I $&&$.&$ 8.$ NONSENSEORSHIP HEYWOOD BROUN GEORGE S.CHAPPELL RUTH HALE BEN HECHT WALLACE 1RWIX ROBERT KEABLE HELEN BULLITT LOWRY and tfie AUTHOR of "THE Edited by FREDERICK OBKIEN DOROTHY R\RKER FRANK SWINNERTON HARLES HANSON TOWNE JOHN V. A. WEAVER 'ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT RRORS of WASHINGTON* G. P. P. SUNDRY ^y OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING I PROHIBITIONS INHIBITIONS^ AND ILLEGALITIES Illustrated by RALPH BARTON G.P. PUTNAAV'S SONS JfEW YORK AND LONDON Ulnickcrbocker IPrcss 1922 Copyright, 1922 by G. P. Putnam's Sons Made in the United Stater, of America p\ v,a 5oHt WE HAVE WITH US TODAY AT current bootliquor quotations, Haig & Haig costs twelve dollars a quart, while any dependable booklegger can unearth a copy of "Jurgen" for about fifteen dollars. Which indicates, at least, an economic application of Nonsenseorship. Its literary, social, and ethical reactions are rather more involved. To define them somewhat we invited a group of not-too-serious thinkers to set down their views regarding nonsenseor ships in general and any pet prohibitions in particular. In introducing those whose gems of protest are to be found in the setting of this volume, it is but sportsmanlike to state at the start that admission was offered to none of notable puritanical pro- clivity. The prohibitionists and censors are not represented. They require, in a levititious literary escapade like this, no spokesman. Their viewpoint already is amply set forth. Moreover, likely they would not be amusing. . . . Also, the exponents of Nonsenseorship are victorious; and at least the iii NONSENSEORSHIP agonized cries of the vanquished, their cynical com- ment or outraged protest, should be given oppor- tunity for expression! Not that we consider HEYWOOD BROUN agonized, cynical, or outraged. Indeed, masquerading as a stalwart foe of inhibitions, he starts right out, at the very head of the parade, with a vehement advocacy of prohibition. His plea (surely, in this setting, traitorous) is to prohibit liquor to all who are over thirty years of age! He declares that "rum was designed for youthful days and is the animating in- fluence which made oats wild." After thirty, pre- sumably, Quaker Oats. . . . And at that we have quite brushed by GEORGE S. CHAPPELL who serves a tasty appetizer at the very threshold, a bubbling cocktail of verse defining the authentic story of censorious gloom. Censorship seems a species of spiritual flagella- tion to BEN HECHT, who, as he says, "ten years ago prided himself upon being as indigestible a type of the incoherent young as the land afforded." And nonsenseorship in general he regards as a war-born Frankenstein, a frenzied virtue grown hugely luminous; "a snowball rolling uphill toward God and gathering furious dimensions, it has escaped the shrewd janitors of orthodoxy who from age to age were able to keep it within bounds." iv NONSENSEORSHIP Then RUTH HALE, who visualizes glowing op- portunities for feminine achievement in the func- tionings of inhibited society. "If the world outside the home is to become as circumscribed and pater- nalized as the world inside it, obviously all the ad- vantage lies with those who have been living under nonsenseorship long enough to have learned to manage it." WALLACE IRWIN is irrepressibly jocose (perhaps because he sailed for unprohibited England the day his manuscript was delivered), breaking into quite undisciplined verse anent the rosiness of life since the red light laws went blue. "I am not sure, as I write, that this article ever will be printed," says ROBERT KEABLE, the English author of "Simon Called Peter." (It is). Mr. Keable, a minister from Africa, wrote of the war as he saw it in France, and in a way which offended people with mental blinders. He declares that the war quite completely knocked humbug on the head and bashed shams irreparably. "Rebels," says he, meaning those who speak their mind and write of things as they see them, "must be drowned in a babble of words." And then HELEN BULLITT LOWRY, the exponent of the cocktailored young lady of today, averring that to the pocket-flask, that milepost between the NONSENSEORSHIP time that was and the time that is, we owe the single standard of drinking. She maintains that the debutantalizing flapper, now driven right out in the open by the reformers, is the real salvation of our mid-victrolian society. No palpitating defense of censorship would be expected from FREDERICK O'BRIEN of the South Seas, who contributes (and deliciously defines) a precious new word to the vocabulary of Nonsen- seorship, "Wowzer." The nature of a wowzer is hinted in a ditty sung by certain uninhibited in- dividuals as they lolled and imbibed among the mystic atolls and white shadows : "Whack the cymbal! Bang the drum! Votaries of Bacchus! Let the popping corks resound, Pass the flowing goblet round! May no mournful voice be found, Though wowzers do attack us !" DOROTHY PARKER gives vent to a poignant Hymn of Hate, anent reformers, who "think every- thing but the Passion Play was written by Avery Hop wood," and whose dominant desire is to purge the sin from Cinema even though they die in the effort. "I hope to God they do," adds the author devoutly. From England, through the eyes of FRANK vi NONSENSEORSHIP SWINNERTON, we glimpse ourselves as others see us, and rather pathetically. In days gone by, lured by reports of America's lawless free-and-easiness, Swinnerton says he craved to visit us. But no more. The wish is dead. We have become hopelessly moral and uninviting. "I see that I shall after all have to live quietly in England with my pipe and my abstemious bottle of beer. And yet I should like to visit America, for it has suddenly become in my imagining an enormous country of 'Don't!' and I want to know what it is like to have 'Don't' said by somebody who is not a woman." Also is raised the British voice of H. M. TOMLINSON, singed with satire. He writes as from a palely pure tomorrow when mankind shall have reached such a state of complete uniformity of soul, mind and body, that "only a particular inquiry will determine a man from a woman, though it may fail to determine a fool from a man." Tomlinson's imagined nation of the future is "as loyal and homo- geneous, as contented, as stable, as a reef of actinozoal plasm." And over each hearth hangs the sacred Symbol a portrait of a sheep. Next is the usually jovial face of CHARLES HANSON TOWNE (that face which has launched a thousand quips) now all stern in his unbattled struggle with Prohibition, dourly surveying this vii NONSENSEORSHIP "land of the spree and home of the grave." . . . "My children," says Towne, "as they sip their light wine and beer . . ." He is, at least, an optimist! But then, we are reminded he is also a bachelor. In his own American language JOHN WEAVER pictures the feelings of an old-time saloon habitue when his former friend the barkeep, now rich from bootlegging, with a home "on the Drive" and all that, declares his socially-climbing daughter quite too good for this particular "Old Soak's" son. Weaver's retrospect of "Bill's Place" will bring damp eyes to the unregenerate: "So neat! And over at the free-lunch counter, Charlie the coon with a apron white like chalk, Dishin' out hot-dogs, and them Boston Beans, And Sad'dy night a great big hot roast ham, Or roast beef simply yellin' to be et, And washed down with a seidel of Old Schlitz !" "The Puritans disliked the theatre because it was jolly. It was a place where people went in de- liberate quest of enjoyment." So says ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT, who emerges as a sort of economic champion of stage morality, though no friend at all of censorship. Despite the mot "nothing risque nothing gained," Woollcott emphatically declares the bed-ridden play is not, as a general thing, suc- cessful. "A blush is not, of course, a bad sign in viii NONSENSEORSHIP the box-office," says he, developing his theme, "but the chuckle of recognition is better. So is the glow of sentiment, so is the tear of sympathy. The smutty and the scandalous are less valuable than homely humor, melodramatic excitement or pretty sentiment." And last in this variegated and alphabeted com- pany the anonymous AUTHOR or "THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON'"' who views the applications of nonsenseorship from the standpoint of national politics. G. P. P. ix CONTENTS PAGE We Have With Us Today . iii G. P. P. Evolution Another of Those Outlines .... 3 GEORGE S. CHAPPELL Nonsenseorship - . 5 HEYWOOD BROUN Literature and the Bastinado * . 17 BEN HECHT The Woman's Place 33 RUTH HALE Owed to Volstead 45 WALLACE IRWIN The Censorship of Thought 53 ROBERT KEABLE The Uninhibited Flapper 69 HELEN BULLITT LOWRY The Wowzer in the South Seas 83 FREDERICK O'BRIEN Reformers : A Hymn of Hate 95 DOROTHY PARKER Prohibition . 99 FRANK SWINNERTON A Guess at Unwritten History H. M. TOMLINSON 113 xi CONTENTS PAGE In Vino Demi-Tasse 131 CHARLES HANSON TOWNE Bootleg 143 JOHN V. A. WEAVER And the Play wright 148 ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT The Oracle That Always Says "No" .... 166 THE AUTHOR OF "THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON" xu ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE George S. Chappell demonstrating his Outline of Censorship 3 Heywood Broun finds America suffering from a dearth of Folly 5 Ben Hecht chopping away at the ever-forgiving and all-condoning Bugaboo of Puritanism ... 17 Ruth Hale as a XXth Century woman guarding the Home Brew 33 Wallace Irwin composing under the influence of syn- thetic gin and Andrew Volstead .... 45 Robert Keable urging the Automaton called Citizen to turn on his oppressor 53 Helen Bullitt Lowry watching Puritanism set the Flapper free 69 Frederick O'Brien finds the South Seas purified and beautified by the Missionaries 83 Dorothy Parker hating Reformers 95 Frank Swinnerton contemplating, from the Tight Little Isle, the two classes of prigs developed by Prohibi- tion; those who accept it and those who rebel . 99 H. M. Tomlinson regarding, with not too great enthusi- asm, the Perfect State of the Future ... 113 Charles Hanson Towne and the Law .... 131 John V. A. Weaver noticing the bartender who has been thrown out of work by Prohibition .... 143 Alexander Woollcott rescuing the Playwright from the awful shears of the Censor 148 The Periscope of the Author of the Mirrors of Washing- ington is turned toward the Great NegativeOracle 166 xiii NONSENSEORSHIP GEORGE S. CHAPPELL DEMONSTRATING HIS OUTLINE OF CENSORSHIP EVOLUTION Another of Those Outlines BY GEORGE S. CHAPPELL Time. The Beginning. When Adam sat with lovely Eve And pressed his primal suit, There was a ban, if we believe Our Genesis, on fruit. But did it give old Adam pause, This One and only law there was? Nine verses are supposed to elapse. X And then great Moses, on the crest Of Sinai, did devise His tablets, acting for the best, (Though some thought otherwise) At least he showed restraint, for then Man's sins were limited to Ten. 3 NONSENSEORSHIP C Ninety-nine In later days the Romans proud Their famous Code began. And lots of things were not allowed By just Justinian. He wrote a list, stupendous long; "One Hundred Ways of Going Wrong." M Nine hundred Napoleon, (see Wells's book) nety-nine Improved the Roman plan verses elapse. By spotting a potential crook In every fellow-man. And by the Thousand off they went To jail, until proved innocent. MDCCCCXXII Nine Now in the change-about complete nine hundred Since Adam passed from view. and For apples we are urged to eat ninety-nine i n i , -i verses elapse. And a11 else 1S tab ' A Million laws hold us in thrall, And we serenely break them all! 4 HEYWOOD BROUN FINDS AMERICA SUFFERING FROM A DEARTH OF FOLLY NONSENSEORSHIP HEYWOOD BROUN A CENSOR is a man who has read about Joshua and forgotten Canute. He believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand. For after all it is life with which he quarrels. Censorship is seldom greatly concerned with truth. Propriety is its worry and obviously impropriety was allowed to creep into the fundamental scheme of creation. It is perhaps a little unfortunate that no right-minded censor was present during the first week in which the world was made. The plan of sex, for instance, could have been suppressed effectively then and Mr. Stunner might have been spared the dreadful and dangerous ordeal of reading "Jurgen" so many centuries later. Indeed, if there had only been right-minded supervision over the modelling of Adam and Eve the world could worry along nicely without the aid of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Sup- 5 NONSENSEORSHIP pression of those, biological facts which the Society includes in its definition of Vice is now impossible. Concealment is really what the good men are after. Somewhat after the manner of the Babes in the Woods they would cover us over with leaves. For men and women they have figs and for babies they have cabbages. It must have been a censor who first hit upon the notion that what you don't know won't hurt you. We doubt whether it is a rule which applies to sex. Eve left Eden and took upon herself a curse for the sake of knowledge. It seems a little heedless of this heroism to advocate that we keep the curse and forget the knowledge. The battle against censorship should have ended at the mo- ment of the eating of the apple. At that moment Man committed himself to the decision that he would know all about life even though he died for it. Unfortunately, under the terms of the exist- ence of mortals one decision is not enough. We must keep reaffirming decisions if they are to hold. Even in Eden there was the germ of a new threat to degrade Adam and Eve back to innocence. When they ate the apple an amoeba in a distant corner of the Garden shuddered and began the long and difficult process of evolution. To all practical purposes John S. Sunnier was already born. 6 NONSENSEORSHIP To us the whole theory of censorship is immoral. If its functions were administered by the wisest man in the world it would still be wrong. But of course the wisest man in the world would have too much sense to be a censor. We are not dealing with him. His substitutes are distinctly lesser folk. They are not even trained for their work except in the most haphazard manner. Obviously a censor should be the most profound of psychologists. Instead the important posts in the agencies of sup- pression go to the boy who can capture the largest number of smutty post cards. After he has con- fiscated a few gross he is promoted to the task of watching over art. By that time he has been pretty thoroughly blasted for the sins of the people. An extraordinary number of things admit of shameful interpretations in his mind. For instance, the sight of a woman making baby clothes is not generally considered a vicious spec- tacle in many communities, but it may not be shown on the screen in Pennsylvania by order of the state board of censors. In New York Kipling's Anne of Austria was not allowed to "take the wage of infamy and eat the bread of shame" in a screen ver- sion of "The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House." Thereby a most immoral effect was created. Anne was shown wandering about quite casually and 7 NONSENSEORSHIP drinking and conversing with sailors who were per- fect strangers to her, but the censors would not allow any stigma to be placed upon her conduct. Indeed this decision seems to support the rather strange theory that deeds don't matter so long as nothing is said about them. The New York picture board is peculiarly sensi- tive to words. Upon one occasion a picture was submitted with the caption, "The air of the South Seas breathes an erotic perfume." "Cut out 'erotic,' " came back the command of the censors. In Illinois, Charlie Chaplin was not allowed to have a scene in "The Kid" in which upon being asked the name of the child he shook his head and rushed into the house, returning a moment later to answer, "Bill." That particular board of censors seemed intent upon keeping secret the fact that there are two sexes. Of course, it may be argued that motion pictures are not an art and that it makes little difference what happens to them. We cannot share that in- difference. Enough has been done in pictures to convince us that very beautiful things might be achieved if only the censors could be put out of the way. Not all the silliness of the modern American picture is the fault of the producers. Much of the blame must rest with the various boards of censor- 8 NONSENSEORSHIP ship. It is difficult to think up many stories in which there is no passion, crime, or birth. As a matter of fact, we are of the opinion that the entire theory of motion picture censorship is mistaken. The guardians of morals hold that if the spectator sees a picture of a man robbing a safe he will thereby be moved to want to rob a safe himself. In rebuttal we offer the testimony of a gentleman much wiser in the knowledge of human conduct than any censor. Writing in "The New Republic," George Bernard Shaw advocated that hereafter public reading-rooms supply their patrons only with books about evil characters. For, he argued, after reading about evil deeds our longings for wickedness are satisfied vicariously. On the other hand there is the danger that the public may read about saints and heroes and drain off its aspirations in such directions without actions. We believe this is true. We once saw a picture about a highwayman (that was in the days before censorship was as strict as it is now) and it con- vinced us that the profession would not suit us. We had not realized the amount of compulsory riding entailed. The particular highwayman whom we saw dined hurriedly, slept infrequently, and invariably had his boots on. Mostly he was being pursued and hurdling over hedges. It left us sore 9 NONSENSEORSHIP in every muscle to watch him. At the end of the eighth reel every bit of longing in our soul to be a swashbuckler had abated. The man in the picture had done the adventuring for us and we could re- turn in comfort to a peaceful existence. Florid literature is the compensation for hum- drummery. If we are ever completely shut off from a chance to see or read about a little evil-doing we shall probably be moved to go out and cut loose on our own. So far we have not felt the necessity. We have been willing to let D'Artagnan do it. Even so arduous an abstinence as prohibition may be made endurable through fictional substi- tutes. After listening to a drinking chorus in a comic opera and watching the amusing antics of the chief comedian who is ever so inebriated we are almost persuaded to stay dry. Prohibition is per- haps the climax of censorship. It has the advan- tage over other forms of suppression in that at least it represents a sensible point of view. Yet, we are not converted. There are things in the world far more important than hard sense. One of the officials of the Anti-Saloon League gave out a statement the other day in which he endeavored to show all the benefits provided by prohibition. But he did it with figures. There was a column showing the increase of accounts in 10 NONSENSEOHSHIP savings banks and another devoted to the decrease of inmates in hospitals, jails and almshouses. From a utilitarian point of view the figures, if correct, could hardly fail to be impressive, but little has been said by either side about the spiritual aspects of rum. Unfortunately there are no statistics on that, and yet it is the one phase of the question which interests us. Some weeks ago we happened to observe a letter from a man who wrote to one of the newspapers protesting against the proposed settlement in Ireland on the ground that, "It's so damned sensible." We have somewhat the same feeling about prohibition. It is a movement to take the folly out of our national life and there is no quality which America needs so sorely. If enforcement ever becomes perfect this will be a nation composed entirely of men who wear rub- bers, put money in the bank, and go to bed at ten. That fine old ringing phrase, "This is on me," will be gone from the language. Conversation will be wholly instructive, for in fifty years the last gen- eration capable of saying, "Do you remember that night ?" will have been gathered to its fathers. Of course, there is no denying the shortsighted- ness of the forces of rum. They cannot escape their responsibility for having aided in the advent of Prohibition. They; were slow to see the necessity 11 NONSENSEORSHIP of some form of curtailment and limitation of the traffic. Such moves as they did make were entirely wrong-headed. For instance, we had ordinances providing for the early closing of cafes. Instead of that we should have had laws forbidding any- body to sell liquor except between the hours of 8 P.M. and 5 A.M. Daytime drinking was always sodden, but something is necessary to make night worth while. Man is more than the beasts, and he should not be driven into dull slumber just because the sun has set. The invention of electricity, liquor, cut glass mirrors, and cards made man the master of his en- vironment rather than its slave. Now that liquor is gone all the other factors are mockery. Card playing has become merely an extension of the cruel and logical process of the survival of the fittest. The fellow with the best hand wins, in- stead of the one with the best head. Nobody draws four cards any more or stands for a raise on an in- side straight. The thing is just cut-throat and scientific and wholly mercenary. The kitty is gone. Nobody cares to come in to a common fund for the purchase of mineral water and cheese sandwiches. And with the passing of the kitty the most promising development of co- operation and communism in America has gone. 12 NONSENSEORSHIP It was prophetic of a more perfectly organized society. In the days of the kitty the fine Socialistic ideal of, "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs," was made specific and workable. And the inspiring romantic tradition of Robin Hood was also carried over into modern life. The kitty robbed only the rich and left the poor alone. But now none of us will contribute* unquestion- ably to the material comfort of others. Each must keep his money for the savings bank. Perhaps, something of the old friendly rivalry may be revived. In a hundred years it may be that men will meet around a table and that one will say to the other, "What have you got?" "I've got $9,876.32 in first mortgages and gilt- edged securities." "That's good. You win." But somehow or other we doubt it. Another mistake which was made in the policy of compromising with the drys was the agreement that liquor should not be served to minors. On the contrary, the provision should have been that drink ought not to be permitted to any man more than thirty years of age. Liquor was never meant to be a steady companion. It was the animating influ- ence which made oats wild. Work and responsi- 13 NONSENSEORSHIP bility are the portion of the mature man. Rum was designed for youthful days when the reckless avidity for experience is so great that reality must be blurred a little lest it blind us. We happened to pick up a copy of "The Harvard Crimson" the other day and read: "The first freshman smoker will be held at 7.45 o'clock this evening in the living room of the Union. P. H. Theopold, '25, Chairman of the Smoker Committee, will act as Chairman, introducing Clark Hodder, '25, and J. H. Child, '25, the Class President and Secretary respectively. After the speeches there will be a motion picture, and some vaudeville by a magician from Keith's. Ginger ale, crackers, and cigarettes will be served. All fresh- men are invited to attend." They used to be called Freshmen Beer Nights and in those days the possibility of friendship at first sight was not fantastic. We feel sure that it cannot be done on ginger ale. The urge for democracy does not dwell in any soft drink. The speeches will be terrible, for there will be no pleasant interruptions of "Aw, sit down," from the man in the back of the room. If somebody begins to sing, "P. H. Theopold is a good old soul," it is not likely to carry conviction. Not once during the evening will any speaker confine himself to saying. 14 NONSENSEORSHIP "To Hell with Yale!" and falling off the table. Probably the magician will not be able to find any- thing in the high hat except white rabbits. Although we have seen no first hand report of that freshman smoker, we feel sure that it was only a crowded self-conscious gathering of a number of young men who said little and went home early. Even from the standpoint of the strictest of abstainers there must be some regret for the passing of ruin. What man who lived through the bad old days does not remember the thrill of rectitude which came to him the first time he said, "Make mine a cigar." Though they have taken away our rum from us we have our memories. Not all the days have been dull gray. Back in the early pages of our diary is the entry about the trip which we made to Boston with William F in the hard winter of 1907. It was agreed that neither of us should drink the same sort of drink twice. Staunch William achieved nineteen varieties, but we topped him with twenty-four. Upon examination we observe that the entry in the memory book was made several days later. The handwriting is a little shaky. But for that adventure we might have lived and died entirely ignorant of the nature of an Angel Float. In those days human sympathy was wider. 15 NONSENSEORSHIP F. M. W. seemed in many respects a matter-of-fact man, but it was he who chanced upon the 59th street Circle just before dawn and paused to call the attention of all bystanders to the statue of Columbus. "Look at him," he said. "Christopher Columbus ! He discovered America and then they sent him back to Spain in chains." He wept, and we realized for the first time that under a rough exterior there beat a heart of gold. 16 BEN HECHT CHOPPSNG AWAY AT THE EVER-FORGIVING AND ALL-CONDONING BUGABOO OF PURITANISM LITERATURE AND THE BASTINADO BEN HECHT SURVEYING the trend of modern literature one must, unless one's mental processes be complicated with opaque prejudices, wonder at the provoking laxity of the national censorship. I write from the viewpoint of an aggrieved iconoclast. It becomes yearly more obvious that the duly elected, commissioned and delegated high priests of the nation's morale are growing blind to the dan- gers which assail them. If not, then how does it come that such enemies of the public weal as H. L. Mencken, Floyd Dell, Sherwood Anderson, Theo- dore Dreiser, Dos Passes, Mr. Cabell, Mr. Rascoe, Mr. Sandburg, Mr. Sinclair Lewis are not in jail? How does it come Professor Frinck of Cornell is not in jail? Bodenheim, Margaret Anderson, Mr. John Weaver are not in jail. Were I the President of the United States sworn to uphold the dignity of its psychopathic repres- sions, pledged on a stack of Bibles to promote the relentless pursuit and annihilation of other people's 17 NONSENSEORSHIP happiness, I would have begun my reign by clap- ping H. L. Mencken into irons forthwith. Mr. Cabell, I would have sent to Russia. Sherwood Anderson I would have boiled in oil. But what is the situation? Observe these gentle- men and their kin enjoying not only their bodily liberty but allowed to prosper on the royalties de- rived from the sale of incendiary volumes designed to destroy the principles upon which the integrity of the commonwealth depends. The spectacle is one aggravating to an iconoclast. There is no affront as distressing as the tolerance of one's enemies. Mr. H. L. Mencken is, perhaps, the outstanding victim of this depravity of indifference which more and more characterizes the enemy. Mr. Mencken, hurling himself for ten years against the Bugaboo of Puritanism a fearless and wonderfully capari- soned Knight of Alarums, Prince of Darkness, Evangel of Chaos Mr. Mencken pauses for a mo- ment out of breath casting about slyly for fresher and deadlier weapons and lo! the Bugaboo with a gentle smile reaches out and embraces him and plants the kiss of love on both his cheeks, strokes his hair wistfully, and invites him to sit on the front porch. Alas, poor Mencken! It is the fate that awaits us all. Zarathustra in the market-place 18 NONSENSEORSHIP feeding ground glass to the populace is gathered to the bosom of the City Fathers and gleefully en- rolled as a member of the Guild. This is no idle rhetoric. Dissent in the Republic has come upon hard ways. Ten years ago the name of Mencken would have stood against the world. Today no college freshman, no lowly professor, no charity worker, or local alderman too puritanical to do him homage. Whereupon the argument is that an era of en- lightenment has set in, that this same Mencken and his contemporary throat-cutters have vanquished the Bugaboo, and that, as a result, a spirit of high intellectual life prevails through the land. The proletaire have risen and are thumbing their nose at the gods. Brander Matthews has sent in a five years' subscription to the Little Review. ,The Comstocks overcome with the vision of their ghastly complexes are appealing to Sigmund Freud for advice and relief. But the argument is superficial. "Victory!" cry the iconoclasts grinding their teeth at the absence of a foe. But it is a victory that rankles in the soul. The foe is not vanquished but, seemingly, bored to death has fallen asleep. It is, in any event, a phenome- non. Many generalizations offer themselves as solace. 19 NONSENSEORSHIP The first paradox of this phenomenon is that Puritanism, beaten to a pulp by an ever-increasing herd of first, second, third, and fourth rate icono- clasts, has triumphed completely in the legislatures of the country. With every new volume exposing the gruesome mainsprings of the national virtue, further taboos and restrictions crowd themselves into the statute books. In a sense it would seem as if the bete populaire, becoming increasingly drunk with the consciousness of its own power, is elatedly preoccupied in cutting off its own nose, tying itself up into knots, and kicking itself in the rear, proclaiming simulta- neously and in triumphant tones, "Observe how powerful I am. I can pass laws making ipecac a compulsory diet." Whereupon the laws are passed and the noble masses with heroic grimaces fall to devouring ipecac, to the confusion of all free-born stomachs. In fact this species of ballot flagellatism, this diverting pastime of hitting itself on the head with a stuffed club has gradually elevated the body politic to the enviable position occupied by the all- powerful king of Fernando Po. This mysterious being lives in the lowest depths of the crater of Riabba. His power is in direct ratio to the taboos which hem him in. Convinced that bathing is a 20 NONSENSEORSHIP crime against his dignity, that sunlight is incom- patible with his royal lineage; convinced that his prestige is dependent upon a weekly three days' fast and a cautious observation of the taboos against all variants of social intercourse piously convinced of these astounding things, the all-powerful mon- arch of Fernando Po sits year in and year out mo- tionless on his throne in the lowest depths of the crater of Riabba, awed by himself and overcome with the contemplation of his all-powerfulness. We have here, I trust, an illuminating analogy. The Republic, like this King of Fernando Po, imposes daily upon itself new taboos, new rituals. Yet there is the phenomenon of its tolerance toward the idol breakers. From the lowest depths of the crater of Riabba in which he sits enthroned the monarch of the Laongos condemns to death with a twitch of his brows all who seek to question the sanctity of the taboos. But this other occupant of the crater of Riabba our Republic raises gentle eyes to the idol wreckers, to the taboo destroyers. An occasional "tut tut" escapes him. And nothing more. Whereupon the argument is that our monarch of the pit is an impotent fellow. Again, a superficial deduction. For behold the censorships with which he belabors himself. 21 NONSENSEORSHIP Censorship, almost extinct in the restriction of the national literature, thrives in every other field. Censorships abound. Food, drink, movies, politics, baseball, diversion, dress all these are under the jurisdiction of a continually aroused censorship. The pulpits and editorial pages emit sonorous hymns of taboo. Every caption writer is an Isaiah, every welfare worker fancies himself the handwrit- ing on the wall. Unchallenged by the vote of the masses or by any outward evidence of mass disssent, the platitudes pile up, the nation is filled from morning to morning with stentorian clamor. Puri- tanism in a frenetic finale approaches a climax. But, and we tiptoe towards the crux of this phe- nomenon, the Bacchanal of Presbyterianism is an artificial climax. Unlike the day of the later Caesars, the populace does not abandon itself in imitation of its Neros and Caligulas. Instead, we have the spectacle of a populace apathetic toward the spirit of its time. The Puritan debauch is the logical culmination of the anti-Paganism and backworldism launched two hundred centuries back. The Christian ethic, to the bewildered chagrin of its advocates, has tri- umphed. Not a triumph this time that offers itself as a cloak for Jesuitism, colonization, or empire juggling. But an unimpeachable triumph entirely 22 NONSENSEORSHIP beyond the control of the most adroit of the choir- Machiavellis. In other words the body politic finds itself be- trayed by its own platitudes. A moral frenzy ani- mates its horizon. But it is a frenzy of idea escaped control, an idea grown too huge and luminous to direct any longer. The moral frenzy of the war was the moral frenzy of such an idea virtue be- come a Frankenstein. This virtue the Golden Rule, the Thou Shalt Nots, the thousand and one unassailable maxims, adages, old saws invented chiefly for the protection of the weak and the solace of the inferior this virtue has taken itself out of the hands of its hitherto adroit worshippers. A snowball rolling uphill toward God and gathering furious dimensions, it has escaped the shrewd jani- tors of orthodoxy who from age to age were able to keep it within bounds. Thus in the war, confronted with the platitude that the world must be made safe for democracy and with the further platitude that democracy and equality were the goals of Christianity and with a dozen similar platitudes none of which had any authentic contact with the life of the nation, thus confronted, the proletaire was forced to lift itself up by its boot straps and rise to the defence of a Frankenstein idealism of which it was the parent- 23 NONSENSEORSHIP victim. Disillusionment with the causes of the war has, however, served no high purpose. The Frankenstein God, the Frankenstein virtue is still enshrined in the Heaven of the Copy Books. And we find the proletaire still worshipping, albeit with the squirmings and grimacings, a horrible idealiza- tion of itself. The Thou Shalt Nots have escaped. They in- crease and multiply with a life of their own. Logic is the most irresponsible of the manias which oper- ate in life. Logic demands that ideas be carried to their climax and this demand, as inexorable as Mr. Newton's law, has made a Frankenstein of the un- suspecting Galilean. Hypnotized by the demands of logic, bewildered by the contemplation of this code of backworldism which he himself seems somehow to have created, the ballot maniac stands riveted at the polls and sacrifices to his own image by hitting himself on the head with further virtuous restrictions a gesture necessary to prevent his own image from giving him the lie. He must, in other words, prove him- self as virtuous, whenever public demonstration de- mands, as the Frankenstein platitudes proclaim him to be. The Puritanism of the nation, remorselessly upheld by its laws and its public factotums is an 24 NONSENSEORSHIP extraneous and artificial pose into which the blun- dering proletaire has tricked itself. There are innumerable consequences. We have, firstly, the spectacle of the masses disporting themselves slyly in the undertow of cynicism. "Modesty," bellows Sir Frankenstein from pul- pit and press, "is a cardinal virtue." "Right O," echoes the feminine contingent and promptly bobs its hair, shortens its skirts, and rolls down its socks. "Abstinence, sobriety, are an economic and spirit- ual necessity," bellows Sir Frankenstein. Whereupon the male contingent votes the land dry and gets drunk. From the foregoing we may derive glimmers of truth concerning the public tolerance of iconoclasts. "Main Street," a volume fathered by Mencken, Freud, and the other Chaos-Bringers, leaps into prominence as a best seller. It is devoured and ac- claimed by the ballot maniac who reads it, smacks his lips over its "truths" and sallies forth to vote further canonizations of hypocrisy into the legal code. Even I, who ten years ago prided myself upon being as indigestible a type of the Incoherent Young as the land afforded, find myself for one month a best seller* on my native heath. Woe the * "Erik Dorn," Mr. Hecht's first novel. Ed. 25 NONSENSEORSHIP prophet who is with honor in his country! He will flee in disgust in quest of hair shirts and a bastinado. Thus, the citizens. With the left hand they greet the iconoclasts and hand them royalties. With the right hand they pass further laws for the iconoclasts to denounce. A phenomenon results. With the thought of the masses becoming more and more neutral in the highty-tighty war between Good and Evil, the laws created by these same masses grow more and more rabid. But it must be borne in mind that although the masses, carried away by flagellant impulses, assist in the creation of these laws, in the main, they are laws, self-created platitudes which give birth to new platitudes. Logic is the most per- nicious of the Holy Ghosts responsible for the conception of undesirable Gods. I am prepared now to make further revelations. The foregoing, although bristling with inconsisten- cies, seems to me, nevertheless, a ground work. I will begin the apocalyptic finale with a resume of the choir-leaders, the high priests, the Mahatmas of Sir Frankenstein. Item one : It is obvious that the laws of the land being the ghastly climaxes of artificial logic and not of human desires or biological necessities, there- fore the salaried apostles of these laws must func- tion similarly outside nature. 26 NONSENSEORSHIP The high priests, it develops indeed upon investi- gation, diligently lickspittling to Sir Frankenstein, have no following. The masses are not going to Heaven in their wake. They, the high priests, are magically out of touch with their worshippers. And from day to day they grow further out of touch until they are to be seen high in the clouds tending the fugitive altars that are soaring toward God on their own power. These high priests are the creatures elected, com- missioned and delegated by the proletaire to per- petuate its grandiose and impossible image. And this they do. They are the custodians of the public morals, meaning the protectors of the huge trick mirror out of which the complexes, neurasthenias, and morbid fears of the public stare back at it in the guise of Virtue, Honor, Decency, and Love. These custodians are also, to leap into the denouement, the censors here under discussion; censors not only tolerated but insisted upon by the people to annoy and harass them and inspire them to further ballot flagellations in order that they, the people, may be spared the disaster of discovering themselves different from what two hundred centuries of self -idealization have driven them into believing themselves to be. This, the high priests do. In every village, ham- 27 NONSENSEORSHIP let and farm they have their say. They chastise. They make things fit for decent people to see or wear or drink, and people flattered to death at the idea of being considered decent submit piously to the distastement infringements and taboos. All-powerful are the censors. But despite this all-powerf ulness they labor under a wretched handi- cap. They are stupid. Stupidity is the paradox to be found most often in all-powerful Gods. They are stupid, the censors. And the Devil is clever. The Seven Arts which are the Seven Incarnations of Dionysius, the Seven Masks of an unrepentant Lucifer, elude them in the horrific struggle. Or at least partially elude them. Occasionally a cloven hoof is spied and sliced to the bone. We return now with proud and tranquil ease to the beginning of this tale, to the phenomenon of a tolerated literary iconoclasm in a land alive with caterwaulings of virtue. As hinted above not all the Arts escape, nor do any of them escape all the time. Music, whose sly and terrible vices were for centuries unperceived by the high priests, has been brought to earth in places. "Jazz Incites to Sin. Syncopation is Devil's Ally." Discovered! One reads the morning paper 28 NONSENSEORSHIP and feels a return of hope. The High Priests are aroused. They have disembowelled an ally. There is hope then of a bloody fray. Another Edition and they will be on our own heads, swinging their snickersnees. Mencken will be arrested and burned in public. Anderson will be strung up by the heels and his estates confiscated. There will be war red war, and we in the army of the iconoclasts growling impotently at each other will face about and have at them with hullaballo and manifesto and snickersnee in turn. "Nude Painting Banned From Window. Nab Store Keeper." We read on. The snickersnee swings towards the vitals of Hollywood. "Movie Magnate Charges Work of Art Cut; Sues Censors. Seeks Redress in Courts." Valhalla! They are closing in. Another forced march and they are upon us. Alas, our coffee cools as we wait impatiently for the alarms to sound. We are intact. Mencken still lives. Anderson still lives. The tide of battle sweeps us by, passes us up, and there's the end to it. Again, our victory rankling, we cast about for reasons. Do not the censors read our books? Yes, the censors read our books. And scratching their necks pensively and immediately below their left ears, the censors fall asleep. Our books were over 29 NONSENSEORSHIP their heads. Our broadsides aimed for their vitals whizzed by their ears and lulled them into slumber. A hideous victory is in our hands. Voltaire blew God out of France for a century. But that was because God was still an emotion in his day and not a Frankenstein of logic. He blew up the high priests. But that was because the high priests still had enough intelligence in that time to know what constituted an epoch-shaking explosion. Our enemies the censors, the hallelujah flingers, commissioned, elected, delegated by the proletaire are not worthy our steel. Having no longer any contact with the masses, they need no genius to perpetuate themselves. The masses care not what they are so long as they are. Figureheads for Frankenstein, they need only shriek themselves blue and their will, will be done. Shrewdness, in- telligence, are qualities non-essential since virtue, no longer feeding upon shrewdness and intelligence, fattens upon its own monstrous logic. The high priests are vital to the lie which man has created for himself as a heaven and out of which his own image leers godlike back at him. They are vital for nothing else. Therefore our immunity. Since they need no grey matter, they have none. And unable to under- stand us, they ignore us. And if we grow too 30 NONSENSEORSHIP insistent, as has Mencken, they put an end to the business by embracing us and pulling our fangs by disgusting us with their stupidity. Given free reign under the conditions herein out- lined, the youth of the land is abandoning itself to a safe and sane orgie of iconoclasm. Satanic epigrams cloud the air of the very market-place. Poets, column conductors, hack literary reviewers, hack romancers, lecturers, realists, imagists, and all are gloatingly engaged in sacking the Temple, in thumbing their nose at the taboos. In fact so widespread is the unlicensed and un- rebuked iconoclasm of the day that a great disgust is being born in the hearts of the pioneers. Every dog has his paradox, every hack his anti-Christ, they bewail. And surveying the horizon despair- ingly they see no enemy rushing upon them with the wind. There are, of course, scattered here and there among the keepers of the Seal, observant priests. They omit isolated groans. They launch Quixotic sorties. But they retire and collapse without wait- ing combat. To their denunciation of "degenerate, sinful and corrupting cesspools of alleged art" (I quote from a review of some of my own work ap- pearing in an issue of the Springfield (111.) Republican) , there is no answering response. They 31 NONSENSEORSHIP are left abandoned, the Fiery Cross burning down to their fingers and flickering out. They cannot be glorified into an enemy. On the whole I fear for the result. Ideas favor a bloody battle-ground for birthplace. And here we stand, drawn up in battle array discharging broad- sides of "Winesburgs, Ohios," "Main Streets," "Cornhuskers" and the like; flying our colors val- iantly but there is no battle. The enemy sleeps. Or the enemy wakes up and issues an indifferent invitation that we stay to tea. Comrade Dreiser may demur at all this and, peeling his vest, reveal us wounds, honorable wounds acquired in honorable battle. And further, he may regale us with tales of hair shirts and bas- tinadoes suffered by him in the Republic. But alas, he is Telemachus, grey-bearded and full of mem- ories. And the youth of Athens, fallen upon softer ways, listen with envious incredulity to such tall tales. 32 RUTH HALE AS A XXTH CENTURY WOMAN GUARDING THE HOME BREW THE WOMAN'S PLACE RUTH HALE AT last the women of this country are about to perform a great service not one of those courtesy services about which so much is so volubly said and so little is done in repayment but a good sturdy performance, that will probably bring these mag- nificent men folks right to their knees. They are going to teach the unfortunates how to live under prohibitions and taboos. Of course there has never been any prodigality of freedom in this country or any other but what there was belonged to the men. The women had to take to the home and stay there. So the two sexes adjusted themselves to life with this difference, that the women had to do all the outwitting and circumvent- ing, all the little smart twists and turns, all the cunning scheming by which people snatch off what they want without appearing to, whereas men got their much or little by prosily sticking their hands out for it. 33 NONSENSEORSHIP This developed, naturally, not only somewhat diverse temperaments, but also greatly diverse equipments. When men cannot get what they want now by either asking or paying for it, they have no more resources. Bless them, they must return into the home, where the secret has been perfected for centuries on centuries of how to hoard a private stock and how to find a bootlegger. Under the steadily growing nonsenseorship regime, they are obliged to come and take lessons from the lately despised group of creatures to whom nonsenseor- ship is a well-thumbed story. If the world outside the home is to become as circumscribed and pa- ternalized as the world inside it, obviously all the advantage lies with those who have been living under nonsenseorship long enough to have learned to manage it. Thus woman moves over from her dull post as keeper of the virtues to the far more important and exciting post as keeper of the vices. It is not an ideal power which she thus acquires. But then none of this is about ideals. This is just a little practical study in what is going to happen, and why. Taboos never yet have added a cubit to the stature of the soul of humanity. They have nearly always been the chattering children of fear and pure idiocy. They have always tried to throw the race 34 NONSENSEORSHIP back on to all fours, and have left the nobility of standing upright wholly out of account. The taboos which have surrounded women time out of mind have been so puerile and imbecile that one quite non-partisanly wonders why on earth they have been allowed to continue. A second thought demonstrates, of course, that fear has had the major part in it, and that skill in cheating has gone so far as practically to nullify the privations of the taboo. But one must put by this hankering after nobil- ity, and accept the plain fact that fear is the dominant human motive. What the race would do if fear were conquered, or at least faced sternly eye to eye, is staggering to contemplate. Perhaps God looks upon that vision. It may be that which gives Him patience. But man at best gives it one terri- fied squint in a lifetime. All behavior must take fear into account. The man who lately brought back from the Amazon Basin news of a fear-dispelling drug used there by a savage tribe, would have been carried home from the steamer on the shoulders of his com- patriots if for one moment he had been believed. His drug may do all he claimed for it, but a country which boasts a Volstead in full stride cannot force itself to take him seriously. The only likely part 35 NONSENSEORSHIP of his story was that the tribes who prepared the drug would put to instant death any woman who happened either to learn how to prepare it or did actually get some of it into her. We recognize that part as familiar. We have made the same fight here against the fearless woman as the savages made on the Amazon. The only thing we were never smart enough to apply was the moral of the Kipling story about the two greatest armies in the world: the men who believed that they could not die till their time came, against those who wanted to die as soon as possible. It was from one or the other of these two kinds of fearlessness that women have trained themselves in wisdom. This is the wisdom which moves them to secret laughter when they find their brothers in the throes of Vol- stead and Krafts. And it is from this wisdom that they will teach them all to be happy, though prohibited. It is an unfortunate fact that humanity will not behave itself. It does not really warm to any of the current virtues. When the Eighteenth Amend- ment says it must not drink hard liquors, its inner heart's desire is to drink them, even beyond its nor- mal, and usual capacity. Prohibition is, it is true, one of the strikingly superimposed virtues. It has nothing whatever to recommend it in man's true 36 NONSENSEORSHIP feelings, and this is not true of many of the civilized traits, though probably not any of them meets with entire approval. We do think that before anything approaching a real art of living is perfected among us, the present ethical system will be wholly out- moded. Meanwhile, pressure brought to bear on the least welcome of all virtues is merely going to make bad behavior worse. But that is Volstead's business, not ours. Let him do battle with that octopus, while we bring up reinforcements to his enemies. Women know all about how to be bad and comfortable while the law goes on trying to make them good and otherwise. Just look at a few of the things on which they have cut their teeth. We do not know, unfortunately, just at what point in her history woman went under the long siege of her taboos. Whether the system of keeping her publicly helpless and interdicted goes before church and state, or was the result of them, there is now no history to tell us. But certainly she always had one supreme power and one supreme weakness, and somewhere in time, her more neutrally equipped male companion played the one against her, to save his own skin from being stripped by the other. But if the past is foggy, the present is not. We do know what is now, and has for a long time been, 37 NONSENSEORSHIP a shocking list of what she must not be allowed to do. She cannot own and control her own property, for instance, except here and there in the world. Perhaps the theory was that she could not create property. But one would have said that such of it as she inherited she had as sound a right to as that that her brother inherited. But no such common sense notion prevailed. No matter how she came by it, it became her husband's as soon as she mar- ried. The law has always behaved as if a woman became a half-wit the moment she married. See- ing what she deliberately lost by it, perhaps the law is right. She lost control of her possessions, in- cluding herself. She lost her citizenship, and she lost her name, though this by custom and not by law. And finally, she never could acquire control even over her own children, which certainly she did create. We do not know how many of these dis- abilities would have been excused on the ground that they were for her own good. It seems likelier that they came under the head of that fine old ab- straction, the general good. No longer back than 1914, H. G. Wells, in "Social Forces in England and America" observed that they would probably never be able to give women any real freedom be- cause there were the children to consider. Mr. 38 NONSENSEORSHIP Wells did not appear to know that he was bridging a horrible conflict in terms with a pretty fatuity. Nor did he later give himself pause when, towards the end of the book, he complained that all the ba- bies were being had by the low grade women, while the high grade ones were quite insensible to their duties. It was possibly with an unruliness of this kind in contemplation that the law decided that women should know nothing of birth control. Now there's a taboo for you. Many of our very best people the moral element, so called will not even speak the words. But that prohibition, like all the others, has its side door may one say its small-family en- trance? The women who do not know all there is to know about it are just those poor, isolated, and ignorant women economically starved who should be the first to be told. Consider the quaintest, we think, of all the pro- scriptions against women that they cannot have citizenship in their own right. What is citizenship if it is not the assumption, made by the State, that because you were born within it, and had grown used to it and fond of it, and were attached to it by all the associations of blood ties, friendships, and what not, you were therefore entitled to take part in it, and could be called on to give it service ? 39 NONSENSEORSHIP If citizenship is a mere legal figment, by what right do States send their citizens to war? Yet women are theoretically transferred, body and bone, heart, memory, and soul, to whatever country or nation their husbands happen to give allegiance to. Isa- dora Duncan, born in California, of generations of Californians, and American all her life, has lately married a young Russian poet. Hereafter she must enter her country as an alien immigrant if it so happens that the quota is not closed. Does any- body in his senses imagine that Isadora Duncan has been changed, or could be changed, for better or worse? An opera singer who was in danger dur- ing the war of losing her position at the Metropoli- tan Opera House because she was an enemy alien, went forth and married an American. By that means she was actually supposed to have been made over into an American. Can naivete go further? For our present purposes we merely want to point out that what is done to one woman in the name of the public good is craftily used by the next one to serve her own ends. There is a terrifying proportion of women in America today who can vote, without knowing a word of our language, without participating in one particle of our com- mon life, because their husbands have taken on American citizenship. They wouldn't be allowed 40 NONSENSEORSHIP to become American citizens if they wanted to, by any other means. There are scores and scores of these legal absurdi- ties conscripting the activities of women. Twenty books could be written about them, and probably will be. But we must leave them, with such repre- sentation as these few instances afford, and go from the body of taboos that are done in the name of the good of the State, to that collection done for woman's own personal good. Some of these are legal and some are not, but they are all operative. They are all things she has to go around, or under. She cannot serve on juries. She is always righteously barred from courtrooms when there is to be testimony concerning sex. Woman, the mother of children, the realist of sex compared to whom the most sympathetic of males is at best an outsider, is to be "protected" from a few scandalous narratives. Of course all women know that they are barred from juries not because the happenings in court would shock or even sur- prise them, but because they would embarrass their far more sensitive and finicky men. So what they wish to know of court proceedings, they learn from their good men, in the pleasant privacy of their homes. If the juries are so much the worse for this sort of thing, and they are, the matter cannot be 41 NONSENSEORSHIP helped by the ladies, dear knows, and the men would die almost any death liefer than that of rav- aged modesty. Probably the most ungrateful of the restrictions on females is that forbidding them to hold office in churches. This has been put on all sorts of high grounds, chief among them being that women could do so much abler work in little auxiliaries of their own. This contention was challenged about two years ago in the House of Commons, by Maud Hoyden, the English Lay Evangelist to whom the pulpits of London are forbidden, with one or two exceptions. Miss Hoyden, whose preaching was being bitterly opposed by several members of the House, annoyed them all considerably by saying that the Church of England had already had two women as its absolute head. This was denied in a great sputter, to which Miss Hoyden replied, "How about Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria?" Well, this happened to be something that nobody could gainsay, but into the wrathy silence which followed, one member of the House rose to his feet and let the cat right out of the bag. If women were given church authority, he said, they would refuse to accept their husbands' authority in their homes, and England would go to rack and ruin. This is one of the few recorded occasions when a taboo-er 42 NONSENSEORSHIP so far forgot himself, and American church poten- tates do not like to be reminded of it. Within a month, one of the Protestant sects in this country has given women the right to hold minor offices, but three others, in general convention, refused even to consider it. Again we are going to rest our case on selected instances, and return to a consideration of how these walled-in women have learned to live com- fortably and with some self-respect behind the gar- rison wall. It is this, after all, which they must now teach their men. The first thing that happened to the woman who married was that she became legally non-existent. But though she was scratched off the public books, she couldn't exactly be scratched out of her hus- band's scheme of general well-being. Neither could the race make great strides without her. After everything in the world had been done to make her as harmless as possible, she still remained non-ignorable. Two courses were open to her; and she has always used whichever of the two was neces- sary at the time. She could be so sweet and beguil- ing, so full of blandishments, that man rushed out to bring her all and more than she had been pro- hibited from having. Or she could terrify him, both by her temper and her biological superiority, into 43 NONSENSEORSHIP stopping his entire precious machinery against her, and thanking his stars that he could get off with a whole skin. Of course these things have not always worked out just so. There have been the tragic mischances. But in the main, an oppressed people learn how to outsmile or outsnarl the oppressor. The Eighteenth Amendment may yet live to wish it was dead. Mr. Volstead seems to have believed that the nonsen- seorship game was new and exciting, and could be trusted to carry itself by storm. Not while the an- cient wisdom of long-borne bans and communica- does looked out of the female eye. There was a body of experts in existence of whom, apparently, he had never even heard. He never once thought how the twentieth cen- tury was to become known as the Century of The Home, with the home brew, and the subscription editions, and the sagacities of women. If he should complain that there is no honor and fine living in all of this, we shall have to agree with him. But we can answer that by guile we have preserved our joys, and cleared our way out from the shadows of his big totem pole. If we have but little magnificence, we have as much as anybody can ever have who is hounded by the legal virtues. And if we may keep a little gaiety for life, by that much do we make him bite the dust. It isn't pretty, but it's art. 44 XQ WALLACE IRWIN COMPOSING UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF SYNTHETIC GIN AND ANDREW VOLSTEAD OWED TO VOLSTEAD WALLACE IEWIN I First Round Prune extract and bright alcohol, so wooden One kills its flavor in rank fusel oil! C 2 H 5 HO a rather good 'un To mix with fruity syrups in our toil To give our social meetings after dark Their necessary spark! And you, most heavenly twins, Born of one mother Although our woe begins When, through our mortal sins, We can't tell which from 'tother Ethyl And Methyl! Like Ike And Mike Strangely you look alike. Like sisters I have met You're very hard to tell apart and yet The one consoles' more gently than a wife; The other turns and cripples you for life. Such spirits as these, and many more I summon From many a poisoned tin, Or many a bottle falsely labelled "Gin" 45 NONSENSEORSHIP Or many a vial pathetic, Yclept "Synthetic." Like Dante on his joy-ride Seeing Hell, Fain would I take you down Through sulphurous fires and caverns bilious brown Into the Land of Mystery and Smell Where Satan steweth And home-breweth While thirsty hooch-hounds yell Their blackest curse, Or worse: "Vol-darn our souls with each Vol-blasted dram That burns our throats and isn't worth a dam ! We drink, yet how we dread it Vol-steadit!" They've said it. II Short Intermission to Change Meter In Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-three A. Lincoln set the darkies free ; In Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen A. Volstead muzzled the canteen And freed the millions, great and small, From bondage to King Alcohol. Was it not thoughtful, good and kind For such a man of such a mind To show an interest so grand In his misguided native land? And don't these statements illustrate Our Nation's progress up to date? We're freedom-loving and we're brave And simply cannot stand a slave. 46 NONSENSEORSHIP And when a crisis needs a man From Mass, or Tex. or Conn, or Kan. That man steps forward, firm of chi So Andrew Volstead came from Minn. He came from Minn, to show the world That gin is wrong And rye is strong And Scotch to limbo should be hurled. Thus with his spotless flag unfurled He went against the Demon Rum Who snarled, "I vum!" Got sort of numb, Rolled up his eyes, lay down and curled While all the saints of heaven above (Including Mr. Bryan's Dove) Cried "Rah-rah-rah ! And siss-boom-ah ! Three cheers for Health and Christian Love! But, Andrew dear Say, now, look here! You're not including wine and beer !" Then Andrew Volstead squared his chin And answered briefly, "Sin is sin." No compromise With the King of Lies ! Both liquor thick and liquor thin We'll cease to tax And use the axe Invented by the Man from Minn. For right is right and wrong is wrong A spell has cursed the world too long. 47 NONSENSEORSHIP The curse IT? THE PERISCOPE OF THE AUTHOR OF THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON IS TURNED TOWARD THE GREAT NEGATIVE ORACLE NONSENSEORSHIP No. The nonsensorship regards him with sus- picion. He must go and have even that part of him which lies below the level of his consciousness dragged forth by experts in the interests of so- ciety, and if there is anything hidden in him which might not be exhibited on the movie screens, he must have it sublimated. He cannot even have suppressed desires. He cannot be a devil of a fel- low even to himself. He cannot be his own censor any longer, he must submit himself to outside cen- soring, to the nonsenseorship. It all came about this way. First to establish divine right somewhere in modern government, the doctrine was set up that the public mind was in- fallible. Thereafter, naturally, attention centered on the public mind. What was it that it had this wonderful quality of always being right? Experi- ence showed that it was not a thinking mind. Since it was not, then the thinking mind was anti-social. Then our very best American philosophers, and some French ones, for the support of mass opinion, developed a system which set forth that reason always led you into traps and that the only mind to trust was the irrational, instinctive or intuitional mind. Thus the nonsenseorship, with excellent philosophic support put the ban upon thinking. Now, I do not contend that many suffer seriously 167 NONSENSEORSHIP from this restriction. For, after all, thinking is hard work and may cheerfully be foregone in the general interest. But does the nonsenseorship rest content with its achievement? If the instinctive part of us is so important, let us have a look at it, says society; perhaps something anti-social may be unearthed there. A Viennese explores this area of the mind. He discovers what society would forbid, merely hidden away. Civilization has merely pressed it into dark corners, as the law has crowded the black- jack artist into alleys and dens of thieves. The psychic police are put on our trail. They must nab every suppressed desire and send it to the reform school for re-education into something beautiful and serviceable. We may not be unhappy, neurotic, mad; our complexes must be inspected. We must suppress our reason, we may not suppress our de- sire; the nonsenseorship says so, and to persuade us, its experts offer us the reward of health and greater usefulness if we make this further surrender. Now, although as I have said we let reason go at the behest of the nonsenseorship without so much as a word of protest, we do not give up our suppressed desires so easily and without a fight. As a result we see the nonsenseorship in a new light. We feel it more keenly now than ever be- 168 NONSENSEORSHIP fore. It is revealed as the Procrustean bed which cramps us up until we ache inside. If there is any- thing the matter with us, if we are introverted, in- trospective, neurotic, complicated, have too much ego or too little ego, are dyspeptic, sick, sore, in- hibited, regressive, defeated or too successful, un- happy, cruel or too kind, if we differ ever so slightly from the enforced average, it is because censorship presses upon us. And the cure for censorship is more censorship. Have your psychic insides cen- sored; if you would be a perfect 36 mentally and morally, with the Hart, Schaffner & Marxed soul which modern society wills that you shall have, con- form not only without but within, and be "splen- didly null"! I think it is the sudden realization that just a little more of individuality, our hidden individuality, is threatened, which makes the non- senseorship irk us now as it never did before. The race has always had it, but in the beginning it was a crude and simple thing, troubling itself only with externals. A woman whose official duty; it is to look after the virtue of the movies in Penn- sylvania or Ohio, will not permit on the screen any; suggestion that there is a physiological relation be- tween a mother and a child. This method of pro- tecting the race has its roots back in the primitive mind of mankind. When men really did not un- derstand how children came about, birth$ were 169 NONSENSEORSHIP catastrophic. A woman at a certain moment had to disappear into the wilderness; she came back having found a baby under a cabbage leaf. Any; contact with her while she was making her discovery; might bring pestilence and death to the tribe. We still believe in the pestilence even if we no longer have faith in the cabbage leaf. The lady censor of Ohio or Pennsylvania is the tribe driving the pregnant woman into the wilderness. On the whole the tribe did it better than we do ; it only re- moved the offender and the mental life of the little community went on just as before. We keep the offender amongst us and close our minds. Our simple ancestors covered no more with the fig leaf than they thought it necessary to hide; we wear the fig leaf over our eyes: that is the nonsenseorship. Mr. Griffith recently brought out a cinema spec- tacle called "Orphans in the Storm," which pre- sented many scenes from the French Revolution. Now it was not long ago that we Americans were all rather proud of the French Revolution. We had had a revolution of our own and we thought with satisfaction that the French had caught theirs from us. We were as pleased about it as the little boy is when the neighbor's little boy catches the mumps from him. He sees an enlargement of his ego in the swollen neck of his playmate. All that is changed now. Mr. Griffith picturing 170 NONSENSEORSHIP the triumphant mob in Paris had to fill his screens with preachments against Bolshevism, which had as much to do with his subject as captions about the rape of the Sabine woman would have had to do with it. It is as if the little boy had been taught to believe that by never saying the word mumps, he could save his playmate from tumefying glands. Soon some committee of morons which attends to the keeping of our intellects on the level with their own will exclude from the schools all histories which contain the words "the American Revolu- tion." We must call it the War for American Independence. That is putting the fig leaf over our eyes. That is the nonsenseorship. But before we decide whether or not we shall re- fuse to yield up our suppressed desires as we have surrendered our reason to it, with the approval of our leading philosopher, Mr. William James, let us consider some of the advantages of the nonsen- seorship. Perhaps it will prove worth while to give up this little internal privilege. First there is the simplicity of consulting the so- called public mind. The favorite aphorism of the politician and his friend and spokesman the editor is: "The public is always right upon a moral issue." This means that if the politician or the propa- gandist can present a question to the people in such 171 NONSENSEORSHIP a way that he can win his end by having the public respond in the negative, he is sure of success. It is as if society depended for its guidance upon the word of an oracle, a great stone image, out of which the priests had only succeeded in producing one response, a sound very much like, "No." The trick would consist of so framing your question that the word "no" would give you approval for your de- signs. That is the art of laying before the public a "moral issue" upon which it is inevitably right. Suppose, in a society ruled by the stone image, you wanted to make war upon your neighbor. You would frame your question thus: "Shall we stand by idly and pusillanimously while our neighbor in- vades our land and rapes our women?" This is a moral issue of the deepest sanctity. You would present it. The priests would do their little some- thing somewhere out of sight. From the great stone image would come a bellow which resembled "No." You would have won on a moral issue and would then be licensed to invade your neighbor's territory and rape his women. Now you will perceive certain advantages in an oracle which can only say one word. You know in advance what its answer will be. Suppose the great stone image could have said either "yes" or "no." Suppose its answer had been "yes" to your right- 172 NONSENSEORSHIP eous question? It would have been embarrassing. You could no longer say with such perfect confi- dence, "It is always right upon a moral issue." Suppose you were capital and you desired to re- duce wages. You would not go to the temple and say, "Shall we reduce wages?" That would not be a moral issue upon which the answer would be right. You would ask, "Shall we tamely acquiesce while the labor unions import the Russian revolu- tion into our very midst?" The great stone voice always to be trusted on moral issues would thun- der, "No." Or suppose you were labor ; for my oracle is even- handed and you wished to extend your organiza- tion you would go to the temple and propound the inquiry, "Shall we be eaten alive by the war profiteers ?" The always moral voice would at least whisper "No." It will be observed that in consulting the oracle whose answer is known in advance, the only skill required consists in so framing the question that you will get a louder roar of "no" than the other side can with its question. If you can always do this you can say with perfect confidence that old granite lungs "is always right upon a moral issue." That is the art of being a great popular leader. Would anyone exchange a voice like that as a 173 NONSENSEORSHIP ruler for the wisdom of the world's ten wisest men? yVe laugh at the Greeks for their practice of con- sulting the oracle at Delphi and rightly, for our oracle beats theirs which used to hedge in its an- swers and leave them in doubt. Ours never equivo- cates; we know its answer beforehand, for the pub- lic mind is compounded of prejudices, fears, herd instincts, youthful hatred of novelty, all easily calculable. It has been my duty for many years to tell what public opinion is on many subjects. My method, more or less unconscious, has been to say to myself, "The public is made up largely of the unthinking. Such and such misinformation has been presented to it. Such and such prejudices and fears have been aroused. Its answer is invariably negative. The result is so and so." It is thus that judges of public opinion invariably proceed. They do not find the popular will reflected in the newspapers. They know it as a chemist knows a reaction, from familiarity with the elements combined. At least such a mind is highly convenient. And after all who does make the best censor, or nonsenseor or whatever you choose to call it? Was it not written, "The child is censor to the man?" Well, if it was not it ought to have been, and it is now. Consider the child as it arrives in the family. 174 NONSENSEORSHIP Forthwith there is not merely the One Subject which may never be mentioned. There are a hund- red subjects. A guard is upon the lips. The little ears must be kept pure. Now, when we set up the establishment of democracy we did take a child into our household. I have discussed elsewhere* the parentage of this infant born of Rousseau and Therese, his moron mistress. The public mind is a child mind because in the first place the mob mind of men is primitive, youthful and undeveloped, and again because by the wide diffusion of primary instruction, we have steadily increased the number of persons with less than adult mentality who contribute to the forming of public opinion. In the nature of the case, fifty per cent, of the public must be sub-normal, that is, youthful mentality. We have reached down to the level of nonsense for our guide. That is why we call it in this book the nonsenseorship. Every one who has watched the growth of a child's vocabulary has observed that it learns to say "no," many months, perhaps more than a year, be- fore it ever says "yes." An infant which took to saying "yes" before it did "no" would violate all precedents, would scandalize its parents, and would grow up to be a revolutionist. It would have an * Chapter V. Behind the Mirrors. 175 NONSENSEORSHIP attitude toward life with which men should not be born and which parents and society would find sub- versive. On the instinct for saying "no" rests all our institutions, from the family to the state. It should exhibit itself early and become a confirmed habit before the dangerous "y es " emerges. Besides, the child needs to say "no" long before it needs to say "yes." Foolish parents feed ifmen- tally as they feed it physically, out of a bottle. If it had not its automatic facility of regurgitation, both mental and physical, it would suffer from ex- cesses. Its "no" is its mental throwing up. The public mind is still in the no-saying, the men- tal regurgitative stage. But is not that ideal for the nonsenseorship ? Does a censor ever have need of any other word but "no"? I have now established the convenience of an oracle whose answer "no" can always be foreseen; and the fitness of the child mind for saying "no," as well as the perfect adaptation of the single word vocabulary to the purposes of the nonsenseorship. One of the important ends which a "no" always serves is maintaining the status quo. We all cling precariously to a whirling planet. We hate change for fear of somehow being spilled off into space. The nonsenseorship of the child mind is splendidly conservative. The baby in the habit of receiving 176 NONSENSEORSHIP its bottle from its nurse will go hungry rather than take it from its mother or father. Gilbert was wrong. Every child is not born a little radical or a little conservative. Reaching down for the child mind in society, with some misgivings, we have been delighted to find it the strongest force making for stability. An amusing thing happened when Mr. Hearst some years ago sought readers in a lower level of intelli- gence than any journalist had till then explored. To interest the child mind he employed the old de- vice of pictures, his favorite illustration portraying the Plunderbund. Now, persons who thought the cartoon of the Plunderbund looked like themselves, viewed the experiment with alarm. But Mr. Hearst was right. He proved to be as he said he was, "our greatest conservative force." The surest guardians of our morals and of our social order are precisely Mr. Hearst's readers, who learned the alphabet spelling out P-L-U-N-D-E-R-B-U-N-D. They watch keenly and with reprobation in Mr. Hearst's press our slightest divagations. De Gourmont, writing of education, asks: "Is it necessary to cultivate at such pains in the minds of the young, hatred of what is new?" And he says it is done only because the teacher naturally hates everything that has come into the world since 177 NONSENSEORSHIP he won his diploma. But no; De Gourmont is mis- taken. It is because we teach the young what it is socially beneficial that they should learn, having re- gard also for their aversion to novelty, to the bottle from any other than the accustomed hands. And we find in the child mind and foster it by education "the will to believe," that great Amer- ican virtue. It requires an immense "will to be- lieve" to grow up in the family and in society, look- ing at the elders and at all that is established, and accepting all the information that mankind has slowly accumulated and which teachers patiently offer. If the young once doubted, once thought but unfortunately they do not! Anyway, we do find in the child mind, which forms the nonsenseor- ship, the "will to believe," of immense social utility. Now, the "will to believe" like teeth which de- cay if not used upon hard food, or muscles which grow flabby if they have not hard work to perform must be given something for its proper exercise. In a chapter on "The Duty of Lying," in his brilliant book Disenchantment,, Mr. C. E. Mon- tague shows what may be done with "the will to believe," developed as it has at last been. "During the war the art of Propaganda was little more than born." In the next war, "the whole sky would be 178 NONSENSEORSHIP darkened with flights of tactical lies, so dense that the enemy would fight in a veritable 'fog of war' darker than London's own November brews, and the world would feel that not only the Angel of Death was abroad, but the Angel of Delusion too, and would hear the beating of two pairs of wings." And what may be done with the "will to believe" in time of war has immense lessons for the days of peace. A British Tommy, quoted by Mr. Monta- gue, summed the moral advantages up : "They tell me we've pulled through at last all right because our propergander dished up better lies than what the Germans did. So I say to myself: 'If tellin' lies is all that bloody good in war, what bloody good is tellin' truth in peace?' " What "bloody good" is it, when you have ready to hand the well-trained "will to believe," which those who censored reason for its social disutility set up as the most serviceable attribute of the human mind? I think I have written enough to prove that the child mind at the bottom of nonsenseorship is the effective base of stability. But the heart of man desires also permanency. Is there reasonable as- surance that we shall always be able to keep the guiding principles of our national life, the non- senseorship, a child mind? It is true that we have reached as far down, 179 NONSENSEORSHIP through our press and through our public men, to the levels of the low I. Q. as it is practicable to go, until we grant actual children and not merely men- tal children an even larger share than they now have in the forming of public opinion ; for this is, as you know, "the age of the child." And no great further advance is likely to be made in the mechanical means of uniting the whole 100,000,000 people of this country in a 24-hour a day, 365 days a year, mass meeting. The cheap newspaper, the moving picture, instant telegraphic bulletin going everywhere, the broadcasting wire- less telephone, and the Ford car, have accomplished all that can be hoped toward giving the widely- scattered population the responsiveness of a mob. But though perhaps we may never lower the I. Q. of the nonsenseorship, no further triumphs being possible in that direction, there is no reason why education, what we call "creating an en- lightened public opinion," should not always main- tain for us the child mind as it now is with all its manifold advantages. Somewhere in Bartlett there is, or ought to be, a quotation which reads like this: "The god who always finds us young and always keeps us so." That is education; it always finds us young and always keeps us so. 180 NONSENSEORSHIP It catches us when our minds are merely acquisi- tive, storing up impressions and information; and it prolongs that period of acquisition to maturity by always throwing facts in our way. Its purpose is not to "sow doubts," far from it, for that would have for its ideal mere intelligence and not social usefulness. It develops instead the "will to be- lieve," and this serves the needs of the propagan- dists, who, as Mr. Will H. Hayes is reported to have said of the movies, "shake the rattle which keeps the American child amused so that it forgets its aches and pains." We may safely trust edu- cation to keep the American mind infantile, merely acquisitive and not critical. And thus the non- senseorship seems sure to be perpetuated, and we reach the ideal of all the ages, society in its perma- nent and final form. Here we are, here we may rest. These considerations persuade me at least that we should make the utmost sacrifices for so perfect a social means as we now have. Let the non- senseorship invade the secret closets of our personality and rummage out our most cherished suppressed desires. Let us have nothing that we may call our own. For my part, I shall spend the proceeds qf this article upon one of the new social police, a psycho-analyst. 181 My Northern Exposure The Kawa at the Pole By Walter E. Traprock Similar in format to the famous Cruise of the Kaioa, this new volume carries the reader on an exciting and riotously funny expedition to the frozen north. It is an account of the ad- ventures of the redoubtable Dr. Traprock (and party) who set out to discover the real North Pole but undertake their voyage in a most unusual manner. The incidents, accidents and final discoveries in this merry burlesque are certain to afford as much, if, indeed, not more enjoyment than the first Kawa story. Fully illustrated from strikingly original photographs. G. P. Putnam's Sons New York London ROLLO IN SOCIETY By George S. Ghappell An up-to-date adaptation of the Rollo Books, so famous in the fifties and thereafter. Gorgeously funny and worthwhile satire, too this book is a hilarious commentary on modern society. Illustrated with 18 drawings by Hogarth, Jr. G. P. Putnam's Sons New York London There never was a book before quite like the "Queen of Sheba." It possesses the interest of authentic history, the lure of romance, the charm of masterful style. And yet the delighted reader soon enough realizes that it is neither history, romance, nor literary biography, but in- stead subtle satire. It is the story, of course, of Balkis, Queen of Sheba. It is written by one blessed with the ability to write sup- plemented with an overwhelming sense of humor an author, who, for the present, has adopted the nom de plume of Phinneas A. Crutch. Some of the diary of Balkis will be happily familiar, in a distorted fashion, to the readers of Mar got. Much of the biography is not, to say the least, unreminiscent of Strachey. And then the so-nearly-authentic tale merges into sea-going burlesque of "The Sheik." Satirical, chuckling, notable literary humor, all of it. An unusual cover from a bas-relief. In addition to half-tone illustrations, line drawings by John Held, Jr., decorate every page. $2.50. G. P. Putnam's Sons 2 West 45th St., New York City DEC* HOME USE CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT MAIN LIBRARY This book is due on the last date stamped below. 1 -month loans may be renewed by calling 642-3405. 6-month loans may be recharged by bringing books to Circulation Desk. Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior to due date. 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