KEEP COOL. Advice of a Philosopher Who Ponders the Eternal Flux of Things.

The following was printed in The Sun (New York) in the September 03, 1914 issue.


KEEP COOL.

Advice of a Philosopher Who Ponders the Eternal Flux of Things.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN-Sir: To those who think in units of fifty thousand years instead of in units of five years, as does the average mind. this European war means absolutely nothing. Life on the planet Earth is an eternally rising and falling wave, and the present international massacre is only a bubble on the top of one of those waves. We attach such great importance to it because we think in terms of our span of life instead of thinking in terms of geological and biological eras.

New redeemers, new dreams, international socialism, international paganism, a new medievalism, a new Renaissance, a new Waterloo, a new Armageddon – that is the future, a procession of yesterdays coming toward us.

Finale: a billion fissures on the face of this dried up sun spark, and then pitch! bang! pouff! we are a million aerolites in the ghastly vortices of space.

So what difference does it make whether the Kaiser strolls down the Champs Elysées or M. Poincaré eats sauerkraut in Berlin?

BENJAMIN DE CASSERES.
NEW YORK, September 2.

10 from “March of Events”

The following 10 essays were from Benjamin DeCasseres syndicated newspaper column that would later be known as the “March of Events,” but went by different names or none at all. We have proofread the text, done basic formatting, and added the dates published. All examples below were transcribed from the Syracuse New York Journal. Eventually, they will be folded into the archives of the website in a more formal way.

Thanks to S.P. and #mybookcult Proofreaders.


Communists and Civil Rights

BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
(December 21, 1934)

THE case of Alexius Karllson, the alien Communist held at Ellis Island for deportation, is full of that ironic mirth which is said to make the gods laugh at all things mortal and which we on earth call the “horselaugh.”

Karllson, whose only use for America is to turn it into a Communistic slave-state, had his lawyer apply for a writ of habeas corpus. He wants to stay in this accursed capitalistic country. He demands the right to go on talking and plotting—neither of which he could do in his own ideological Utopia, Russia, without an early morning trip to the live-target yard.

Federal Judge Goddard denied the writ on the ground that membership in the Communist party was proof of conspiracy to overthrow the government.


Aside from the momentous nature of this decision, the question arises why these enemies of the American form of government are so loath to leave our shores. They exhaust every legal resource of this hateful “bourgeois-capitalistic-ruggedly individualistic” democracy to stay here.

They appeal—with perfectly straight faces—to their “rights” under the constitution—that constitution which they would tear into bits.

They abjectly petition judges and bureau chiefs at Washington to keep them here, where they are, so they claim, being “exploited” and “enslaved”—those very judges and bureau chiefs that they would not only abolish but lift into the air with a gentle bomb or two.

They use, in a word, all the privileges that a free democratic country accords them—free speech, free pen and a free soap-box—TO ADVOCATE THE ABOLITION OF ALL THESE SWEAT-AND-BLOOD-BOUGHT PRIVILEGES.

WE PERMIT these aliens to use our own culture and civilized practices for the purpose of destroying us!


No wonder they want to stay here! Think of the loot!

It is like inviting a man to sit in your office chair so that he can more comfortably shoot you.

The Communists, both of the foreign and home-spawned varieties, are strong for the preservation of American civil liberties when their own liberties are threatened.

But when they come into power, as in Russia, presto!— all civil liberties disappear and the Karllsons line up against a wall anyone who utters those words of hated democratic capitalistic origin, civil liberties.

A political dissenter in Russia when arrested ls hurried before a MILITARY TRIBUNAL. He has no counsel (that is a capitalistic custom). There is not even a trial. There is a “hearing” (the military tribunal HEAR themselves pronounce sentence), and the objector to Communism is hurried up against a wall.

The only writ of habeas corpus is written by the vultures if the fellow is not buried in quicklime.


Sixty-six of these cases in one day In the last communist “purge”!

And Karllson and his Communist plotters yawp about their “rights”!

As a matter of fact, Karllson and his alien cronies know that they are having the time of their lives in free America. They never breathed freely before they came here.

But it is time to check the breathing of these plotters, of all plotters of all patterns—Communists, Nazists and Fascists—and make them understand that this democratic- individualistic republic is still a going concern.

The Communists dish it out (in Russia), but they can’t take it (in the U. S. A.).

THERE SHOULD BE NO CIVIL RIGHTS FOR THOSE WHO DO NOT BELIEVE IN THEM.

The dictatorship of the proletariat means the end of everything that is fundamentally American! Liberty, self-reliance, private property, civil procedure, free speech, free press and even free movement.

It would be the return of ant-civilization. Instead of the free-flying eagle as our emblem a Communist regime would substitute A BUG.


What the Communists here need is a dish of their own cooking. Do unto them as they have done unto the minorities in Russia!

The time for action is NOW. Let democracy destroy Communism. Don’t wait until the Fascist man-on-horseback appears!


Mr. Tugwell

BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
(January 15, 1935)

BEFUDDLEMENT!

No word more precisely describes the mental flounderings of the Sanhedrin of professors who hatch the word-eggs of the “new order” in Washington.

There is nothing courageous, well-defined or creative in the books, pamphlets or the verbose proclamations of these professorial and professional rigmaroleans.

Now and then they flutter around the red flame of Communism. When they feel they are in danger of getting politically scorched, they blithely trip away to the frogpond of near-Socialism.

Here, comfortably squatted, they croak “rugged individualist,” “capitalist” and “Tory” at the self-reliant, aggressive, self-made Americans who pass by.

These horn-rimmed nunkey-donkeys of the New Deal are already immortalized by what they do not know.

Their thoughts hop around pathetically on their flypaper brains.

Their mucilaginous political views prevent their puny ideas from ever taking wing.

Hence they have no historical sense, no knowledge of men at first band, no psychological penetration and no sincere belief of any kind except in the financial rewards of publicity and that their jobs MAY some day be turned into a soft life-commissarship.

Befuddlement!

Of all the hopelessly befuddled minds of the “new order,” Rexford Guy Tugwell, deputy commissar in the department of agriculture, seems to be most muddle-headed.

He is the most perfect type of the yes-and-no man, of the right-wing-left-wing-no-wing man, of the high-diddle- diddle-jump-over-the-fiddle, the phoney-baloney young man.

One has but to read his latest bull on the New Deal, called “The Battle for Democracy,” to see plainly that the grand junta of Brain-Trusters is very like Br’er Rabbit: It come in by the same hole it went out at.

Someone said economics was the deadly dull science. This is sheer nonsense. Nothing is dull to a live, vital brain.

It isn’t economics that is dull. It is the brains of the political-professorial press agents of the New Deal that are atrophied.

Befuddlement!

Listen to Mr. Tugwell:

“What the old order describes as ‘rugged individualism’ meant the regimentation of the many for the benefit of the few.”

ONE OF THESE “FEW” IS REXFORD GUY TUGWELL.

The “old order” and “rugged individualism,” which he despises, built the dozen or so universities from which Mr. Tugwell drank at the bubbling founts of Marx, Engels and the other czars of collectivism.

It was the “old order” and “rugged individualism” that made Possible Mr. Tugwell’s job of deputy commissar of agriculture, with its emoluments and the revenues he derives from his royalty-laden proclamations.

If the “old order” meant, as Mr. Tugwell says, “The regimentation of the many for the benefit of the few,” THEN WHY HAVE THE WORKING CLASSES OF ALL THE WORLD BATTERED AT OUR DOORS FOR ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS? WAS IT TO BE REGIMENTED AND EXPLOITED?

The “old order” and the “rugged individualism” of the American character built the only country in the world WHERE THERE WAS NEITHER COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE NOR REGIMENTED HUMAN BEINGS; WHERE LABOR UNIONS ACHIEVED MORE IN FIFTY YEARS THAN ALL THE LABOR UNIONS OF EUROPE HAD ACHIEVED IN A CENTURY.

“Malefactors of great wealth” and “plutocrat” having become shopworn, the “new order” demagogues have invented the new bugaboo of “rugged individualism” to scare the old ladies of both sexes.

It is “rugged individualism.” physical, mental and political, that is the very core of the character of Mr. Tugwell’s humane chief, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“Rugged individualism” is a mighty, an inspiring phrase that should be hung on every wall in every home and office in America.

The antonym to “rugged individualism” is milksop, weakling, chicken-heart.

Under which banner does Mr. Tugwell prefer to march?


More befuddlement!

“What is demanded of us in America today is the making over of the institutions controlled and operated for the benefit of the few so that, regardless of their control, they shall be operated for the benefit of the many.”

As they do in bled-to-the-bone Russia, where a small bureaucratic Camorra own 170,000,000 people body and soul? Here Mr. Tugwell flutters around the red flame.

I spoke of Mr. Tugwell’s lack of historical sense. I suggest that he throw his abstractions out of the window and read concrete American history.

From the foundation of America, THE MANY HAVE BENEFITTED BECAUSE THE FEW HAVE BENEFITTED.


The working classes of America are literally dragged upward when the few prosper by the inexorable law of supply and demand.

Besides, where have 99 percent of Mr. Tugwell’s “few” come from in America? They have risen because of their RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM and their SUPERIOR COMPETENCE right out of the ranks of the “many.”

And who is to “operate” these “institutions” for the benefit of the many?

Why, of course, Rexford Guy Tugwell and the rest of the vast army of mentally befuddled “new order” crusaders who only wait the signal to doff their masks of “democracy” and turn to the duped “many” the face of Lenin.


Matriarchy?

BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
(March 9, 1935)

A PUBLIC SOOTHSAYER some time ago said that somewhere in our country was now a young man who would be the first Fascist dictator of America.

This loud wish-thought brought to life a Communist soothsayer who predicted that somewhere on the high seas a stowaway was approaching America who would be the first commissar of the United States of Soviet Republics.

Both of there crystal gazers left out the obvious fact that there are just about one hundred and twenty-four millions of Americans left who, when it comes to a showdown, might object to both a native Fascist dictator or a foreign first commissar in the manner of the famous axe which smote the no less famous chicken in the neck.

But a prophecy that has more material ground than either is the statement of Miss Lillian D. Rock, vice president of the National Association of Women Lawyers, that she expected to see a woman as vice president of the United States before another decade, and, later on, a president.


The League for a Woman President and Vice President has already opened permanent headquarters in Brooklyn, and the drive for “recognition” will come next year at both conventions. All male delegates to both national conventions had better go with their wives and mothers.

The male has made such a bad mess of it in Washington in late years that it might pertinently be asked, why shouldn’t the hand that rocks the cradle ALSO help to rock the boat?

As Miss Rock, who is the organizer of this matriarchal movement, so wisely and pertinently says:

“The voice that sang the evening lullaby should play an important role in the legislative halls of the state and Nation.”

This logical connection between the evening excursion to Blanket Bay with the little darling and initiating legislation on taxation, drawing up a declaration of war and refunding the public debt will be instantly apparent even to the dullest masculine brain among the brain trusters at the national capital.


Another striking apothegm of Miss Rock’s is also worth recording:

“The brain that solved the economic problems of the home was certainly keen enough to play a part in politics.”

No mere male can gainsay this. As a matter of fact, the very first duty of a woman president, if she is true to her innate economic instincts, will be to create a secretary of charge accounts.

It must also be recorded, reluctantly and regretfully, that woman has already played “a part in politics”. The fate of a New York magistrate and a New York secretary of state, both evening lullaby singers, must grieve the judicious and even cause some quakings and forebodings among the masculine upholders of the honor of the Republic.

Man is, of course, naturally a scalawag. So we expect of woman better things. However, the several ladies who have sat in Congress have seemed, off the record, somewhat null and void, and certainly our grand old America would not dance with prideful and puffy joy at seeing a Ma Ferguson in the White House.

As a matter of truth, that estimable lady is too good for the job. Too much character is not desirable in high places in democracies. Ma is a dud at carrying water on both shoulders.

On the other hand, a woman president would give us many advantages, especially if she had with her a sound yes-and-yes, lollipop-sucking president consort at her heels.

Reason seems by way of rotting in Washington at the present time. A good dose of female intuition might snap us back into the good old days.

A cabinet of pure intuitionalists, especially a postmaster generaless who flipped out postmasterships on purely subconscious grounds, could decide the heavy problems of state just like THAT. Why waste the people’s time with reason, hindsight and foresight when we can get time-saving intuition F.O.B. and off the hoof?

Women have ruled great nations before. There are the instances of those profound stateswomen and humane lawgivers, Jezebel, Cleopatra, Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth.

Of course, there was Queen Victoria, but that good lady had the misfortune to have been doomed to reign in the Victorian era, so she was really not seen at her best.

With a woman in the White House, many states and legislative bodies would go feminine. This would eventually put man back just where he belongs: He could fight and die for his country, build the airways, finance big business, create the art and literature of a nation, and put up the ironwork on 80-story skyscrapers. Let the beast do the dirty work!

Meanwhile, Mrs. Roosevelt—who knows—says the country is not yet ready for a woman president.

With the highest respect for that sagacious lady’s opinion, I think the country is just about ready for anything short of total extinction.


New American Primer

BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
(March 20, 1935)

The following primer for all naughty Americans could be compiled from a day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month reading of the red, pink and sour-green publications published in the land of the good-natured sucker, the U.S.A.:

To defend fundamental American institutions is now Fascism.

To be wealthy is to have your heel on the neck of the poor.

To war against the enemies of democratic doctrines is to be sold to the “interests.”

To believe in the competitive system stamps you as a Wall Street wolf.

To announce yourself as a rugged individualist means you are getting ready to shoot down pajama-stitchers.

To believe that Jefferson was a greater man than Lenin brands you as a “bourgeois” and a “tory.”


To denounce the crimes of the Cheka and the GPU is treason to the ideal of the brotherhood of man.

To wear an American flag in your lapel means that you advocate calling out the state militia to suppress labor unions.

To believe that the Constitution of the United States is a superior document to “Das Kapital” is proof-positive that you are working your help to the bone.

To merely whisper that Communism should not be taught in state-supported institutions brands you as an enemy of Stalin’s Nutopia.

To believe that alien enemies should be deported to the lands of their birth makes you a paid agent of Adolf Hitler.

To denounce a Russian blood purge means you are not “social-minded.”

To adhere to the capitalistic system of economic development as the best for ALL the people in the long run is prima facie evidence that you are for child-labor, sweatshops and the 24-hour day.

To believe that the state is the servant of the individual links you with the White Guards.

To even suspect that our freedom is not wholly in the keeping of the carmine Civil Liberties Union nails you as a brutal coal-and-iron baron.

To announce that state-aid, as a principal, is an anti-American doctrine, is to put yourself in the class of beetle-browed predatory Cro-Magnons.

To even insinuate that the American boudoir branch of Leninism and the spats-and-monocle phalanx of the New Vision is merely a publicity racket in some vacuous skulls is to be branded as a poor slob of a Victorian who still reads Dumas and Walter Scott.


To believe that America has its own political philosophy and social ideals that have no relation to Marxist fiddle-faddle, diddle-daddle and walla-walla is to line you up with the savage capitalistic seamstress-starvers.

To assert that Communism is worming its way into the army and navy means that you are for making war immediately on Russia, Japan and Irak.

To even mildly observe that a Moscowegian who plots the violent overthrow of the American government should be brought to heel is certain proof that you have secretly torn up the Declaration of Independence.

To sit in your seat while the “Internationale” is being played in Madison Square Garden is treason to the world proletarian state. Horrendus horrors!—They may even find a copy of the “Star-Spangled Banner” in your pocket!

To asseverate that it is more important that a man should be free mentally, physically and verbally than that he should be “secured” in his livelihood stamps you as a gold bloc buzzard.

In a word, the American system is doomed. The Politburo has spoken, you poor American fish!


American Parade

BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
(March 28, 1935)

Grand Marshal:
The Mad-Hatter


On Horseback:
Politicians, Racketeers, Dope Kings


In Automobiles:
Brain-Trusters, Bureaucrats, Economists


Grand Float:
The United States Treasury Pumping Out Billions of
Dollars All Over the World


TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS
Dragging Ball and Chain


CLOWNS SENATORS SENATORS CLOWNS


Grand Float:
Guillotine Chopping Off the Heads of Capitalists


On Foot:
Upton Sinclair Leading Ten Thousand Communists


TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS
Dragging Ball and Chain


Grand Float:
Marriner S. Eccles Dividing Our Incomes Among
the Spectators


GANGSTERS GANGSTERS GANGSTERS


Colossal Tumbril in Which Sits Big Business Manacled


INFLATIONISTS DEFLATIONISTS DILUTIONISTS
STABILIZERS


On Foot:
Henry A. Wallace Gertrude Stein Rexford G. Tugwell


TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS
Dragging Ball and Chain


Revolving Platform:
Dr. Townsend Hurling Another Fellow’s
$8,000,000,000 to the Multitude


Grand Float:
Radical Professors Carrying the Moscow State
University to New York


DEVALUATIONISTS DEPRECIATIONISTS
REVALUATIONISTS EXPANSIONISTS


Tableau Vivant:
Huey Long, Theodore G. Bilbo, Jim Farley and
General Johnson in a Battle Royal


On a Mule:
Nicholas Murray Butler Costumed as Jupiter


TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS
Dragging Ball and Chain


Grand Float:
Symbolical Figure of the NRA Making No Thing Grow
Where Two Things Grew Before


COMMUNISTS FASCISTS NAZISTS SOCIALISTS


An Old Fire-Horse Labeled CREDIT


Grand Float (for the Kiddies):
A Gigantic Rubber Figure Labeled
THE NATIONAL DEBT Dilating to Bursting Dimensions


TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS
Dragging Bail and Chain


Ambulances Ambulances Ambulances Ambulances


MIKE ROMANOFF


America Last!

BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
(April 1, 1935)

THE YALE NEWS, student organ of the great university in New Haven, prints a long editorial urging our colleges to institute courses in Communism and Fascism.

This ought to be electrifying news to the shoals of Stracheys and Mosleys in Europe who are hoping to run the blockade of our loose and good-natured immigration laws to pick up an honest capitalistic-tainted penny.

These Communist and Fascist highbrows lie in the offing like the ships of old Rum Row in order to bootleg their reactionary and mediaeval Old World doctrines in our colleges and schools.

They will also, no doubt, demonstrate to the plastic generation how poisonous, out-moded and oppressive is our own home-grown brand of government labeled INDIVIDUALISTIC DEMOCRACY.


The Yale News suavely asserts with the flamboyant omniscience of ignorance that “one of these two extremes will prevail in this country.”

This is what is known as a wish-thought. Back of it, in the shadow, stands another wish-thought—democracy is dead.

The editorial then blandly says, “Education should open its eyes.”

What it means to say is:

“LET’S THROW SAND IN THE EYES OF AMERICA—MAYBE WE CAN MIX IN A DROP OR TWO OF VITRIOL.”

“Fascism and Communism are realities,” slickly pursues the NEWS.

Then why not institute traveling scholarships for the study at first hand of these systems in the countries with which they are blessed? Bath diseases and Utopias should be studied on the home grounds.

“it is essential that courses be instituted at Yale to deal specifically with these problems,” pursues, with its innocent, china-blue eyes, the editorial.


We already know how “specifically” these problems are dealt with at Teachers’ College, Columbia University. That is, ALL AMERICANS WHO ARE NOT RED ARE STAMPED YELLOW.

But, the YALE NEWS condescendingly admits, as a kind of after-thought, a little sop to conscience or what you will:

“Needless to say, the study of our own government …. must be in no way sacrificed.”

This ought to hearten the rapidly disappearing American cells and cadres in some of our colleges.

This concession ought, further, to stiffen the spines of the declining American colonies in Columbia and Yale.


The Wheeler-Rayburn bill, pending in Congress, is one of the most disturbing pieces of legislation ever suggested in this country.

By destroying holding companies it would wreck a twelve-thousand-million-dollar industry.

In so doing, it would destroy the value of investments held by tens of millions of people, including the life-savings of families, by as ruthless a method of confiscation as could be devised.

Abuses and bad practices in the holding company field must and shall be corrected and prevented from recurring.

But why kill a patient in order to cure his malady?

There is just one thing for Congress to do with the Wheeler-Rayburn bill—REJECT IT!


Billion Paranoia

BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
(April 2, 1935)

ONE of the symptoms of chronic paranoia is the delusion of a person totally broke that he has vast sums of money and that he can go on indefinitely borrowing and spending without paying back.

A cold-blooded, disinterested ailienist—say from Mars—who should make a cursory examination of the centralized national brain in Washington, or if he merely skimmed the daily papers, would most certainly pronounce us a nation far advanced along the road to paranoia.

The United States has a huge debt, running far into the billions. It has a deficit of billions of dollars. And yet it goes on spending billions of dollars—always BILLIONS, MORE BILLIONS AND MORE BILLIONS.


These billions are raised in taxes, always MORE TAXES, ALWAYS MORE BILLIONS.

Millions of persons not yet born are already being taxed into prenatal poverty to pay for the dementia of our billion-bitten rulers and their congressional servants.

Croesus, king of Lydia, was so rich and powerful that he drew all the wise men of Greece to his court.

Uncle Sam, in the hallucinated visions of our billion mad representatives, is now Uncle Croesus.

And he, too, has drawn around him all the wise men of the Republic. ——-

They have trooped from the East, South and West all a-shimmer with degrees and decorations.

Many of them have graduated from four colleges, while others, like Topsy, just growed up into wisdom.

The word BILLIONS, like a star of promise and good news, drew them to the miraculous pork barrel which is in Washington.

Once being in the atmosphere where BILLIONS are spent that do not exist, where BILLIONS are paid out of empty tills and where BILLIONS of taxes are levied on people who are not yet born, they soon came to believe that the one hundred and twenty-five million inhabitants of the United States are nothing but safe deposit vaults to be rifled at will.

And so, like those happy and fantastic persona who live in asylums, they toss away billions of dollars over the breakfast coffee.


This billion-mania is no doubt part of “the more abundant life”—at least for the wise men in and out of Congress who manipulate our destinies.

There is an almighty lift, an airy buoyancy, an expansive feeling of well-being that comes to the great official who can fling billions around from toast to coast which is far greater than the effect of a morning swim or a predinner cocktail.

Our billion complex began during the war. It was our first national taste of colossal spending, colossal taxing and colossal lending.

We flipped billions out of our pocket with the merry ha-ha of a drunken sailor entering a penny arcade with a dime to spend.

We dished up billions for the European countries— those that we fought with, those that we fought against and those that didn’t fight at all—with the superb carelessness of a maharajah who has nothing else to do but to tax the living and unborn to their last rag.


During the boom years following the war we continued on our billion binge with the assurance born of our swelling head.

Those years were the megalomania period of Uncle Croesus’ new life. To talk in millions was bourgeois. To think in thousands was infantile.

We kept lending. We kept spending.

We were open sesame to Europe and to our own people.

In those days a ribbon clerk would throw out his chest when he arrived at the store in the morning and say to the cash girl:

“I see WE appropriated several billions yesterday, and Europe now owes us rah-rah billions.”

The humblest citizen lived on the manna of hallucinating BILLIONS.


Came the dawn—1929.

Did that cure us of the billion frenzy?

No. What was merely megalomania passed into paranoia.

Instead of retrenching, we began to talk bigger billions than ever.

The more definitely Europe repudiates the billions we “loaned” her, the more Uncle Croesus spends.

The deeper we get into a hole, the higher climb the billions.

THE LESS WE HAVE THE MORE WE SPEND.

It’s the greatest paradox of the ages—DEMENTIA PARADOX!


“Reactionaries”

BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
(April 29, 1935)

One of the oldest tricks of political revolutionists (especially of the collectivist breed) is to fasten epithets on their adversaries.

A conservative becomes a Tory, a Tory becomes a reactionary, and a reactionary becomes an advocate of shooting down strikers.

Today in America all who do not believe in Communism, Socialism, Tugwellism, Wallaceism or any of the other varieties of collectivism are “reactionaries.”

The reverse of this is the cold truth.

It is individualism (the ruggeder, the better) that is RADICAL, PROGRESSIVE and in the STREAM OF EVOLUTION.

It is Communism that is REACTIONARY and RETROGRESSIVE.


Communism is NOT advancement. It is a RECESSION, a degenerative movement to OLD, DISCARDED FORMS.

It can only be put over where THE INTELLIGENCE IS LOW, WHERE PERSONAL INITIATIVE HAS BEEN PARALYZED, WHERE FEAR IS THE DOMINANT EMOTION.

That is the reason it was so easy to apply the doctrine to Russia. The Russians have regimented minds and fear has been their constant companion for centuries.

Communism may be observed in all its mechanical degeneracy in the ant, the bee and the beaver, where millions of years of automatism has killed all change. Here is complete Stalinization.

There is nothing new in Communism. It is as old as herd-tyranny.

Dr. Frederick B. Robinson, president of the College of the City of New York, recently said something about Communism that demolishes tons of verbal humbug:

“Communism is nothing new. It was one of the primitive forms of tribal government thousands of years ago. Its obvious shortcomings and fallacies caused it to be discarded as civilization progressed.

“To revert to it would be to destroy the development and advancement of mankind for many centuries. It would be a reversion to patriarchal government…. It would destroy the freedom of the individual. This is the freedom for which America, and the American Government especially, stands—freedom of self-expression, freedom to make personal contracts and free use of personal property.”


Communism has been tried here in America. There were Brook Farm, the Oneida Community, the George Rapp experiment in Pennsylvania, Robert Owen’s “New Harmony” and Topolobampo in California.

They all went to pieces — these “Edens” — because of that old serpent the INDIVIDUAL, who is always a healthy, energetic, promoting, progressive, goad-and-evil animal.

Communism’s divinization of the laborer and the peasant is an insane attempt to reverse a supreme biological law — THE RACE IS TO THE SWIFTEST AND THE STRONGEST AND THE MOST INTELLIGENT, even among laborers and peasants.

History also gives Communism the lie. All collectivist nations are culturally dead nations.

Civilization advances with STRUGGLE, COMPETITION, THE RIVALRY OF BRAINS.

The whole economic plan of the brain-trusters at Washington is REACTIONARY-COMMUNISTIC, or maybe Commufascist.

The depression began with a panic in 1929.

IT HAS BEEN PERPETUATED BY SEMI-COMMUNISTIC EXPERIMENTS AT WASHINGTON.

The REACTIONARIES are in the saddle and the fabric of our institutions crumples.

The genius and destiny of America is FORWARD—which means MORE RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM.


‘Down With EVERYTHING!’

BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
(May 29, 1935)

AFTER one hundred and fifty years of upbuilding an epidemic of destruction evidently has taken possession of the American people—or at least of that part of them that now pretends to represent them.

“DOWN WITH EVERYTHING!”

Among professional Communists, direct-action anarchists and that vast horde of “social innovators” who are born with ants in their bones and bats in their belfrey, this is quite understandable.

But, both officially and among a crowd of demagogues and their followers, a demoniacal spirit, totally foreign to the conservative instincts of the American, has suddenly seized the country.


Is this mania to revolutionize all our traditions, to tear up all our safeguards to liberty and to trample on all that we once boasted of—our ingenuity, our individualism, our competitive joy—NARROWLY LINKED TO THE RISE AND DOMINANCE IN OUR LIFE OF RACKETEERING AND GANGSTERISM?

There is a close connection, psychologically and actually, between the professional politician and the gangster.

Their methods differ, but their object is the same—SPOLIATION.

One uses a gun. The other uses the weapons of taxes, bureaucratic tyranny and sappings and mining the edifice of free institutions under the guise of “going forward to better things.”


DOWN WITH EVERYTHING ! Down with profits! Down with the rich! Down with savings! Down with free competition! Down with incomes! Down with independdence! [** ]misspelled in original text[] Down with the Constitution! Down with private business! Down with criticism! Down with capital! Down with over-production! Down with under-production! Down with the law of supply and demand —etc., etc., etc.

DOWN WITH EVERYTHING—EXCEPT the jobs of politicians, the right to confiscate personal wealth, the right to build up a tyrannous bureaucracy, the right to play fast-and-lose with every crackbrained theory that has made Europe a shambles and a stench.

THESE things are made safe for the mob-masters and the Utopian racketeers.


Look back from 1935 to 1932. Here is a three-year perspective for solid thought.

1T LOOKS NOW AS IF THERE HAD BEEN A PLOT HATCHED BEFORE THE LAST ELECTION WHICH IS ONLY NOW COMING TO LIGHT.

If the national program that is now undermining the traditional American Republic had ever been hinted at in the Democratic platform adopted in the summer of 1932, HERBERT HOOVER WOULD NOW BE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

The Socialists who now rule at Washington are bent on a program of DOWN WITH EVERYTHING!

They are doing precisely as the dictator-tyrants of Europe are doing—everything to dig themselves in indefinitely.

The “forgotten man” is today more completely forgotten than ever—HE IS NOW JUST A NUMBER ON A DOLE CARD.

The “remembered man”—that is, the man of wealth, the business man, the capitalist—is the big target of the “down with everything!” program.


Economic atheism is another reason for this destructive business.

We no longer believe in natural law. We no longer believe that business and normal human beings, who are left alone, more certainly attain their ends than when they are harried and hamstrung.

When we have as rulers men of the “down with everything!” school we have turned to strange gods.

Especially are these new, strange gods a menace when they and their actual character and opinion never were elected by the people, but swooped down on us in the Trojan horse of a perfectly conventional and traditionally American political platform.


Who Is President?

BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
(June 22, 1935)

IN 1932 THE American electorate was under the impression that it had elected Franklin D. Roosevelt President of the United States, running on the Democratic platform.

THE MAN WHOM IT REALLY ELECTED PRESIDENT WAS NORMAN THOMAS, RUNNING ON THE SOCIALIST PLATFORM.

No sooner had Mr. Roosevelt been inaugurated than the Democratic platform, which the people had indorsed by a plurality of 7,000,000 votes, was thrown overboard and the platform of the Socialist party, which polled only 884,781 votes out of a total of 39,000,000 votes, WAS ADOPTED ALMOST IN TOTO.

Therefore, we are ruled today by a party that was OVERWHELMINGLY DEFEATED AT THE POLLS BY BOTH MAJOR PARTIES.

We elected a Democratic ticket, but we live under a SOCIALISTIC form of government.

Let us looks at the facts:

The only two important planks in the Democratic platform, adopted at Chicago in June, 1932, that have been lived up to are the prohibition and national defense planks.

The platform began with this “solemn covenant” with the people:

“The Democratic party solemnly promises by appropriate action to put into effect the principles, policies and reforms herein indicated.”

They were: A drastic reduction of governmental expenditures; the abolition of useless commissions and offices; consolidation of departments and bureaus; eliminating extravagance; a federal budget annually balanced; unemployment and old-age insurance under STATE LAWS.

All these “solemn promises” have been broken by increased governmental expenses, the creation of new commissions and bureaus; increased extravagance; a further division, instead of “consolidation,” of departments and bureaus; an unbalanced federal budget; a mounting debt, and federal unemployment and old-age insurance instead of insurance under state laws EXCLUSIVELY.


The rest of the platform consists of vague generalities piled on the still vaguer basic generality of “to recover economic liberty.”

Now turn to the platform of the national Socialist party, adopted in May, 1932, at Milwaukee.

Here are the leading planks in that platform which the Roosevelt administration has tried by every means in its power, TO FOIST ON A COUNTRY THAT VOTED FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM:

The entrance of the United States into the world court (failed).

Recognition of the Soviet government (succeeded).

Six-hour day and a five-day week (succeeded, partly).

Increased inheritance tax (about to be launched).

Moratorium on farm foreclosures (succeeded until knocked out by the ALL-AMERICAN supreme court).

Socialization of the power, banking and other industries (already begun on a large scale under the NRA—until smashed by the same ALL-AMERICAN supreme court, Socialistic power and banking planks now under consideration).


Cancellation of war debts (tacitly successful, as nothing is being done in the matter).

That is the platform adopted by a party, whose avowed aim is the DESTRUCTION of individualistic – Democratic – capitalistic America and the SUBSTITUTION of a tyranny of economic and political mob-masters originating in the brains of reactionary minded European peoples.

And that is the platform—with still more revolutionary and crackpot details—that the Roosevelt administration has adopted, instead of the one it was ORDERED TO PUT INTO EFFECT BY THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES!

If Norman Thomas was elected president in 1932, why isn’t he serving?

WHY HAS HE A PROXY?

DEUS AMERICANUS (1929)

The following essay by Benjamin DeCasseres was published in E. Haldeman-Julius’ “Little Blue Book” No. 1411, titled The Real Thomas Edison, published circa 1929. Haldeman-Julius had a page count that he wanted to reach for his famous little booklets, and since the titular essay only constituted 15 pages, we can assume he included the three other essays to fill the rest of the 64 pages. It is the only Litle Blue Book DeCasseres was included in, though his writing did appear in some of E. Haldeman-Julius’  journals.

Of note is the website Little Blue Books Bibliography. Any research into the publishing history of the E. Haldeman-Julius catalog will show that not only were publishing records not clear, but he often reused catalog numbers for different booklets, and would also retitle booklets just before they were published, but after promotional material was released! Jake Gibbs, the author of the website, worked on the bibliography for fifteen years, and it was completed just before his death. It is a monumental worth that others have attempted before, but his is certainly the most definitive by a long shot.

Mr. Gibbs describes the booklet:

1411. A. L. Shands. The Real Thomas A. Edison. c1929.
Contents:
1 LBB (c).
2 copyright, PUSA.
3 “Contents.”
4 blank.
5-19 “The Real Thomas A. Edison,” A. L. Shands.
20-33 “The Amazing Ignatius Donnelly,” Miriam Allen deFord.
34-49 “Deus Americanus,” Benjamin deCasseres.
50-61 “Was Thoreau an Anarchist?” C. Hartley Grattan.
62-4 blank.

Previous to Mr. Gibbs work was http://haldeman-julius.org/, which is sadly now only available through archive.org. There is a great deal of information there found nowhere else.

The essay itself is about Theodore Roosevelt, the 33rd governor of New York from 1899 to 1900, and then the 26th president of the United States from 1901 to 1909.

I want to thank S.P. for this assistance in proofreading this transcription.


DEUS AMERICANUS

HOW THE PERFECT ONE BECAME THE LIVING SOUL
OF THESE STATES

Benjamin deCasseres

The noblest activity of Man is the creation of myths and gods. Man is a lie-loving animal. He calls it the search for the Ideal. Euclid, Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Edison have no power over his psychical life, and very little over his practical life. No human being has ever patterned his life on the type of the impersonal, cold, reasoning truth-seeker. It is Venus, Apollo and Hercules; Siegfried, St. George and St. Patrick; Christ, Buddha, Mahomet, Swedenborg; Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn, Pollyanna; Caesar, Napoleon, Lincoln; Kit Carson, Byron, Paul Revere, that are deified. Try to make a hero out of Eli Whitney in a school boy’s mind if he is reading the life of Daniel Boone! Try to make a heroine out of Madame Curie in the mind of a schoolgirl if she is reading the life of Joan of Arc!

The elect are not yet cold in the grave when they are lovingly lifted out of their coffins and swaddled in attributes that they never possessed. Their least gesture exaggerated to heroic proportions, they are set to suckle at the fat breasts of credulity; and so they rise, trailing their garments of mythic glory, into the empyreans of the imagination, where they reign as richly festooned prototypes, or, rather, as generating stud-horses and mares of the Ideal.

Every people must have an archetype of its national consciousness. The Greeks delighted in personifying all the elements of the Greek soul and of life. The modems are somewhat slower at the beautiful art of deification, although it has gradually accumulated a stock of Alfred the Greats, St. Genevieves, and, later, quite a litter of Joan of Arcs, Garibaldis, Bismarcks, Cromwells and other variations of Thor, Prometheus and Mexitl.

America had no national Deus until God decreed the mighty conflict of San Juan Hill. Neither Washington nor Lincoln quite filled the bill. Both are destined to become gods, no doubt, and float around in the skulls of posterity as immaculate prototypes of Liberty and Equality. They have already passed into the semi-legendary stage; but they both lack the quality of university, of cosmical versatility, of physical prowess. Washington and Lincoln were specialists. They were supermen by accident, not by divine intention, as was he who was born unto us, like Buddha, amid purple and fine linen, in the annus mirabilis 1858, but who chose deliberately the Common Way, the suffrages and approbation of the lowly.

I make no less a claim—which I shall prove—for this man than an incarnation. He was Deus Vulgus, the People incarnate, the body, brain and breath of America made corporeal. His evolution from foetus to Pantheon was as clearly ordained as was the assassination of McKinley, which cleared the way for his emergence from military fame to civic glory.

There is not an element in the American character that is not found magnified with startling clearness in our Deus. He is the very lexicon of all our virtues. By our “virtues” I mean of course our strengths, our root-motives, which I have catalogued in “The Complete American.” For those who have not read that wonder-book I will give here a list of those elemental American characteristics of which Deus Amcricanus is the supreme Hanuman: The passion for the circus; love of good, honest humbug; dialectical righteousness; camp-meeting mysticism; blare; hearth, home and mother; Pragmatic idealism; belief in the divinity of statistics; Our Hero; belief in nonogenarian wiseacres; the sentimental reformer; hullabaloo; upward and onward; respectability; you’re a liar; autoscopy; Chauvinism; keep smiling!—or grinning! Multiply, multiply! acrobatie superficiality; healthy, prolonged and manly exhibitionism; the masterful courage that first discovers the will of the people and then follows it resolutely to the end; speed; gregariousness; resonant, torse, ethico-orotund, ethico-magniloquent, ethico-detonating phrases like “a square deal,” “predatory interests,” “malefactors of great wealth.”

These constitute the very gizzard of the American’s Thirty-nine Articles, all en-souled in our Deus. And much more, for Deus Americanus was not only a mold into which was poured the soil-sap of a people but he was a creator as well. He o’er-leaped the mold and gave his people new values, new nebulae for posterity in which it could sun itself and worship from afar. He was a Hercules of physical strength, a mighty, planet-roving Nimrod; a Columbus of lost rivers and lost lands, a patron of the arts, sciences and the new spelling; a mighty warrior; a Mazeppa of the Dakotas; a super-policeman; a world-feared boxer and fencer; conqueror of the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn; maker of republics, with or without their consent; the constructor of a mighty canal; a naval-lord after several sea-goings; the conserver of American womanhood and childhood; the discoverer of Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Hart Benton; a super-Linnaeus, a super-Audubon, a super-Thoreau; the Great Peacemaker; Ambassador-at-Large to all peoples and all royal funerals; founder of the Ananias Club, which he convened and prorogued at his pleasure; patron saint of the Boy Scouts and Madonna to the Campfire girls; founder of the American Lourdes, Sagamore Hill; he taught His People to fear God and do their part; father of the Dry Sunday; Big Brother to all coal-strikers; and, above all, the divine Gascon of the Strenuous Life. Since Adam delved and Eve bit has any people ever had such a Deus? Take all the Dei and semi-Dei out of Homer, Asgard and Nibelheim, fuse them into a single Deus and you would not find in him the universality and perfectability of our Deus Americanus!

Every authentic god must have at least one temptation, one Gethsemane, one wrestling match with the Devil, one dragon to his credit.  The god must or else he cannot become a god. Our Deus had such a test put on him, and he came out triumphant, having beheaded the Foe in four words—”that dirty little atheist!” That Deus Americanus deliberately cast around to find a Fiend with which to wrestle—as some Doubting Thomases have intimated—I reject, after profound thought and study, as utterly ridiculous. Tom Paine had long been in the minds of all Real Americans the Arch-Fiend and the Anti-Christ. The Methodists had pictured him with horns and tail and the cloven hoof. Millions of American babies were scared into untimely righteousness with “If you are not a good little boy, Tom Paine’ll get you!” He was universally anathema. George Washington turned his back on the Devil when he returned from Europe, and so, shortly afterward, soared to the Heaven of the Saved. Paine was therefore inexorably listed by Fate as one of the Great Labors of Deus Americanus.

This final slaughter of Tom Paine by our Deus was, I believe, the greatest of his Labors because the conflict was spiritual and was hidden from the public gaze. Our god must have reconnoitered the Anti-Christ of the American Revolution from all angles before he began his attack, before there issued from his mighty pen the searing and deadly phrase “that dirty little atheist!” Our Lohengrin-Siegfried found his deepest suspicion realized; the fiend Paine was dirty, little and an atheist. More, he found confronting him a poxy, malignant dwarf, who under the mask of reason practiced the obscene black mass which he had learned in a French prison, where he had been thrown for trying to overthrow the God of Louis XIV and Tor quemada. The battle was short and decisive Hallelujah! Tom Paine is no more, our little children sleep in peace, and Deus Americanus for reward, now sits beside Elohim and watches the writhings of Paine the Anti-Christ and Anti-God in Hell. Sursum corda!

Deus Americanus was the looking-glass of all mythological genius, but much. more. If he was Hercules, Nimrod, Lohengrin, Mars and St. George, he also held in that mighty soul a Confucius, a Tartarin, a Marco Polo, a Taras Bulba, a Munchausen, a Wilhelm the Second. “I am large; I contain multitudes!” he might have said just as well as did a minor American poet whom Deus Antericanus never took up because, no doubt, he saw in him a rival of the doctrine of the Strenuous Life. Our Deus would tolerate no rivals. To him alone, and for him alone, the khaki and the sword, the medals and the decorations, the bay and the laurel. That which did not come from Sagamore-Horeb was terefah, scabby, ratty, un-American. A summons was a command. Has any American dared to reject a call to Sagamore-Horeb from Deus Amcricanus? Not even James Huneker dared to face the wrath of the expunger of Tom Paine and the Attila of San Juan Hill!

No godlet could ever become Deus Americanus unless he was impeccably respectable. Respectability and sexual rectitude are to .the American what bacchic and venusian bohemianism was to the ancients. So there is no smirch on the Earth-life of Deus Antericanus. He comes up clean—as clean as the whistle of Gabriel. No whisper shadowed him through life. He was Made in America, where Family Life is the cornerstone of the Temple. He sprouted from the loins of our most ancient and adamantine virtue. Had Tom Paine, the Foe, a wife or even children? I never heard of them (I am not an authority on demonology). Ben Franklin might have been Deus Americanus, but he, who incarnated so many of our traits, failed in two characteristics—he had no San Juan Hill and his puritanism was tainted with common Latin habits. George Washington ran a still, gambled and they do say——. Lincoln told Boccaccian stories. They were automatically ruled out. But the Immaculate One was found in a cradle in East Twentieth street. Destiny’s dice were set. The Perfect American—sans peur et sans reproche was born unto us!

Deus Americanus of course had his enemies while he was still in the woof and mesh of the flesh. What god had not his enemies? The Strenuous Life stimulates the birth of rivals. Deus Americanus was, in fact, always at Armageddon. Every day was Armageddon to him. Carrying in his larynx the very Voice of the quick and the dead, his brain weaving ideals for countless unborn Boy Scouts, feeling within his depths the Message of the Square Deal of Posterity, hearing in the cyclopean thump of his fist on thousands of tables the muffled drum-beat of his immortality, uttering through those great carnivorous teeth a defy to the enemies of His People, who, naturally, were the enemies of the Lord of Righteousness; casting out in the fire of his nostrils Malefactors of Great Wealth (no names given), slaughtering with mighty Isaiahan epithet those who dared disagree with him. battling for the Lord in rain or shine. Yankees win or Yankees lose—it would, indeed, have been miraculously unique if this Mighty Killer of the Moose and the Lion had not had his Lucifer, his Cain, his Brutus. The New York World even went so far as to sue Deus Americanus for libel. As well try to smash an Idea with a bamboo walking-stick!

They have accused him of disloyalty. How un-Deus-like such charges seem to us today, we who are molding for posterity the Great Legend! A god may be—nay, must be—inconsistent. He is protean. A law unto himself—sublime and impeccable egotist that he was!—those who could not do a volteface in perfect step with our Deus Amenicanus were flung to the ambulance corps. He was true to himself and to his heaven-storming dreams. Little men of Earth! Little men of Earth!—you who speak of loyalty, consistency! You live in realities, While our Deus was an Absolute. Loyalty! Gratitude! Consistency! A dog’s virtues! A nationalist when he spoke to the Egyptians in Egypt, imperialist when he addressed Englishmen in England—that was typically American, and therefore right. Our fishers of men and votes, do they not have one doctrine for the white aristocracy of the South, another for the Hog and Wheat Blocs of the West, another for the Mammon-sodden peoples of the East, and still another for the Harlem Ethiopian Belt? Consistency, thou art neither an American nor a Deus. Every blasphemy that has been uttered against Deus Americanus has been uttered by Prometheus against Zeus; but Zeus (and his heirs) still reigns and the vultures still nibble at the penitent liver of Prometheus.

The divinity of our Deus was squarely proven in his lifetime. He was bullet-proof. Twice was the Sign given. Twice did Deus Americanus come forth a greater than Siegfried, who, it will be remembered, had a vulnerable spot in the back which worked his undoing. But the King of the Nibelungs of the West—our Deus—although he had bathed in the blood of many Dragons of Evil, had been a Friend of Nature since boyhood, and so even the trees held their breath in brotherly awe and stayed the naughty leaf from falling on his back when he raged against the Malefactors and atheistic heathens.

Soaked in Dragon’s blood! No! Our Deus was soaked in something far greater. He was soaked in American Virtues and American Ideals. We Americans are baptized in the blood of Righteousness, and neither Excalibur nor the hosts of Tom Paine shall prevail against us! At the height of the Homeric contest on San Juan Hill, when the thunders from the fifty-mile-long Spanish artillery were shaking the world, Deus Americanus abandoned his horse, like Napoleon at Lodi, and, pistol in hand, charged with his handful of men into the frightful rain of shells and bullets. The great Spanish Army collapsed at the daring, miraculous feat and surrendered. San Juan Hill was the whirling fiery egg that hatched a Deus. An invulnerable incarnation had appeared amongst us. The Great Legend had begun to jell!

Again, many years later, when the voice of Achilles, which by its sound alone had shattered the Trojan army, had taken possession of our Deus the second Sign of invulnerability was given. It was in Milwaukee. An unknown man—a descendant or a disciple of the dirty little atheist, no doubt—shot at Deus Americanus, but so completely and miraculously was he panoplied in American Home Virtues and Ideals that he went right on speaking to his audience with most miraculous tongue.  Unshatterable proof this, and finally, that he was our Deus!

He had his play-moments, too, that endeared him to us probably beyond all else, for we are a play-people, almost infantile, it would seem, sometimes. We are the laughing baby-eye of the world, and ’twas fit that that element of our national character should appear in Deus Americanus. He played for us in the White House for many years. What gambols, what clownings, what sensational pranks he put on for us! How we guffawed, rocked, shook with mirth! So much so that when the Deus left the White House to retire into the Desert, like St. Francis of Assisi, for meditation and counsel with the lions of the Zambesi, he gave Utterance to the most celebrated mot of any abdicating ruler, “Well, I’ve had a corking good time!” Only a god could indulge in and get away with (as the saying goes) such a sportive remark after guiding for eight years the spiritual, moral and physical destinies of His People. Life is always a comedy to the gods—and what has an Olympian to do except have “a corking good time”?

Deus Americanus was a being of sublime moral courage, another trait that is almost uniquely American and which is one of the reasons, no doubt, why the Zeitgeist chose him as the Living Soul of These States. While he was reveling in his “corking good time” in the White House he executed one of those sudden morale coups that got him the name in some quarters of the Spiritual Marechal Ney, “the bravest of the brave.” He invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him and told the Associated Press so point-blank. There were gasps and sputterings among us Earth-whiffets, especially among the whiffets of the Southland. A Negro on terms of equality with the greatest of the White House Dei! But the Deus had resolved to go Lincoln one better. The latter had merely set the Negro free physically, but Deus Americanus had resolved to set him free socially and politically, which he did, as is known of all men, for he followed up his recognition of Booker T. Washington by enforcing throughout the Southland the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. This being one of the celebrated Twelve Labors, I will not touch upon it further. If Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, the Deus was certainly the Great Necromancer, for in assuring the Negroes of the South during their lifetime and unto unborn posterities the right to vote he accomplished one of the greatest moral and seemingly impossible victories in history.

Deus Americanus had not a provincial soul. He was never a local god. He went forth, when the Call came, unto all the world with the Big American Idea. He proclaimed it from the Sorbonne, from the Pyramids, on the Banks of the Amazon, at the very doors of the Vatican, from the Tower of London, on the Nile, and he fairly slapped it into the back of that fellow-Deus. Kaiser Wilhelm II, at Potsdam, where he uttered that famous toast which terrified the world, “With an army like that, I could lick the world!” Did he say “I” or “you”? N’importe! As a good American and a sound Deusian, I prefer to believe he said “I.” It sounds American, it is American, for we can lick the world, by Jingo!—as was said of yore. Messenger, handshaker and Ambassador to all the world was our Deus, and he was received wherever he went as Caesar Americanus by vast mobs that shouted Viva! and Prosit!

Like all genius, like all beings destined for apotheosis, he knew as a youth that he was born for a Purpose. The attractions are proportioned to the destinies, says Swedenborg. He first of all prepared himself for his secretly foretold Deushood by strengthening his body and his will. All gods are perfect physically and have almighty wills, he read in his dictionary of mythology. He was in his younger adolescent days a weakling, timid, almost sickly. By acts of fortitude and discipline such as only the Pre-Destined dare undertake he finally achieved, after many years, the title of Bwana Tombo, the Fat Man.

All greatness in action is founded on the exclusion of some universal human quality. No man can act continuously and have a continuous sense of humor. For humor is the supreme critic, the supreme disintegrator, the supreme paralyzer of action. Deus Americanus, like Narcissus, Alexander the Great, Cromwell and Napoleon, was totally devoid of a sense of humor. It was his pillar of strength, else he would not have undertaken the Labor of “Drying up” New York for one whole Sunday when he was Police Commissioner, a Labor which was so signally and admirably successful and grows so great in the eye of Fame that Deus Dry Sunday will, no doubt, in the calendars of posterity oust Easter Sunday as a day celebrating the rise of a regenerated New York from the hells of Swizzle.

Of all the elements which have gone to making Deus Americanus the body, blood and brain of our national, innermost self no small credit is due to the “style” of his many books. Nothing can be farther from “literature,” which among us is feminine for writin’. And there was, of course, nothing feminine in the Deus. His collected Logos is the American Style, as plain as a hitching post, as devoid of metaphor as an income-tax blank, as raw as the meat of pre-Promethean anthropophagi. Indeed, as his enemies can vouch, did he not verbally “eat ’em alive?”—he who would have branded in his pistol-shot prose Pan himself a “Nature Fakir” if the latter had ever questioned the eye and ear of the great Wilderness Hunter? No American writer, Deus or semi-Deus, has ever given us such home-grown and root-American epigrams: “The good woman is the best of all good citizens.” “Deeds, not words, alone shall save us.” “Let us pray with our bodies for our souls’ desire.” (This last is the one mystical flight in the prose of the Deus, and is almost Sapphic in its pagan grandeur.) “I believe in hard work and honest sport.” “I believe in a sane mind in a sane body.” (Our Deus translated this from the mens sana in corpore sano of an obscene Roman reformer named Juvenal, and, although he gives him no credit—gods have plenary rights in expropriation—the perfect translation of the difficult phrase proves the profound nature of his scholarship. Besides, the phrase achieved American validity only at the exact moment that Deus Americanus wrote “I believe” in front of it.) “These nations (Germany and Turkey) in this crisis stand for the reign of Moloch and Beelzebub on this earth.” “A churchless community is a community on the rapid down grade.” These are but a few of the epigrams from the vast treasure-house of Sagamorean wisdom, which has already. swept away forever the moral pot-shots of Epictetus, Confucius, Aurelius, Poor Richard, Oscar Wilde and Godey. The style is the god, verily.

But I do not ask trans-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic mankind to take my word alone that he of whom I have written is the veritable soil-and-soul Deus Americanus. Here follows the proclamation from Pantheon of the Deus on East Twentieth Street, New York City, where one may see the sacred relics and vestures of the American. I do not know who is the author of this sublime apotheosis of the greatest Police Commissioner New York ever had; but I do know that in it he has condensed the soul of Deus Americanus. To wit:

“He was found faithful over a few things and he was made ruler over many; he cut his own trail clean and straight and millions followed him toward the light. He was frail; he made himself a tower of strength. He was timid; he made himself a lion of courage. He was a dreamer; he became one of the great doers of all time. Men put their trust in him; women found a champion in him; kings stood in awe of him, but children made him their playmate. He broke a nation’s slumber with his cry, and it rose up. He touched the eyes of blind men with a flame that gave them vision. Souls became swords through him; swords became servants of God. He was loyal to his country and he exacted loyalty; he loved many lands, but he loved his own land best. He was terrible in battle but tender to the weak; joyous and tireless, being free from self-pity; clean with a cleanness that cleansed the air like a gale. His courtesy knew no wealth, no class; his friendship, no creed or color or race. His courage stood every onslaught of savage beast and ruthless man, of loneliness, of victory, of defeat. His mind was eager, his heart was true, his body and spirit, defiant of obstacles, ready to meet what might come. He fought injustice and tyranny; bore sorrow gallantly; loved all nature, bleak spaces and hardy companions, hazardous adventure and the zest of battle. Wherever he went he carried his own pack; and in the uttermost part of the earth he kept his conscience for his guide.”

America, behold your soul; behold your one Olympian double!

FIND AUTHOR’S TASTES DIFFER

The Pomona Progress Bulletin (Pomona, California)
12 May 1932 (Page 14)

NEW YORK (U.P.) Literary tastes differ among leading authors and editors of the United States, according to a symposium collected by the United Press. A number of prominent writers were asked to name three recently published books particularly to their liking. Their selections follow:

H. L. Mencken, editor The American Mercury: The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist, by Robert Eisler; The Mysterious Madame, by C. E. Bechofer Roberts; The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind, by H. G. Wells.

Carl Van Doren, editor The Literary Guild: Expression In America, by Ludwig Lewlsohn; Wellington, by Philip Guedalla; The Social Life of Apes and Monkeys, by S. Zuckerman.

Fannie Hurst

Fannie Hurst, novelist: The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck; Russia, by Hans von Eckhardt.

Chrigtpher Morley, novelist and critic: The Tragedy of Henry Ford, by Jonathan Leonard; Kamonga, by Homer W. Smith; And Life Goes On, by Vici Baum.

Alexander Woolcott, critic: Stepping Westward, by Laura E. Richards; The Unseen Assassins, by Norman Angell; Loads of Love, by Anne Parrish.

Benjamin DeCasseres, critic: Mental Healers, by Stefan Zwelg; The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler; Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.

Anthony Abbott

Anthony Abbott, detective novel writer: Death Answers the Bell, by Valentine Williams; The Kennel Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine; The Documents In the Case, by Dorothy Sayre.

William McFee, novelist: Way of the Lancer, by Richard Boleslav-sky; Rackety Rax, by Joel Sayre; Seventy Years in Archaeology, by Sir Flinders Petrie.

George Jean Nathan, critic: Essays In Persuasion, by L. M. Keynes: The Story of My Life, by Clarence Darrow; The Puritan, by Liam O’Flaherty.

Ben Hecht, novelist: “It’s no body’s business what I read.

Gene Fowler, novelist: Dr. Hofstetter’s Spavin & Gold Cure Almanac; Pueblo, Colo., telephone directory, issue of 1902; Black Beauty.

Harry Elmer Barnes, author and critic: Only Yesterday, by Frederick Lewis Allen; The Story of My Life, by Clarence Darrow; Is Capitalism Doomed? by Dennis

Spinoza: Liberator of God and Man & Against the Rabbis

Celebrating the 300th birthday of his relative Benedict Spinoza (1632 – 1677) saw Benjamin DeCasseres release two volumes about the man and his work. The first was Spinoza: Liberator of God and Man in 1933, and the second was Spinoza Against the Rabbis in 1937. This new edition combines them both for the first time, newly typeset and designed. DeCasseres brings to the light in this book hitherto unknown aspects of the doctrines of Spinoza: his liberation of God from the shackles of anthropomorphism, his glorification of the Will-to-Power, and his divinization of the Ego of the individual man. In the chapter entitled “Anathema!” DeCasseres has with a dramatic power only equaled in the pages of Victor Hugo or Merejkovsky pictured the excommunication from the Jewish Church of Benedict de Spinoza.

Limited hardback available exclusively from the publisher.

Paperback edition available on Amazon.com, Amazon UK, or directly from the publisher.

Edwin Markham to Benjamin DeCasseres

Edwin Markham ( 1852–1940) was an American poet. From 1923 to 1931 he was Poet Laureate of Oregon.

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My dear Mr. De Casseres:
I wish to thank you for remembering me with occasional copies of your printed writings. I trust that you will send me more.
I have a sincere admiration for your remarkable powers of expression; and many of your ideas meet with my entire approval.
But of course I do not accept the philosophy of ultimate pessimism. I cannot follow you into the Cimmerian darkness where you sometimes wander. Man has built his own hells, and he will sometime climb out of them to stand upon a cliff of stars.
Cordially yours,
Edwin Markham

DeCasseres Dances With Nietzsche

 

Two small articles/reviews from the Detroit Jewish Chronicle concerning Benjamin DeCasseres and Nietzsche.  The first about “Germans, Jews and France,” published November 15, 1935,  followed by  “I Dance With Nietzsche,” published December 11, 1936, enjoy.


DeCasseres Shows Nietzsche Hated the German People

Benjamin DeCasseres, eminent writer and critic, descendant of the family of Baruch Spinoza, is the author of a pamphlet, “Germans, Jews and France,” in which is compiled a series of statements from the writings of Nietzsche. This pamphlet, published by the Rose Printers & Publishers, Inc., 91 Runyon St., Newark, N.J., proves that contrary to the claims of Nazis, Nietzsche hated the Germans and had the highest respect for the Jews. DeCasseres took the excerpts in this pamphlet from the 15 volumes of Nietzsche’s works. In a foreword to the booklet he states:  “In Germany his universal doctrine of Will-to-Power and his ideal of Superman have been used by professors and mob-masters as philosophy to excuse their atrocities, their sadism and their totalitarian-state crimes. But they have carefully concealed what you will find in this booklet.”

In his attack on the Germans, Nietzsche is quoted among other things as follows:

“German intellect’ is my foul air.”

“When I try to think of the kind of man who is opposed to me in all my instincts, my mental image takes the form of a German.”

“Even the presence of a German retards my digestion.”

“I can no longer abide the (German) race.”

“I was condemned to the society of the Germans.”

Under the caption “Germany and the Germans,”Mr. DeCasseres has compiled a chapter of quotations among which we read:

“The Germans have not the faintest idea how vulgar they are.”

“The spirit of Germany—soft, swampy, slippery soil.”

“A man lowers himself by frequenting the society of Germans.”

Another chapter in which he condemns the Germans is titled “German Culture.”

Three of the 31 pages are devoted to a discussion of the Jews, and he says of them:

“What a blessing a Jew is among Germans!”

“This race (the Jews) should not be irritated without necessity. Therefore anti-Semites should be expelled from Germany.”

“Since Wagner’s return to Germany he has condescended to everything that I despise—even to anti-Semitism.”

“In respect to cleaner intellectual habits, Europe is not a little Indebted to the Jews; above all, the Germans as being a lamentably deraissonable race, who, even at the present day, must always have their ‘heads washed. ‘It has always been the Jews’ problem to bring a people to raison.”

“It was Heinrich Heins who gave me the most perfected Idea of what a lyrical poet could be.”

“Among Jews I did, indeed, find taste and delicacy toward me, but not among Germans.”

“The Jews are beyond all doubt the strongest, the toughest and purest race at present living in Europe.”

A two-page chapter on France pays tribute to the French as compared to the Germans he despised. Nietzsche is quoted as saying: “We Germans are nearer to barbarism than the French.”

Detroit Jewish Chronicle – November 15, 1935, P.6


DeCasseres “Dances With Nietzsche”

Benjamin DeCasseres, lineal descendent of Spinoza, ranks among the outstanding authorities on the German philosopher, Nietzsche, whose name has been invoked by Nazis in the campaign against the Jews. A short time ago DeCasseres published a pamphlet entitled “Germans, Jews and France by Nietzsche” in which he compiled the writings of this German to prove that instead of being a hater of Jews, Nietzsche, rather, favored them and despised the Germans.

A great lover of Nietzsche, DeCasseres is continually writing commentaries on his works and one of the most interesting of his pamphlets entitled “I Dance with Nietzsche” has just come off the press. It is procurable at 50 cents from him, care of the Blackstone Publishers, 118 W. 27th St., New York City.

The title of this pamphlet is derived from Nietzsche’s having been referred to as the Dancing Philosopher. A most interesting tribute to Nietzsche is contained in this pamphlet in which DeCasseres writes:

“No one has stimulated me over a longer period of time than Nietzsche. Merely to pick up one of his books after reading him for 30 years gives me a great thrill, physical, mental and metaphysical. With a book of his in my hand I feel precisely like a person who holds a bomb.”

“I love him because he inflames every part of my physic and physical life. He is perpetual ecstasy, orgasm. He inflames me to intellectual anger, quite often, as well as to dancing with intellectual joy. But I thank him for infuriating me almost as much as I thank him for penetrating me with mental ecstasy. For whether I agree or disagree with him, he causes my emotions, my thoughts, my nerves to dance.”

Elsewhere in this booklet, Mr. DeCasseres states:

“The prophet and writer in Nietzsche are straight out of the Old Testament. He is of the strain of Isaiah and Jeremiah, King David and Jesus. He is an Old Testament Jew transposed to a modern sensibility. He Is par excellence the Puritan. He is in no sense Greek. He is Oriental. “His “funeral of God’ Is somewhat pathetic, for he has resurrected Jehovah under the name of the Superman. ‘Sacrifices’ are demanded in the name of the Superman. Here is the God of the Old Testament again.”

DeCasseres calls Nietzsche “the greatest phychologist of all time, one of the greatest poets who have ever lived, one of the master-stylists of world-literature, one of the Six Colossi of Thought, the incarnation of all militant Individualists that have been and the protagonist of those to come — sublimely beautiful soul whose like we shall probably not see again.”

Detroit Jewish Chronicle – December 11, 1936 P.13

 

Hawthorne: Emperor of Shadows

 

From the “Hawthorne number”  of The Critic – Vol.XLV No.1, July 1904


Hawthorne: Emperor of Shadows

By Benjamin DeCasseres

 

HAWTHORNE drank from the beaker of inexhaustible shadows; his soul sought instinctively the obscure and the crepuscular; the shadow-glozed figures of his brain were never mockeries of the real, but phantasms of the dead-beings called out of the endless night of the tomb to sport, at his will, in the shadow of crypts and catacombs, or to languish in half-lights, or to be the pawns in some moral problem that vexed his sensitive heart. He dallied in byways and roamed strange, blighted heaths, and preferred to listen to the sibilant murmurs that came from the brackish tarn than to stand beside the gay, tumbling waterfall in the full light of the sun. He was an emperor—but an emperor of elves—an Oberon whose reign began at the twilight hour and who abdicated at the first cockcrow. He was a giant—but a giant leashed in cobwebs. He was a thinker whose thoughts were always at half-mast for the sorrows that sucked at his heart. He was exquisitely aware of a Conscience. He knew that the supernormal could alone explain the normal, that the exceptional housed all the laws that governed ordinary occurrences plus an explanation, which if it did not explain gave us something better — another mystery. “The Scarlet Letter” is the romance of pain; “The House of the Seven Gables” is the romance of crime; “The Marble Faun” the romance of penitential despair.

The evil that is in the heart of man; the subtle poisonous vapors that emanate from his soul like vent-hole gases; strange, sudden maladies without name, dateless in their birth, bringing with them reversions to a kind of devilship; moral cankers which he identified with physical environment and which he made to dwell in dank cellars, in old gabled houses, in curious angles in the garden-wall, or in the fetor of old wells—these things possessed Hawthorne entirely. He dealt with pain as though it were a conscious being —a survival in his brain of the puritan belief in a personal devil. He never burst through the black cerements and dun dreams that kept him apart from his kind. His tales are his soul-saga.

They portray a man immured in a sunless moat—one who is content with the dark, but who, unconsciously, rises from his seat at intervals and searches the walls with his eyes for a chink of light. His mind was a lodging-house for the distraught. What weird, pain-bitten, grief-ravaged beings took up their abode in that caravansary at night and slunk away in the morning, maybe never to return!—imprinted, unprintable, untellable. And there came, too, to stay with him myriads of wan, pale, ethereal wayfarers who seemed to bear about their eyes the light of impalpable worlds and on their brows the sombre thoughts of thwarted genius. The best that is in a man is never told—and the worst is past imagining. Two things the soul cannot formulate in language: its remote, obscure emotions and its immediate noon-day certainties. In Hawthorne’s face there are the wonderful tales that he never told.

There is phantom-touch in his pages. He lacked the sense of reality—the sure test of spirituality. Long, shadowy files sweep up from out the unconscious and form black processions across the earth. That is life. It is the phantom lockstep. These shadows come and go, making frenetic comic gestures. They whisper hoarsely each to the other—and this they call history. They scud across the earth from the immurmurous to the immurmurous — from Mist to Mist. They are palpitant sobs vested in flesh-mesh. This star is but a ghost walk—the fading ramparts of a mystic Elsinore, and graveyards are but tombs within tombs. The days sheened in their meridional glories, the nights set with their little pulsing eyes are the reflections of soul-torrent. Our arts are but the photographs of the apparitional.

Who has touched the Real or tethered the Now? What Hawthorne saw, that is so. Who can say, “Here thought begins and things cease”? Who can put his thought upon that moment that divides the sleeping moment from the waking moment?—who can tell how far one trenches on the other? Life is but a conscious sleeping; sleep an unconscious waking—or a waking into the Unconscious. Life in prospect is always phosphorescent with hope; the path behind is a white capped dream. Youth and Age are to both somnambules. Our imaginations —and Hawthorne was an imaginative seer — are unplumbed, immeasurable. Fancy is the mirror that gives us back the real. Life is a progressive dream, a languorous, painful unwinding. We pace the decks, withered gods, the definite shrunk to a hint, a puzzle to ourselves, a puzzle to the beasts below and the inhabitants of the fourth dimension above. Hawthorne nowhere formulates this sense of mystery, but it stands shadowlike behind each sentence. It is the breath of his literary body.

Though here, of our date and time, he was a belated spirit—a fanciful, roving, ether-cleaving spirit who one day, while peeping in curiosity over the eaves of his dream-mansion, fell into flesh. Society annoyed him and he turned from the rouged arts of civilization with a fine contempt.

Genius treads far from that bellowing sphinx called civilization. The nineteenth century was a coarse melodrama written by the devil for the delectation of the blasé gods. By ignoring it utterly Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walter Pater became its greatest critics. Civilization at best is a peddler dressed up to look like a monarch. It is that process which has subtilized the direct and made automatic the spontaneous. It has made a crooked line the shortest way between two given points and substituted Machiavelli for Euclid. It invents pains in order to banish from its heart the horrible boredom that oppresses it. The vaunted arts and sciences sit cheek-by-jowl with Mammon. “Progress” is the cluck-cluck of satisfaction of Caliban as he makes headway into thicker mud.

Practical life stands for the utter materialization of the soul. Its glitter, which attracts from afar, is the glitter that falls from pomade-burnished garbage cans. In the great cities, which Rousseau called nature’s sinks, men do not congregate, but fester. Cities are great street-canalled slime-vats, wherein long familiarity has indurated the sense of smell. Here the souls of men turn turtle: they call it “business.” Ideals melt in these fens like the snow-image in Hawthorne’s tale when it is dragged by the Practical Man—always and everywhere an atheist—before the fireplace. Practical life!—the domain of the arched spine and the furtive glance—it is better to become moss-grown in the Old Manse of Dreams. Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, Clifford Pynchon, Miriam, Donatello shall outlive in shadowy immortality the flesh and blood beings that mimic their ways here below, and the turrets and spires of our civilization shall long be gangrened in the muds of oblivion when the shadow-makers that have gone shall still with potent rod smite the souls of generations unborn, and from them, as from us, shall burst the fountains of exalted wonder.

What strange shadows tread at our heels!—shadows of evil and shadows of good. On how slight a pivot turn our fortunes! In that exquisite fantasy, “David Swan,” the muffled march of events that never materialize, that cross and recross our paths unseen, unapprehended, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father when he parades before the eyes of the spirit-blind Queen Gertrude, is the theme of  Hawthorne. In this little allegory we read the chances of life. Our destinies are brittle but inexorable, and we are tossed around in the great world-forces like a bottle in the sea.

Young Swan lies down to rest beneath a tree that stands by a well-travelled road. He is poor and sleeps deep. A carriage becomes disabled near him and the occupants, an elderly lady and gentleman, while waiting for a broken wheel to be mended, contemplate his adoption, but the coachman interrupts with the message that the carriage is ready, and Fortune, which just grazed him in her flight, passes on forever. Death, in the guise of thieves who are about to murder him for his clothing, but who are opportunely frightened off, lingers near him for a second and then postpones her rendezvous with the soul of David Swan. Love, in the person of a young girl who steps aside to contemplate and blush, glides by him. David wakes and goes on his way whistling.

Our days are freighted with gifts and curses, and the bitterness of life lies in the consciousness of what might have been. Yet the Law never swerves, or if it swerve, it carries on its breast the debris of our dreams and hurries us to the Gulf that swallows all dreams. The might-have-been is as far away as that which never came to being. “Our happiness passes close by us.” Not so: it is the illusion of space. Unless we possess it, it is but the greater mockery when it thrusts its flowers under our noses and when we are about to inhale the fragrance substitutes snuff.

Hawthorne, King of a realm fantastic, Emperor of shadows, Grand Seigneur of the unmapped, tourist of the sub terrene, who saw from behind his lattice of fancy the pain that bases the moral world and the comic lie that is called optimism — he sups to-night, with Omar, Amiel, and de Maupassant, on herbs and bitters. For he was one of the Order of the Black Veil—in life a soul of regal pains, in death a quenchless memory in our hearts.

 

 

DECASSERES PLANS U. S. LIBERTY FIGHT

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, SUNDAY MORNING. AUGUST 11. 1935


DECASSERES PLANS U. S. LIBERTY FIGHT

Philosopher Turns to New Credo in “War on Collectivism”

NEW YORK, Aug. 10 (A. P.) Benjamin DeCasseres, philosopher and descendant of philosophers, turned today from his abstractions to what he termed “a fighting political realism in the defense of American liberty.”

“I purpose from now on,” he said, to use all my forces in battling for the preservation of the American-British-French ideal of civil liberties against Communism, Fascism, Nazism or any form of collectivism that ties the individual to the Juggernaut of a dictatorial State.

“The difference between Communism and Fascism is a difference in stench.” The descendant of Spinoza, great Dutch philosopher of the 18th century, turned his back on the philosophers of antiquity and modernity.

Rings Liberty Bell

“I have hobnobbed with Buddha and Aeschylus, Plato and Schopenhauer, Spinoza and Nietzsche, Victor Hugo and Baudelaire, Goethe and Heine, Montaigne and Whitman, Hegel and Keats, Thomas Hardy and Dostoievsky,” he said,”–in fact, with the whole earth brain trust.

“I salute them in temporary farewell, walk down Olympus into Independence Hall, roll up my sleeves, carry the Liberty Bell up to the tower—and ring it till it either cracks to dust or until I die.” For his battle cry DeCasseres has taken a new American credo, culled from the men he considers the great type American political leaders—Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

His credo:

“I believe with Benjamin Franklin that any nation that exchanges its liberty for security is not worthy of either.”

“I believe with Thomas Jefferson that the least government is the best government.”

Activities Divided

“All my life I have divided my spiritual, mental and emotional activities between Olympus and Independence Hall.”

“That is, part of me pursued truth and beauty in the great thinkers and poets, and part of me pursued with passionate militancy the fierce individualism of Thomas Jefferson.”

“Today I leave Olympus, except for short visits, and move, bag and baggage, into Independence Hall and Monticello.” DeCasseres said he considered that “there is a mighty war being fought now in every country in the world.”

“It is individualism versus collectivism; freedom versus reactionary totalitarianism.”

“I shall advocate individualism against all forms of standardized stagnation, sterile conformity, beehive Socialism. Communism and the efforts of capitalism to monopolize the necessities of life.”

“The most brutal form of capitalism is the totalitarian State: Russia, Germany and Italy.”

The philosopher, although he has turned from thoughts to deeds, insists on the rational approach to action.

“Every American worthy of the name,” he said, “should know why he is an American.”

“And having found out that this greatest deliberate experiment ever made in human liberties, with all its attendant faults and corruptions, is the superior politically of any other Government that has heretofore appeared on earth, he should be prepared to risk everything to save it from the threatened universal catastrophe of the superstitious belief that the State is a miracle machine.”

America’s Most Unpublished Author

As published in the San Bernardino Sun, Volume 67, Number 23, 23 September 1930


Intelligentsia Pole Star Gives Bernard Shaw Merciless Flaying In Volume Lauding H.L Mencken

America’s Most Unpublished Author at Last ‘Clicks’ and Works to Be Printed

By H. ALLEN SMITH (United Press Correspondent) NEW YORK, Sept. 22.

Benjamin Decasseres, pole star of the American intelligentsia and sometimes called the most unpublished author in the United States, has written a new book that will be published. It is called “Mencken and Shaw, the Anatomy of America’s Voltaire and England’s Other John Bull.” Between its covers Decasseres sets out, with a pen that drips blue fire, to prove that George Bernard Shaw is a colossal mountebank and that H. L. Mencken is the true modern Voltaire.

Lives in Apartment Off Gramercy Park

This being an interesting thesis, Decasseres submitted to an interview. He lives in an apartment off Gramercy park surrounded by books, green pencils, unpublished manuscripts and an ice box well stocked with tannic acid. The “Lone Eagle” of American literature wore brown striped pajamas, of a silken texture, during the interview. First off he brought out his 16 unpublished books. These range in topic from a volume of poetry to the love letters of Bio and Benjamin Decasseres. “The publishers,” Decasseres said, “won’t touch my stuff because I won’t go to literary teas.” His new volume on Mencken and Shaw will be published by Silas Newton, a Texas oil man. Newton may publish all of Decasseres works. The 57-year-old author believes that Mencken’s books should be placed in the schools, “to teach Americans how to write English.” He holds that Mencken is the greatest writer as well as the greatest social satirist this country has ever produced. “I have taken Mencken and Shaw,” he said, “as the world’s two outstanding sane rebels. But my idea is that Mencken’s sanity is sincere, while Shaw’s is not. Shaw delights in making people believe he is insane, which he probably is. He is a cheap publicity-seeker, a publicity-shark of the lowest type. He is like a trick bear, always clowning. “The big difference lies in the fact that Mencken has character, Shaw has none. I don’t agree with Mencken on many of his literary and esthetic judgments. But I believe that his grandeur comes from his narrowness, his height comes from his lack of breadth. “Mencken glories in the use of words. He takes the same pleasure in studying the use of words that a Beethoven would take in the study of notes, or a Rembrandt in the study of colors.” The frequent charge of insincerity, brought against Mencken, irritates Decasseres.

Has Been Pursuing One Line of Thought

“For 20 years.” he said, “the man has been following one solid line of thought a battering ram against sham and humbug and popular idols. My objection to him is that he is monotonously sincere. I wish he would change his record occasionally.” Decasseres said that Shaw has never created a character that will live, that he is the “father of all the sophisticated drool that exists on the stage today. He is the greatest disaster to the English stage of the century. He cannot create human beings, only epigrani-spouters, and he creates his characters to fit his epigrams instead of letting the epigrams flow naturally from the characters. I might add that he gats all his epigrams from jazzing up Schopenhauer, Neitzsche, Tolstoy, La Rochefocauld, Oscar Wilde and Samuel Butler. Shaw is related to the world of great artist? as jazz composers are related to Beethoven and Mozart.” Decasseres sent the proofs of his book to Mencken, who in- turn wrote a letter to the author. The last line of this letter reads: “You forgot to put in that I was baptized at the age of two months and had the hives for five weeks thereafter.”