Down with the Fourth of July

Great collection. Three relevant Mencken items:

1. H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Fourth Series (New York: Octagon Books, 1985), pp. 227-28:

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change of substance. The American colonists, when they got rid of the Potsdam tyrant, believed fondly that they were getting rid of oppressive taxes forever and setting up complete liberty. They found almost instantly that taxes were higher than ever, and before many years they were writhing under the Alien and Sedition Acts.

2. H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), pp. 145-46.

Political revolutions do not often accomplish anything of genuine value; their one undoubted effect is simply to throw out one gang of thieves and put in another… [T]he American colonies gained little by their revolt in 1776 … Under the British hoof they would have got on just as well, and probably a great deal better.

3. H.L. Mencken, Minority Report (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 146-47.

I marvel that no one tries to launch a royalist movement in the United States. I have printed several articles in favor of it from time to time, but they were always more or less jocose. Nine Americans out of ten are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high susceptibility to the political claims of presidents’ sons and other relatives, usually nonentities. The rise of Roosevelt II was obviously due to his name. He would never have been appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy if it had not been for that name — indeed, he would never have been elected to the New York State Senate. Wilson appointed him to the Navy Department for the same reason that Roosevelt I appointed Charles J. Bonaparte — in order to gather in some reflected dynastic glory.

And there’s also Mencken’s Declaration of Independence in American, but I think we all know about that.