The Revolt Against the Masses. Fred Siegel
years of war, The New Republic reversed course and supported American entry into the conflict, in part on the grounds that American involvement could help stem German militarism and also accelerate domestic reform. The reversal led Bourne to break with Croly and his mentor John Dewey, as well as with Walter Lippmann of The New Republic. In Bourne’s influential essays “War and the Intellectuals” and “War Is the Health of the State,” written in 1917 for Seven Arts, he lamented that the entire pre-war period had been “spiritually wasted.” “The real enemy” he insisted, as he had not when in France and Germany, “was war itself.” He said little of Wilson except to argue cursorily that he could have used American powers to “force a just peace.” And he had few disagreements with Wilson’s war aims except to argue that democracy could have been expanded peacefully.
He decried “a war deliberately made by intellectuals,” referring not to the Nietzschean strand in Germany that he much admired, but to American intellectuals. Equating Germany’s Prussian political life with that of the U.S., he compared pro-war writers at The New Republic to the Prussian general and theorist of war Friedrich von Bernhardi. His old friends at The New Republic had betrayed their calling, he insisted, by bowing before the British like “colonials” in thrall to their masters. Appealing to the instincts of “the herd,” they had incited the “sluggish masses” to go to war. He seems never to have asked why unconventional souls such as Thorsten Veblen, his good friend Van Wyck Brooks, and Upton Sinclair felt sufficiently menaced by Prussian militarism to reluctantly support, as did Wilson, American entry into the war.
When Bourne succumbed to influenza in 1918, he was deeply mourned by his many friends. Brooks remembered his “quick bird like steps and the long, black student’s cape he had brought back with him from Paris.” In his celebrated novel 1919, John Dos Passos wrote that if ever a man had a ghost, it was Bourne: “A tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York, crying out in a shrill soundless giggle: War is the health of the state.”
But that wasn’t quite right. The American state shrank rapidly under Wilson’s successor, Republican Warren G. Harding. The new president had the good graces to free Socialist Eugene Debs, whom Woodrow Wilson had jailed for vocally opposing the war. Harding’s slogan was “not nostrums but normality.” The main stem of the GOP, historian Morton Keller writes, “sloughed off its older support for active government and redefined itself as the party of laissez-faire and the old America”
While Bourne was dying, H.L. Mencken, described by the New York Times as “the premier social critic of the first half of the twentieth century,” was coming to fame as a bitter German-American critic of “Mr. Wilson’s War.” At the height of his influence in the 1920s, Mencken’s reputation fattened on the inanities of Prohibition, blue-nosed book-banning, and the Ku Klux Klan, all of which he saw as works of the “boobus Americanus.” His broadsides against Prohibition, posturing preachers, and anti-evolutionists made him a hero to generations of liberals and college students. But his true quarry was American democracy and the American people, whom he defined as a “rabble of ignorant peasants.”
Henry Louis Mencken, born in 1880 to a moderately successful German-American cigar manufacturer, adopted his father’s prejudices. Father and son disdained do-gooders, socialists, and Democrats. Terry Teachout, in his book on Mencken, The Skeptic, quotes Mencken’s description of his father: “All mankind, in his sight, was divided into two great races: those who paid their bills, and those who didn’t. The former were virtuous, despite any evidence that could be adduced to the contrary; the latter were unanimously and incurably scoundrels.” His father’s death freed the young Henry, age eighteen, to become a newspaperman.
A self-educated man, Mencken developed himself by writing books, at the age of twenty-six and twenty-seven, on the plays of George Bernard Shaw and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, his two chief intellectual influences. His was the first book on Nietzsche published in America. Neither book was successful, but both represented the first flowerings of an audacious talent.
Mencken’s style drew heavily on Shaw, particularly his propensity for “stating the obvious in terms of the scandalous.” Mencken, the confident son of a burgher, was little interested in Shaw’s Fabian Socialism, but he was enthralled by the Irishman’s insistence on “the selective breeding of man.” In his 1903 play Man and Superman, Shaw wrote that “we must eliminate the Yahoo, or his vote will wreck the Commonwealth,” and these words became a signpost of Mencken’s career. In a sense, each writer paved the way for the other. Thanks in part to Mencken, Shaw became a popular playwright in America even before he established himself as a fixture on the London stage. The Devil’s Disciple and Caesar and Cleopatra were first presented in America, not England.
Shaw the transplanted Irishman and Mencken the displaced Deutschlander shared an abiding hatred of Anglo-American culture. And like the Napoleonists (the British radical Whigs who hoped for a Napoleonic victory that could clear out the detritus of the English aristocracy), Mencken and Shaw strongly admired powerful rulers who could defeat democracy in the name of a more orderly and culturally hierarchical set of social arrangements.
The Americans learned from Shaw how to be narrow-minded in a witty, superior way. Shaw pioneered the path whereby an author could simultaneously insult the middle class and yet be embraced by it on the grounds that receptivity to criticism signified someone who was a cut above. Both men mined the ore that was usually the moral strength but sometime the self-defeating vulnerability of Western culture: its capacity for self-criticism.
The content of Mencken’s writings drew on Shaw’s Social Darwinist, Nietzschean, and eugenicist thinking. “Through Shaw,” Mencken later wrote, “ I found my vocation at last.” In the introduction to his essays on Shaw’s plays, Mencken wrote, “Darwin made this war between the faithful and the scoffers the chief concern of the time, and the sham-smashing that is going on might be compared to the crusades that engrossed the world in the middle ages.” And Shaw was “the premier scoffer and dominant heretic of the day,” declared Mencken. For all the differences between the meat-eating, beer-drinking Mencken and the asexual, anti-vaccine, vegetarian teetotaler Shaw, they were both, acknowledged the American, “working the same side of the street.” Both men rose to the height of their influence in the midst of the carnage of World War I. Shaw as a pacifist (for the time being) and Mencken as paladin of free speech became icons of opposition to conventional Anglo-American values.
Mencken had genuine cause for bitterness during World War I, when the excesses of zealous Americanism left him fearful for the safety of his family. But while Mencken was touting the genius of Teutonic militarism, German saboteurs blew up the munitions depot at Black Tom Island off Manhattan. That strike, until 9/11 the most violent action by a hostile force in the history of New York City, caused $20 million (in 1916 dollars) of damage, sinking the peninsula and its contents into the sea. The Kaiser’s plans to invade New York Harbor and his plot to bring Mexico into the war against the United States never came off, but not from a lack of interest.
Mencken’s World War I writings on behalf of imperial Germany have been largely forgotten. Opposed to American intervention on the side of the Allies in the Great War, Mencken had no objection to war per se. Drawing on Nietzsche’s notion of the “will to power,” he wrote: “War is a good thing, because it is honest, it admits the central fact of human nature. . . . A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid.” What he opposed were British, and then American, efforts at defeating German militarism.
The war, notes Mencken biographer Fred Hobson, “focused his thoughts” and created a clear position. Mencken explained:
I, too, like the leaders of Germany, had grave doubts about democracy. . . . It suddenly dawned on me, somewhat to my surprise, that the whole body of doctrine that I had been preaching was fundamentally anti–Anglo Saxon, and that if I had any spiritual home at all, it must be in the land of my ancestors. When World War I actually started, I began forthwith to whoop for the Kaiser, and I kept up that whooping so long as there was any free speech