Teachout – 2004 National Meeting
Terry
Teachout
The Philadelphia Society 40th Gala! National Meeting
May 1, 2004
Let me begin
by thanking you for your forbearance in allowing me to speak through a
mouthpiece—one who is both a colleague and a friend.
I’m
especially sorry not to be with you today because of the exceptional nature of
this morning’s session. It’s not every day—to put it mildly—that a group
gathers together to discuss G.K. Chesterton and
H.L. Mencken and Whittaker Chambers,
three very great journalists who at first glance don’t seem to have much else
in common. Nor, so far as I know, is there anyone else in the world who has
brought out books about any two of these men, much less all three of them. For
it so happens that my very first book,
which I edited in 1989, was Ghosts on the
Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers. Since that time I’ve also
published a biography of Mencken and edited an anthology of his
journalism. About Chesterton I can claim no such distinction, save for being a
charter subscriber to the uniform edition of his complete works, but I’ve written
about him on more than one occasion, which probably puts me well ahead of most
Mencken buffs!
Some paths just don’t cross. When I
first went to work in New York back in 1985, I knew people who had known
Whittaker Chambers and people who knew Alger Hiss, and never, ever did the twain
once meet. In fact, Hiss used to drop by the offices of
Harper’s Magazine once in a while—that was where I had my first
job in Manhattan—and I remember having a half-serious discussion with some of
my friends at National Review about
what I should do if I were ever unlucky enough to be introduced to him. I think
we agreed that the best thing to do would be to kick him in the shins. Instead,
I edited
Ghosts on the Roof, and no sooner was it published than the Berlin
Wall fell. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
So far as I know, H.L. Mencken never
met Chambers or Chesterton, and to the
best of my knowledge he never wrote about Chambers, though I have no doubt that
he would have disliked him on sight. In Mencken’s book, Chambers had
two-and-a-half strikes against him going in. He was a Communist who became a
very public ex-Communist, and he was, even worse, a religious convert. In 1927,
Mencken wrote, “Next to a missionary, a convert is the most abhorrent shape I
can imagine. I dislike persons who change their basic ideas, and I dislike them
when they change them for good reasons quite as much as when they change them
for bad ones. A convert to a good idea is simply a man who confesses that he was
formerly an ass—and is probably one still.”
Three years later, Mencken was invited
to contribute his personal credo to a symposium whose other participants
included Albert Einstein, John Dewey, H.G.
Wells, and Bertrand Russell. Being a journalist and thus accustomed to writing
short, he got the whole of it into these three crisp sentences: “I
believe that it is better to tell the truth
than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free
than to be a slave. And I believe that
it is better to know than to be ignorant.” That is a credo without shadows or
second thoughts. It is also, though Mencken didn’t make a point of saying so
on this particular occasion, the credo of a rationalist—and, not to put too
fine a point on it, a village atheist.
Whittaker Chambers, by contrast, was
the truest of true believers. “Political freedom, as the Western world has
known it, is only a political reading of the Bible,” he wrote in
Witness. “Religion and freedom are indivisibleÖ.Economics is not
the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be
solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age.”
Now, it isn’t hard to imagine the
horse laugh H.L. Mencken would have emitted had those words been addressed to
him. Such talk was anathema to laissez-faire individualists like Mencken, who
were far more concerned with the rise of centralized government in America than
the overall spiritual condition of the West—and who for the same reason were
in turn anathema to Chambers, as his published letters make surpassingly clear.
In any case, the twain never met. After
breaking with the Communist Party, Chambers labored anonymously in the vineyards
of Time magazine until August of 1948,
when he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Under other circumstances, Mencken would doubtless have had something
sharp to say about Chambers’ testimony, but in November of that year, he
suffered a stroke that deprived him of the power to read and write and brought
his career to a full stop. If he had any opinion of the Hiss case, it went
unrecorded.
Mencken and Chesterton,
on the other hand, had quite a bit to say about one another, a fact of which
surprisingly few people are aware—unless they’re fortunate enough to have
read my Mencken biography! Again, they never met, but they wrote about one
another on many occasions. Mencken even reviewed Chesterton’s
Orthodoxy in The Smart Set
in 1908, wittilyÖand predictably. “Disillusion,” he wrote, “is like
quinine. Its taste is abominable—but it cures. Not even Chesterton, with all
his skill at writing, and with all his general cleverness—and he is the
cleverest man, I believe, in the world today, though also one of the most
ignorant—can turn that truth into anything else.”
About Mencken
as about so many other subjects, Chesterton was considerably less predictable.
In 1930, he wrote, “I have so warm an admiration for Mr. Mencken as the critic
of Puritan pride and stupidity that I regret that he should try to make himself
out a back number out of mere irreligious irritation.” Isn’t that
interesting? Of all the things G.K. Chesterton might
have said about H.L. Mencken, it’s fascinating—and revealing—that he
actually chose to praise the legendary
scourge of American religion for his opposition to the spiritual narrowness of
American puritanism. “Puritan pride and stupidity.” When I first ran across
those words, I knew they’d have to go into The
Skeptic, because they tell us something important about
both men. I can’t imagine that Whittaker Chambers, the deep-dyed
pessimist who embraced Quakerism and wore black wherever he went, would ever
have praised Mencken for much of
anything, least of all his opposition to Puritanism.
I wish I could close the circle neatly
at this point, but Chambers mentions G.K. Chesterton only in passing in Ghosts
on the Roof, making reference to the way in which he “needled capitalism
and the middle class with wit and paradox.” I’ve no idea whether he read
Chesterton at all closely, though I doubt it. His literary tastes ran in very
different directions. But to read Chambers’ own
writings is to recognize that he and Chesterton were in certain ways kindred
spirits.
I edited Ghosts
on the Roof because I wanted to read a number of pieces by Chambers I’d
only read about. And of them, the one
about which I was most curious was the essay he wrote for
Life magazine in 1948 called “The Devil.” Except for Witness,
and a few of those amazing letters, I’m not sure he ever wrote anything
better, because the subject of the Devil was closer to his heart than any other.
He’d known temptation, every kind of temptation that came to mankind under the
aspect of modernity, and he’d succumbed to it, over and over again. He
betrayed his country. He betrayed his wife. He betrayed the God in Whom he long
feared to believe. And so when he came to write about the Devil, he knew what he
was talking about, and then some.
Do you remember that essay? It’s a
little short story, set in a New York nightclub on New Year’s Eve. A pessimist
is sitting in a corner, trying not to look too out of things, when a massive and
immaculate gentleman with a rich Miami tan sits down next to him, introduces
himself, and strikes up a conversation. No horns, no tail, no cloven feet. He
quotes Baudelaire: “The Devil’s cleverest wile is to make men believe that
he does not exist.” And then he offers proof that he does:
Behold
the world! Behold my handiwork!Öthe growth of factories to supply the huge
demand for material goods which were the only values secular man could really
feel; the growth of cities and slums, the corruption by the cities of the
countryside which in other times had been the reservoir from which exhausted
cultures replenished their faith and forces; the inhuman industrial oppression
of men, women and children whose desperation found expression in the inhuman
horrors of communism, socialism and anarchism; the debasement of all standards
of conduct and taste as God was forgotten and with Him the only absolute
standard; finally, the world wars with millions of men dying by all the horrors
contrived by secular genius. Consider for a moment the miracle of the flame
thrower; or the spectacle of a government physically destroying millions of the
people in whose interests it was created to govern. Do you doubt my triumph when
you stop to think that the mind of man conceived the concentration camps?
Well. That may be the Devil speaking,
but if you know anything about G.K. Chesterton, a man who in his own way was
equally fascinated by diabolism and the Devil, you’ll know
he would have had no difficulty in endorsing those words, which were
published 12 years after his death. As different as they may have been in
temperament, Chesterton and Chambers clearly saw the world in much the same
way—an essentially religious way—and their common view of politics, unlike
that of H.L. Mencken, was no less essentially religious in its orientation.
Yet here we are, talking about
Chesterton, Chambers, and Mencken as
if they were three peas in a conservative pod, a description all three men would
have violently rejected, just as none of them would ever have accepted the label
“conservative.” And the funny thing is that to most all of us, it still
makes sense, albeit of a rough-and-ready kind, to claim all of them as men of
the Right.
Why is this so? Because for most of its
history to date, the American conservative movement has been far more inclusive
than its enemies would ever care to admit. Inclusive by design, I might add: the
intellectuals who clustered around Bill Buckley in the Fifties were anything but
all of a piece, and yet Bill thought it of the very first importance that they
should all feel at home under his big
ideological tent.
National
Review conservatism, as I need not remind any
of you, understood itself from the start as a fusion
of disparate elements, not so much an ideology as a movement held together by
consensus on a fairly small list of indispensable essentials. Of course it had
no room for bonafide extremists: Bill read Ayn Rand and the
privatize-the-lighthouses libertarians out of the movement as decisively as he
did Robert Welch and the Eisenhower-was-a-commie Birchers. But those who wished
to enter the tent were for the most part welcome there, so long as they had the
right enemies and opposed the wrong things. And—for the most
part—Chesterton, Mencken, and Chambers all filled the bill. Which is why it
makes sense for us to spend a morning talking about three men who probably
wouldn’t have liked each other very much had they ever met face to face.
That spirit of consensus governed
American conservatism for more than three decades. It helped to put Ronald
Reagan into the White House. And though it’s shown unmistakable signs of
splintering ever since the Berlin Wall fell and deprived us of our common enemy,
I confess to being more than a bit surprised that the conservative movement has
held together as well as it has since then.
Which is not to say I’m sure it will
be holding together that well ten years from now. That, I think, depends on the
degree to which liberalism retains its hold on the levers of cultural influence
in America, and perhaps as well on the degree to which what remains of the West
comes to see radical Islam as a full-fledged threat to Western civilization.
American conservatism is a movement,
not an ideology, and in the absence of such powerfully unifying exterior
threats, I can’t imagine that the centrifugal force of our underlying
differences won’t eventually split us apart. Ultimately, it’s impossible to
reconcile the proto-libertarianism of H.L. Mencken, the Catholic distributism of
G.K. Chesterton, and the chastened modernism of Whittaker Chambers. They simply
don’t add up. That circle can’t be squared—not if philosophical
consistency is your ultimate value.
But in what journalists have taken to
calling a “50/50 nation,” one in which Red and Blue Americans stare
suspiciously at one another across a cultural abyss, it may well be that the
politics of conservative consensus still has a few good years ahead of it, and
maybe even more than a few. For in such a world, the children of Mencken,
Chesterton, and Chambers really do
have enough in common to keep on breaking bread together.
That, at any rate, is why
I find it possible to read the writings of all three men with profit
and enjoyment—and frequent disagreement. I don’t think any
of them was right about everything. Mencken was too narrowly rationalist,
Chesterton too economically naÔve, Chambers too temperamentally pessimistic.
But each of them got more than enough things right to still be worth reading,
and remembering.