Mencken on the Maker of Law

Mencken on the Maker of Law

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes the maker of law, pages 131-139. Below is an overview of his discussion on the maker of law; my comments are in brackets.
    “In the United States, the general democratic tendency to crowd competent and self-respecting men out of the public service is exaggerated by a curious constitutional rule, unknown in any other country.” Although its “aim is to preserve for every electoral unit a direct and continuous voice in the government; its actual effect is to fill all the legislative bodies of the land with puerile local politicians, many of them so stupid that they are quite unable to grasp the problems with which government has to deal.” [For example, the Representative from Georgia who thought that islands floated like boats and would sink or capsize if too many people were on the island.]
    Often no competent man is available in a district to represent it. [Many competent men live in most districts; however, they do not want to degrade themselves to the level of a democratic politician described by Mencken.] According to Mencken, the competent man “is usually so enmeshed in operations against the resident imbeciles and their leaders, and hence so unpopular, that his candidature is out of the question.”
    [Mencken seems convinced that if Congress and State legislatures were filled with competent men the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol would not have been adopted.] “[P]liant and unconscionable jackasses” in Congress allying with members from “all the more backward States” forced the Prohibition Amendment through Congress. “[T]he votes of even more degraded noodles, assembled from the backwoods in the State Legislatures, that put the amendment into the Constitution.”
    Mencken believes that “[i]f it were possible for a congressional district to choose any man to represent it, as is the case in all other civilized countries, there would be more breaks in the monotony of legislative venality and stupidity, for even the rustic mob, in the absence of strong local antipathies, well fanned by demagogues, might succumb occasionally to the magic of a great name.”
    Because a representative must reside in the district that he represents, “a depressing gang of incompetents, mainly petty lawyers and small-town bankers” become the predominant representatives. Moreover, “in intelligence, information and integrity,” the House of Representatives “is comparable to a gang of bootleggers — a House so deficient in competent leaders that it can scarcely carry on its business.” [This is an excellent description of the Congress that President Trump faces.] Another result “is the immense power of . . . corrupt and sinister agencies [lobbyists].”
    Mencken has a low opinion of the average Southerner in the House of Representatives. According to him, the average Southern Representative “got his early education in a hedge school, he proceeded to some preposterous Methodist or Baptist college, and then he served for a time as a school teacher in his native swamps, finally reaching the dignity of county superintendent of schools and meanwhile reading law. Admitted to the bar, and having got a taste of county politics as superintendent, he became district attorney, and perhaps, after a while, county judge.” After running for Congress three or four times, he is finally elected. Such a man is unfit “for the responsibilities of a law-maker. . . . He is an ignoramus, and he is quite without the common decencies. Having to choose  between sense and nonsense, he chooses nonsense almost instinctively.” Before he went to Washington and began meeting “lobbyists, bootleggers and the correspondents of the newspapers, he had perhaps never met a single intelligent human being.” Moreover, officialdom disdains him. “His dream is to be chosen to go on a congressional junket, i.e., on a drunken holiday at government expense. His daily toil is getting jobs for relatives and retainers.” He is “a knavish and preposterous nonentity, half-way between a kleagle of the Ku Klux and a grand worthy bow-wow of the Knights of Zoroaster. It is such vermin who make the laws of the United States.” [Mencken’s description of the typical Southern Representative is less accurate today. However, it is still accurate if applied to Representatives from across the country by changing the names of some organizations. For example, the Klan is irrelevant today, except in the minds of those who believe the Southern Poverty Law Center. Today, all Klan organizations of more than two or three members are governmental fronts.]
    As for Senators, they “are measurably better, if only because they serve for longer terms.” Having a two-year term, a Representative “is constantly running for re-election. Scarcely has he got to Washington before he must hurry home and resume his bootlicking of the local bosses.” However, a Senator “may safely forget them for two or three years, and so, if there is no insuperable impediment in his character, he may show a certain independence, and yet survive.” Occasionally, some Senators may attain “a laudable mastery of the public business, particularly such as lies within the range of their private interest.” Moreover, they may “show the intellectual dignity and vigour of genuine statesmen.” Nevertheless, the average Senator “is simply a party hack, without ideas and without anything rationally describable as self-respect. His backbone has a sweet resiliency.” Moreover, “it is quite impossible to forecast his action, even on a matter of the highest principle, without knowing what rewards are offered by the rival sides.” These Senators prefer “their jobs to their dignity.”
    [Mencken gives an accurate, but unfortunately, description of the people who govern the United States and make their laws. Nothing has changed for the better since he wrote.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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