The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “The Anglo-Saxon,” by H.L. Mencken

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Next up on the essays shelf:

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, by H.L. Mencken

Way to make friends, Henry!

This lengthy essay on “The Anglo-Saxon” was first published in the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1923, and then reprinted in The American Tradition, Prejudices: Fourth Series (I love Mencken’s book titles). Mencken is extremely crabby about the Anglo-Saxon man, especially the American variety. He speaks as an Anglo-Saxon himself. First of all, he thinks the whole theory of race for Anglo-Saxons is myth-making on their part. If they investigated the situation, most Anglo-Saxons would find a generous “mix” in their blood, so get off your pure high horse. Additionally, being Anglo-Saxon is nothing to brag about (according to Mencken). What exactly have you contributed to human society, in the realms of arts, sciences, and everything else? Basically, all the Anglo-Saxon does is toot his own moronic horn. Incessantly. And why does he do this? Because he feels inferior. Because he knows, deep down, that he IS inferior, in every way that counts, but mostly intellectually. The immigrants to America, those who are NOT Anglo-Saxon, are not only catching up to him in terms of accomplishment, but far far surpassing him. Naturally this only increases his sense of inferiority. But instead of being able to say, “Wow. I am feeling so inferior”, which, of course, is impossible (especially in someone with as limited brain-power as the typical Anglo-Saxon), instead he starts to pump himself full of hot air, and brag left and right about how his race is the greatest race ever, his race is the most noble, every Good Idea Man has ever had has come from HIS race. Of course this is patently untrue and so the Anglo-Saxon looks more and more ridiculous as the years go on.

This is Mencken’s viewpoint. He lays it out in devastating crabby detail over 20 pages or so (maybe more, this is just an excerpt).

It’s no surprise that Mencken loved going after bores and pinheads. He loved taking down a vain and empty-headed man. Nothing offended him more than someone puffed up with his own sense of moral superiority. Mencken wrote elsewhere that he doesn’t think he has ever written a “moral judgment” – that that is not his bag at all. While that point is certainly debatable (someone who proudly identifies as “Anglo-Saxon” will certainly feel JUDGED by this column), his larger point seems to be that those who lord it over others are usually those LEAST qualified to do so. Mencken was a big believer in aristocracy, let’s not forget. He was a proud elitist and thought that 90% of mankind was moronic and should be kept far far away from the halls of power (although he realized it was too late, and that the halls of power actually reached out ONLY to morons).

Mencken, naturally, was writing in the 1920s, when the KKK was experiencing gigantic growth rates – not just in rural areas, but urban as well (thanks D.W. Griffith!), and the “Anglo-Saxon” was making himself a nuisance in his own nation, as folks from Eastern Europe, Italy, elsewhere, were coming here and ACTUALLY living the American Dream, making the Anglo-Saxons in white hoods proclaiming their purity look like halfwits.

So let’s sit back, and enjoy Mencken at his crabby finest! I love it when he says “and even physically”. Classic Mencken. Mean!

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “The Anglo-Saxon,” by H.L. Mencken

The good qualities of this so-called Anglo-Saxon are many, and I am certainly not disposed to question them, but I here pass them over without apology, for he devotes practically the whole of his literature and fully a half of his oral discourse to celebrating them himself, and so there is no danger that they will ever be disregarded. No other known man, indeed, is so violently the blowhard, save it be his English kinsman. In this fact lies the first cause of the ridiculous figure he commonly cuts in the eyes of other people: he brags and blusters so incessantly that, if he actually had the combined virtues of Socrates, the Cid and the Twelve Apostles, he would still go beyond the facts, and so appear a mere Bombastes Furioso. This habit, I believe, is fundamentally English, but it has been exaggerated in the Americano by his larger admixture of Celtic blood. In late years in America it has taken on an almost pathological character, and is to be explained, perhaps, only in terms of the Freudian necromancy. Braggadocio, in the 100% American – “we won the war,” “it is our duty to lead the world,” and so on – is probably no more than a protective mechanism erected to conceal an inescapable sense of inferiority.

That this inferiority is real must be obvious to any impartial observer. Whenever the Anglo-Saxon, whether of the English or of the American variety, comes into sharp conflict with men of other stocks, he tends to be worsted, or, at best, to be forced back upon extraneous and irrelevant aids to assist him in the struggle. Here in the United States his defeat is so palpable that it has filled him with vast alarms, and reduced him to seeking succor in grotesque and extravagant devices. In the fine arts, in the sciences and even in the more complex sorts of business the children of the later immigrants are running away from the descendants of the early settlers. To call the roll of Americans eminent in almost any field of human endeavor above the most elemental is to call a list of strange and often outlandish names;even the panel of Congress presents a startling example. Of the Americans who have come into notice during the past fifty years as poets, as novelists, as critics, as painters, as sculptors and in the minor arts, less than half bear Anglo-Saxon names, and in this minority there are few of pure Anglo-Saxon blood. So in the sciences. So in the higher reaches of engineering and technology. So in philosophy and its branches. So even in industry and agriculture. In those areas where the competition between the new and the old bloodstreams is most sharp and clear-cut, say in New York, in seaboard New England and in the farming States of the upper Middle West, the defeat of the so-called Anglo-Saxon is overwhelming and unmistakable. Once his predominance everywhere was actual and undisputed; today, even where he remains superior numerically, it is largely sentimental and illusory.

The descendants of the later immigrants tend generally to move upward; the descendants of the first settlers, I believe, tend plainly to move downward, mentally, spiritually, and even physically. Civilization is at its lowest mark in the United States precisely in those areas where the Anglo-Saxon still presumes to rule. He runs the whole South – and in the whole South there are not as many first-rate men as in many a single city of the mongrel North. Wherever he is still firmly in the saddle, there we look for such pathological phenomena as Fundamentalism, Prohibition and Ku Kluxery, and there they flourish. It is not in the northern cities, with their mixed population, that the death-rate is highest, and politics most corrupt, and religion nearest to voodooism, and every decent human aspiration suspect; it is in the areas that the recent immigrations have not penetrated where the “purest Anglo-Saxon blood in the world” still flows. I could pile up evidences, but they are not necessary. The fact is too plain to be challenged. One testimony will be sufficient: it comes from two inquirers who made an exhaustive survey of a region in southeastern Ohio, where “the people are more purely Americans than in the rest of the State”:

Here gross superstition exercises strong control over the thought and action of a large proportion of the people. Syphilitic and other venereal diseases are common and increasing over whole counties, while in some communities nearly every family is afflicted with inherited or infectious disease. Many cases of incest are known; inbreeding is rife. Imbeciles, feeble-minded, and delinquents are numerous, politics is corrupt, and selling of votes is common, petty crimes abound, the schools have been badly managed and poorly attended. Cases of rape, assault, and robbery are of almost weekly occurrence within five minutes’ walk of the corporation limits of one of the county seats, while in another county political control is held by a self-confessed criminal. Alcoholic intemperance is excessive. Gross immorality and its evil results are by no means confined to the hill districts, but are extreme also in the towns.1

As I say, the American of the old stock is not unaware of this steady, and, of late, somewhat rapid deterioration – this gradual loss of his old mastery in the land his ancestors helped to wring from the Indian and the wildcat. He senses it, indeed, very painfully, and, as if in despair of arresting it in fact, makes desperate efforts to dispose of it by denial and concealment. These efforts often take grotesque and extravagant forms. Laws are passed to hobble and cage the citizen of newer stocks in a hundred fantastic ways. It is made difficult and socially dangerous for him to teach his children the speech of his fathers, or to maintain the cultural attitudes that he has inherited from them. Every divergence from the norm of the low-cast Anglo-Saxon is treated as an attentat against the commonwealth, and punished with eager ferocity.

1 Since the above was written there has been unqualified confirmation of it by a distinguished English authority, to wit, Arnold J. Toynbee. See his Study of History, Vol. I, pp. 466-67, and Vol. II, pp. 311-12.

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1 Response to The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “The Anglo-Saxon,” by H.L. Mencken

  1. SAG says:

    Though nearly 10 years have passed since the posting of this entry, I feel the compulsion to observe that Mencken is not speaking as an Anglo-Saxon himself, being of German (Teutonic, in the racial terminology of the day) descent himself.

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