Mencken’s Declaration of Independence in American

(Appended to this entry is a discussion of Mencken’s atheism.)

Premise Checker has brought to my attention H.L. Mencken’s low-vernacular version of the Declaration of Independence, written in 1921. Leaving aside Mencken’s characteristic nastiness (he is, after all, trivializing and at times trashing the Declaration), I find it somewhat amusing. However, I don’t agree with Mencken’s idea (which appears at the bottom of the linked page) that the original Declaration is incomprehensible to people of normal intelligence and application; that is only true of a handful of phrases in the long indictment of the King, which are not of essential importances in the document. Further, since Mencken’s version is in ungrammatical slang, with lots of “aint’s” and double negatives, indeed, with more double negatives than even the most uneducated person would ever use, he obviously has more in mind than merely translating the Declaration into readily accessible, modern language; he is expressing his contempt for the American people, whom he sees as a bunch of ignorant boobs. Also notable, given the fact that Mencken paraphrases the entire Declaration sentence by sentence, is his omission of the Declaration’s key references to the Deity and to what Jefferson described as the tragically broken bond of consanguinity between the Americans and the British; the first omission shows his atheism, the second his Germanic racial hostility to Anglo-Saxons. That his biases impelled him to conceal these central themes of the Declaration does not speak well of him. Still, when Mencken is not being so disdainful and gets with the spirit of the thing, as he does in the long list of the King’s abuses, his rendition has a certain charm and rough eloquence, and expresses something of the American character, at least in its slangy, early-20th-century, urban-working-class mode. It begins:

WHEN THINGS get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, me and you is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain’t got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time whichever way he likes, so long as he don’t interfere with nobody else. That any government that don’t give a man them rights ain’t worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of government they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter.

The rest can be read here.

- end of initial entry -

Premise Checker wrote:

Actually, Mr. Mencken was not an atheist. He called himself a “genial agnostic,” though he was quite opposed to rural Fundamentalists. He got along very well with the clergy, particularly with Roman Catholics. In his actual beliefs, he was basically what would nowadays be called an Intelligent Designer. He thought the universe was too orderly to have come about by chance, but he insisted that no more was actually known than that.

LA replied:

I did a quick Google search and he’s frequently described as an atheist. The reason I thought to call him one was his stunning omission of the references to God in the Declaration of Independence. That is not something a Deist would do, or even an agnostic. It is the act of a person who consciously or unconsciously cannot admit God into even a parody of another man’s work in which God is central.

Below are some quotes from the “non-atheist” Mencken. As can be seen, there is nothing “genial” in his attitude toward religion. And if he called himself a genial agnostic, he was kidding himself. No agnostic or Deist could be so hostile to religion and to the very idea of God. Indeed he displays what I would call the defining feature of the aggressive atheist; he doesn’t just disbelieve in God, he sees such belief as a contemptible human defect.

Henry Louis “H.L.” Mencken, American editor and critic (1880-1956).

“We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the same sense and to the same extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

Religion is “so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.” [“Treatise on the Gods”]

“Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of kings.”

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable… . A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.”

“God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.” [from the alt.quotations archive, found from http://www.starlingtech.com/quotes/search.html]

“Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration—courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.” [1925]

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 04, 2006 11:37 AM | Send