"Prof. Veblen and the Cow",
By H[enry] L[ouis] Mencken

The Smart Set, (Magazine), New York,
Vol. LIX, No. 1 (May, 1919), pp. 138-144.
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[138]
PROF. VEBLEN AND THE COW
By H. L. Mencken

I

TEN or twelve years ago, being engaged in a fatuous public discussion with 
what was then known as an intellectual Socialist (he has since, observing the 
proof of the pudding in Russia, renounced the red flag, taken down the wood-
cut of Karl Marx from his wall, put up lithographs of Josephus Daniels, Elihu 
Root and Abraham Lincoln, and bought War Savings Stamps), I was constantly 
beguiled and assaulted by his long quotations from a certain Prof. Dr. 
Thorstein Veblen, then quite unknown to me. My antagonist seemed to attach a 
great deal of importance to these quotations and urged me to read them well, 
but the more I read them the less I could make out of them, and so, growing 
impatient, I denounced this Prof. Veblen as a hawker of pishposh, refused to 
waste any more time on his snarling polysyllables, and applied myself to the 
other Socialist witnesses in the case, seeking to set fire to their shirts. 
That old debate, which took place by mail (for the Socialist lived like a 
moving-picture actor on his country estate, and I was a wage-slave attached 
to a city newspaper), was afterward embalmed in a dull book, and the book is 
now as completely forgotten as Baxter's "Saint's Rest" or the Constitution of 
the United States. I myself have not looked into it for six or eight years, 
and all I remember of my opponent's argument (beyond the fact that he not 
only failed to convert me to the embryonic Bolshevism of the time, but even 
shook my native faith in democracy) is his curious respect for the aforesaid 
Prof. Dr. Thorstein Veblen, and his delight in the learned gentleman's long, 
tortuous and (to me, at least) flapdoodlish phrases.

There was, indeed, a time when I forgot even this — when my mind was purged 
of the professor's very name. This was, say, from 1909 or thereabout to the 
middle of 1917. During that time, having lost interest in Socialism, even as 
an amateur psychiatrist, I ceased to read its literature, and thus lost track 
of all its Great Thinkers. The periodicals that I then gave an eye to, 
setting aside newspapers, were chiefly the familiar American imitations of 
the English weeklies of opinion, and in these the dominant Great Thinker was, 
first, the late Prof. Dr. William James, and, after his decease, Prof. Dr. 
John Dewey. The reign of James, as the illuminated will recall, was long and 
glorious. For three or four years running he was mentioned in every one of 
those warmed-over Spectators and Saturday Reviews at least once a week, and 
often a dozen times. Among the less sombre gazettes of the republic, to be 
sure, there were other heroes: Maeterlinck, Rabindranath Tagore, Judge Ben B. 
Lindsey, Arnold Bennett, the late Major-General Roosevelt, Tom Lawson and so 
on. Still further down the literary and intellectual scale there were yet 
others: Hall Caine, Eugene Brieux and Leonard Merrick among them, with paper-
bag cookery and the twilight sleep to dispute their popularity. But on the 
majestic level of the Nation, among the white and lavender peaks of 
professorial ratiocination, there was scarcely a serious rival to James. Now 
and then, perhaps, Jane Addams had a month of vogue, and during one winter 
there was a rage for Bergson, and for a short space German spies tried to set 
up Eucken (now damned with Wagner, Nietzsche [139] and Ludendorff), but 
taking one day with another James held his own against the field. His ideas, 
immediately they were stated, became the ideas of every pedagogue from 
Harvard to Leland Stanford, and the pedagogues, laboring furiously at space 
rates, rammed them into the skulls of the lesser intelligentsia. To have 
called James an ass, during the year 1909, would have been as fatal as to 
have written a sentence like this one without so many haves. He died a year 
or so later, but his ghost went marching on: it took three or four years to 
interpret and pigeon-hole his philosophical remains and to take down and 
redact his messages (via Sir Oliver Lodge, Little Brighteyes, Wah-Wah the 
Indian Chief, and other gifted psychics) from the spirit world. But then, 
gradually, he achieved the whole irrevocable act of death, and there was a 
vacancy. To it Prof. Dr. Dewey was elected by the acclamation of all right-
thinking and forward-looking men. He was an expert in pedagogics, 
metaphysics, psychology, ethics, logic, politics, pedagogical metaphysics, 
metaphysical psychology, psychological ethics, ethical logic, logical 
politics and political pedagogics. He was Artium Magister, Philosophiae 
Doctor and twice Legum Doctor. He had written a book called "How to Think." 
He was a professor. Ergo, he was the ideal candidate, and so he was 
nominated, elected and inaugurated, and for three years, more or less, he 
enjoyed a peaceful reign in the groves of sapience, and the intelligentsia 
venerated him as they had once venerated James.

I myself enjoyed the discourses of this Prof. Dewey and was in hopes that he 
would last. Born so recently as 1859 and a man of sober habits, he seemed 
likely to peg along until 1935 or 1940, a gentle and charming geyser of 
correct thought. But it was not, alas, to be. Under cover of pragmatism, that 
serpent's metaphysic, there was unrest beneath the surface. Young college 
professors who seemed as harmless as so many convicts in the death-house were 
secretly, flirting with new and red-hot ideas. Whole regiments and brigades 
of them yielded in stealthy privacy to rebellious and often incomprehensible 
yearnings. Now and then, as if to reveal what was brewing, a hell fire blazed 
and a Prof. Dr. Scott Nearing went sky-hooting through its smoke. One heard 
whispers of strange heresies — economic, sociological, even political. Gossip 
had it that pedagogy was hatching vipers, nay, was already brought to bed. 
But not much of this got into the jitney Saturday Reviews and grape-juice 
Athenaeums — a hint or two, maybe, but no more. In the main they kept to 
their old resolute demands for a pure civil-service, the budget system in 
Congress, the abolition of hazing at the Naval Academy, an honest primary and 
justice to the Filipinos, with the overthrow of Prussian militarism added 
after August, 1914. And Dr. Dewey, on his remote Socratic Alp, pursued the 
calm reinforcement of the philosophical principles underlying these and all 
other lofty causes. ...

Then, of a sudden, Siss! Boom! Ah! Then, overnight, the rising of the 
intellectual Bolsheviki, the headlong assault upon all the old axioms of 
pedagogical speculation, the nihilistic dethronement of Prof. Dewey — and 
rah, rah, rah for Prof. Dr. Thorstein Veblen! Veblen? Could it be-? Aye, it 
was! My old acquaintance! The Doctor obscurus of my half-forgotten bout with 
the intellectual Socialist! The Great Thinker redivivus! Here, indeed, he was 
again, and in a few months — almost it seemed a few days — he was all over 
the Nation, the Dial, the New Republic and the rest of them, and his books 
and pamphlets began to pour from the presses, and the newspapers reported his 
every wink and whisper, and everybody who was anybody began gabbling about 
him. The spectacle, I do not hesitate to say, somewhat distressed me. On the 
one hand, I was sorry to see so learned and interesting a man as Dr. Dewey 
sent back to Columbia, there to lecture in imperfect Yiddish to classes of 
Grand Street Platos. And on the other hand, I shrunk supinely from [140] the 
appalling job, newly rearing itself before me, of re-reading the whole, canon 
of the singularly laborious and muggy, the incomparably tangled and 
unintelligible works of Prof. Dr. Thorstein Veblen.

II

WELL, I have got through it nevertheless, and, after all, with rather less 
damage than I looked for. There are, first and last, six volumes on the 
eminent master's shelf, and I have read the whole half dozen. I rehearse 
their titles: "The Theory of the Leisure Class," "The Theory of Business 
Enterprise," "The Instinct of Workmanship," "Imperial Germany and the 
Industrial Revolution," "The Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its 
Perpetuation" and "The Higher Learning in America" (all Huebsch). But I do 
not recommend the complete course; a part will suffice for you, if you are 
naturally bright. Read the first book and the last, and you will pick up 
enough of Prof. Veblen's theory to outfit you acceptably. Read the first 
alone, and you will have a fairly good general acquaintance with his ideas. 
For those ideas, save in detail, are quite simple, and what is more, often 
very familiar. The only thing that is genuinely new about them is the 
astoundingly grandiose and rococo manner of their statement — the almost 
unbelievable tediousness and flatulence of the learned schoolmaster's prose. 
Tunnel under those great mounds and stalagmites of words, dig down into that 
vast kitchen-midden of discordant and irritating polysyllables, blow up that 
hard, thick shell of professorial bombast, and what you will find is chiefly 
a mass of platitudes — the self-evident made thunderous, the obvious in terms 
of the stupendous. Marx said a great deal of it, and what Marx overlooked has 
been said over and over again by his heirs and assigns. But Marx, at this 
business, labored under a handicap: he wrote in German, a language he 
actually understood. Prof. Veblen suffers no such disadvantage. Though born, 
I believe, in These States, and resident here all his life, he achieves the 
effect, perhaps without employing the means, of thinking in some foreign 
language — say Latin, Sumerian or Old Church Slavic — and then painfully 
clawing his thoughts into English. The result is a style that affects the 
higher cerebral centers like a constant roll of subway expresses. The second 
result is a sort of bewildered numbness of the senses, as before some 
fabulous and unearthly marvel. And the third result, if I make no mistake, is 
the present celebrity of the professor as a Great Thinker. In brief, he 
states his hollow nothings in such high, astounding terms that they must 
inevitably arrest and blister the right-thinking mind. He makes them 
mysterious. He makes them shocking. He makes them portentous. And so he makes 
them stick and burn.

No doubt you think that I exaggerate — perhaps even that I lie. If so, then 
consider this specimen — the first paragraph of Chapter XIII of "The Theory 
of the Leisure Class":

"In an increasing proportion as time goes on, the anthropomorphic cult, with 
its code of devout observances, suffers a progressive disintegration through 
the stress of economic exigencies and the decay of the system of status. As 
this disintegration proceeds, there come to be associated and blended with 
the devout attitude certain other motives and impulses that are not always of 
an anthropomorphic origin, nor traceable to the habit of personal 
subservience. Not all of these subsidiary impulses that blend with the bait 
of devoutness in the later devotional life are altogether congruous with the 
devout attitude or with the anthropomorphic apprehension of sequence of 
phenomena. Their origin being not the same, their action upon the scheme of 
devout life is also not in the same direction. In many ways they traverse the 
underlying norm of subservience or vicarious life to which the code of devout 
observances and the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal institutions are to be 
traced as their substantial basis. Through the presence of these alien 
motives the social and industrial rιgime of status gradually disintegrates, 
and the canon of personal subservience loses the support derived from an 
unbroken tradition. Extraneous habits and proclivities encroach upon the 
field of action occupied by this canon, and it presently [141] comes about 
that the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal structures are partially converted to 
other uses, in some measure alien to the purposes of the scheme of devout 
life as it stood in the days of the most vigorous and characteristic 
development of the priesthood."

Well, what have we here? What do all these harsh, cacophonous sentences mean? 
Simply that, in the course of time, the worship of God is corrupted by 
extraneous enterprises, and that the church, ceasing to be merely a temple, 
becomes the headquarters of these enterprises. In brief, that men try to 
serve God by serving other men. This bald platitude, which must be obvious to 
any child who has ever been to a church bazar or a parish house, is here 
tortured, worried and run through rollers until it is spread out to 241 
words, of which fully 200 are unnecessary. The next paragraph is even worse. 
In it the gifted pundit undertakes to explain in his peculiar dialect "that 
non-reverent sense of aesthetic congruity with the environment which is left 
as a residue of the latter-day act of worship after elimination of its 
anthropomorphic content." Just what does he mean by this "non-reverent sense 
of aesthetic congruity"? I have studied the whole paragraph for three days, 
halting only for meals and sleep, and I have come to certain conclusions. I 
may be wrong, but nevertheless it is the best that I can do. What I conclude 
is this: he is trying to say that many people go to church, not because they 
are afraid of the devil, but because they enjoy the music, and like to look 
at the stained glass, the potted lilies and the rev. pastor. To get this 
profound and highly original observation upon paper, he wastes, not merely 
241, but more than 300 words! To say what could be said on a postage stamp he 
takes more than a page in his book!

And so in the other five volumes. In "The Higher Learning in America," the 
last to be published, the writing reaches its worst. It is as if the practise 
of it were a relentless and incurable disease, a sort of progressive 
intellectual diabetes. Words are piled upon 

words until all sense that there must be a meaning in them is lost. One 
wanders in a maze of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, 
conjunctions, pronouns and participles, most of them swollen and nearly all 
of them unable to walk. It is almost impossible to imagine worse English, 
within the limits of correct grammar. It is clumsy, affected, obscure, 
bombastic, windy, empty. It is without grace or distinction and it is often 
almost without elemental sense. And yet this highfalutin rumble-bumble, with 
its roots half in platitude and half in nonsense, has been gravely accepted, 
for a year or two past, as revelation, and the author of it has been put into 
the front rank of national prophets. Nothing could more horribly reveal the 
essential childishness of all intellectual speculation in the United States. 
Nothing could offer a more depressing proof of the extent to which the game 
of ideas has been divested of all interest and vitality, and reduced to the 
estate of a formal combat with bladders between platitudinizing pedagogues.

III

I HAVE said that most of Prof. Veblen's notions are not only flabby, but also 
stale. This is true. Reading him, one never gets the thrill that goes with 
sharp and original thinking, dexterously put into words. His fundamental 
ideas, stripping them of their gaudy investiture, are always seen to be 
feeble and obvious. The concepts underlying "The Theory of the Leisure Class" 
are simply Socialism-and-water, and the concepts underlying "The Higher 
Learning in America" are so elemental that even the editorial writers of 
newspapers have often voiced them. But now and then, starting from this stock 
balderdash, the talented professor attempts flights of a more original 
character — and straightway comes tumbling down into absurdity. What the poor 
reader then has to struggle with is not only intolerably bad writing, but 
also loose, cocksure and preposterous thinking. In brief, what he then has to 
[142] struggle with is stuff so bad that it is almost impossible to imagine 
it much worse.

Now for an example or two. The first is from Chapter IV of "The Theory of the 
Leisure Class." The specific problem before the professor has to do with the 
social convention which frowns upon the consumption of alcohol by women, at 
least to the extent to which men may consume it. Well, then, what is his 
explanation of this convention? In brief, here is his process of reasoning:

1. The leisure class, which is the predatory class of feudal times, reserves 
alt luxuries for itself, and disapproves their use by members of the lower 
classes, for this use takes away their charm by taking away their exclusive 
possession.
2. Women are chattels in the possession of the leisure class, and hence 
subject to the rules made for inferiors. "The patriarchal tradition ... says 
that the woman, being a chattel, should consume only what is necessary to her 
sustenance, except so far as her further consumption contributes to the 
comfort or the good repute of her master."

3. The consumption of alcohol contributes nothing to the comfort or good 
repute of the woman's master, but "detracts sensibly from the comfort or 
pleasure" of her master. Ergo, she is forbidden to drink.

This, I believe, is a fair specimen of the professor's reasoning. Observe it 
well, for it is typical. That is to say, it starts off with a gratuitous and 
highly dubious assumption, proceeds to an equally dubious deduction, and then 
ends with a platitude which begs the whole question. What sound reason is 
there for believing that exclusive possession is the hall-mark of luxury? 
There is none that I can see. It may be true of a few luxuries, but it is 
certainly not true of the most familiar 
ones. Do I enjoy a decent hath because I know that John Smith cannot afford 
one — or because I delight in being clean? Do I admire Beethoven's Fifth 
Symphony because it is incomprehensible to bootblacks and Methodists — or 
because I genuinely love music? Do I with the liver — or because the terrapin 
is intrinsically a more charming dose? Do I prefer kissing a pretty girl to 
kissing a charwoman because even a janitor may kiss a charwoman — or because 
the pretty girl looks better, smells better and kisses better? Now and then, 
to be sure, the idea of exclusive possession enters into the concept of 
luxury. I may, if I am an idiot, esteem a book because it is a unique first 
edition. I may, if I am fond, esteem a woman because she smiles on no one 
else. But even here, save in a very small minority of cases, other 
attractions plainly enter into the matter. It pleases me to have a unique 
first edition, but I wouldn't care anything for a unique first edition of 
Charles Garvice or Old Cap Collier: the author must have my respect, the book 
must be intrinsically valuable, there must be much more to it than its mere 
uniqueness. And if, being fond, I glory in the exclusive smiles of a certain 
Miss - or Mrs. -, then surely my satisfaction depends chiefly upon the lady 
herself, and not upon my mere monopoly. Would I delight in the fidelity of 
the charwoman? Would it give me any joy to learn that, through a sense of 
duty to me, she had ceased to kiss the janitor?

Confronted by such considerations it seems to me that Dr. Veblen is on wobbly 
ground when he sets up his twin theories of conspicuous consumption and 
conspicuous waste, and that he reduces them to utter absurdity by his long 
and tedious support of them. Nor is he a bit more persuasive when he deals 
with the specific position of women. That they are, in a limited sense, 
chattels is too obvious to need statement. A rich man adorns his wife with 
expensive clothes and jewels for the same reason, among others, that he 
adorns his own head with a plug-hat: to notify, everybody that he can afford 
it — in brief, to excite the envy of Socialists. But he also does it, let us 
hope, for another and far better and more powerful reason, to wit that be 
[143] Socialist philosophers. In Russia, I am told, the Bolsheviki have 
actually repudiated it as insane. But, nevertheless it still appeals very 
forcibly to the majority of normal men in civilized countries, and I am 
convinced that it is a hundred times as potent as any other reason. The 
American husband dresses his wife like a circus horse, not prima-rarily 
because he wants to display his wealth, but because he is a sentimental 
fellow and ever ready to yield to her desires. If any conception of her as a 
chattel were really in him, even unconsciously, he would be less her slave. 
As it is, her vicarious practise of conspicuous waste commonly reaches such a 
development that her master himself is forced into renunciations — which 
brings Dr. Veblen's theory to the verge of self-destruction.

His final conclusion is as unsound as his premisses. All it comes to is a 
plain begging of the question. Why does a man forbid his wife to drink all 
the alcohol that she can hold? Because it "detracts sensibly from his comfort 
or pleasure." In other words, it detracts from his comfort and pleasure 
because it detracts from his comfort and pleasure. Nothing could be feebler. 
Meanwhile, the real answer is so plain that even a college professor should 
know it. A man forbids his wife to drink too much because, deep in his secret 
archives, he has records of the behavior of other women who drank too much, 
and he is eager to safeguard his wife's self-respect and his own dignity 
against what he knows to be certain invasion. In brief, it is a commonplace 
of observation, familiar to all males beyond the age of twenty-one, that once 
a woman is drunk the rest is a mere matter of time and place: the girl is 
already there. A husband, viewing this prospect, perhaps shrinks from having 
his chattel damaged. But let us be soft enough to think that he may also 
shrink from seeing humiliation, ridicule and bitter regret inflicted upon one 
who is under his protection, and one whose dignity and happiness are precious 
to him, and one whom he regards with deep and (I surely hope) lasting 
affection. A man's grandfather is surely not his chattel, even by the terms 
of the Veblen theory, and yet I am sure that no sane man would let the old 
gentleman go beyond a discreet cocktail or two if a bout of genuine lushing 
were certain to be followed by the complete destruction of his dignity, his 
chastity and (if a Presbyterian) his immortal soul.

IV

ONE more example of the estimable professor's logic. On page 135 of "The 
Theory of the Leisure Class" he turns his garish and buzzing searchlight upon 
a double problem. First, why do we have lawns around our country houses? 
Secondly, why don't we employ cows to keep them clipped, instead of importing 
sweating Italians, Croatians, Alabamans? The first is answered by an appeal 
to ethnology: we delight in lawns because we are the descendants of "a 
pastoral people inhabiting a region with a humid climate." True enough, there 
is in a well-kept lawn "an element of sensuous beauty," but that is 
secondary: the main thing is that our dolicho-blond ancestors had flocks, and 
thus took a keen professional interest in grass. (The Marx motif! The 
economic interpretation of history in E flat.) But why don't we keep flocks? 
Why do we renounce cows and hire Jugo-Slavs? Because "to the average popular 
apprehension a herd of cattle so pointedly suggests thrift and usefulness 
that their presence ... would be intolerably cheap." With the highest 
respect, Pish! Plowing through a bad book from end to end, I can find nothing 
sillier than this. Here, indeed, the whole "theory of conspicuous waste" is 
exposed for precisely what it is: one percent platitude and ninety-nine 
percent bosh. Has the genial professor, pondering his great problems, ever 
taken a walk in the country? And has he, in the course of that walk, ever 
crossed a pasture inhabited by a cow (Bos taurus)? And has he, making That 
crossing, ever passed astern of the [144] cow herself? And has he, thus 
passing astern, ever stepped carelessly, and — 

But this is not a medical journal, and so I had better haul up. The cow, to 
me, symbolizes the whole speculation of this laborious and humorless 
pedagogue. From end to end of his books you will find the same tedious 
torturing of plain facts, the same relentless piling up of thin and 
preposterous theory, the same flatulent bombast, the same intellectual 
strabismus. And always with an air of vast importance, always in vexed and 
formidable sentences, always in the longest words possible, always in the 
worst English that even a professor ever wrote. One visualizes him with his 
head thrown back, searching for cryptic answers in the firmament — and not 
seeing the overt and disconcerting cow — not watching his step. One sees him 
as the pundit par excellence, infinitely earnest and diligent, infinitely 
honest and patient, but also infinitely hollow and exasperating.

V

But the learned man himself is less interesting as a phenomenon than the 
lavish hospitality with which his muddled and highly dubious ideas have been 
received. They are greeted with the utmost gravity, and almost as if they 
were the revelations of an inspired sage. And so they contribute their mite 
to the intellectual befuddlement of the country. That befuddlement is 
constantly marked by foreign observers. There is, in America, no alert and 
thorough thinking out of the fundamental problems of our society; there is 
only, as one Englishman has said, a noisy battle over superficialities, a 
conflict of crazes. Every year sees another intellectual Munyon arise, with 
another sure cure for all the sorrows of the country. Sometimes this Great 
Thinker is imported — once he was Pastor Wagner, once he was Bergson, once he 
was Eucken, once he was a lady, by name Ellen Key —; but more often he is of 
native growth. I do not rank Dr. 

Veblen among the worst of these prophets, save as a stylist; I am actually 
convinced that he belongs among the best. But that best is surely bad enough, 
comparing it to the best of other lands. Our trouble, in brief, is that we 
have so far failed to produce an intellectual aristocracy, and that we thus 
lack any machinery for testing ideas critically and in the light of a settled 
and well-tried philosophy. The general notion of democracy will not suffice; 
it is too loose, too vague and academic, and its terms change too often. The 
mob is credulous and inflammatory; the reigning plutocracy is ignorant to the 
verge of imbecility; in the middle ground there is nothing save an indistinct 
herd of professors, often quite as ignorant as the plutocracy and always in 
great fear of it.

Dr. Veblen describes this faction of scholastic intelligentsia very 
accurately in "The Higher Learning in America," albeit the thing has been 
done before and in vastly clearer English. It is responsible for what passes 
as the well-informed opinion of the country — for the sort of opinion one 
encounters in the aforesaid imitations of the English weeklies — for what 
later on leaks down, much diluted, into the few newspapers that are not 
frankly idiotic. But it is, in the main, timorous and futile, for it comes 
from a class of men of no definite and inassailable position, and hence a 
class that is but seldom recruited from men of courage and originality. Dr. 
Veblen exposes the characters of this class in the book I have mentioned: its 
supreme flower is the American college president, a professional sycophant 
and platitudinarian, engaged endlessly, not in the pursuit and dissemination 
of knowledge, but in the courting of rich donkeys and the entertainment of 
mobs. The book itself is proof of what this sycophancy at the top comes to in 
the end: it professes to expose abuses, and yet it discreetly refrains from 
describing them specifically, with names and dates. If so much prudence shows 
itself in a professor admittedly of su-
[More, perhaps, anon]
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