sort of miracle. If she has actually hatched him, he is far away by the time he has come to his full stature and glitter—in the nearest big city, in Chicago or New York. Podunk is proud of him, and many other Podunks, perhaps, are stirred by his ideas, his attitudes, his fine phrases—but he lives, say, in some Manhattan congressional district which has the Hon. Patrick Googan as its representative by divine right, and so there is no way to get him into the halls of Congress. In his place goes the Hon. John P. Balderdash, State’s attorney for five years, State senator for two terms, and county judge for a brief space—and always a snide and petty fellow, always on the best of terms with the local bosses, always eager for a job on any terms they lay down.

The yokels vote for the Hon. Mr. Balderdash, not because they admire him, but because their only choice is between him and the Hon. James Bosh. If anything even remotely resembling a first-rate man could come into the contest, if it were lawful for them to rid themselves of their recurrent dilemma by soliciting the interest of such a man, then they would often enough rise in their might and compel their parish overlords, as the English put it, to adopt him. But the constitution protects these overlords in their business, and in the long run the voters resign all thought of deliverance. Thus the combat remains one between small men, and interest in it dies out. Most of the men who go to the lower house are third-raters, even in their own narrow bailiwicks. In my own congressional district, part of a large city, there has never been a candidate of any party, during the twenty years that I have voted, who was above the intellectual level of a comer grocer. No successful candidate of that district has ever made a speech in ,Congress (or out of it) worth hearing, or contributed a single sound idea otherwise to the solution of any public problem. One and all, they have confined themselves exclusively to the trade in jobs. One and all, they have been ciphers in the house and before the country.

Well, perhaps I labour my point too much. It is, after all, not important. The main thing is the simple fact that the average representative from my district is typical of Congress—that, if anything, he is superior to the normal congressman of our days. That normal congressman, as year chases year, tends to descend to such depths of puerility, to such abysses of petty shysterism, that he becomes offensive alike to the intelligence and to the nose. His outlook, when it is honest, is commonly childish—and it is very seldom honest. The product of a political system which puts all stress upon the rewards of public office, he is willing to make any sacrifice, of dignity, of principle, of honour, to hold and have those rewards. He has no courage, no intellectual amour propre, no ardent belief in anything save his job, and the jobs of his friends. It was easy for Wilson to beat him into line on the war issue; it was easy for the prohibitionists to intimidate and stampede him; it is easy for any resolute man or group of men to do likewise. I read the Congressional Record faithfully, and have done so for years. In the Senate debates, amid oceans of tosh, I occasionally encounter a flash of wit or a gleam of sense; direct elections have not yet done their work.
But in the lower house there is seldom anything save a garrulous and intolerable imbecility. The discussion of measures of the utmost importance—bills upon which the security and prosperity of the whole nation depend—is carried on in the manner of the chautauqua and the rural stump. Entire days go by without a single congressman saying anything as intelligent, say, as the gleams that one sometimes finds in the New York Herald , or even in the New York Times. The newspapers, unfortunately, give no adequate picture of the business. No American journal reports the daily debates comprehensively, as the debates in the House of Commons are reported by the London Times, Daily Telegraph, and Morning Post. All one hears of, as a rule, is the action taken, and only too often the action taken, even when it is reported fairly, is unintelligible without the antecedent discussion. If any one who reads this wants to know what such a discussion is like, then I counsel him to go to the nearest public library, ask for the Record for 1918, and read the debate in the lower house on the Volstead Act. It was, I believe, an average debate, and on a subject of capital importance. It was, from first to last, almost fabulous in its evasion of the plain issue, its incredible timorousness and stupidity, its gross mountebankery and dishonesty. Not twenty men spoke in it as men of honour and self-respect. Not ten brought any idea into it that was not a silly idea and a stale one.

That debate deserves a great deal more study than it will ever get from the historians of American politics, nearly all of whom, whether they lean to the right or to the left, are bedazzled by the economic interpretation of history, and so seek to account for all political phenomena in terms of crop movements, wage scales, and panics in Wall Street. It seems to me that that obsession blinds them to a fact of the first importance, to wit, the fact that political ideas, under a democracy as under a monarchy, originate above quite as often as they originate below, and that their popularity depends quite as much upon the special class interests of professional politicians as it depends upon the underlying economic interests of the actual voters. It is, of course, true, as I have argued, that the people can force ideas upon the politicians, given powerful leaders of a non-political (or, at all events, non-machine) sort, but it is equally true that there are serious impediments to the process, and that it is not successful very often. As a matter of everyday practice the rise and fall of political notions is determined by the self-interest of the practical politicians of the country, and though they naturally try to bring the business into harmony with any great popular movements that may be in progress spontaneously, they by no means wait and beg for mandates when none are vociferously forthcoming, but go ahead bravely on their own account, hoping to drag public opinion with them and so safeguard their jobs. Such is the origin of many affecting issues, later held dear by millions of the plain people. Such was the process whereby prohibition was foisted upon the nation by constitutional amendment, to the dismay of the solid majority opposed to it and to the surprise of the minority in favour of it.

What lay under the sudden and melodramatic success of the prohibitionist agitators was simply their discovery of incurable cowardice and venality of the normal American politician—their shrewd abandonment of logical and evidential propaganda for direct political action. For years their cause had languished. Now and then a State or part of a State went dry, but often it went wet again a few years later. Those were the placid days of white-ribbon rallies, of wholesale pledge-signings, of lectures by converted drunkards, of orgiastic meetings in remote Baptist and Methodist churches, of a childish reliance upon arguments that fetched only drunken men and their wives, and so grew progressively feebler as the country became more sober. The thing was scarcely even a nuisance; it tended steadily to descend to the level of a joke. The prohibitionist vote for President hung around a quarter of a million; it seemed impossible to pull it up to a formidable figure, despite the stupendous labours of thousands of eloquent dervishes, lay and clerical, male and female. But then, out of nowhere, came the Anti-Saloon League, and—sis! boom! ah! Then came the sudden shift of the fire from the people to the politicians—and at once there was rapid progress. The people could only be wooed and bamboozled, but the politicians could be threatened; their hold upon their jobs could be shaken; they could be converted at wholesale and by force majeure. The old prohibition weepers and gurglers were quite incapable of this enterprise, but the new janissaries of the Anti-Saloon League—sharp lawyers, ecclesiastics too ambitious to pound mere pulpits, outlaw politicians seeking a way back to the trough—were experts at every trick and dodge it demanded. They understood the soul of the American politician. To him they applied the economic interpretation of history, resolutely and with a great deal of genial humour. They knew that his whole politics, his whole philosophy, his whole concept of honesty and honour, was embraced in his single and insatiable yearning for a job, and they showed him how, by playing with them, he could get it and keep it, and how, by standing against them, he could lose it. Prohibition was rammed into the constitution by conquering the politicians; the people in general were amazed when the thing was accomplished; it may take years to reconcile them to it.

It was the party system that gave the Anti-Saloon League manipulators their chance, and they took advantage of it with great boldness and cleverness. The two great parties divide the country almost equally; it is difficult to predict, in a given year, whether the one or the other musters the most votes. This division goes down into the lowest electoral units; even in those backward areas where one party has divine grace and the other is of the devil there are factional differences that amount to the same thing. In other words, the average American politician is never quite sure of his job. An election (and, if not an election, then a primary) always exposes him to a definite hazard, and he is eager to diminish it by getting help from outside his own following, at whatever cost to the principles he commonly professes. Here lies the opportunity for minorities willing to trade on a realistic political basis. In the old days the prohibitionists refused to trade, and in consequence they were disregarded, for their fidelity to their own grotesque candidates protected the candidates of both the regular parties. But with the coming of the Anti-Saloon League they abandoned this fidelity and began to dicker in a forthright and unashamed manner, quickly comprehensible to all professional politicians. That is, they asked for a pledge on one specific issue, and were willing to swallow any commitment on other issues. If Beelzebub, running on one ticket, agreed to support prohibition, and the Archangel Gabriel, running on another, found himself entertaining conscientious doubts, they were instantly and solidly for Beelzebub, and they not only gave him the votes that they directly controlled, but they also gave him the benefit of a campaign support that was ruthless, pertinacious, extraordinarily ingenious, and overwhelmingly effective. Beelzebub, whatever his swinishness otherwise, was bathed in holy oils; Gabriel’s name became a thing to scare children.

Obviously, the support thus offered was particularly tempting to a politician who found himself facing public suspicion for his general political practices—in brief, to the worst type of machine professional. Such a politician is always acutely aware that it is not positive merit that commonly gets a man into public office in the United States, but simply disvulnerability. Even when they come to nominate a President, the qualities the two great parties seek are chiefly the negative ones; they want, net a candidate of forceful and immovable ideas, but one whose ideas are vague and not too tenaciously held, and in whose personality there is nothing to alarm or affront the populace. Of two candidates, that one usually wins who least arouses the distrusts and suspicions of the great masses of undifferentiated men. This advantage of the safe and sane, the colourless and unprovocative, the apparently stodgy and commonplace man extends to the most trivial contests, and politicians are keen to make use of it. Thus the jobseeker with an aura of past political misdemeanour about him was eager to get the Christian immunity bath that the prohibitionists offered him so generously, and in the first years of their fight they dealt almost exclusively with such fellows. He, on his side, promised simply to vote for prohibition—not even, in most cases, to pretend to any personal belief in it.

The prohibitionists, on their side, promised to deliver the votes of their followers to him on election day, to cry him up as one saved by a shining light, and, most important of all, to denounce his opponent as an agent of hell. He was free, by this agreement, to carry on his regular political business as usual. The prohibitionists asked no patronage of him. They didn’t afflict him with projects for other reforms. All they demanded was that he cast his vote as agreed upon when the signal was given to him.

At the start, of course, such scoundrels frequently violated their agreements. In the South, in particular, dry legislature after dry legislature sold out to the liquor lobby, which, in those days, still had plenty of money. An assemblyman would be elected with the aid of the prohibitionists, make a few maudlin speeches against the curse of drink, and then, at the last minute, vote wet for some thin and specious reason, or for no avowed reason at all. But the prohibition manipulators, as I have said, were excellent politicians, and so they knew how to put down that sort of treason. At the next election they transferred their favour to the opposition candidate, and inasmuch as he had seen the traitor elected at the last election he was commonly very eager to do business. The punishment for the treason was condign and merciless. The dry rabblerousers, lay and clerical, trumpeted news of it from end to end of the constituency. What was a new and gratifying disvulnerability was transformed into a vulnerability of the worst sort; the recreant one became the county Harry Thaw, Oscar Wilde, Captain Boy-Ed, and Debs. A few such salutary examples and treason became rare. The prohibitionists, indeed, came to prefer dealing with such victims of their reprisals. They could trust them perfectly, once the lesson had been learned; they were actually more trustworthy than honest believers, for the latter usually had ideas of their own and interfered with the official plans of campaign. Thus, in the end, the professional politicians of both parties came under the yoke. The final battle in Congress transcended all party lines; democrats and republicans fought alike for places on the bandwagon. The spectacle offered a searching and not unhumorous commentary on the party system and on the honour of American politicians no less. Two-thirds, at least, of the votes for the amendment were cast by men who did not believe in it, and who cherished a hearty hope, to the list moment, that some act of God would bring about its defeat.

Such holocausts of frankness and decency are certainly not rare in American politics; on the contrary, they glow with normalcy. The typical legislative situation among us—and the typical administrative situation as well—is one in which men wholly devoid of inner integrity, facing a minority that is resolutely determined to get its will, yield up their ideas, their freedom, and their honour in order to save their jobs. I say administrative situation as well; what I mean is that in these later days the pusillanimity of the actual law-maker is fully matched by the pusillanimity of the enforcing officer, whether humble assistant district attorney or powerful judge. The war, with its obliteration of customary pretences and loosening of fundamental forces, threw up the whole process into high relief. For nearly two long years there was a complete abandonment of sense and self-respect. Rowelled and intimidated by minorities that finally coalesced into a frantic majority, legislators allowed themselves to be forced into imbecility after imbecility, and administrative officers, including some of the highest judges in the land, followed them helter-skelter. In the lower house of Congress there was one man—already forgotten—who showed the stature of a man. He resigned his seat and went home to his self-respect. The rest had no self-respect to go home to. Eager beyond all to hold their places, at whatever cost to principle, and uneasily conscious of their vulnerability to attack, however frenzied and unjust, they surrendered abjectly and repeatedly—to the White House, to the newspapers, to any group enterprising enough to issue orders to them and resolute enough to flourish weapons before them. It was a spectacle full of indecency—there are even congressmen who blush when they think of it today—but it was nevertheless a spectacle that was typical. The fortunes of politics, as they now run, make it overwhelmingly probable that every new recruit to public office will be just such a poltroon.

The odds are enormously in favour of him, and enormously against the man of honour. Such a man of honour may occasionally drift in, taken almost unawares by some political accident, but it is the pushing, bumptious, unconscionable bounder who is constantly fighting to get in, and only too often he succeeds. The rules of the game are made to fit his taste and his talents. He can survive as a hog can survive in the swill-yard.

Go to the Congressional Directory and investigate the origins and past performances of the present members of the lower house—our typical assemblage of typical politicians, the cornerstone of our whole representative system, the symbol of our democracy. You will find that well over half of them are obscure lawyers, school-teachers, and mortgage-sharks out of almost anonymous towns—men of common traditions, sordid aspirations, and no attainments at all. One and all, the members of this majority—and it is constant, no matter what party is in power—are plastered with the brass ornaments of the more brummagem fraternal orders. One and all, they are devoid of any contact with what passes for culture, even in their remote bailiwicks. One and all their careers are bare of civilizing influences. . . . Such is the American Witenagemot in this 146th year of the Republic. Such are the men who make the laws that all of us must obey, and who carry on our dealings with the world. Go to their debates, and you will discover what equipment they bring to their high business. What they know of sound literature is what one may get out of McGuffey’s Fifth Reader. What they know of political science is the nonsense preached in the chautauquas and on the stump. What they know of history is the childish stuff taught in grammar-schools. What they know of the arts and sciences of all the great body of knowledge that is the chief intellectual baggage of modem man—is absolutely nothing.

H.L. Mencken

___________________________________________________________________________________

URL: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2011/02/01/h-l-mencken-on-congressmen