The American Credo Part 2

Again, it got through the const.i.tutional amendment by promising the liquor men to give them one year to dispose of their lawfully acc.u.mulated stocks--and then broke its promise under cover of alleged war necessity, despite the fact that the war was actually over. Both proceedings, so abhorrent to any man of honour, failed to arouse any indignation among the plain people. On the contrary the plain people viewed them as, in some vague way, smart and creditable, and as, in any case, thoroughly justified by the superior moral obligation that we have hitherto discussed.

Thus the _b.o.o.bus america.n.u.s_ is lead and watched over by zealous men, all of them highly skilled at training him in the way that he should think and act. The Const.i.tution of his country guarantees that he shall be a free man and a.s.sumes that he is intelligent, but the laws and customs that have grown up under that Const.i.tution give the lie to both the guarantee and the a.s.sumption. It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law, in fact, that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts. If there were not regulations against the saloon (it seems to say) he would get drunk every day, dissipate his means, undermine his health and beggar his family. If there were not postal regulations as to his reading matter, he would divide his time between Bolshevist literature and p.o.r.nographic literature and so become at once an anarchist and a guinea pig. If he were not forbidden under heavy penalties to cross a state line with a wench, he would be chronically unfaithful to his wife. Worse, if his daughter were not protected by statutes of the most draconian severity, she would succ.u.mb to the first Italian she encountered, yield up her person to him, enroll herself upon his staff and go upon the streets. So runs the course of legislation in this land of freemen. We could pile up example upon example, but will defer the business for the present. Perhaps it may be resumed in a work one of us is now engaged upon--a full length study of the popular mind under the republic. But that work will take years....

VII

No doubt we should apologize for writing, even so, so long a preface to so succinct a book. The one excuse we can think of is that, having read it, one need not read the book. That book, as we have said, may strike the superficial as jocular, but in actual fact it is a very serious and even profound composition, not addressed to the casual reader, but to the scholar. Its preparation involved a great diligence, and its study is not to be undertaken lightly. What the psychologist will find to admire in it, however, is not its learning and painstaking, its laborious erudition, but its compression. It establishes, we believe, a new and clearer method for a science long run to turgidity and flatulence. Perhaps it may be even said to set up an entirely new science, to wit, that of descriptive sociological psychology. We believe that this field will attract many men of inquiring mind hereafter and yield a valuable crop of important facts. The experimental method, intrinsically so sound and useful, has been much abused by orthodox psychologists; it inevitably leads them into a trackless maze of meaningless tables and diagrams; they keep their eyes so resolutely upon the intellectual process that they pay no heed to the primary intellectual materials. Nevertheless, it must be obvious that the conclusions that a man comes to, the emotions that he harbours and the crazes that sway him are of much less significance than the fundamental a.s.sumptions upon which they are all based.

There has been, indeed, some discussion of those fundamental a.s.sumptions of late. We have heard, for example, many acute discourses upon the effects produced upon the whole thinking of the German people, peasants and professors alike, by the underlying German a.s.sumption that the late Kaiser was anointed of G.o.d and hence above all ordinary human responsibility. We have heard talk, too, of the curious Irish axiom that there is a mysterious something in the nature of things, giving the Irish people an indefeasible right to govern Ireland as they please, regardless of the safety of their next-door neighbours. And we have heard many outlandish principles of the same sort from political theorists, _e.g._, regarding the inalienable right of democracy to prevail over all other forms of government and the inalienable right of all national groups, however small, to self-determination. Well, here is an attempt to a.s.semble in convenient form, without comment or interpretation, some of the fundamental beliefs of the largest body of human beings now under one flag in Christendom. It is but a beginning.

The field is barely platted. It must be explored to the last furlong and all its fantastic and fascinating treasures unearthed and examined before ever there can be any accurate understanding of the mind of the American people.

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN H.L. MENCKEN _New York, 1920._

THE AMERICAN CREDO

--1

That the philoprogenitive instinct in rabbits is so intense that the alliance of two normally a.s.siduous rabbits is productive of 265 offspring in one year.

--2

That there are hundreds of letters in the Dead Letter Office whose failure to arrive at their intended destinations was instrumental in separating as many lovers.

--3

That the Italian who sells bananas on a push-cart always takes the bananas home at night and sleeps with them under his bed.

--4

That a man's stability in the community and reliability in business may be measured by the number of children he has.

--5

That in j.a.pan an American can buy a beautiful geisha for two dollars and that, upon being bought, she will promptly fall madly in love with him and will run his house for him in a scrupulously clean manner.

--6

That all sailors are gifted with an extraordinary propensity for amour, but that on their first night of sh.o.r.e leave they hang around the water-front saloons and are given knock-out drops.

--7

That when a comedian, just before the rise of the curtain, is handed a telegram announcing the death of his mother or only child, he goes out on the stage and gives a more comic performance than ever.

--8

That the lions in the cage which a lion-tamer enters are always sixty years old and have had all their teeth pulled.

--9

That the Siamese Twins were joined together by gutta percha moulded and painted to look like a shoulder blade.

--10

That if a woman about to become a mother plays the piano every day, her baby will be born a Victor Herbert.

--11

That all excursion boats are so old that if they ran into a drifting beer-keg they would sink.

--12

That a doctor knows so much about women that he can no longer fall in love with one of them.

--13

That when one takes one's best girl to see the monkeys in the zoo, the monkeys invariably do something that is very embarra.s.sing.

--14

That firemen, awakened suddenly in the middle of the night, go to fires in their stocking feet.

--15

That something mysterious goes on in the rooms back of chop suey restaurants.

--16

That oil of pennyroyal will drive away mosquitoes.