Since the summer of 2016, I’ve read H.L. Mencken with a deep sense of purpose; in many ways, his acerbic morality has gotten me through much of the carnival of buncombe our country has revealed itself to be, if only because he reminds me that this America has always been here. On the eve of an election of dramatic historic importance, I thought it relevant to share three paragraphs from Mencken’s essay “The Eve of Armageddon,” written the day before the election of 1928, but feeling like it could have been written this weekend (which the exception of the gendered pronouns and some antiquated racial terminology):
I daresay the extent of the bigotry prevailing in America, as it has been revealed by the campaign, has astounded a great many Americans, and perhaps even made them doubt the testimony of their own eyes and ears. This surprise is not in itself surprising, for Americans of one class seldom know anything about Americans of other classes. What the average native yokel believes about your average city man is probably nine-tenths untrue, and what the average city man believes about the average yokel is almost as inaccurate.
A good part of this ignorance is probably due to the powerful effect of shibboleths. Every American is taught in school that all Americans are free, and so he goes on believing it his whole life—overlooking the plain fact that no negro is really free in the South, and no miner in Pennsylvania, and no radical in any of a dozen great states. He hears of equality before the law, and he accepts it as a reality, though it exists nowhere, and there are Federal laws which formally repudiate it. In the same way he is taught that religious toleration prevails among us, and uncritically swallows the lie. No such thing really exists. No such thing has ever existed.
This campaign has demonstrated the fact. It has brought bigotry out in the open, and revealed its true proportions. It has shown that millions of Americans, far from being free and tolerant men, are the slaves of an ignorant, impudent and unconscionable clergy. It has dredged up theological ideas so preposterous that they would make an intelligent Zulu laugh, and has brought the proof that they are cherished by nearly half the whole population, and by at least four-fifths outside the cities. It has made it plain that this theology is not merely a harmless aberration of the misinformed, like spiritualism, chiropractic or Christian Science, but the foundation of a peculiar way of life, bellicose, domineering, brutal and malignant—in brief, the complete antithesis of any recognizable form of Christianity. And it has shown, finally, that this compound of superstition and hatred has enough steam behind it to make one of the candidates for the Presidency knuckle to it and turn it upon his opponent—basely, to be sure, but probably wisely.