Thorstein's Endless Train of Thought: Where's the Caboose?
The Baltimore newspaperman and literary critic, Henry Louis Mencken, once took on the unenviable job of critiquing the thinking and writing of Thorstein Veblen apparently in an effort to disabuse all concerned of any notion that there was a scintilla of originality to be found therein. Whether or not one agrees with Mencken's assessment, one cannot come away from this piece without being at least slightly amused.
Professor Veblen
by H.L. Mencken
From Prejudices: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp.
59-83. An expansion of Prof. Veblen and the Cow, which appeared in the Smart
Set for May, 1919, pp. 138-44, and made a considerable pother. The events
dealt with in this essay seem far away today, and perhaps a bit incredible,
but they deserve to be recalled, for another and even more preposterous
Veblen may be on us tomorrow. On the advent of the New Deal in 1933 some
of the wizards at Washington tried to revive him, but this time he did not
take and was soon forgotten again. I never met him, but years after 1919
I heard from some of his friends that my onslaught had greatly upset him,
and, in fact, made him despair of the Republic. He died in 1929
BACK in the year 1909, being engaged in a bombastic discussion with what
was then known as an intellectual Socialist (like the rest of the intelligentsia,
he succumbed to the first fife-corps of World War I, pulled down the red
flag, damned Marx as a German spy, and began whooping for Woodrow Wilson
and Otto Kahn), I was greatly belabored and incommoded by his long quotations
from a certain Prof. Thorstein Veblen, then quite unknown to me. My antagonist
manifestly attached a great deal of importance to these borrowed sagacities,
for he often heaved them at me in lengths of a column or two, and urged
me to read every word of them. I tried hard enough, but found it impossible
going. The more I read them, in fact, the less I could make of them, and
so in the end, growing impatient and impolite, I denounced this Prof. Veblen
as a geyser of pishposh, refused to waste any more time upon his incomprehen-
266 | A Mencken CHRESTOMATHY | 266 |
sible syllogisms, and applied myself to the other Socialist witnesses in
the case, seeking to set fire to their shirts.
That old debate, which took place by mail (for the Socialist lived in levantine
luxury on his country estate and I was a wage-slave attached to a city newspaper),
was afterward embalmed in a dull book, and got the mild notice of a day.
The book, by name, "Men vs. the Man,''1 is now as completely forgotten
as Baxter's "Saint's Rest" or the Constitution of the United States.
I myself am perhaps the only man who remembers it at all, and the only thing
I can recall of my opponent's argument (beyond the fact that it not only
failed to convert me to Marxism, but left me a bitter and incurable scoffer
at democracy in all its forms) is his curious respect for the aforesaid
Veblen, and his delight in the learned gentleman's long, tortuous and (to
me, at least) intolerably flapdoodlish phrases.
There was, indeed, a time when I forgot even thiswhen my mind was empty
of the professor's very name. That was, say, from 1909 or thereabout to
the middle of 1917. During those years, having lost all my former interest
in Socialism, even as a species of insanity, I ceased to read its literature,
and thus lost track of its Great Thinkers. The periodicals that I then gave
an eye to, setting aside newspapers, were chiefly the familiar American
imitations of the English weeklies of opinion, and in these the dominant
Great Thinker was, first, the late Dr. William James, and, after his decease
in 1910, Dr. John Dewey. The reign of James, as the illuminated will recall,
was long and glorious. For three or four years running he was mentioned
in every one of those American Spectators and Saturday Reviews
at least once a week, and often a dozen times. Among the less somber gazettes
of the republic, to be sure, there were other heroes: Maeterlinck, Rabindranath
Tagore, Judge Ben B. Lindsey, and so on, and still further down the literary
and intellectual scale there were yet others Hall Caine, Brieux and Jack
Johnson among them, with paper-bag cookery and the twilight sleep to dispute
their popularity. But on the majestic level of the pre-Villard Nation,
among the white and lavender peaks of professorial ratiocination, there
was scarcely a serious rival to James. Now and then, perhaps, Jane Addams
had a month of vogue, 1 New York, 1910. The Socialist was Robert Rives La
Monte.
267 | XIV. American Immortals | 267 |
and during one Winter there was a rage for Bergson, but taking one day with
another James held his own against the field.
His ideas, immediately they were stated, became the ideas of every pedagogue
from Harvard to Leland Stanford, and the pedagogues rammed them into the
skulls of the lesser cerebelli. When he died his ghost went marching on:
it took three or four years to interpret and pigeon-hole his philosophical
remains and to take down and redact his messages (via Sir Oliver Lodge,
Little Brighteyes, Wah-Wah the Indian Chief, and other gifted psychics)
from the spirit world. But then, gradually, he achieved the ultimate, stupendous
and irrevocable act of death, and there was a vacancy. To it Prof. Dr. Dewey
was elected by the acclamation of all right-thinking and forward-looking
men. He was an expert in pedagogics, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, logic,
politics, pedagogical metaphysics, metaphysical psychology, psychological
ethics, ethical logic, logical politics and political pedagogics. He was
artium magister, philosophiae doctor and twice legum doctor.
He had written a book called "How to Think." He sat in a professor's
chair and caned sophomores for blowing spit-balls. Ergo, he was the
ideal candidate, and so he was nominated, elected and inaugurated, and for
three years, more or less, he enjoyed a glorious reign in the groves of
sapience, and the inferior umbilicarii venerated him as they had
once venerated James.
I myself greatly enjoyed and profited by the discourses of this Prof. Dewey
and was in hopes that he would last. Born of indestructible Vermont stock
and a man of the highest bearable sobriety, he seemed likely to peg along
almost ad infinitum, a gentle and charming volcano of correct thought.
But it was not, alas, to be. Under cover of pragmatism, the serpent's metaphysic
that James had left behind him, there was unrest beneath the surface. Young
professors in remote and obscure universities, apparently as harmless as
so many convicts in the death-house, were secretly flirting with new and
red-hot ideas. Whole squads of them yielded in stealthy privacy to rebellious
and often incomprehensible yearnings. Now and then, as if to reveal what
was brewing, a hellmouth blazed and a Dr. Scott Nearing went sky-hooting
through its smoke. One heard whispers of strange heresieseconomic, sociological,
even political. Gossip had it
268 | A Mencken CHRESTOMATHY | 268 |
that pedagogy was hatching vipers, nay, was already brought to bed. But
not much of this got into the home-made Saturday Reviews and Athenaeumsa
hint or two maybe, but no more. In the main they kept to their old resolute
demands for a pure civil-service, the budget system in Congress, the abolition
of hazing at the Naval Academy, an honest primary, and justice to the Filipinos,
with extermination of the Prussian monster added after August, 1914. And
Dr. Dewey, on his remote Socratic Alp, pursued the calm reenforcement of
the philosophical principles underlying these and all other lofty and indignant
causes.
Then, of a sudden, Siss! Boom! Ah! Then, overnight, the upspringing of intellectual
soviets, the headlong assault upon all the old axioms of pedagogical speculation,
the nihilistic dethronement of Prof. Deweyand rah, rah, rah for Prof. Dr.
Thorstein Veblen! Veblen? Could it be? Aye, it was! My old acquaintance!
The doctor obscurus of my half-forgotten bout with the so-called
intellectual Socialist! The Great Thinker redivivus! Here, indeed, he was
again, and in a few months almost it seemed a few dayshe was all over
the Nation, the Dial, the New Republic and the rest
of them, his books and pamphlets began to pour from the presses, the newspapers
reported his every wink and whisper, and everybody who was anybody began
gabbling about him. The spectacle, I do not hesitate to say, somewhat disconcerted
me and even distressed me. On the one hand, I was sorry to see so learned
and interesting a man as Dr. Dewey sent back to the insufferable dungeons
of Columbia, there to lecture in imperfect Yiddish to classes of Grand Street
Platos. And on the other hand, I shrunk supinely from the appalling job,
newly rearing itself before me, of rereading the whole canon of the singularly
laborious and muggy, the incomparably tangled and unintelligible works of
Prof. Veblen.
But if a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies,
and so I managed to get through the whole infernal job. I read "The
Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899), I read "The Theory of Business
Enterprise" (1904), and then I read "The Instinct of Workmanship"
(1914). A hiatus followed; I was racked by a severe neuralgia, with delusions
of persecution. On recovering I tackled "Imperial Germany and the
269 | XIV. American Immortals | 269 |
Industrial Revolution" (1915). Marasmus for a month, and then "The
Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation" (1917). What ensued
was never diagnosed; probably it was some low infection of the mesentery
or spleen. When it passed off, leaving only an asthmatic cough, I read "The
Higher Learning in America" (1918), and then went to Mt. Clemens to
drink the Glauber's salts. Eureka! the business was done! It had strained
me, but now it was over. Alas, a good part of the agony had been needless.
What I found myself aware of, coming to the end, was that practically the
whole system of Prof. Veblen was in his first book and his lastthat is,
in "The Theory of the Leisure Class," and "The Higher Learning
in America." 2 I pass on the news to literary archeologists. Read these
two, and you won't have to read the others. And if even two daunt you, then
read the first. Once through it, though you will have missed many a pearl
and many a pain, you will have an excellent grasp of the gifted metaphysician's
ideas.
For those ideas, in the main, were quite simple, and often anything but
revolutionary in essence. What was genuinely remarkable about them was not
their novelty, or their complexity, nor even the fact that a professor should
harbor them; it was the astoundingly grandiose and rococo manner of their
statement, the almost unbelievable tediousness and flatulence of the gifted
headmaster's prose, his unprecedented talent for saying nothing in an august
and heroic manner. There are tales of an actress of the last generation,
probably Sarah Bernhardt, who could put pathos and even terror into a recitation
of the multiplication table. Something of the same talent, raised to a high
power, was in this Prof. Veblen. If one tunneled under his great moraines
and stalagmites of words, dug down into his vast kitchen-midden of discordant
and raucous polysyllables, blew up the hard, thick shell of his almost theological
manner, what one found in his discourse was chiefly a mass of platitudesthe
self-evident made horrifying, the obvious in terms of the staggering.
Marx, I daresay, had said a good deal of it long before him, and what Marx
overlooked had been said over and over again by his heirs and assigns. But
Marx, at this business, labored
2 He wrote four books between The Higher
Learning and his death in, but they were only reboilings of old bones, and
attracted no notice.
270 | A Mencken CHRESTOMATHY | 270 |
under a technical handicap; he wrote in German, a language he actually understood.
Prof. Veblen submitted himself to no such disadvantage. Though born, I believe,
in These States, and resident here all his life, he achieved the effect,
perhaps without employing the means, of thinking in some unearthly foreign
languagesay Swahili, Sumerian or Old Bulgarianand then painfully clawing
his thoughts into a copious but uncertain and book-learned English. The
result was a style that affected the higher cerebral centers like a constant
roll of subway expresses. The second result was a sort of bewildered numbness
of the senses, as before some fabulous and unearthly marvel. And the third
result, if I make no mistake, was the celebrity of the professor as a Great
Thinker. In brief, he stated his hollow nothings in such high, astounding
terms that inevitably arrested and blistered the right-thinking mind. He
made them mysterious. He made them shocking. He made them portentous. And
so, flinging them at naive and believing souls, he made them stick and burn.
Consider this specimenthe first paragraph of Chapter XIII of "The
Theory of the Leisure Class":
In an increasing proportion as time goes on, the anthropomorphic cult, with
its code of devout observances, suffers a progressive disintegration through
the stress of economic exigencies and the decay of the system of status.
As this disintegration proceeds, there come to be associated and blended
with the devout attitude certain other motives and impulses that are not
always of an anthropomorphic origin, nor traceable to the habit of personal
subservience. Not all of these subsidiary impulses that blend with the bait
of devoutness in the later devotional life are altogether congruous with
the devout attitude or with the anthropomorphic apprehension of sequence
of phenomena. Their origin being not the same, their action upon the scheme
of devout life is also not in the same direction. In many ways they traverse
the underlying norm of subservience or vicarious life to which the code
of devout observances and the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal institutions
are to be traced as their substantial basis. Through the presence of these
alien mo-
XIV. American Immortals
tives the social and industrial regime of status gradually disintegrates,
and the canon of personal subservience loses the support derived from an
unbroken tradition. Extraneous habits and proclivities encroach upon the
field of action occupied by this canon, and it presently comes about that
the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal structures are partially converted to
other uses, in some measure alien to the purpose of the scheme of devout
life as it stood in the days of the most vigorous and characteristic development of the priesthood.
Well, what have we here? What does this appalling salvo of rhetorical artillery
signify? What was the sweating professor trying to say? Simply that in the
course of time the worship of God is commonly corrupted by other enterprises,
and that the church, ceasing to be a mere temple of adoration, becomes the
headquarters of these other enterprises. More simply still, that men sometimes
vary serving God by serving other men, which means, of course, serving themselves.
This bald platitude, which must be obvious to any child who has ever been
to a church bazaar, was here tortured, worried and run through rollers until
it spread out to 241 words, of which fully 200 were unnecessary. The next
paragraph was even worse. In it the master undertook to explain in his peculiar
dialect the meaning of "that non-reverent sense of aesthetic congruity
with the environment which is left as a residue of the latter-day act of
worship after elimination of its anthropomorphic content." Just what
did he mean by this "non-reverent sense of aesthetic congruity"?
I studied the whole paragraph for three days, halting only for prayer and
sleep, and I came to certain conclusions. What I concluded was this: he
was trying to say that many people go to church, not because they are afraid
of the devil but because they enjoy the music, and like to look at the stained
glass, the potted lilies and the rev. pastor. To get this profound and highly
original observation upon paper, he wasted, not merely 241, but more than
300 words. To say what might have been said on a postage stamp he took more
than a page in his book.
And so it went, alas, alas, in all his other volumesa cent's worth of information
wrapped in a bale of polysyllables. In
272 | A Mencken CHRESTOMATHY | 272 |
"The Higher Learning in America" the thing perhaps reached its
damndest and worst. It was as if the practise of that incredibly obscure
and malodorous style were a relentless disease, a sort of progressive intellectual
diabetes, a leprosy of the horse sense. Words were flung upon words until
all recollection that there must be a meaning in them, a ground and excuse
for them, were lost. One wandered in a labyrinth of nouns, adjectives, verbs,
pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and participles, most of them
swollen and nearly all of them unable to walk. It was, and is, impossible
to imagine worse English, within the limits of intelligible grammar. It
was clumsy, affected, opaque, bombastic, windy, empty. It was without grace
or distinction and it was often without the most elementary order. The professor
got himself enmeshed in his gnarled sentences like a bull trapped by barbed
wire, and his efforts to extricate himself were quite as furious and quite
as spectacular. He heaved, he leaped, he writhed; at times he seemed to
be at the point of yelling for the police. It was a picture to bemuse the
vulgar and to give the judicious grief.
Worse, there was nothing at the bottom of all this strident wind-musicthe
ideas it was designed to set forth were, in the overwhelming main, poor
ideas, and often they were ideas that were almost idiotic. The concepts
underlying, say, "The Theory of the Leisure Class" were simply
Socialism and well water; the concepts underlying "The Higher Learning
in America" were so childishly obvious that even the poor drudges who
wrote editorials for newspapers often voiced them, and when, now and then,
the professor tired of this emission of stale bosh and attempted flights
of a more original character, he straightway came tumbling down into absurdity.
What the reader then had to struggle with was not only intolerably bad writing,
but also loose, flabby, cocksure and preposterous thinking.... Again I take
refuge in an example. It is from Chapter IV of "The Theory of the Leisure
Class." The problem before the author here had to do with the social
convention which, in pre-Prohibition 1899, frowned upon the consumption
of alcohol by women at least to the extent to which men might consume it
decorously. Well, then, what was his explanation of this convention? Here,
in brief, was his process of reasoning:
273 | XIV. American Immortals | 273 |
1. The leisure class, which is the predatory class of feudal times, reserves
all luxuries for itself, and disapproves their use by members of the lower
classes, for this use takes away their charm by taking away their exclusive
possession. ~.
2. Women are chattels in the possession of the leisure class, and hence
subject to the rules made for inferiors. "The patriarchal tradition
. . . says that the woman, being a chattel, should consume only what is
necessary to her sustenance, except so far as her further consumption contributes
to the comfort or the good repute of her master."
3. The consumption of alcohol contributes nothing to the comfort or good
repute of the woman's master, but "detracts sensibly from the comfort
or pleasure" of her master. Ergo, she is forbidden to drink.
This, I believe, was a fair specimen of the Veblenian ratiocination. Observe
it well, for it was typical. That is to say, it started off with a gratuitous
and highly dubious assumption, proceeded to an equally dubious deduction,
and then ended with a platitude which begged the whole question. What sount1
reason was there for believing that exclusive possession was the hall-mark
of luxury? There was none that I could see. It might be true of a few luxuries,
but it was certainly not true of the most familiar ones. Did I enjoy a decent
bath because I knew that John Smith could not afford oneor because I delighted
in being clean? Did I admire Beethoven's Fifth Symphony because it was incomprehensible
to Congressmen and Methodists or because I genuinely loved music? Did I
prefer kissing a pretty girl to kissing a charwoman because even a janitor
may kiss a charwomanor because the pretty girl looked better, smelled better
and kissed better?
Confronted by such considerations, it seemed to me that there was little
truth left in Prof. Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous
wastethat what remained of it, after it was practically applied a few times,
was no more than a wraith of balderdash. What could have been plainer than
his failure in the case of the human female? Starting off with a platitude,
he ended in absurdity. No one could deny, I was willing to grant, that in
a clearly limited sense, women oc-
274 | A Mencken CHRESTOMATHY | 274 |
cupied a place in the worldor, more accurately, aspired to a place in the
worldthat had some resemblance to that of a chattel. Marriage, the goal
of their only honest and permanent hopes, invaded their individuality; a
married woman (I was thinking, remember, of 1899) became the function of
another individuality. Thus the appearance she presented to the world was
often the mirror of her husband's egoism. A rich man hung his wife with
expensive clothes and jewels for the same reason, among others, that he
drove an expensive car: to notify everybody that he could afford itin brief,
to excite the envy of Marxians. But he also did it, let us hope, for another
and far more powerful reason, to wit, that he delighted in her, that he
loved herand so wanted to make her gaudy and happy. This reason, to be
sure, was rejected by the Marxians of the time, as it is rejected by those
of ours, but nevertheless, it continued to appeal very forcibly, and so
continues in our own day, to the majority of normal husbands in the nations
of the West. The American husband, in particular, dresses his wife like
a circus horse, not primarily because he wants to display his wealth upon
her person, but because he is a soft and moony fellow and ever ready to
yield to her desires, however preposterous. If any conception of her as
a chattel were actively in him, even unconsciously, he would be a good deal
less her slave. As it is, her vicarious practise of conspicuous waste commonly
reaches such a development that her master himself is forced into renunciationswhich
brought Prof. Dr. Veblen's theory to self-destruction.
His final conclusion was as unsound as his premisses. All it came to was
a plain begging of the question. Why does a man forbid his wife to drink
all the alcohol she can hold? Because, he said, it "detracts sensibly
from his comfort or pleasure." In other words, it detracts from his
comfort and pleasure because it detracts from his comfort and pleasure.
Meanwhile, the real answer is so plain that even a professor should know
it. A man forbids his wife to drink too much because, deep in his secret
archives, he has records of the behavior of other women who drank too much,
and is eager to safeguard his wife's connubial rectitude and his own dignity
against what he knows to be certain invasion. In brief, it is a commonplace
of observation, fa-
275 | XIV. American Immortals | 275 |
miliar to all males beyond the age of twenty-one, that once a woman is drunk
the rest is a mere matter of time and place: the girl is already there.
A husband, viewing this prospect, perhaps shrinks from having his chattel
damaged. But let us be soft enough to think that he may also shrink from
seeing humiliation and bitter regret inflicted upon one who is under his
protection, and one whose dignity and happiness are precious to him, and
one whom he regards with deep and (I surely hope) lasting affection. A man's
grandfather is surely not his chattel, even by the terms of the Veblen theory,
yet I am sure that no sane man would let the old gentleman go beyond a discreet
cocktail or two if a bout of genuine bibbing were certain to be followed
by the complete destruction of his dignity, his chastity and (if a Presbyterian)
his immortal soul.
One more example of the Veblenian logic and I must pass on. On page 135
of "The Theory of the Leisure Class" he turned his garish and
buzzing searchlight upon another problem of the domestic hearth, this time
a double one. First, why do we have lawns around our country houses? Secondly,
why don't we use cows to keep them clipped, instead of employing Italians,
Croatians and blackamoors? The first question was answered by an appeal
to ethnology: we delight in lawns because we are the descendants of "a
pastoral people inhabiting a region with a humid climate"because our
dolicho-blond ancestors had flocks, and thus took a keen professional interest
in grass. (The Marx motif! The economic interpretation of history
in E flat.) But why don't we keep flocks? Why do we renounce cows
and hire Jugo-Slavs? Because "to the average popular apprehension a
herd of cattle so pointedly suggests thrift and usefulness that their presence
. . . would be intolerably cheap." Plowing through a bad book from
end to end, I could find nothing sillier than this. Here, indeed, the whole
"theory of conspicuous waste" was exposed for precisely what it
was: one per cent. platitude and ninety-nine per cent. nonsense. Had the
genial professor, pondering his great problems, ever taken a walk in the
country? And had he, in the course of that walk, ever crossed a pasture
inhabited by a cow (Bos taurus)? And had he, making that crossing,
ever passed astern of the cow herself? And had he, thus passing astern,
ever stepped carelessly, and
∗ ∗ ∗