e fact that I had
published a book on Nietzsche in 1906, six years after his death, I was
called upon by agents of the Department of Justice, elaborately
outfitted with badges, to meet the charge that I was an intimate
associate and agent of "the German monster, Nietzsky." I quote the
official _proces verbal_, an indignant but often misspelled document.
Alas, poor Nietzsche! After all his laborious efforts to prove that he
was not a German, but a Pole--even after his heroic readiness, via
anti-anti-Semitism, to meet the deduction that, if a Pole, then probably
also a Jew!

But under all this alarmed and preposterous tosh there was at least a
sound instinct, and that was the instinct which recognized Nietzsche as
the most eloquent, pertinacious and effective of all the critics of the
philosophy to which the Allies against Germany stood committed, and on
the strength of which, at all events in theory, the United States had
engaged itself in the war. He was not, in point of fact, involved with
the visible enemy, save in remote and transient ways; the German,
officially, remained the most ardent of Christians during the war and
became a democrat at its close. But he was plainly a foe of democracy in
all its forms, political, religious and epistemological, and what is
worse, his opposition was set forth in terms that were not only
extraordinarily penetrating and devastating, but also uncommonly
offensive. It was thus quite natural that he should have aroused a
degree of indignation verging upon the pathological in the two countries
that had planted themselves upon the democratic platform most boldly,
and that felt it most shaky, one may add, under their feet. I daresay
that Nietzsche, had he been alive, would have got a lot of satisfaction
out of the execration thus heaped upon him, not only because, being a
vain fellow, he enjoyed execration as a tribute to his general
singularity, and hence to his superiority, but also and more importantly
because, being no mean psychologist, he would have recognized the
disconcerting doubts underlying it. If Nietzsche's criticism of
democracy were as ignorant and empty, say, as the average evangelical
clergyman's criticism of Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection, then
the advocates of democracy could afford to dismiss it as loftily as the
Darwinians dismiss the blather of the holy clerks. And if his attack
upon Christianity were mere sound and fury, signifying nothing, then
there wou