H.L. Mencken on Congressman

This essay appeared in the book “Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans” By Harold Stearns published in 1922.
This is a particularly scathing criticism of members of the House of Representatives. (just as bad if not worse today) You’ll notice Mencken’s accurate foreboding that the same was to happen to the Senate as “direct elections have not yet done their work”. There is also an excellent explanation of “the process whereby prohibition was foisted upon the nation by constitutional amendment, to the dismay of the solid majority opposed to it and to the surprise of the minority in favour of it.” (Beware those single issue lobbyists)

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Go to the Congressional Directory and investigate the origins and past performances of the present members of the lower house—our typical assemblage of typical politicians, the cornerstone of our whole representative system, the symbol of our democracy. You will find that well over half of them are obscure lawyers, school-teachers, and mortgage-sharks out of almost anonymous towns—men of common traditions, sordid aspirations, and no attainments at all. One and all, the members of this majority—and it is constant, no matter what party is in power—are plastered with the brass ornaments of the more brummagem fraternal orders. One and all, they are devoid of any contact with what passes for culture, even in their remote bailiwicks. One and all their careers are bare of civilizing influences. . . . Such is the American Witenagemot in this 146th year of the Republic. Such are the men who make the laws that all of us must obey, and who carry on our dealings with the world. Go to their debates, and you will discover what equipment they bring to their high business. What they know of sound literature is what one may get out of McGuffey’s Fifth Reader. What they know of political science is the nonsense preached in the chautauquas and on the stump. What they know of history is the childish stuff taught in grammar-schools. What they know of the arts and sciences of all the great body of knowledge that is the chief intellectual baggage of modem man—is absolutely nothing.

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H.L. Mencken