Terry Teachout

The Philadelphia Society 40^th 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 indivisible….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, wittily…and 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!…the 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 naïve, Chambers too temperamentally pessimistic. But each of them got more than enough things right to still be worth reading, and remembering.