H.L. Mencken – Gamalielese – Baltimore Sun – 3/7/21
On the question of the logical content of Dr. Harding’s harangue of last Friday I do not presume to have views.
The matter has been debated at great length by the editorial writers of the Republic, all of them experts in logic; moreover, I confess to being prejudiced.
When a man arises publicly to argue that the United States entered the late war because of a “concern for preserved civilization,” I can only snicker in a superior way and wonder why he isn’t holding down the chair of history in some American university.
When he says that the United States has “never sought territorial aggrandizement through force,” the snicker arises to the virulence of a chuckle, and I turn to the first volume of General Grant’s memoirs.
And when, gaining momentum, he gravely informs the boobery that “ours is a constitutional freedom where the popular will is supreme, and minorities are sacredly protected,” then I abandon myself to a mirth that transcends, perhaps, the seemly, and send picture postcards of A. Mitchell Palmer and the Atlanta Penitentiary to all of my enemies who happen to be Socialists.
But when it comes to the style of a great man’s discourse, I can speak with a great deal less prejudice, and maybe with somewhat more competence, for I have earned most of my livelihood for twenty years past by translating the bad English of a multitude of authors into measurably better English.
Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding.
Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati.
That is to say, he writes the worst English I have even encountered.
It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.
It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.
It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh.
It is rumble and bumble.
It is flap and doodle.
It is balder and dash.
But I grow lyrical.
More scientifically, what is the matter with it?
Why does it seem so flabby, so banal, so confused and childish, so stupidly at war with sense?
If you first read the inaugural address and then heard it intoned, as I did (at least in part), then you will perhaps arrive at an answer.
That answer is very simple.
When Dr. Harding prepares a speech he does not think of it in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand.
That is to say, the thing is always a stump speech; it is conceived as a stump speech and written as a stump speech.
More, it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly able to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.
Such imbeciles do not want ideas — that is, new ideas, ideas that are unfamiliar, ideas that challenge their attention.
What they want is simply a gaudy series of platitudes, of sonorous nonsense driven home with gestures.
As I say, they can’t understand many words of more than two syllables, but that is not saying that they do not esteem such words.
On the contrary, they like them and demand them.
The roll of incomprehensible polysyllables enchants them.
They like phrases which thunder like salvos of artillery.
Let that thunder sound, and they take all the rest on trust.
If a sentence begins furiously and then peters out into fatuity, they are still satisfied.
If a phrase has a punch in it, they do not ask that it also have a meaning.
If a word slips off the tongue like a ship going down the ways, they are content and applaud it and wait for the next.
Brought up amid such hinds, trained by long practice to engage and delight them, Dr. Harding carries his stump manner into everything he writes.
He is, perhaps, too old to learn a better way.
He is, more likely, too discreet to experiment.
The stump speech, put into cold type, maketh the judicious to grieve.
But roared from an actual stump, with arms flying and eyes flashing and the old flag overhead, it is certainly and brilliantly effective.
Read the inaugural address, and it will gag you.
But hear it recited through a sound-magnifier, with grand gestures to ram home its periods, and you will begin to understand it.
Let us turn to a specific example.
I exhume a sentence from the latter half of the eminent orator’s discourse:
I would like government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.
I assume that you have read it.
I also assume that you set it down as idiotic — a series of words without sense.
You are quite right; it is.
But now imagine it intoned as it were designed to be intoned.
Imagine the slow tempo of a public speech.
Imagine the stately unrolling of the first clause, the delicate pause upon the word “then” — and then the loud discharge of the phrase “in understanding,” “in mutuality of interest,” “in concern for the common good,” each with its attendant glare and roll of the eyes, each with a sublime heave, each with its gesture of a blacksmith bringing down his sledge upon an egg — imagine all this, and then ask yourself where you have got.
You have got, in brief, to a point where you don’t know what it is all about.
You hear and applaud the phrases, but their connection has already escaped you.
And so, when in violation of all sequence and logic, the final phrase, “our tasks will be solved,” assaults you, you do not notice its disharmony — all you notice is that, if this or that, already forgotten, is done, “our tasks will be solved.”
Whereupon, glad of the assurance and thrilled by the vast gestures that drive it home, you give a cheer.
That is, if you are the sort of man who goes to political meetings, which is to say, if you are the sort of man that Dr. Harding is used to talking to, which is to say, if you are a jackass.
The whole inaugural address reeked with just such nonsense.
The thing started off with an error in English in its very first sentence — the confusion of pronouns is the one-he combination, so beloved of bad newspaper reporters.
It bristled with words misused: Civic for civil, luring for alluring, womanhood for women, referendum for reference, even task for problem.
“The task is to be solved” — what could be worse?
Yet I find it twice.
“The expressed views of world opinion” — what irritating tautology!
“The expressed conscience of progress” — what on earth does it mean?
“This is not selfishness, it is sanctity” — what intelligible idea do you get out of that?
“I know that Congress and the administration will favor every wise government policy to aid the resumption and encourage continued progress” — the resumption of what?
“Service is the supreme commitment of life”—ach, du heiliger!
But is such bosh out of place in stump speech?
Obviously not.
It is precisely and thoroughly in place of stump speech.
A tight fabric of ideas would weary and exasperate the audience; what it wants is a simple loud burble of words, a procession of phrases that roar, a series of whoops.
This is what it got in the inaugural address of the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding.
And this is what it will get for four long years — unless God sends a miracle and the corruptible puts on incorruption …
Almost I long for the sweeter song, the rubber-stamps of more familiar design, the gentler and more seemly bosh of the late Woodrow.
H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
Chiropractic: An Essay by H.L. Mencken
H.L. Mencken
December 1, 1924
This preposterous quackery flourishes lushIy in the back reaches of the Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities.
As the old-time family doctor dies out in the country towns, with no competent successor willing to take over his dismal business, he is followed by some hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six months, often by correspondence.
In Los Angeles the Damned, there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more generally esteemed.
Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to the heart of the town, along Wilshire boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are even chiropractic “hospitals.”
The Mormons who pour in from the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these “hospitals” copiously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of the town sorcerers.
That pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord — in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch.
This, plainly enough, is buncombe.
The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover.
This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.
Both doctrines were launched upon the world by an old quack named Andrew T. Still, the father of osteopathy.
For years the osteopaths merchanted them, and made money at the trade.
But as they grew opulent they grew ambitious, i.e., they began to study anatomy and physiology.
The result was a gradual abandonment of Papa Still’s ideas.
The high-toned osteopath of today is a sort of eclectic.
He tries anything that promises to work, from tonsillectomy to the x-rays.
With four years’ training behind him, he probably knows more anatomy than the average graduate of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, or at all events, more osteology.
Thus enlightened, he seldom has much to say about pinched nerves in the back.
But as he abandoned the Still revelation it was seized by the chiropractors, led by another quack, one Palmer.
This Palmer grabbed the pinched nerve nonsense and began teaching it to ambitious farm-hands and out-at-elbow Baptist preachers in a few easy lessons.
Today the backwoods swarm with chiropractors, and in most States they have been able to exert enough pressure on the rural politicians to get themselves licensed.
[It is not altogether a matter of pressure. Large numbers of rustic legislators are themselves believers in chiropractic. So are many members of Congress.]
Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor.
No education beyond the elements is necessary.
The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits — retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents.
Now and then a quack of some other school — say homeopathy — plunges into it.
Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.
Such quackeries suck in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal.
When these botched fall into the hands of competent medical men they are very likely to be patched up and turned loose upon the world, to beget their kind.
But massaged along the backbone to cure their lues [syphylis], they quickly pass into the last stages, and so their pathogenic heritage perishes with them.
What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
That the labors of quacks tend to propagate epidemics and so menace the lives of all of us, as is alleged by their medical opponents — this I doubt.
The fact is that most infectious diseases of any seriousness throw out such alarming symptoms and so quickly that no sane chiropractor is likely to monkey with them.
Seeing his patient breaking out in pustules, or choking, or falling into a stupor, he takes to the woods at once, and leaves the business to the nearest medical man.
His trade is mainly with ambulant patients; they must come to his studio for treatment.
Most of them have lingering diseases; they tour all the neighborhood doctors before they reach him.
His treatment, being nonsensical, is in accord with the divine plan.
It is seldom, perhaps, that he actually kills a patient, but at all events he keeps any a worthy soul from getting well.
The osteopaths, I fear, are finding this new competition serious and unpleasant.
As I have said, it was their Hippocrates, the late Dr. Still, who invented all of the thrusts, lunges, yanks, hooks and bounces that the lowly chiropractors now employ with such vast effect, and for years the osteopaths had a monopoly of them.
But when they began to grow scientific and ambitious their course of training was lengthened until it took in all sorts of tricks and dodges borrowed from the regular doctors, or resurrection men, including the plucking of tonsils, adenoids and appendices, the use of the stomach-pump, and even some of the legerdemain of psychiatry.
They now harry their students furiously, and turn them out ready for anything from growing hair on a bald head to frying a patient with the x-rays.
All this new striving, of course, quickly brought its inevitable penalties.
The osteopathic graduate, having sweated so long, was no longer willing to take a case of delirium tremens for $2, and in consequence he lost patients.
Worse, very few aspirants could make the long grade.
The essence of osteopathy itself could be grasped by any lively farmhand or night watchman in a few weeks, but the borrowed magic baffled him.
Confronted by the phenomenon of gastrulation, or by the curious behavior of heart muscle, or by any of the current theories of immunity, he commonly took refuge, like his brother of the orthodox faculty, in a gulp of laboratory alcohol, or fled the premises altogether.
Thus he was lost to osteopathic science, and the chiropractors took him in; nay, they welcomed him.
He was their meat.
Borrowing that primitive part of osteopathy which was comprehensible to the meanest understanding, they threw the rest overboard, at the same time denouncing it as a sorcery invented by the Medical Trust.
Thus they gathered in the garage mechanics, ash-men and decayed welterweights, and the land began to fill with their graduates.
Now there is a chiropractor at every crossroads.
I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the so-called science of public hygiene, which now seeks to make imbeciles immortal.
If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney’s spot and playing on his vertebra as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven.
And if that same man, having achieved lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith to cure its diphtheria by pulling its neck, then I do not resist the divine will that there shall be one less radio fan later on.
In such matters, I am convinced, the laws of nature are far better guides than the fiats and machinations of medical busybodies.
If the latter gentlemen had their way, death, save at the hands of hangmen, policemen and other such legalized assassins, would be abolished altogether, and the present differential in favor of the enlightened would disappear.
I can’t convince myself that would work any good to the world.
On the contrary, it seems to me that the current coddling of the half-witted should be stopped before it goes too far if, indeed, it has not gone too far already.
To that end nothing operates more cheaply and effectively than the prosperity of quacks.
Every time a bottle of cancer oil goes through the mails Homo americanus is improved to that extent.
And every time a chiropractor spits on his hands and proceeds to treat a gastric ulcer by stretching the backbone the same high end is achieved.
But chiropractic, of course, is not perfect.
It has superb potentialities, but only too often they are not converted into concrete cadavers.
The hygienists rescue many of its foreordained customers, and, turning them over to agents of the Medical Trust, maintained at the public expense, get them cured.
Moreover, chiropractic itself is not certainly fatal: even an Iowan with diabetes may survive its embraces.
Yet worse, I have a suspicion that it sometimes actually cures.
For all I know (or any orthodox pathologist seems to know) it may be true that certain malaises are caused by the pressure of vagrant vertebra upon the spinal nerves.
And it may be true that a hearty ex-boilermaker, by a vigorous yanking and kneading, may be able to relieve that pressure.
What is needed is a scientific inquiry into the matter, under rigid test conditions, by a committee of men learned in the architecture and plumbing of the body, and of a high and incorruptible sagacity.
Let a thousand patients be selected, let a gang of selected chiropractors examine their backbones and determine what is the matter with them, and then let these diagnoses be checked up by the exact methods of scientific medicine.
Then let the same chiropractors essay to cure the patients whose maladies have been determined.
My guess is that the chiropractors’ errors in diagnosis will run to at least 95% and that their failures in treatment will push 99%.
But I am willing to be convinced.
Where is there is such a committee to be found?
I undertake to nominate it at ten minutes’ notice.
The land swarms with men competent in anatomy and pathology, and yet not engaged as doctors.
There are thousands of hospitals, with endless clinical material.
I offer to supply the committee with cigars and music during the test.
I offer, further, to supply both the committee and the chiropractors with sound wet goods.
I offer, finally, to give a bawdy banquet to the whole Medical Trust at the conclusion of the proceedings.
_______________________
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was a controversial American journalist, essayist and literary critic. During the 1920s, he became famous for his vitriolic attacks on what he considered to be the hypocrisy, stupidity, and bigotry of much of American life. For obvious reasons, his critics considered him highly skilled at satire but intolerant and often crude. This essay was published in the Baltimore Evening Sun in December 1924. Although the medical knowledge of his day was still quite primitive, Mencken knew enough to realize that chiropractic theory was preposterous.
https://quackwatch.org/chiropractic/hx/mencken/
H.L. Mencken
December 1, 1924
This preposterous quackery flourishes lushIy in the back reaches of the Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities.
As the old-time family doctor dies out in the country towns, with no competent successor willing to take over his dismal business, he is followed by some hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six months, often by correspondence.
In Los Angeles the Damned, there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more generally esteemed.
Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to the heart of the town, along Wilshire boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are even chiropractic “hospitals.”
The Mormons who pour in from the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these “hospitals” copiously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of the town sorcerers.
That pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord — in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch.
This, plainly enough, is buncombe.
The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover.
This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.
Both doctrines were launched upon the world by an old quack named Andrew T. Still, the father of osteopathy.
For years the osteopaths merchanted them, and made money at the trade.
But as they grew opulent they grew ambitious, i.e., they began to study anatomy and physiology.
The result was a gradual abandonment of Papa Still’s ideas.
The high-toned osteopath of today is a sort of eclectic.
He tries anything that promises to work, from tonsillectomy to the x-rays.
With four years’ training behind him, he probably knows more anatomy than the average graduate of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, or at all events, more osteology.
Thus enlightened, he seldom has much to say about pinched nerves in the back.
But as he abandoned the Still revelation it was seized by the chiropractors, led by another quack, one Palmer.
This Palmer grabbed the pinched nerve nonsense and began teaching it to ambitious farm-hands and out-at-elbow Baptist preachers in a few easy lessons.
Today the backwoods swarm with chiropractors, and in most States they have been able to exert enough pressure on the rural politicians to get themselves licensed.
[It is not altogether a matter of pressure. Large numbers of rustic legislators are themselves believers in chiropractic. So are many members of Congress.]
Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor.
No education beyond the elements is necessary.
The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits — retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents.
Now and then a quack of some other school — say homeopathy — plunges into it.
Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.
Such quackeries suck in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal.
When these botched fall into the hands of competent medical men they are very likely to be patched up and turned loose upon the world, to beget their kind.
But massaged along the backbone to cure their lues [syphylis], they quickly pass into the last stages, and so their pathogenic heritage perishes with them.
What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
That the labors of quacks tend to propagate epidemics and so menace the lives of all of us, as is alleged by their medical opponents — this I doubt.
The fact is that most infectious diseases of any seriousness throw out such alarming symptoms and so quickly that no sane chiropractor is likely to monkey with them.
Seeing his patient breaking out in pustules, or choking, or falling into a stupor, he takes to the woods at once, and leaves the business to the nearest medical man.
His trade is mainly with ambulant patients; they must come to his studio for treatment.
Most of them have lingering diseases; they tour all the neighborhood doctors before they reach him.
His treatment, being nonsensical, is in accord with the divine plan.
It is seldom, perhaps, that he actually kills a patient, but at all events he keeps any a worthy soul from getting well.
The osteopaths, I fear, are finding this new competition serious and unpleasant.
As I have said, it was their Hippocrates, the late Dr. Still, who invented all of the thrusts, lunges, yanks, hooks and bounces that the lowly chiropractors now employ with such vast effect, and for years the osteopaths had a monopoly of them.
But when they began to grow scientific and ambitious their course of training was lengthened until it took in all sorts of tricks and dodges borrowed from the regular doctors, or resurrection men, including the plucking of tonsils, adenoids and appendices, the use of the stomach-pump, and even some of the legerdemain of psychiatry.
They now harry their students furiously, and turn them out ready for anything from growing hair on a bald head to frying a patient with the x-rays.
All this new striving, of course, quickly brought its inevitable penalties.
The osteopathic graduate, having sweated so long, was no longer willing to take a case of delirium tremens for $2, and in consequence he lost patients.
Worse, very few aspirants could make the long grade.
The essence of osteopathy itself could be grasped by any lively farmhand or night watchman in a few weeks, but the borrowed magic baffled him.
Confronted by the phenomenon of gastrulation, or by the curious behavior of heart muscle, or by any of the current theories of immunity, he commonly took refuge, like his brother of the orthodox faculty, in a gulp of laboratory alcohol, or fled the premises altogether.
Thus he was lost to osteopathic science, and the chiropractors took him in; nay, they welcomed him.
He was their meat.
Borrowing that primitive part of osteopathy which was comprehensible to the meanest understanding, they threw the rest overboard, at the same time denouncing it as a sorcery invented by the Medical Trust.
Thus they gathered in the garage mechanics, ash-men and decayed welterweights, and the land began to fill with their graduates.
Now there is a chiropractor at every crossroads.
I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the so-called science of public hygiene, which now seeks to make imbeciles immortal.
If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney’s spot and playing on his vertebra as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven.
And if that same man, having achieved lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith to cure its diphtheria by pulling its neck, then I do not resist the divine will that there shall be one less radio fan later on.
In such matters, I am convinced, the laws of nature are far better guides than the fiats and machinations of medical busybodies.
If the latter gentlemen had their way, death, save at the hands of hangmen, policemen and other such legalized assassins, would be abolished altogether, and the present differential in favor of the enlightened would disappear.
I can’t convince myself that would work any good to the world.
On the contrary, it seems to me that the current coddling of the half-witted should be stopped before it goes too far if, indeed, it has not gone too far already.
To that end nothing operates more cheaply and effectively than the prosperity of quacks.
Every time a bottle of cancer oil goes through the mails Homo americanus is improved to that extent.
And every time a chiropractor spits on his hands and proceeds to treat a gastric ulcer by stretching the backbone the same high end is achieved.
But chiropractic, of course, is not perfect.
It has superb potentialities, but only too often they are not converted into concrete cadavers.
The hygienists rescue many of its foreordained customers, and, turning them over to agents of the Medical Trust, maintained at the public expense, get them cured.
Moreover, chiropractic itself is not certainly fatal: even an Iowan with diabetes may survive its embraces.
Yet worse, I have a suspicion that it sometimes actually cures.
For all I know (or any orthodox pathologist seems to know) it may be true that certain malaises are caused by the pressure of vagrant vertebra upon the spinal nerves.
And it may be true that a hearty ex-boilermaker, by a vigorous yanking and kneading, may be able to relieve that pressure.
What is needed is a scientific inquiry into the matter, under rigid test conditions, by a committee of men learned in the architecture and plumbing of the body, and of a high and incorruptible sagacity.
Let a thousand patients be selected, let a gang of selected chiropractors examine their backbones and determine what is the matter with them, and then let these diagnoses be checked up by the exact methods of scientific medicine.
Then let the same chiropractors essay to cure the patients whose maladies have been determined.
My guess is that the chiropractors’ errors in diagnosis will run to at least 95% and that their failures in treatment will push 99%.
But I am willing to be convinced.
Where is there is such a committee to be found?
I undertake to nominate it at ten minutes’ notice.
The land swarms with men competent in anatomy and pathology, and yet not engaged as doctors.
There are thousands of hospitals, with endless clinical material.
I offer to supply the committee with cigars and music during the test.
I offer, further, to supply both the committee and the chiropractors with sound wet goods.
I offer, finally, to give a bawdy banquet to the whole Medical Trust at the conclusion of the proceedings.
_______________________
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was a controversial American journalist, essayist and literary critic. During the 1920s, he became famous for his vitriolic attacks on what he considered to be the hypocrisy, stupidity, and bigotry of much of American life. For obvious reasons, his critics considered him highly skilled at satire but intolerant and often crude. This essay was published in the Baltimore Evening Sun in December 1924. Although the medical knowledge of his day was still quite primitive, Mencken knew enough to realize that chiropractic theory was preposterous.
https://quackwatch.org/chiropractic/hx/mencken/
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
The Nation
April 27, 1921
A Short View of Gamalielese
IN the first sentence of the historic address from the east front of the Capitol, glowing there like a gem, was that piquant miscegenation of pronouns the one-he combination, for years a favorite of bad newspaper reporters and the inferior clergy.
In the fourth sentence of the first message to Congress is illy, the passion of rural grammar teachers and professors of rhetoric in one-building universities.
We are, as they say, getting warm.
The next great state paper — who knows? — may caress and enchant us with “Whom can deny?”
And the next with “I would have had to have had.”
And the next with “between you and I.”
And the next, going the whole hog, with alright, to date the gaudiest, loveliest, darndest flower of the American language, which God preserve!
Hog: flower?
Perhaps the distemper is contagious.
But certainly not uninteresting to study and snuffle over — certainly no dull thing to the specialist in morbid philology.
In the style of the late Woodrow there was nothing, after all, very remarkable, despite the orgiastic praises of Adolph Ochs, the Hon. Josephus Daniels, and other such fanatics.
It was simply the style of a somewhat literary and sentimental curate, with borrowings from Moody and Sankey and Dr. Berthold Baer.
Its phrases lisped and cooed; there was a velvety and funereal gurgling in them; they were made to be intoned between the second and third lessons by fashionable rectors; aided by fifes and drums, or even by cost-plus contracts, they were competent to vamp the intellect.
But intrinsically they were hollow.
No heart’s blood was in them; no gobs of raw flesh.
There was no passion there, hot, exigent, and challenging.
They could not make one puff and pant. . . .
One had to wait for Dr. Harding for that.
In his style there is pressure, ardency, effortcy, gasping, a high grunting, Cheyne-Stokes breathing.
It is a style that rolls and groans, struggles and complains.
It is the style of a rhinoceros liberating himself by main strength from a lake of boiling molasses.
In the doctrine that it is obscure I take no stock whatever.
Not a single sentence in the two great papers is incomprehensible to me, even after I have dined.
I exhume a sample strophe from the canto on the budget system in the message: “It will be a very great satisfaction to know of its early enactment, so it may be employed in establishing the economies and business methods so necessary in the minimum of expenditure.”
This is awful stuff, I grant you, but is it actually unintelligible?
Surely not.
Read it slowly and critically, and it may boggle you, but read it at one flash, and the meaning will be clear enough.
Its method is that of pointillisme.
The blotches of color are violent, and, seen too closely they appear insane, but stand off a bit and a quite simple and even austere design is at once discerned.
“I hope it is adopted soon, so that we may employ the economies and business methods needed to hold down expenses”: this is the kernel.
What else is there is the style.
It is the style of what the text-books of rhetoric call “elevated” discourse.
Its aim is to lend force to a simple hope or plea or asseveration by giving it the dynamic whoop and hoopla of a revival sermon, an auction sale, or a college yell.
The nuclear thought is not smothered in the process, as Democratic aesthetes argue, nor is it true that there is sometimes no nuclear thought at all.
It is always present, and nine times out of ten it is simple, obvious, and highly respectable.
But it lacks punch; it is devoid of any capacity to startle and scorch.
To give it the vigor and dignity that a great occasion demands it is carefully encased in those swathings of sonorous polysyllables, and then, the charge being rammed home, it is discharged point-blank into the ears and cerebrums of Christendom.
Such is the Gamalian manner, the secret of the Gamalian style.
That style had its origin under circumstances that are surely not unknown to experts in politico-agrarian oratory.
It came to birth on the rustic stump, it developed to full growth among the chautauquas, and it got its final polishing in a small-town newspaper office.
In brief, it reflects admirably the tastes and traditions of the sort of audience at which it was first aimed, to wit, the yokelry of the hinterland, naive, agape, thirsty for the prodigious, and eager to yell.
Such an audience has no fancy for a well-knit and succinct argument, packed with ideas.
Of all ideas, indeed, it is suspicious, but it will at least tolerate those that it knows by long hearing, those that have come to the estate of platitudes, those that fall readily into gallant and highfalutin phrases.
Above all, it distrusts perspicuity, for perspicuity is challenging and forces one to think, and hence lays a burden on the mind.
What it likes most of all is the roll of incomprehensible polysyllables — the more incomprehensible the better.
It wants to be bombarded, bawled at, overwhelmed by mad gusts of the parts of speech.
It wants to be entertained by orators who are manifestly superior — fellows whose discourse is so all-fired learned and unintelligible, so brilliant with hard words and trombone phrases, that it leaves them gasping.
Let the thunder sound, and it takes all else on trust.
If a sentence ends with a roar, it does not stop to inquire how it began.
If a phrase has punch, it does not ask that it also have a meaning.
If a word stings, that is enough.
Trained to the service of such connoisseurs. Dr. Harding carries over the style that they admire into his traffic with the Congress, the effete intelligentsia, and the powers and principalities of Europe.
That style is based upon the simplest of principles.
For every idea there is what may be called a maximum investiture — a garb of words beyond which it is a sheer impossibility to go in gaudiness.
For every plain word there is a word four times as big.
The problem is to think the thing out in terms of harmless banality, to arrange a series of obvious and familiar ideas in a logical sequence, and then to translate them, one by one, into nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns of the highest conceivable horse-power — to lift the whole discourse to the plane of artillery practice — to dignify the sense by all the arts of sorcery.
Turn to the two immortal documents.
The word citizen is plainly banal; even a Congressman can understand it.
Very well, then let us make it citizenship — and citizenship it becomes every time.
But even that is not enough.
There comes a high point in the argument; a few more pounds of steam must be found.
Citizen now undergoes a second proliferation; it becomes factor in our citizenship.
“We must invite . . . every factor in our citizenship to join in the effort” — to restore normalcy.
So with women.
It is a word in common use, a vulgar word, a word unfit for the occasions of statecraft.
Also, it becomes womanhood.
Again, there is reference; it swells up a bit and becomes referendum.
Yet again, civil becomes civic — more scholarly, more tasty, more nobby.
Yet again, interference has a low smack; it suggests plow-horses that interfere.
En avant! there is intermediation!
And so with whole phrases.
“The views of the world” gives way to “the expressed views of world opinion.”
“Heedless of cost” becomes “in heedlessness of cost.”
“Public conscience” becomes “the expressed conscience of progress.”
The “uplift,” now ancient and a trifle obscene, is triumphantly reincarnated in “our manifestation of human interest.”
“The Government’s duty to develop good citizens” shrieks upward like a rocket and bursts magnificently into “the Government’s obligation affirmatively to encourage development of the highest and most efficient type of citizenship.”
And so on and on.
Naturally enough, this style has its perils, no less hellish than war’s.
A man, so blowing up the parts of speech, may have one burst in his face.
I discern something of the sort, alas, in “Congress might speed the price readjustment to normal relationship, with helpfulness of both producer and consumer.”
Here there has been an accident, just what I do not know.
I suspect that “normal relationship” was substituted for normalcy, and that normalcy somehow got its revenge.
Or maybe helpfulness came to its rescue and did the dirty work.
Furthermore, the little word of has a suspicious look.
I let the problem go.
It is not one that a literary man engages with much gusto.
He knows by harsh experience that words have a way of playing tricks — that they run amok at times, and toss him in the air, or stand him on his head — that fooling with them is like training leopards and panthers to leap through hoops and play the violoncello.
There is, I have a notion, a foul conspiracy among words to pull Dr. Harding’s legs from under him.
He has tortured them for years — on the stump, in the chautauquas, beside the felled and smoking ox, at the annual banquets of the Chamber of Commerce, the Knights of Pythias, the Rotary Club, the Moose; above all, on the floors of legislative halls and in the columns of the Marion Star.
He has forced them into strange and abhorrent marriages.
He has stretched them as if they were chewing-gum.
He has introduced pipes into them and pumped them until they screamed.
He has put them to cruel and unusual uses.
He has shown them no mercy. . . .
Now, at last, they have him before a crowd that loves mirth, and make ready to get their revanche.
Now they prepare to put the skids under him.
https://nebula.wsimg.com/7f34069f1bacce ... oworigin=1
April 27, 1921
A Short View of Gamalielese
IN the first sentence of the historic address from the east front of the Capitol, glowing there like a gem, was that piquant miscegenation of pronouns the one-he combination, for years a favorite of bad newspaper reporters and the inferior clergy.
In the fourth sentence of the first message to Congress is illy, the passion of rural grammar teachers and professors of rhetoric in one-building universities.
We are, as they say, getting warm.
The next great state paper — who knows? — may caress and enchant us with “Whom can deny?”
And the next with “I would have had to have had.”
And the next with “between you and I.”
And the next, going the whole hog, with alright, to date the gaudiest, loveliest, darndest flower of the American language, which God preserve!
Hog: flower?
Perhaps the distemper is contagious.
But certainly not uninteresting to study and snuffle over — certainly no dull thing to the specialist in morbid philology.
In the style of the late Woodrow there was nothing, after all, very remarkable, despite the orgiastic praises of Adolph Ochs, the Hon. Josephus Daniels, and other such fanatics.
It was simply the style of a somewhat literary and sentimental curate, with borrowings from Moody and Sankey and Dr. Berthold Baer.
Its phrases lisped and cooed; there was a velvety and funereal gurgling in them; they were made to be intoned between the second and third lessons by fashionable rectors; aided by fifes and drums, or even by cost-plus contracts, they were competent to vamp the intellect.
But intrinsically they were hollow.
No heart’s blood was in them; no gobs of raw flesh.
There was no passion there, hot, exigent, and challenging.
They could not make one puff and pant. . . .
One had to wait for Dr. Harding for that.
In his style there is pressure, ardency, effortcy, gasping, a high grunting, Cheyne-Stokes breathing.
It is a style that rolls and groans, struggles and complains.
It is the style of a rhinoceros liberating himself by main strength from a lake of boiling molasses.
In the doctrine that it is obscure I take no stock whatever.
Not a single sentence in the two great papers is incomprehensible to me, even after I have dined.
I exhume a sample strophe from the canto on the budget system in the message: “It will be a very great satisfaction to know of its early enactment, so it may be employed in establishing the economies and business methods so necessary in the minimum of expenditure.”
This is awful stuff, I grant you, but is it actually unintelligible?
Surely not.
Read it slowly and critically, and it may boggle you, but read it at one flash, and the meaning will be clear enough.
Its method is that of pointillisme.
The blotches of color are violent, and, seen too closely they appear insane, but stand off a bit and a quite simple and even austere design is at once discerned.
“I hope it is adopted soon, so that we may employ the economies and business methods needed to hold down expenses”: this is the kernel.
What else is there is the style.
It is the style of what the text-books of rhetoric call “elevated” discourse.
Its aim is to lend force to a simple hope or plea or asseveration by giving it the dynamic whoop and hoopla of a revival sermon, an auction sale, or a college yell.
The nuclear thought is not smothered in the process, as Democratic aesthetes argue, nor is it true that there is sometimes no nuclear thought at all.
It is always present, and nine times out of ten it is simple, obvious, and highly respectable.
But it lacks punch; it is devoid of any capacity to startle and scorch.
To give it the vigor and dignity that a great occasion demands it is carefully encased in those swathings of sonorous polysyllables, and then, the charge being rammed home, it is discharged point-blank into the ears and cerebrums of Christendom.
Such is the Gamalian manner, the secret of the Gamalian style.
That style had its origin under circumstances that are surely not unknown to experts in politico-agrarian oratory.
It came to birth on the rustic stump, it developed to full growth among the chautauquas, and it got its final polishing in a small-town newspaper office.
In brief, it reflects admirably the tastes and traditions of the sort of audience at which it was first aimed, to wit, the yokelry of the hinterland, naive, agape, thirsty for the prodigious, and eager to yell.
Such an audience has no fancy for a well-knit and succinct argument, packed with ideas.
Of all ideas, indeed, it is suspicious, but it will at least tolerate those that it knows by long hearing, those that have come to the estate of platitudes, those that fall readily into gallant and highfalutin phrases.
Above all, it distrusts perspicuity, for perspicuity is challenging and forces one to think, and hence lays a burden on the mind.
What it likes most of all is the roll of incomprehensible polysyllables — the more incomprehensible the better.
It wants to be bombarded, bawled at, overwhelmed by mad gusts of the parts of speech.
It wants to be entertained by orators who are manifestly superior — fellows whose discourse is so all-fired learned and unintelligible, so brilliant with hard words and trombone phrases, that it leaves them gasping.
Let the thunder sound, and it takes all else on trust.
If a sentence ends with a roar, it does not stop to inquire how it began.
If a phrase has punch, it does not ask that it also have a meaning.
If a word stings, that is enough.
Trained to the service of such connoisseurs. Dr. Harding carries over the style that they admire into his traffic with the Congress, the effete intelligentsia, and the powers and principalities of Europe.
That style is based upon the simplest of principles.
For every idea there is what may be called a maximum investiture — a garb of words beyond which it is a sheer impossibility to go in gaudiness.
For every plain word there is a word four times as big.
The problem is to think the thing out in terms of harmless banality, to arrange a series of obvious and familiar ideas in a logical sequence, and then to translate them, one by one, into nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns of the highest conceivable horse-power — to lift the whole discourse to the plane of artillery practice — to dignify the sense by all the arts of sorcery.
Turn to the two immortal documents.
The word citizen is plainly banal; even a Congressman can understand it.
Very well, then let us make it citizenship — and citizenship it becomes every time.
But even that is not enough.
There comes a high point in the argument; a few more pounds of steam must be found.
Citizen now undergoes a second proliferation; it becomes factor in our citizenship.
“We must invite . . . every factor in our citizenship to join in the effort” — to restore normalcy.
So with women.
It is a word in common use, a vulgar word, a word unfit for the occasions of statecraft.
Also, it becomes womanhood.
Again, there is reference; it swells up a bit and becomes referendum.
Yet again, civil becomes civic — more scholarly, more tasty, more nobby.
Yet again, interference has a low smack; it suggests plow-horses that interfere.
En avant! there is intermediation!
And so with whole phrases.
“The views of the world” gives way to “the expressed views of world opinion.”
“Heedless of cost” becomes “in heedlessness of cost.”
“Public conscience” becomes “the expressed conscience of progress.”
The “uplift,” now ancient and a trifle obscene, is triumphantly reincarnated in “our manifestation of human interest.”
“The Government’s duty to develop good citizens” shrieks upward like a rocket and bursts magnificently into “the Government’s obligation affirmatively to encourage development of the highest and most efficient type of citizenship.”
And so on and on.
Naturally enough, this style has its perils, no less hellish than war’s.
A man, so blowing up the parts of speech, may have one burst in his face.
I discern something of the sort, alas, in “Congress might speed the price readjustment to normal relationship, with helpfulness of both producer and consumer.”
Here there has been an accident, just what I do not know.
I suspect that “normal relationship” was substituted for normalcy, and that normalcy somehow got its revenge.
Or maybe helpfulness came to its rescue and did the dirty work.
Furthermore, the little word of has a suspicious look.
I let the problem go.
It is not one that a literary man engages with much gusto.
He knows by harsh experience that words have a way of playing tricks — that they run amok at times, and toss him in the air, or stand him on his head — that fooling with them is like training leopards and panthers to leap through hoops and play the violoncello.
There is, I have a notion, a foul conspiracy among words to pull Dr. Harding’s legs from under him.
He has tortured them for years — on the stump, in the chautauquas, beside the felled and smoking ox, at the annual banquets of the Chamber of Commerce, the Knights of Pythias, the Rotary Club, the Moose; above all, on the floors of legislative halls and in the columns of the Marion Star.
He has forced them into strange and abhorrent marriages.
He has stretched them as if they were chewing-gum.
He has introduced pipes into them and pumped them until they screamed.
He has put them to cruel and unusual uses.
He has shown them no mercy. . . .
Now, at last, they have him before a crowd that loves mirth, and make ready to get their revanche.
Now they prepare to put the skids under him.
https://nebula.wsimg.com/7f34069f1bacce ... oworigin=1
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
On Being an American
by H.L. Mencken (1922)
All the while I have been forgetting the third of my reasons for remaining so faithful a citizen of the Federation, despite all the lascivious inducements from expatriates to follow them beyond the seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I succumb.
It is the reason which grows out of my mediaeval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties.
The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth.
It is a show which avoids diligently all the kinds of clowning which tire me most quickly — for example, royal ceremonials, the tedious hocus-pocus of haut politique, the taking of politics seriously — and lays chief stress upon the kinds which delight me unceasingly — for example, the ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues, the pursuit of witches and heretics, the desperate struggles of inferior men to claw their way into Heaven.
We have clowns in constant practice among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state as a Jack Dempsey is above a paralytic — and not a few dozen or score of them, but whole droves and herds.
Human enterprises which, in all other Christian countries, are resigned despairingly to an incurable dullness — things that seem devoid of exhilirating amusement, by their very nature — are here lifted to such vast heights of buffoonery that contemplating them strains the midriff almost to breaking.
I cite an example: the worship of God.
Everywhere else on earth it is carried on in a solemn and dispiriting manner; in England, of course, the bishops are obscene, but the average man seldom gets a fair chance to laugh at them and enjoy them.
Now come home.
Here we not only have bishops who are enormously more obscene than even the most gifted of the English bishops; we have also a huge force of lesser specialists in ecclesiastical mountebankery — tin-horn Loyolas, Savonarolas and Xaviers of a hundred fantastic rites, each performing untiringly and each full of a grotesque and illimitable whimsicality.
Every American town, however small, has one of its own: a holy clerk with so fine a talent for introducing the arts of jazz into the salvation of the damned that his performance takes on all the gaudiness of a four-ring circus, and the bald announcement that he will raid Hell on such and such a night is enough to empty all the town blind-pigs and bordellos and pack his sanctuary to the doors.
And to aid him and inspire him there are travelling experts to whom he stands in the relation of a wart to the Matterhorn — stupendous masters of theological imbecility, contrivers of doctrines utterly preposterous, heirs to the Joseph Smith, Mother Eddy and John Alexander Dowie tradition — Bryan, Sunday, and their like.
These are the eminences of the American Sacred College.
I delight in them.
Their proceedings make me a happier American.
Turn, now, to politics.
Consider, for example, a campaign for the Presidency.
Would it be possible to imagine anything more uproariously idiotic — a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sganarelle, Gobbo and Dr. Cook — the unspeakable, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable?
I defy any one to match it elsewhere on this earth.
In other lands, at worst, there are at least intelligible issues, coherent ideas, salient personalities.
Somebody says something, and somebody replies.
But what did Harding say in 1920, and what did Cox reply?
Who was Harding, anyhow, and who was Cox?
Here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics.
Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannon with blank cartridges charged with talcum power, and so let fly.
Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy reminder that it is serious, and that some one may be hurt.
I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that no-where else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness...
... Here politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for "King Lear," or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
But feeling better for the laugh.
Ridi si sapis, said Martial.
Mirth is necessary to wisdom, to comfort, above all to happiness.
Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication.
Here the buffoonery never stops.
What could be more delightful than the endless struggle of the Puritan to make the joy of the minority unlawful and impossible?
The effort is itself a greater joy to one standing on the side-lines than any or all of the carnal joys it combats.
Always, when I contemplate an uplifter at his hopeless business, I recall a scene in an old- time burlesque show, witnessed for hire in my days as a dramatic critic.
A chorus girl executed a fall upon the stage, and Rudolph Krausemeyer, the Swiss comdeian, rushed to her aid.
As he stooped painfully to succor her, Irving Rabinovitz, the Zionist comedian, fetched him a fearful clout across the cofferdam with a slap-stick.
So the uplifter, the soul-saver, the Americanizer, striving to make the Republic fit for Y.M.C.A. secretaries.
He is the eternal American, ever moved by the best of intentions, ever running a la Krausemeyer to the rescue of virtue, and ever getting his pantaloons fanned by the Devil.
I am naturally sinful, and such spectacles caress me.
If the slap-stick were a sash-weight, the show would be cruel, and I'd probably complain to the Polizei.
As it is, I know that the uplifter is not really hurt, but simply shocked.
The blow, in fact, does him good, for it helps get him into Heaven, as exegetes prove from Matthew v, 11: Hereux serez-vous, lorsqu'on vous outragera, qu'on vous persecutera, and so on.
As for me, it makes me a more contented man, and hence a better citizen.
One man prefers the Republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria.
Another because it has laws to keep him sober and his daughter chaste.
Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the cathedral at Chartres.
Another because, living here, he can read the New York Evening Journal.
Another because there is a warrant out for him somewhere else.
Me, I like it because it amuses me to my taste.
I never get tired of the show.
It is worth every cent it costs.
That cost, it seems to me is very moderate.
Taxes in the United States are not actually high.
I figure, for example, that my private share of the expense of maintaining the Hon. Mr. Harding in the White House this year will work out to less than 80 cents.
Try to think of better sport for the money: in New York it has been estimated that it costs $8 to get comfortably tight, and $17.50, on an average, to pinch a girl's arm.
The United States Senate will cost me perhaps $11 for the year, but against that expense set the subscription price of the Congressional Record, about $15, which, as a journalist, I receive for nothing.
For $4 less than nothing I am thus entertained as Solomon never was by his hooch dancers.
Col. George Brinton McClellan Harvey costs me but 25 cents a year; I get Nicholas Murray Butler free.
Finally, there is young Teddy Roosevelt, the naval expert.
Teddy costs me, as I work it out, about 11 cents a year, or less than a cent a month.
More, he entertains me doubly for the money, first as a naval expert, and secondly as a walking attentat upon democracy, a devastating proof that there is nothing, after all, in that superstition.
We Americans subscribe to the doctrine of human equality — and the Rooseveltii reduce it to an absurdity as brilliantly as the sons of Veit Bach.
Where is your equal opportunity now?
Here in this Eden of clowns, with the highest rewards of clowning theoretically open to every poor boy — here in the very citadel of democracy we found and cherish a clown dynasty!
Monadnock Valley Press > Mencken
https://monadnock.net/mencken/american.html
by H.L. Mencken (1922)
All the while I have been forgetting the third of my reasons for remaining so faithful a citizen of the Federation, despite all the lascivious inducements from expatriates to follow them beyond the seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I succumb.
It is the reason which grows out of my mediaeval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties.
The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth.
It is a show which avoids diligently all the kinds of clowning which tire me most quickly — for example, royal ceremonials, the tedious hocus-pocus of haut politique, the taking of politics seriously — and lays chief stress upon the kinds which delight me unceasingly — for example, the ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues, the pursuit of witches and heretics, the desperate struggles of inferior men to claw their way into Heaven.
We have clowns in constant practice among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state as a Jack Dempsey is above a paralytic — and not a few dozen or score of them, but whole droves and herds.
Human enterprises which, in all other Christian countries, are resigned despairingly to an incurable dullness — things that seem devoid of exhilirating amusement, by their very nature — are here lifted to such vast heights of buffoonery that contemplating them strains the midriff almost to breaking.
I cite an example: the worship of God.
Everywhere else on earth it is carried on in a solemn and dispiriting manner; in England, of course, the bishops are obscene, but the average man seldom gets a fair chance to laugh at them and enjoy them.
Now come home.
Here we not only have bishops who are enormously more obscene than even the most gifted of the English bishops; we have also a huge force of lesser specialists in ecclesiastical mountebankery — tin-horn Loyolas, Savonarolas and Xaviers of a hundred fantastic rites, each performing untiringly and each full of a grotesque and illimitable whimsicality.
Every American town, however small, has one of its own: a holy clerk with so fine a talent for introducing the arts of jazz into the salvation of the damned that his performance takes on all the gaudiness of a four-ring circus, and the bald announcement that he will raid Hell on such and such a night is enough to empty all the town blind-pigs and bordellos and pack his sanctuary to the doors.
And to aid him and inspire him there are travelling experts to whom he stands in the relation of a wart to the Matterhorn — stupendous masters of theological imbecility, contrivers of doctrines utterly preposterous, heirs to the Joseph Smith, Mother Eddy and John Alexander Dowie tradition — Bryan, Sunday, and their like.
These are the eminences of the American Sacred College.
I delight in them.
Their proceedings make me a happier American.
Turn, now, to politics.
Consider, for example, a campaign for the Presidency.
Would it be possible to imagine anything more uproariously idiotic — a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sganarelle, Gobbo and Dr. Cook — the unspeakable, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable?
I defy any one to match it elsewhere on this earth.
In other lands, at worst, there are at least intelligible issues, coherent ideas, salient personalities.
Somebody says something, and somebody replies.
But what did Harding say in 1920, and what did Cox reply?
Who was Harding, anyhow, and who was Cox?
Here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics.
Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannon with blank cartridges charged with talcum power, and so let fly.
Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy reminder that it is serious, and that some one may be hurt.
I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that no-where else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness...
... Here politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for "King Lear," or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
But feeling better for the laugh.
Ridi si sapis, said Martial.
Mirth is necessary to wisdom, to comfort, above all to happiness.
Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication.
Here the buffoonery never stops.
What could be more delightful than the endless struggle of the Puritan to make the joy of the minority unlawful and impossible?
The effort is itself a greater joy to one standing on the side-lines than any or all of the carnal joys it combats.
Always, when I contemplate an uplifter at his hopeless business, I recall a scene in an old- time burlesque show, witnessed for hire in my days as a dramatic critic.
A chorus girl executed a fall upon the stage, and Rudolph Krausemeyer, the Swiss comdeian, rushed to her aid.
As he stooped painfully to succor her, Irving Rabinovitz, the Zionist comedian, fetched him a fearful clout across the cofferdam with a slap-stick.
So the uplifter, the soul-saver, the Americanizer, striving to make the Republic fit for Y.M.C.A. secretaries.
He is the eternal American, ever moved by the best of intentions, ever running a la Krausemeyer to the rescue of virtue, and ever getting his pantaloons fanned by the Devil.
I am naturally sinful, and such spectacles caress me.
If the slap-stick were a sash-weight, the show would be cruel, and I'd probably complain to the Polizei.
As it is, I know that the uplifter is not really hurt, but simply shocked.
The blow, in fact, does him good, for it helps get him into Heaven, as exegetes prove from Matthew v, 11: Hereux serez-vous, lorsqu'on vous outragera, qu'on vous persecutera, and so on.
As for me, it makes me a more contented man, and hence a better citizen.
One man prefers the Republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria.
Another because it has laws to keep him sober and his daughter chaste.
Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the cathedral at Chartres.
Another because, living here, he can read the New York Evening Journal.
Another because there is a warrant out for him somewhere else.
Me, I like it because it amuses me to my taste.
I never get tired of the show.
It is worth every cent it costs.
That cost, it seems to me is very moderate.
Taxes in the United States are not actually high.
I figure, for example, that my private share of the expense of maintaining the Hon. Mr. Harding in the White House this year will work out to less than 80 cents.
Try to think of better sport for the money: in New York it has been estimated that it costs $8 to get comfortably tight, and $17.50, on an average, to pinch a girl's arm.
The United States Senate will cost me perhaps $11 for the year, but against that expense set the subscription price of the Congressional Record, about $15, which, as a journalist, I receive for nothing.
For $4 less than nothing I am thus entertained as Solomon never was by his hooch dancers.
Col. George Brinton McClellan Harvey costs me but 25 cents a year; I get Nicholas Murray Butler free.
Finally, there is young Teddy Roosevelt, the naval expert.
Teddy costs me, as I work it out, about 11 cents a year, or less than a cent a month.
More, he entertains me doubly for the money, first as a naval expert, and secondly as a walking attentat upon democracy, a devastating proof that there is nothing, after all, in that superstition.
We Americans subscribe to the doctrine of human equality — and the Rooseveltii reduce it to an absurdity as brilliantly as the sons of Veit Bach.
Where is your equal opportunity now?
Here in this Eden of clowns, with the highest rewards of clowning theoretically open to every poor boy — here in the very citadel of democracy we found and cherish a clown dynasty!
Monadnock Valley Press > Mencken
https://monadnock.net/mencken/american.html
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
'The Libido for the Ugly'
On a Winter day some years ago, coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the expresses of the Pennsylvania Railroad, I rolled eastward for an hour through the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland County.
It was familiar ground; boy and man, I had been through it often before.
But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation.
Here was the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth — and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke.
Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination — and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.
I am not speaking of mere filth.
One expects steel towns to be dirty.
What I allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight.
From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five miles, there was not one insight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye.
Some were so bad, and they were among the most pretentious — churches, stores, warehouses, and the like — that they were downright startling; one blinked before them as one blinks before a man with his face shot away.
A few linger in memory, horrible even there: a crazy little church just west of Jeannette, set like a dormer-window on the side of a bare, leprous hill; the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at another forlorn town, a steel stadium like a huge rat-trap somewhere further down the line.
But most of all I recall the general effect — of hideousness without a break.
There was not a single decent house within eye-range from the Pittsburgh suburbs to the Greensburg yards.
There was not one that was not misshapen, and there was not one that was not shabby.
The country itself is not uncomely, despite the grime of the endless mills.
It is, in form, a narrow river valley, with deep gullies running up into the hills.
It is thickly settled, but not noticeably overcrowded.
There is still plenty of room for building, even in the larger towns, and there are very few solid blocks.
Nearly every house, big and little, has space on all four sides.
Obviously, if there were architects of any professional sense or dignity in the region, they would have perfected a chalet to hug the hillsides -- a chalet with a high-pitched roof, to throw off the heavy Winter storms, but still essentially a low and clinging building, wider than it was tall.
But what have they done?
They have taken as their model a brick set on end.
This they have converted into a thing of dingy clapboards, with a narrow, low-pitched roof.
And the whole they have set upon thin, preposterous brick piers.
By the hundreds and thousands, these abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery on their deep sides they are three, four and even five stories high; on their low sides, they bury themselves swinishly in the mud.
Not a fifth of them are perpendicular.
They lean this way and that, hanging on to their bases precariously.
And one and all they are streaked in grime, with dead and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the streaks.
Now and then there is a house of brick.
But what brick!
When it is new it is the color of a fried egg.
When it has taken on the patina of the mills it is the color of an egg long past all hope or caring.
Was it necessary to adopt that shocking color?
No more than it was necessary to set all of the houses on end.
Red brick, even in a steel town, ages with some dignity.
Let it become downright black, and it is still sightly, especially if its trimmings are of white stone, with soot in the depths and the high spots washed by the rain.
But in Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so they have the most loathsome towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye.
I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer.
I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States.
I have seen the mill towns of decomposing New England and the desert towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas.
I am familiar with the back streets of Newark, Brooklyn and Chicago, and have made scientific explorations to Camden, N.J. and Newport News, Va.
Safe in a Pullman, I have whirled through the gloomy, God-forsaken villages of Iowa and Kansas, and the malarious tide-water hamlets of Georgia.
I have been to Bridgeport, Conn., and to Los Angeles.
But nowhere on this earth, at home or abroad, have I seen anything to compare to the villages that huddle along the line of the Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg.
They are incomparable in color, and they are incomparable in design.
It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them.
They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical.
One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting such dreadful things, and one can scarcely imagine human beings bearing life in them.
Are they so frightful because the valley is full of foreigners — dull, insensate brutes, with no love of beauty in them?
Then why didn’t these foreigners set up similar abominations in the countries that they came from?
You will, in fact, find nothing of the sort in Europe save perhaps in the more putrid parts of England.
There is scarcely an ugly village on the whole Continent.
The peasants, however poor, somehow manage to make themselves graceful and charming habitations, even in Spain.
But in the American village and small town, the pull is always toward ugliness, and in that Westmoreland valley, it has been yielded to with an eagerness bordering upon passion.
It is incredible that mere ignorance should have achieved such masterpieces of horror.
On certain levels of the American race, indeed, there seems to be a positive libido for the ugly, as on other and less Christian levels there is a libido for the beautiful.
It is impossible to put down the wallpaper that defaces the average American home of the lower middle class to mere inadvertence, or to the obscene humor of the manufacturers.
Such ghastly designs, it must be obvious, give a genuine delight to a certain type of mind.
They meet, in some unfathomable way, its obscure and unintelligible demands.
They caress it as "The Palms" caresses it, or the art of Landseer, or the ecclesiastical architecture of the United States.
The taste for them is as enigmatical and yet as common as the taste for vaudeville, dogmatic theology, sentimental movies, and the poetry of Edgar A. Guest.
Or for the metaphysical speculations of Arthur Brisbane.
Thus I suspect (though confessedly without knowing) that the vast majority of the honest folk of Westmoreland County, and especially the 100% Americans among them, actually admire the houses they live in and are proud of them.
For the same money, they could get vastly better ones, but they prefer what they have got.
Certainly, there was no pressure upon the Veterans of Foreign Wars to choose the dreadful edifice that bears their banner, for there are plenty of vacant buildings along the trackside, and some of them are appreciably better.
They might, indeed, have built a better one of their own.
But they chose that clapboarded horror with their eyes open, and having chosen it, they let it mellow into its present shocking depravity.
They like it as it is: beside it, the Parthenon would no doubt offend them.
In precisely the same way the authors of the rat-trap stadium that I have mentioned made a deliberate choice.
After painfully designing and erecting it, they made it perfect in their own sight by putting a completely impossible pent-house, painted a staring yellow, on top of it.
The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye.
It is that of a Presbyterian grinning.
But they like it.
Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable.
Its habitat is the United States.
Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.
The etiology of this madness deserves a great deal more study than it has got.
There must be causes behind it; it arises and flourishes in obedience to biological laws, and not as a mere act of God.
What, precisely, are the terms of those laws?
And why do they run stronger in America than elsewhere?
Let some honest Privat Dozent in pathological sociology apply himself to the problem.
https://www.thoughtco.com/libido-for-th ... en-1690254
On a Winter day some years ago, coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the expresses of the Pennsylvania Railroad, I rolled eastward for an hour through the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland County.
It was familiar ground; boy and man, I had been through it often before.
But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation.
Here was the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth — and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke.
Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination — and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.
I am not speaking of mere filth.
One expects steel towns to be dirty.
What I allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight.
From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five miles, there was not one insight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye.
Some were so bad, and they were among the most pretentious — churches, stores, warehouses, and the like — that they were downright startling; one blinked before them as one blinks before a man with his face shot away.
A few linger in memory, horrible even there: a crazy little church just west of Jeannette, set like a dormer-window on the side of a bare, leprous hill; the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at another forlorn town, a steel stadium like a huge rat-trap somewhere further down the line.
But most of all I recall the general effect — of hideousness without a break.
There was not a single decent house within eye-range from the Pittsburgh suburbs to the Greensburg yards.
There was not one that was not misshapen, and there was not one that was not shabby.
The country itself is not uncomely, despite the grime of the endless mills.
It is, in form, a narrow river valley, with deep gullies running up into the hills.
It is thickly settled, but not noticeably overcrowded.
There is still plenty of room for building, even in the larger towns, and there are very few solid blocks.
Nearly every house, big and little, has space on all four sides.
Obviously, if there were architects of any professional sense or dignity in the region, they would have perfected a chalet to hug the hillsides -- a chalet with a high-pitched roof, to throw off the heavy Winter storms, but still essentially a low and clinging building, wider than it was tall.
But what have they done?
They have taken as their model a brick set on end.
This they have converted into a thing of dingy clapboards, with a narrow, low-pitched roof.
And the whole they have set upon thin, preposterous brick piers.
By the hundreds and thousands, these abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery on their deep sides they are three, four and even five stories high; on their low sides, they bury themselves swinishly in the mud.
Not a fifth of them are perpendicular.
They lean this way and that, hanging on to their bases precariously.
And one and all they are streaked in grime, with dead and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the streaks.
Now and then there is a house of brick.
But what brick!
When it is new it is the color of a fried egg.
When it has taken on the patina of the mills it is the color of an egg long past all hope or caring.
Was it necessary to adopt that shocking color?
No more than it was necessary to set all of the houses on end.
Red brick, even in a steel town, ages with some dignity.
Let it become downright black, and it is still sightly, especially if its trimmings are of white stone, with soot in the depths and the high spots washed by the rain.
But in Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so they have the most loathsome towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye.
I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer.
I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States.
I have seen the mill towns of decomposing New England and the desert towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas.
I am familiar with the back streets of Newark, Brooklyn and Chicago, and have made scientific explorations to Camden, N.J. and Newport News, Va.
Safe in a Pullman, I have whirled through the gloomy, God-forsaken villages of Iowa and Kansas, and the malarious tide-water hamlets of Georgia.
I have been to Bridgeport, Conn., and to Los Angeles.
But nowhere on this earth, at home or abroad, have I seen anything to compare to the villages that huddle along the line of the Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg.
They are incomparable in color, and they are incomparable in design.
It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them.
They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical.
One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting such dreadful things, and one can scarcely imagine human beings bearing life in them.
Are they so frightful because the valley is full of foreigners — dull, insensate brutes, with no love of beauty in them?
Then why didn’t these foreigners set up similar abominations in the countries that they came from?
You will, in fact, find nothing of the sort in Europe save perhaps in the more putrid parts of England.
There is scarcely an ugly village on the whole Continent.
The peasants, however poor, somehow manage to make themselves graceful and charming habitations, even in Spain.
But in the American village and small town, the pull is always toward ugliness, and in that Westmoreland valley, it has been yielded to with an eagerness bordering upon passion.
It is incredible that mere ignorance should have achieved such masterpieces of horror.
On certain levels of the American race, indeed, there seems to be a positive libido for the ugly, as on other and less Christian levels there is a libido for the beautiful.
It is impossible to put down the wallpaper that defaces the average American home of the lower middle class to mere inadvertence, or to the obscene humor of the manufacturers.
Such ghastly designs, it must be obvious, give a genuine delight to a certain type of mind.
They meet, in some unfathomable way, its obscure and unintelligible demands.
They caress it as "The Palms" caresses it, or the art of Landseer, or the ecclesiastical architecture of the United States.
The taste for them is as enigmatical and yet as common as the taste for vaudeville, dogmatic theology, sentimental movies, and the poetry of Edgar A. Guest.
Or for the metaphysical speculations of Arthur Brisbane.
Thus I suspect (though confessedly without knowing) that the vast majority of the honest folk of Westmoreland County, and especially the 100% Americans among them, actually admire the houses they live in and are proud of them.
For the same money, they could get vastly better ones, but they prefer what they have got.
Certainly, there was no pressure upon the Veterans of Foreign Wars to choose the dreadful edifice that bears their banner, for there are plenty of vacant buildings along the trackside, and some of them are appreciably better.
They might, indeed, have built a better one of their own.
But they chose that clapboarded horror with their eyes open, and having chosen it, they let it mellow into its present shocking depravity.
They like it as it is: beside it, the Parthenon would no doubt offend them.
In precisely the same way the authors of the rat-trap stadium that I have mentioned made a deliberate choice.
After painfully designing and erecting it, they made it perfect in their own sight by putting a completely impossible pent-house, painted a staring yellow, on top of it.
The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye.
It is that of a Presbyterian grinning.
But they like it.
Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable.
Its habitat is the United States.
Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.
The etiology of this madness deserves a great deal more study than it has got.
There must be causes behind it; it arises and flourishes in obedience to biological laws, and not as a mere act of God.
What, precisely, are the terms of those laws?
And why do they run stronger in America than elsewhere?
Let some honest Privat Dozent in pathological sociology apply himself to the problem.
https://www.thoughtco.com/libido-for-th ... en-1690254
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
The Politician: Thoughts by H. L. Mencken, 1940.
After damning politicians up hill and down dale for many years as rogues and vagabonds, frauds and scoundrels, I sometimes suspect that, like everyone else, I often expect too much of them.
Though faith and confidence are surely more or less foreign to my nature, I not infrequently find myself looking to them to be able, diligent, candid, and even honest.
Plainly enough, that is too large an order, as anyone must realize who reflects upon the manner in which they reach public office.
They seldom ever get there by merit alone, at least in democratic states.
Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle.
They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged.
It is a talent like any other, and when it is exercised by a radio crooner, a movie actor or a bishop, it even takes on a certain austere and sorry respectability.
But it is obviously not identical with a capacity for the intricate problems of statecraft.
Those problems demand for their solution — when they are soluble at all, which is not often — a high degree of technical proficiency, and with it there should go an adamantine kind of integrity, for the temptations of a public official are almost as cruel as those of a glamor girl or a dipsomaniac.
But we train a man for facing them, not by locking him up in a monastery and stuffing him with wisdom and virtue, but by turning him loose on the stump.
If he is a smart and enterprising fellow, which he usually is, he quickly discovers there that hooey pleases the boobs a great deal more than sense.
Indeed, he finds that sense really disquiets and alarms them — that it makes them, at best, intolerably uncomfortable, just as a tight collar makes them uncomfortable, or a speck of dust in the eye, or the thought of Hell.
The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache.
After trying a few shots of it on his customers, the larval statesman concludes sadly that it must hurt them, and after that he taps a more humane keg, and in a little while the whole audience is singing “Glory, glory, hallelujah,” and when the returns come in the candidate is on his way to the White House.
I hope no one will mistake this brief account of the political process under democracy for exaggeration.
It is almost literally true.
I do not mean to argue, remember, that all politicians are villains in the same sense that a burglar, a child-stealer, or a Darwinian are villains.
Far from it.
Many of them, in their private characters, are very charming persons, and I have known plenty that I’d trust with my diamonds, my daughter or my liberty, if I had any such things.
I happen to be acquainted to some extent with nearly all the gentlemen, both Democrats and Republicans, who are currently itching for the Presidency, including the present incumbent, and I testify freely that they are all pleasant fellows, with qualities above rather than below the common.
The worst of them is a great deal better company than most generals in the army, or writers of murder mysteries, or astrophysicists, and the best is a really superior and wholly delightful man — full of sound knowledge, competent and prudent, frank and enterprising, and quite as honest as any American can be without being clapped into a madhouse.
Don’t ask me what his name is, for I am not in politics.
I can only tell you that he has been in public life a long while, and has not been caught yet.
But will this prodigy, or any of his rivals, ever unload any appreciable amount of sagacity on the stump?
Will any of them venture to tell the plain truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the situation of the country, foreign or domestic?
Will any of them refrain from promises that he knows he can’t fulfill — that no human being could fulfill?
Will any of them utter a word, however obvious, that will alarm and alienate any of the huge packs of morons who now cluster at the public trough, wallowing in the pap that grows thinner and thinner, hoping against hope?
Answer: maybe for a few weeks at the start.
Maybe before the campaign really begins.
Maybe behind the door.
But not after the issue is fairly joined, and the struggle is on in earnest.
From that moment they will all resort to demagogy, and by the middle of June of election year the only choice among them will be a choice between amateurs of that science and professionals.
They will promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants.
They’ll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable.
They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money that no one will have to earn.
When one of them demonstrates that twice two is five, another will prove that it is six, six and a half, ten, twenty.
In brief, they will divest themselves of their character as sensible, candid and truthful men, and become simply candidates for office, bent only on collaring votes.
They will all know by then, even supposing that some of them don’t know it now, that votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense, and they will apply themselves to the job with a hearty yo-heave-ho.
Most of them, before the uproar is over, will actually convince themselves.
The winner will be whoever promises the most with the least probability of delivering anything.
Some years ago I accompanied a candidate for the Presidency on his campaign-tour.
He was, like all such rascals, an amusing fellow, and I came to like him very much.
His speeches, at the start, were full of fire.
He was going to save the country from all the stupendous frauds and false pretenses of his rival.
Every time that rival offered to rescue another million of poor fish from the neglects and oversights of God he howled his derision from the back platform of his train.
I noticed at once that these blasts of common sense got very little applause, and after a while the candidate began to notice it too.
Worse, he began to get word from his spies on the train of his rival that the rival was wowing them, panicking them, laying them in the aisles.
They threw flowers, hot dogs and five-cent cigars at him.
In places where the times were especially hard they tried to unhook the locomotive from his train, so that he’d have to stay with them awhile longer, and promise them some more.
There were no Gallup polls in those innocent days, but the local politicians had ways of their own for finding out how the cat was jumping, and they began to join my candidate’s train in the middle of the night, and wake him up to tell him that all was lost, including honor.
This had some effect upon him — in truth, an effect almost as powerful as that of sitting in the electric chair.
He lost his intelligent manner, and became something you could hardly distinguish from an idealist.
Instead of mocking he began to promise, and in a little while he was promising everything that his rival was promising, and a good deal more.
One night out in the Bible country, after the hullabaloo of the day was over, I went into his private car along with another newspaper reporter, and we sat down to gabble with him.
This other reporter, a faithful member of the candidate’s own party, began to upbraid him, at first very gently, for letting off so much hokum.
What did he mean by making promises that no human being on this earth, and not many of the angels in Heaven, could ever hope to carry out?
In particular, what was his idea in trying to work off all those preposterous bile-beans and snake-oils on the poor farmers, a class of men who had been fooled and rooked by every fresh wave of politicians since Apostolic times?
Did he really believe that the Utopia he had begun so fervently to preach would ever come to pass?
Did he honestly think that farmers, as a body, would ever see all their rosy dreams come true, or that the share-croppers in their lower ranks would ever be more than a hop, skip and jump from starvation?
The candidate thought awhile, took a long swallow of the coffin-varnish he carried with him, and then replied that the answer in every case was no.
He was well aware, he said, that the plight of the farmers was intrinsically hopeless, and would probably continue so, despite doles from the treasury, for centuries to come.
He had no notion that anything could be done about it by merely human means, and certainly not by political means: it would take a new Moses, and a whole series of miracles.
“But you forget, Mr. Blank,” he concluded sadly, “that our agreement in the premisses [sic] must remain purely personal."
"You are not a candidate for President of the United States."
"I am.”
As we left him his interlocutor, a gentleman grown gray in Washington and long ago lost to every decency, pointed the moral of the episode.
“In politics,” he said, “man must learn to rise above principle.”
Then he drove it in with another: “When the water reaches the upper deck,” he said, “follow the rats.”
https://rawhistory.com/the-politician-t ... cken-1940/
After damning politicians up hill and down dale for many years as rogues and vagabonds, frauds and scoundrels, I sometimes suspect that, like everyone else, I often expect too much of them.
Though faith and confidence are surely more or less foreign to my nature, I not infrequently find myself looking to them to be able, diligent, candid, and even honest.
Plainly enough, that is too large an order, as anyone must realize who reflects upon the manner in which they reach public office.
They seldom ever get there by merit alone, at least in democratic states.
Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle.
They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged.
It is a talent like any other, and when it is exercised by a radio crooner, a movie actor or a bishop, it even takes on a certain austere and sorry respectability.
But it is obviously not identical with a capacity for the intricate problems of statecraft.
Those problems demand for their solution — when they are soluble at all, which is not often — a high degree of technical proficiency, and with it there should go an adamantine kind of integrity, for the temptations of a public official are almost as cruel as those of a glamor girl or a dipsomaniac.
But we train a man for facing them, not by locking him up in a monastery and stuffing him with wisdom and virtue, but by turning him loose on the stump.
If he is a smart and enterprising fellow, which he usually is, he quickly discovers there that hooey pleases the boobs a great deal more than sense.
Indeed, he finds that sense really disquiets and alarms them — that it makes them, at best, intolerably uncomfortable, just as a tight collar makes them uncomfortable, or a speck of dust in the eye, or the thought of Hell.
The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache.
After trying a few shots of it on his customers, the larval statesman concludes sadly that it must hurt them, and after that he taps a more humane keg, and in a little while the whole audience is singing “Glory, glory, hallelujah,” and when the returns come in the candidate is on his way to the White House.
I hope no one will mistake this brief account of the political process under democracy for exaggeration.
It is almost literally true.
I do not mean to argue, remember, that all politicians are villains in the same sense that a burglar, a child-stealer, or a Darwinian are villains.
Far from it.
Many of them, in their private characters, are very charming persons, and I have known plenty that I’d trust with my diamonds, my daughter or my liberty, if I had any such things.
I happen to be acquainted to some extent with nearly all the gentlemen, both Democrats and Republicans, who are currently itching for the Presidency, including the present incumbent, and I testify freely that they are all pleasant fellows, with qualities above rather than below the common.
The worst of them is a great deal better company than most generals in the army, or writers of murder mysteries, or astrophysicists, and the best is a really superior and wholly delightful man — full of sound knowledge, competent and prudent, frank and enterprising, and quite as honest as any American can be without being clapped into a madhouse.
Don’t ask me what his name is, for I am not in politics.
I can only tell you that he has been in public life a long while, and has not been caught yet.
But will this prodigy, or any of his rivals, ever unload any appreciable amount of sagacity on the stump?
Will any of them venture to tell the plain truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the situation of the country, foreign or domestic?
Will any of them refrain from promises that he knows he can’t fulfill — that no human being could fulfill?
Will any of them utter a word, however obvious, that will alarm and alienate any of the huge packs of morons who now cluster at the public trough, wallowing in the pap that grows thinner and thinner, hoping against hope?
Answer: maybe for a few weeks at the start.
Maybe before the campaign really begins.
Maybe behind the door.
But not after the issue is fairly joined, and the struggle is on in earnest.
From that moment they will all resort to demagogy, and by the middle of June of election year the only choice among them will be a choice between amateurs of that science and professionals.
They will promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants.
They’ll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable.
They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money that no one will have to earn.
When one of them demonstrates that twice two is five, another will prove that it is six, six and a half, ten, twenty.
In brief, they will divest themselves of their character as sensible, candid and truthful men, and become simply candidates for office, bent only on collaring votes.
They will all know by then, even supposing that some of them don’t know it now, that votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense, and they will apply themselves to the job with a hearty yo-heave-ho.
Most of them, before the uproar is over, will actually convince themselves.
The winner will be whoever promises the most with the least probability of delivering anything.
Some years ago I accompanied a candidate for the Presidency on his campaign-tour.
He was, like all such rascals, an amusing fellow, and I came to like him very much.
His speeches, at the start, were full of fire.
He was going to save the country from all the stupendous frauds and false pretenses of his rival.
Every time that rival offered to rescue another million of poor fish from the neglects and oversights of God he howled his derision from the back platform of his train.
I noticed at once that these blasts of common sense got very little applause, and after a while the candidate began to notice it too.
Worse, he began to get word from his spies on the train of his rival that the rival was wowing them, panicking them, laying them in the aisles.
They threw flowers, hot dogs and five-cent cigars at him.
In places where the times were especially hard they tried to unhook the locomotive from his train, so that he’d have to stay with them awhile longer, and promise them some more.
There were no Gallup polls in those innocent days, but the local politicians had ways of their own for finding out how the cat was jumping, and they began to join my candidate’s train in the middle of the night, and wake him up to tell him that all was lost, including honor.
This had some effect upon him — in truth, an effect almost as powerful as that of sitting in the electric chair.
He lost his intelligent manner, and became something you could hardly distinguish from an idealist.
Instead of mocking he began to promise, and in a little while he was promising everything that his rival was promising, and a good deal more.
One night out in the Bible country, after the hullabaloo of the day was over, I went into his private car along with another newspaper reporter, and we sat down to gabble with him.
This other reporter, a faithful member of the candidate’s own party, began to upbraid him, at first very gently, for letting off so much hokum.
What did he mean by making promises that no human being on this earth, and not many of the angels in Heaven, could ever hope to carry out?
In particular, what was his idea in trying to work off all those preposterous bile-beans and snake-oils on the poor farmers, a class of men who had been fooled and rooked by every fresh wave of politicians since Apostolic times?
Did he really believe that the Utopia he had begun so fervently to preach would ever come to pass?
Did he honestly think that farmers, as a body, would ever see all their rosy dreams come true, or that the share-croppers in their lower ranks would ever be more than a hop, skip and jump from starvation?
The candidate thought awhile, took a long swallow of the coffin-varnish he carried with him, and then replied that the answer in every case was no.
He was well aware, he said, that the plight of the farmers was intrinsically hopeless, and would probably continue so, despite doles from the treasury, for centuries to come.
He had no notion that anything could be done about it by merely human means, and certainly not by political means: it would take a new Moses, and a whole series of miracles.
“But you forget, Mr. Blank,” he concluded sadly, “that our agreement in the premisses [sic] must remain purely personal."
"You are not a candidate for President of the United States."
"I am.”
As we left him his interlocutor, a gentleman grown gray in Washington and long ago lost to every decency, pointed the moral of the episode.
“In politics,” he said, “man must learn to rise above principle.”
Then he drove it in with another: “When the water reaches the upper deck,” he said, “follow the rats.”
https://rawhistory.com/the-politician-t ... cken-1940/
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
Labor in Politics
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/August 11, 1924
The Hon. Mr. La Follette, I take it, is too old a bird to attach much importance to the American Federation of Labor’s indorsement of his candidacy.
Theoretically, this indorsement will bring him the 2,926,468 votes of the Federation’s members, and the six or seven million votes of their wives, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and other well-wishers.
But actually, it will be worth vastly less to him.
For labor, in America, seems quite unable to function politically, and at every election its vote is hopelessly divided.
In November, I dare say, hundreds of thousands of union men will cast their votes for the Hon. Charles G. Dawes, perhaps the most bold and bloodthirsty enemy of unionism ever heard of in American politics.
It is hard to make out why this should be so.
Perhaps one reason lies in the fact that labor leaders, in the Republic, are mainly mountebanks who are for themselves long before and after they are for labor, and that it is thus easy for the professional politicians to corrupt them.
Both parties bid for their support by promising them jobs, and so they are divided, and their influence upon their followers, at least in political matters, is greatly weakened.
The enthusiasm of a given labor leader for this or that ticket is usually too transparent to deceive even union men.
Everyone knows that he has been promised something, and in most cases everyone also knows precisely what it is.
I do not know how many labor leaders now recline at their ease in public offices in the United States, but the number must be very large.
In almost every State there are jobs that were created expressly for them, and have no other utility.
And in Washington there are many other such jobs.
Moreover, it is easy to fetch large numbers of them by appointing them to gaudy honorary commissions and sending them on junkets at the public expense.
There is a type of labor leader, indeed, who would rather strut about in a plug hat than get a job.
Some of these peacocks have gone very high in the movement, and are as hot against radicals as so many Wall street bankers.
But the political impotence of labor is due more largely to the fact that the American workingman, like other Americans, has ambitions, and is thus disinclined to think of himself as a workingman.
In other words, he refuses to be class conscious.
What he usually hopes is that, on some near tomorrow, he will be able to escape from work and go into business for himself, and so begin oppressing his late colleagues.
This dream makes him resist the regimentation that must inevitably go with every really effective labor movement.
In particular, it makes him resist all efforts to control his vote.
He values his freedom as a citizen more than he values his welfare as a workingman, for he will be a citizen all his life, whereas, as I have said, he has a secret but indomitable faith that he will some day cease to be a workingman.
Has anyone ever noticed that union men are radical in proportion as the trades they practice diminish this hope?
At the extreme Left stand the railroad engineers and firemen, who were for La Follette long before he was an actual candidate.
After them come the steel workers and coal miners, and the copper miners and lumbermen of the West.
It is easy to see why.
A locomotive engineer, save he be insane, must know very well that he can never hope to own a railroad of his own.
A steel worker is in the same boat; if he saved all his wages for a hundred years, he would still lack enough to buy a blast furnace.
And so with the miners and the lumbermen.
But in the smaller trades there is still hope, and it shows itself in the policies of their practitioners.
Consider, for example, old Sam Gompers.
Sam, in those far-off days when he worked, was a cigarmaker.
Well, a cigarmaker, at that time, could go into business for himself the moment he had saved $50.
It is not so easy today, but Sam remembers only yesterday.
He is almost wholly devoid of class consciousness.
He thinks of himself, not as a workingman, but as a public man, and the familiar companion of Dr. Coolidge, President Willard and Judge Gary.
The needle trades may appear to offer evidence against this notion, but there is far more appearance than substance in it.
The garment workers, in the happy days when any thrifty workman, after five or ten years at the machine, could start a sweatshop of his own, was anything but radical.
They had nothing to do with the early adventures of such visionaries as Debs and Powderly, nor were they run amok by Herr Most.
It was only after their old hope began to fade — after it had become a practical impossibility for any ordinary slave to escape from the sweatshop — that they turned to Socialism.
Now they are resigned and class conscious — and very radical.
No doubt the other trades that still hold aloof will follow them as escape from servitude becomes more and more difficult.
It will be a long, long while, perhaps, before such workingmen as electricians, locksmiths and chimney-sweeps turn to the Left, for all that one of them needs to go into business for himself is a set of simple tools, but in other trades the thing is growing more nearly impossible as year chases year.
Not many of the working bakers of today will ever own bakeries of their own, and not many of the plumbers will ever become boss plumbers, and not many of the carpenters will ever be contractors.
The brew-workers went to the Left long ago, and the machinists are going even now.
Soon or late the last door of escape will be closed, and a man who begins at the bench will die at the bench.
But hope, I believe, will linger long after the last reality has been squeezed from it, for men never abandon it without a hard struggle.
When it is no longer supported by facts it will be supported by occasional miracles.
Even today one sometimes hears of a railroad president who started as a fireman, or a coal operator who once mined coal.
Moreover, the windows will remain open after the door is closed.
Any plumber of today, when he loses hope of setting up a studio of his own, is free to become an osteopath, a bootlegger or a labor leader.
It is hard for a man with that possibility always before him to become class conscious.
As I say, the Hon. Mr. La Follette is no novice in politics, and so it is highly improbable that he sets much value upon the indorsement of the American Federation of Labor.
He knows very well that all of its bosses are against his principal ideas, and that most of its members are with them.
The statement of Gompers and company shows very plainly why it indorsed him.
Both of the great parties, at their conventions, showed it the door, and so it was forced to go to La Follette to save its face.
But it is no more a radical organization than the Sulgrave Foundation or the Rotary International.
On the contrary, it is stoutly and even violently conservative.
La Follette’s real strength among the workingmen lies in the regions outside the Federation’s pale, and even outside the pale of the railroad brotherhoods.
It will get most of his labor votes, not from organized labor at all, but from unorganized labor.
It is there that discontent is greatest, for the Federation and the brotherhoods are wholly selfish, and not only refuse to help the poor fellows without their ranks, but even give capital a hand in oppressing them.
The migratory laborers of the West, if they had votes, would all vote for La Follette.
For both of the major parties are against them, as the Federation of Labor is against them, and their efforts to protect themselves from oppression have only converted oppression into persecution.
They are in precisely the position that all workingmen would be in if Dr. Dawes could have his way.
But despite all this, Dawes will get a great many labor votes — perhaps as many as La Follette.
The White House anterooms are already filled with labor leaders, all eager to kiss hands and pledge their fealty.
La Follette, as everyone knows, has only the remotest chance of getting into the White House; Dr. Coolidge is pretty sure to stay there.
Once his safety is assured, he will not be ungrateful to those who saved him from the Reds.
There will be jobs and jobs to give out, high-sounding dignities to distribute.
Some of them will go to labor leaders, and a few weeks later these worthy men will be in Washington, elegantly done out in full-dress evening dress-suits, and dining amicably with Mr. Vice-President Dawes.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -politics/
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/August 11, 1924
The Hon. Mr. La Follette, I take it, is too old a bird to attach much importance to the American Federation of Labor’s indorsement of his candidacy.
Theoretically, this indorsement will bring him the 2,926,468 votes of the Federation’s members, and the six or seven million votes of their wives, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and other well-wishers.
But actually, it will be worth vastly less to him.
For labor, in America, seems quite unable to function politically, and at every election its vote is hopelessly divided.
In November, I dare say, hundreds of thousands of union men will cast their votes for the Hon. Charles G. Dawes, perhaps the most bold and bloodthirsty enemy of unionism ever heard of in American politics.
It is hard to make out why this should be so.
Perhaps one reason lies in the fact that labor leaders, in the Republic, are mainly mountebanks who are for themselves long before and after they are for labor, and that it is thus easy for the professional politicians to corrupt them.
Both parties bid for their support by promising them jobs, and so they are divided, and their influence upon their followers, at least in political matters, is greatly weakened.
The enthusiasm of a given labor leader for this or that ticket is usually too transparent to deceive even union men.
Everyone knows that he has been promised something, and in most cases everyone also knows precisely what it is.
I do not know how many labor leaders now recline at their ease in public offices in the United States, but the number must be very large.
In almost every State there are jobs that were created expressly for them, and have no other utility.
And in Washington there are many other such jobs.
Moreover, it is easy to fetch large numbers of them by appointing them to gaudy honorary commissions and sending them on junkets at the public expense.
There is a type of labor leader, indeed, who would rather strut about in a plug hat than get a job.
Some of these peacocks have gone very high in the movement, and are as hot against radicals as so many Wall street bankers.
But the political impotence of labor is due more largely to the fact that the American workingman, like other Americans, has ambitions, and is thus disinclined to think of himself as a workingman.
In other words, he refuses to be class conscious.
What he usually hopes is that, on some near tomorrow, he will be able to escape from work and go into business for himself, and so begin oppressing his late colleagues.
This dream makes him resist the regimentation that must inevitably go with every really effective labor movement.
In particular, it makes him resist all efforts to control his vote.
He values his freedom as a citizen more than he values his welfare as a workingman, for he will be a citizen all his life, whereas, as I have said, he has a secret but indomitable faith that he will some day cease to be a workingman.
Has anyone ever noticed that union men are radical in proportion as the trades they practice diminish this hope?
At the extreme Left stand the railroad engineers and firemen, who were for La Follette long before he was an actual candidate.
After them come the steel workers and coal miners, and the copper miners and lumbermen of the West.
It is easy to see why.
A locomotive engineer, save he be insane, must know very well that he can never hope to own a railroad of his own.
A steel worker is in the same boat; if he saved all his wages for a hundred years, he would still lack enough to buy a blast furnace.
And so with the miners and the lumbermen.
But in the smaller trades there is still hope, and it shows itself in the policies of their practitioners.
Consider, for example, old Sam Gompers.
Sam, in those far-off days when he worked, was a cigarmaker.
Well, a cigarmaker, at that time, could go into business for himself the moment he had saved $50.
It is not so easy today, but Sam remembers only yesterday.
He is almost wholly devoid of class consciousness.
He thinks of himself, not as a workingman, but as a public man, and the familiar companion of Dr. Coolidge, President Willard and Judge Gary.
The needle trades may appear to offer evidence against this notion, but there is far more appearance than substance in it.
The garment workers, in the happy days when any thrifty workman, after five or ten years at the machine, could start a sweatshop of his own, was anything but radical.
They had nothing to do with the early adventures of such visionaries as Debs and Powderly, nor were they run amok by Herr Most.
It was only after their old hope began to fade — after it had become a practical impossibility for any ordinary slave to escape from the sweatshop — that they turned to Socialism.
Now they are resigned and class conscious — and very radical.
No doubt the other trades that still hold aloof will follow them as escape from servitude becomes more and more difficult.
It will be a long, long while, perhaps, before such workingmen as electricians, locksmiths and chimney-sweeps turn to the Left, for all that one of them needs to go into business for himself is a set of simple tools, but in other trades the thing is growing more nearly impossible as year chases year.
Not many of the working bakers of today will ever own bakeries of their own, and not many of the plumbers will ever become boss plumbers, and not many of the carpenters will ever be contractors.
The brew-workers went to the Left long ago, and the machinists are going even now.
Soon or late the last door of escape will be closed, and a man who begins at the bench will die at the bench.
But hope, I believe, will linger long after the last reality has been squeezed from it, for men never abandon it without a hard struggle.
When it is no longer supported by facts it will be supported by occasional miracles.
Even today one sometimes hears of a railroad president who started as a fireman, or a coal operator who once mined coal.
Moreover, the windows will remain open after the door is closed.
Any plumber of today, when he loses hope of setting up a studio of his own, is free to become an osteopath, a bootlegger or a labor leader.
It is hard for a man with that possibility always before him to become class conscious.
As I say, the Hon. Mr. La Follette is no novice in politics, and so it is highly improbable that he sets much value upon the indorsement of the American Federation of Labor.
He knows very well that all of its bosses are against his principal ideas, and that most of its members are with them.
The statement of Gompers and company shows very plainly why it indorsed him.
Both of the great parties, at their conventions, showed it the door, and so it was forced to go to La Follette to save its face.
But it is no more a radical organization than the Sulgrave Foundation or the Rotary International.
On the contrary, it is stoutly and even violently conservative.
La Follette’s real strength among the workingmen lies in the regions outside the Federation’s pale, and even outside the pale of the railroad brotherhoods.
It will get most of his labor votes, not from organized labor at all, but from unorganized labor.
It is there that discontent is greatest, for the Federation and the brotherhoods are wholly selfish, and not only refuse to help the poor fellows without their ranks, but even give capital a hand in oppressing them.
The migratory laborers of the West, if they had votes, would all vote for La Follette.
For both of the major parties are against them, as the Federation of Labor is against them, and their efforts to protect themselves from oppression have only converted oppression into persecution.
They are in precisely the position that all workingmen would be in if Dr. Dawes could have his way.
But despite all this, Dawes will get a great many labor votes — perhaps as many as La Follette.
The White House anterooms are already filled with labor leaders, all eager to kiss hands and pledge their fealty.
La Follette, as everyone knows, has only the remotest chance of getting into the White House; Dr. Coolidge is pretty sure to stay there.
Once his safety is assured, he will not be ungrateful to those who saved him from the Reds.
There will be jobs and jobs to give out, high-sounding dignities to distribute.
Some of them will go to labor leaders, and a few weeks later these worthy men will be in Washington, elegantly done out in full-dress evening dress-suits, and dining amicably with Mr. Vice-President Dawes.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -politics/
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
Breathing Space
SEPTEMBER 6, 2023
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/August 4, 1924
This would seem to be a good time for the prudent voter to keep his ears open and his mind in the same state.
Of only one of the four eminent men on the two major tickets is much known, and even of that one, the Hon. Mr. Coolidge, there is less known than there ought to be.
It is established that he is a stubborn little fellow with a tight, unimaginative mind, but it is certainly not established that he is a man of any genuine ability.
He made a dreadful mess of the Daugherty business and of the Denby business, trying to hang on and to let go at the same time, and he made an even worse mess of the business of handling Congress.
He seems to have very little capacity for dealing with men, and indeed, despite his bucolic stubbornness, very little resolution of any kind.
The chances are that if he is elected in November his administration will be one of turmoil and difficulty, and that it will end in scandal and disaster.
Big Business, it appears, is in favor of him, and with it Little Business.
The fact should be sufficient to make the judicious regard him somewhat suspiciously.
For Big Business, in America, is almost wholly devoid of anything even poetically describable as public spirit.
It is frankly on the make, day in and day out, and hence for the sort of politician who gives it the best chance.
In order to get that chance it is willing to make any conceivable sacrifice of common sense and the common decencies.
Big Business was in favor of Prohibition, believing that a sober workman would make a better slave than one with a few drinks in him.
It was in favor of all the gross robberies and extortions that went on during the war, and profited by all of them.
It was in favor of the crude throttling of free speech that was then undertaken in the name of patriotism, and is still in favor of it.
It was hot against the proceedings which unveiled the swineries of Fall, Doheny, Daugherty, Burns and company, as Dr. Coolidge himself was.
Now it is in favor of Dr. Coolidge.
He may be, as they say, a virtuous and diligent man, but he is surely in very bad company.
What of Dr. Davis?
His press-agents, it appears, lay stress on two things: that he is highly intellectual, a man who reads books, and that he is a very successful lawyer.
The two merits, alas, do not often go together, nor is there any evidence that either is of much public value in a President.
The last reader of books who sat in the White House got the United States into a ruinous war, increased the public debt by $25,000,000, destroyed the Bill of Rights, and filled the Government service with such strange fowl as Bryan, Lansing, Palmer, Burleson and Colonel House.
This book-worm was also a lawyer, though a bad one.
Dr. Davis is said to be a good one.
But is there any reason to believe that, among lawyers, the best are much better than the rest?
I can find none.
All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part it least, to good ones.
They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them.
Every Federal judge is a lawyer.
So are most Congressmen.
Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it.
If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
Dr. Davis is a lawyer whose life has been devoted to protecting the great enterprises of Big Business.
He used to work for J. Pierpont Morgan, and he has himself said that he is proud of the fact.
Mr. Morgan is an international banker, engaged in squeezing nations that are hard up and in trouble.
His operations are safeguarded for him by the man-power of the United States.
He was one of the principal beneficiaries of the late war, and made millions out of it.
The Government hospitals are now full of one-legged soldiers who gallantly protected his investments then, and the public schools are full of boys who will protect his investments tomorrow.
Mr. Davis, it would seem, approves this benign business, and, as I say, is proud of his connection with it.
I knew a man once who was proud of his skill at biting off little dogs’ tails.
This brings us to the candidates for the Vice-Presidency.
Of the Hon. Mr. Dawes it is sufficient to say that he is a shining light in both Big Business and the law.
He is what they call well heeled and he is frankly sympathetic with other men who are well heeled.
When, after the war was over, certain Congressmen began asking what had become of some of the money appropriated for its conduct, Mr. Dawes appeared before them, gave them a good round cursing, and so scared them into silence.
What became of the money was never found out.
Then the learned gentleman turned his attention to schemes for policing labor.
His masterpiece, it appears, involved the copious cracking of heads.
All the Rotary Clubs and Chambers of Commerce are in favor of Mr. Dawes.
He is the pet candidate of the country bankers.
Most of them, in fact, are sorry that he doesn’t head the ticket.
Of the Hon. Mr. Bryan I can tell you little, save that he wears a skullcap and is a brother to the eminent Jennings.
Jennings was hot against Dr. Davis and threatened to bolt the ticket if he was nominated.
So they put Brother Charley on it, and thus spiked him.
Brother Charley has gone on in politics out in the cow states by promising, if elected, to reduce the price of coal and gasoline.
His opponents, in the main, have promised to raise the price of corn and wheat.
Confronted by such a choice, the husbandmen have commonly voted for Charley, as for the least of two swindlers.
In brief, a politician rather above the average.
Unlike Brother Jennings, he is said to be doubtful about the scientific accuracy of Genesis, but the eloquence of Jennings will suffice to hold the rustic Fundamentalists in line.
In his early days Charley was sporty, and had something to do with horses.
But now, with his skullcap, he looks like a country undertaker.
The job he aspires to has been held in the past by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun and Hannibal Hamlin.
More recently, it has been held by Garrett A. Hobart, Charles W. Fairbanks and the Hon. Mr. Coolidge.
The Hon. Mr. La Follette remains.
He has no hope, it would seem, of actually seizing the throne; all he dreams of accomplishing is to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where, holding the balance of power, he will be able to dictate the election.
But what good will that do him?
His right of dictation, practically considered, will be simply a right to choose between the Hon. Mr. Coolidge and the Hon. Mr. Davis.
Dr. La Follette himself will probably be the third man, but no one believes that either side will consent to his election — and the House will be restricted to the three high men; it cannot go outside for a candidate.
In brief, his power, assuming that he keeps both Dr. Coolidge and Dr. Davis from getting a majority in the Electoral College, will have only what the lawyers call a nuisance value.
He will be able to scare everyone half to death, and yet he will be unable to get anything for himself.
But won’t it be possible for him, with both gangs at his mercy, to strike a bargain with either one or the other?
Won’t both be willing, in return for his support, to adopt his program, and so give him a great moral victory?
Of course, of course!
Both sides will be willing to promise anything, on a stack of Bibles a mile high.
And whichever side promises most, and so fetches Dr. La Follette, will ditch him two hours after its candidate is inaugurated.
But another possibility remains.
La Follette is surely no flapper in politics.
It may be that he will refuse to believe either party.
In that case there will be no election at all, and March 4 will come without a new president in waiting.
What will happen then?
Dr. Coolidge, I presume, will try to hold on — and ten thousand eager patriots will apply for injunctions and mandamuses against him.
In other words, the whole comedy will be transferred to the Supreme Court of the United States.
In yet other words, it will become infinitely low and buffoonish, infinitely amusing.
Nine lawyers, including one good one, will elect the President.
I give warning that I shall need the Stadium to laugh in.
But this is not yet.
The time has not come for overt mirth.
The perspicacious subject of the Republic, for a month or two, will listen much and say little.
We’ll know more about the candidates by September 1.
And what we find out about them may make the show even more charming than it is today.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... ing-space/
SEPTEMBER 6, 2023
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/August 4, 1924
This would seem to be a good time for the prudent voter to keep his ears open and his mind in the same state.
Of only one of the four eminent men on the two major tickets is much known, and even of that one, the Hon. Mr. Coolidge, there is less known than there ought to be.
It is established that he is a stubborn little fellow with a tight, unimaginative mind, but it is certainly not established that he is a man of any genuine ability.
He made a dreadful mess of the Daugherty business and of the Denby business, trying to hang on and to let go at the same time, and he made an even worse mess of the business of handling Congress.
He seems to have very little capacity for dealing with men, and indeed, despite his bucolic stubbornness, very little resolution of any kind.
The chances are that if he is elected in November his administration will be one of turmoil and difficulty, and that it will end in scandal and disaster.
Big Business, it appears, is in favor of him, and with it Little Business.
The fact should be sufficient to make the judicious regard him somewhat suspiciously.
For Big Business, in America, is almost wholly devoid of anything even poetically describable as public spirit.
It is frankly on the make, day in and day out, and hence for the sort of politician who gives it the best chance.
In order to get that chance it is willing to make any conceivable sacrifice of common sense and the common decencies.
Big Business was in favor of Prohibition, believing that a sober workman would make a better slave than one with a few drinks in him.
It was in favor of all the gross robberies and extortions that went on during the war, and profited by all of them.
It was in favor of the crude throttling of free speech that was then undertaken in the name of patriotism, and is still in favor of it.
It was hot against the proceedings which unveiled the swineries of Fall, Doheny, Daugherty, Burns and company, as Dr. Coolidge himself was.
Now it is in favor of Dr. Coolidge.
He may be, as they say, a virtuous and diligent man, but he is surely in very bad company.
What of Dr. Davis?
His press-agents, it appears, lay stress on two things: that he is highly intellectual, a man who reads books, and that he is a very successful lawyer.
The two merits, alas, do not often go together, nor is there any evidence that either is of much public value in a President.
The last reader of books who sat in the White House got the United States into a ruinous war, increased the public debt by $25,000,000, destroyed the Bill of Rights, and filled the Government service with such strange fowl as Bryan, Lansing, Palmer, Burleson and Colonel House.
This book-worm was also a lawyer, though a bad one.
Dr. Davis is said to be a good one.
But is there any reason to believe that, among lawyers, the best are much better than the rest?
I can find none.
All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part it least, to good ones.
They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them.
Every Federal judge is a lawyer.
So are most Congressmen.
Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it.
If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
Dr. Davis is a lawyer whose life has been devoted to protecting the great enterprises of Big Business.
He used to work for J. Pierpont Morgan, and he has himself said that he is proud of the fact.
Mr. Morgan is an international banker, engaged in squeezing nations that are hard up and in trouble.
His operations are safeguarded for him by the man-power of the United States.
He was one of the principal beneficiaries of the late war, and made millions out of it.
The Government hospitals are now full of one-legged soldiers who gallantly protected his investments then, and the public schools are full of boys who will protect his investments tomorrow.
Mr. Davis, it would seem, approves this benign business, and, as I say, is proud of his connection with it.
I knew a man once who was proud of his skill at biting off little dogs’ tails.
This brings us to the candidates for the Vice-Presidency.
Of the Hon. Mr. Dawes it is sufficient to say that he is a shining light in both Big Business and the law.
He is what they call well heeled and he is frankly sympathetic with other men who are well heeled.
When, after the war was over, certain Congressmen began asking what had become of some of the money appropriated for its conduct, Mr. Dawes appeared before them, gave them a good round cursing, and so scared them into silence.
What became of the money was never found out.
Then the learned gentleman turned his attention to schemes for policing labor.
His masterpiece, it appears, involved the copious cracking of heads.
All the Rotary Clubs and Chambers of Commerce are in favor of Mr. Dawes.
He is the pet candidate of the country bankers.
Most of them, in fact, are sorry that he doesn’t head the ticket.
Of the Hon. Mr. Bryan I can tell you little, save that he wears a skullcap and is a brother to the eminent Jennings.
Jennings was hot against Dr. Davis and threatened to bolt the ticket if he was nominated.
So they put Brother Charley on it, and thus spiked him.
Brother Charley has gone on in politics out in the cow states by promising, if elected, to reduce the price of coal and gasoline.
His opponents, in the main, have promised to raise the price of corn and wheat.
Confronted by such a choice, the husbandmen have commonly voted for Charley, as for the least of two swindlers.
In brief, a politician rather above the average.
Unlike Brother Jennings, he is said to be doubtful about the scientific accuracy of Genesis, but the eloquence of Jennings will suffice to hold the rustic Fundamentalists in line.
In his early days Charley was sporty, and had something to do with horses.
But now, with his skullcap, he looks like a country undertaker.
The job he aspires to has been held in the past by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun and Hannibal Hamlin.
More recently, it has been held by Garrett A. Hobart, Charles W. Fairbanks and the Hon. Mr. Coolidge.
The Hon. Mr. La Follette remains.
He has no hope, it would seem, of actually seizing the throne; all he dreams of accomplishing is to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where, holding the balance of power, he will be able to dictate the election.
But what good will that do him?
His right of dictation, practically considered, will be simply a right to choose between the Hon. Mr. Coolidge and the Hon. Mr. Davis.
Dr. La Follette himself will probably be the third man, but no one believes that either side will consent to his election — and the House will be restricted to the three high men; it cannot go outside for a candidate.
In brief, his power, assuming that he keeps both Dr. Coolidge and Dr. Davis from getting a majority in the Electoral College, will have only what the lawyers call a nuisance value.
He will be able to scare everyone half to death, and yet he will be unable to get anything for himself.
But won’t it be possible for him, with both gangs at his mercy, to strike a bargain with either one or the other?
Won’t both be willing, in return for his support, to adopt his program, and so give him a great moral victory?
Of course, of course!
Both sides will be willing to promise anything, on a stack of Bibles a mile high.
And whichever side promises most, and so fetches Dr. La Follette, will ditch him two hours after its candidate is inaugurated.
But another possibility remains.
La Follette is surely no flapper in politics.
It may be that he will refuse to believe either party.
In that case there will be no election at all, and March 4 will come without a new president in waiting.
What will happen then?
Dr. Coolidge, I presume, will try to hold on — and ten thousand eager patriots will apply for injunctions and mandamuses against him.
In other words, the whole comedy will be transferred to the Supreme Court of the United States.
In yet other words, it will become infinitely low and buffoonish, infinitely amusing.
Nine lawyers, including one good one, will elect the President.
I give warning that I shall need the Stadium to laugh in.
But this is not yet.
The time has not come for overt mirth.
The perspicacious subject of the Republic, for a month or two, will listen much and say little.
We’ll know more about the candidates by September 1.
And what we find out about them may make the show even more charming than it is today.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... ing-space/
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
The Coolidge Buncombe
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/October 6, 1924
One of the chief arguments made for Dr. Coolidge is that the majority of businessmen are for him.
If this were true, then it would be fair to conclude, not only that businessmen can put their private profits above the public good — which they probably do in fact, precisely like the rest of us — but also that they are singularly lacking in sense and prudence.
For if anything is plain today, it must be that another Coolidge administration, if it is inflicted upon us, will end inevitably in scandal and disaster.
The day good Cal is elected every thieving scoundrel in the Republican party will burst into hosannas, and the day he is inaugurated there will be song and praise services wherever injunctions are tight and profits run to 50 per cent.
Then will follow, for a year or two, a reign of mirth in Washington, wilder and merrier, even, than that of Harding’s time.
And then there will come an explosion.
How all this will benefit legitimate business I can’t make out.
The only businessmen who will gain anything by it will be the one who manages to steal enough while the going is good to last him all the rest of his life.
All the others will get burnt in the explosion, as they always do when political dynamite is set off.
Do they quake today before the menace of La Follette?
If so, let them consider how La Follette came to be so formidable.
Three years ago he was apparently as dead as Gog and Magog.
The Farmer Labor party snored beside him in the political morgue; Socialism was already in the dissecting room.
Then came, in quick succession, the oil scandal, the Veterans’ Bureau scandal and the intolerable stench of Dougherty.
In six months La Follettism was on its legs again, and now it is so strong that only a miracle can keep the election out of the House.
When so-called radicalism is denounced this sequence of cause and effect is only too often overlooked.
It is assumed that men become radicals because they are naturally criminal, or because they have been bribed by Russian gold, or because they have not been properly Americanized.
But the thing that actually moves them, nine times out of ten, is simply the conviction that the Government they suffer under is unbearably and incurably corrupt.
The Doheny-Denby oil arrangement made thousands of them.
The wholesale burglary of the Veterans’ Bureau made thousands more.
And the exposure of the Department of Justice under Dougherty and Burns lifted the number to millions.
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic.
He is more likely one who loves his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more distressed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched.
He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
Where the government is honestly and competently administered radicalism is unheard of.
Why is it that we have no radical party of any importance in Maryland?
Because the State government is in the hands of reasonably decent men — above all, because the State courts are honest and everyone knows it.
And why is radicalism so strong in California?
Because the State is run by a dreadful combination of crooked politicians and grasping Babbitts — because the fundamental rights of man are worth nothing there, and anyone who protests against the carnival of graft and oppression is railroaded to jail — above all, because the State courts are so servile, stupid and lawless that they almost equal the Federal courts under the Anti-Saloon League.
No honest man in California is safe.
There are laws especially designed to silence him, and they are enforced by kept judges with merciless severity.
The result is that California is on fire with radicals — that radicals pop up twice as fast as the Babbitts and their judicial valets can pursue and scotch them.
What I contend is that the Coolidge Administration, if it is inflicted on us, is bound to be quite as bad as the Harding Administration, and that the chances are that it will be a great deal worse.
In other words, I contend that it is bound to manufacture radicalism in a wholesale manner, and that this radicalism will be far more dangerous to legitimate business than the mild stuff that Dr. La Follette now has on tap.
I believe that the Coolidge Administration will be worse than that of Harding for the plain reason that Coolidge himself is worse than Harding.
Harding was an ignoramus, but there were unquestionably good impulses in him.
He had a great desire to be liked and respected; he was susceptible to good as well as to bad suggestions; his very vanity, in the long run, might have saved him from the rogues who exploited him.
Behind Harding the politician there was always Harding the businessman — a man of successful and honorable career, jealous of his good name.
Coolidge is simply a professional politician, and a very petty, sordid and dull one.
He has lived by job-seeking and job-holding all his life; his every thought is that of his miserable trade.
When it comes to a conflict between politicians and reputable folk, his instinctive sympathy always goes to the politicians.
He showed this sympathy plainly in the Denby and Daugherty cases.
To say that he was not strongly in favor of both men is to utter nonsense.
He not only kept them in office as long as he could, despite the massive proofs of their unfitness; he also worked for them behind the door, stealthily and ignominiously.
To this day he has not said a single word against either of them; all his objurgations have been leveled at those who exposed them and drove them out.
He kept the asinine Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., in office until a week or so ago, and then gave him a parting salute of twenty-one guns.
He is even now trying to promote Captain Robison, the man who arranged the Doheny oil grab.
Who has forgotten that he wanted to appoint Daugherty to “investigate” that colossal steal?
Or that he was in close and constant communication with Ned McLean, Dougherty’s and Fall’s friend, during the whole of the inquiry?
No amount of campaign blather will suffice to wipe out this discreditable record.
Coolidge pulled against the oil investigation from the start; he pulled against the Dougherty investigation from the start; he let Daugherty and Denby go at last only under pressure, and after trying to hit their opponents below the belt.
His sympathy has been with such oppressed patriots all his life, and it is with them today.
If he is elected for four years every professional politician in the Republican party will rejoice, and with sound reason.
There will be good times for the boys — and Fall, Daugherty and company will be safe.
But will the country be safe?
It is not so certain.
Those businessmen who think only of easy profits tomorrow might do well to give a thought or two to the day after.
They have seen a very formidable radical movement roll up under their noses.
If they have any sense, they will not be deceived by the argument that it has been set in motion by “agitators.”
What agitators?
Who and where are they?
I can find no such persons.
La Follette stumped the country for years and got nowhere.
Only his own State heeded him.
But last winter he began to get a response, and soon it was immense and vociferous.
That response came from men and women who had become convinced at last, and with good logic, that government by professional politicians was intolerably and hopelessly rotten — that the only remedy was to turn them out, and then make laws to prevent them coming back.
Personally I doubt that such laws, if made, will work.
In other words, I am not a radical.
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
But that is certainly not the common American view; the majority of Americans are far more hopeful.
When they see an evil they try to remedy it — by peaceful means if possible, and if not, then by force.
In the present case millions of them tire of the degrading Coolidge farce, with its puerile evasion of issues, its cloaking of Denby and Daugherty, its exaltation of such political jugglers as Slemp and Butler, its snide conspiracy to rob La Follette of honest votes in California.
They tire of it and want to end it.
What now, if they are forced to stand four years more if it?
What if they must see it grow ever worse and worse?
To timorous businessmen, in this year 1924, La Follette may look dangerous.
But let them ask themselves what sort of radicalism will probably be afoot in 1928, after four more years of Coolidge.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -buncombe/
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/October 6, 1924
One of the chief arguments made for Dr. Coolidge is that the majority of businessmen are for him.
If this were true, then it would be fair to conclude, not only that businessmen can put their private profits above the public good — which they probably do in fact, precisely like the rest of us — but also that they are singularly lacking in sense and prudence.
For if anything is plain today, it must be that another Coolidge administration, if it is inflicted upon us, will end inevitably in scandal and disaster.
The day good Cal is elected every thieving scoundrel in the Republican party will burst into hosannas, and the day he is inaugurated there will be song and praise services wherever injunctions are tight and profits run to 50 per cent.
Then will follow, for a year or two, a reign of mirth in Washington, wilder and merrier, even, than that of Harding’s time.
And then there will come an explosion.
How all this will benefit legitimate business I can’t make out.
The only businessmen who will gain anything by it will be the one who manages to steal enough while the going is good to last him all the rest of his life.
All the others will get burnt in the explosion, as they always do when political dynamite is set off.
Do they quake today before the menace of La Follette?
If so, let them consider how La Follette came to be so formidable.
Three years ago he was apparently as dead as Gog and Magog.
The Farmer Labor party snored beside him in the political morgue; Socialism was already in the dissecting room.
Then came, in quick succession, the oil scandal, the Veterans’ Bureau scandal and the intolerable stench of Dougherty.
In six months La Follettism was on its legs again, and now it is so strong that only a miracle can keep the election out of the House.
When so-called radicalism is denounced this sequence of cause and effect is only too often overlooked.
It is assumed that men become radicals because they are naturally criminal, or because they have been bribed by Russian gold, or because they have not been properly Americanized.
But the thing that actually moves them, nine times out of ten, is simply the conviction that the Government they suffer under is unbearably and incurably corrupt.
The Doheny-Denby oil arrangement made thousands of them.
The wholesale burglary of the Veterans’ Bureau made thousands more.
And the exposure of the Department of Justice under Dougherty and Burns lifted the number to millions.
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic.
He is more likely one who loves his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more distressed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched.
He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
Where the government is honestly and competently administered radicalism is unheard of.
Why is it that we have no radical party of any importance in Maryland?
Because the State government is in the hands of reasonably decent men — above all, because the State courts are honest and everyone knows it.
And why is radicalism so strong in California?
Because the State is run by a dreadful combination of crooked politicians and grasping Babbitts — because the fundamental rights of man are worth nothing there, and anyone who protests against the carnival of graft and oppression is railroaded to jail — above all, because the State courts are so servile, stupid and lawless that they almost equal the Federal courts under the Anti-Saloon League.
No honest man in California is safe.
There are laws especially designed to silence him, and they are enforced by kept judges with merciless severity.
The result is that California is on fire with radicals — that radicals pop up twice as fast as the Babbitts and their judicial valets can pursue and scotch them.
What I contend is that the Coolidge Administration, if it is inflicted on us, is bound to be quite as bad as the Harding Administration, and that the chances are that it will be a great deal worse.
In other words, I contend that it is bound to manufacture radicalism in a wholesale manner, and that this radicalism will be far more dangerous to legitimate business than the mild stuff that Dr. La Follette now has on tap.
I believe that the Coolidge Administration will be worse than that of Harding for the plain reason that Coolidge himself is worse than Harding.
Harding was an ignoramus, but there were unquestionably good impulses in him.
He had a great desire to be liked and respected; he was susceptible to good as well as to bad suggestions; his very vanity, in the long run, might have saved him from the rogues who exploited him.
Behind Harding the politician there was always Harding the businessman — a man of successful and honorable career, jealous of his good name.
Coolidge is simply a professional politician, and a very petty, sordid and dull one.
He has lived by job-seeking and job-holding all his life; his every thought is that of his miserable trade.
When it comes to a conflict between politicians and reputable folk, his instinctive sympathy always goes to the politicians.
He showed this sympathy plainly in the Denby and Daugherty cases.
To say that he was not strongly in favor of both men is to utter nonsense.
He not only kept them in office as long as he could, despite the massive proofs of their unfitness; he also worked for them behind the door, stealthily and ignominiously.
To this day he has not said a single word against either of them; all his objurgations have been leveled at those who exposed them and drove them out.
He kept the asinine Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., in office until a week or so ago, and then gave him a parting salute of twenty-one guns.
He is even now trying to promote Captain Robison, the man who arranged the Doheny oil grab.
Who has forgotten that he wanted to appoint Daugherty to “investigate” that colossal steal?
Or that he was in close and constant communication with Ned McLean, Dougherty’s and Fall’s friend, during the whole of the inquiry?
No amount of campaign blather will suffice to wipe out this discreditable record.
Coolidge pulled against the oil investigation from the start; he pulled against the Dougherty investigation from the start; he let Daugherty and Denby go at last only under pressure, and after trying to hit their opponents below the belt.
His sympathy has been with such oppressed patriots all his life, and it is with them today.
If he is elected for four years every professional politician in the Republican party will rejoice, and with sound reason.
There will be good times for the boys — and Fall, Daugherty and company will be safe.
But will the country be safe?
It is not so certain.
Those businessmen who think only of easy profits tomorrow might do well to give a thought or two to the day after.
They have seen a very formidable radical movement roll up under their noses.
If they have any sense, they will not be deceived by the argument that it has been set in motion by “agitators.”
What agitators?
Who and where are they?
I can find no such persons.
La Follette stumped the country for years and got nowhere.
Only his own State heeded him.
But last winter he began to get a response, and soon it was immense and vociferous.
That response came from men and women who had become convinced at last, and with good logic, that government by professional politicians was intolerably and hopelessly rotten — that the only remedy was to turn them out, and then make laws to prevent them coming back.
Personally I doubt that such laws, if made, will work.
In other words, I am not a radical.
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
But that is certainly not the common American view; the majority of Americans are far more hopeful.
When they see an evil they try to remedy it — by peaceful means if possible, and if not, then by force.
In the present case millions of them tire of the degrading Coolidge farce, with its puerile evasion of issues, its cloaking of Denby and Daugherty, its exaltation of such political jugglers as Slemp and Butler, its snide conspiracy to rob La Follette of honest votes in California.
They tire of it and want to end it.
What now, if they are forced to stand four years more if it?
What if they must see it grow ever worse and worse?
To timorous businessmen, in this year 1924, La Follette may look dangerous.
But let them ask themselves what sort of radicalism will probably be afoot in 1928, after four more years of Coolidge.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -buncombe/
Re: H.L. MENCKEN ESSAYS
Mr. Davis’ Campaign
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/October 13, 1924
Every day, for at least a month past, I have heard the whisper that the Hon. John W. Davis was about to bust loose and shake the country with some hot stuff.
And every day he has kept on prattling his amiable nothings.
Surely, by this time, even his most devoted partisans must begin to notice the plain fact that the hon. gentleman has blown up, and is no more.
As for me, I can recall no candidate for the Presidency, not even the Hon. Alton B. Parker, who ever carried on a more ineffective campaign.
It is not that the Hon. Mr. Davis has made an amateur’s blunders.
It is not that he lacks eloquence.
It is not that he has come under suspicion of grave crimes and misdemeanors.
It is simply that he is too timorous a man to rise to the situation that confronts him — that he is ruining himself by playing safe.
All of his speeches that I have read, probably two dozen, might have been made just as well by a university president or by one of the wind-jamming Babbitts who address Kiwanis and Rotary.
Here, perhaps, I libel the university presidents.
As a class, they are platitudinous and nonsensical enough, God knows, but there is at least one among them, Dr. Butler, of Columbia, who actually says something when he speaks.
Dr. Davis says precisely nothing.
Even his girlish flings at the Ku Klux Klan are without substance.
What he says is simply what everyone now says.
If he is really against the Klan, why doesn’t he give it a wallop where it is tender?
That is to say, why doesn’t he denounce its connection with the sinister enterprises of the Methodist and Baptist churches, and with the Anti-Saloon League?
If he is opposed to the entrance of religion into politics, here is his chance to say so plainly.
Instead, he is content to poll-parrot academic objurgations that are five years old, and so thin that even the Southern newspapers now bawl them.
The learned gentleman is still worse when he gets upon the subject of what he calls personal liberty.
His pleas for this great boon have all the heat and force of a flapper’s demand that her beau stop kissing her.
They almost recall the sermons on Ibsen and Maeterlinck that used to be delivered by intellectual suburban rectors twenty-five years ago.
The orator, it appears, is hot for something, but it never becomes clear just what that something is.
Does he favor personal liberty?
Then precisely what personal liberty?
Only one brand of it has been subverted of late in anything approaching a wholesale and public manner.
This one brand he never mentions.
About it he is elaborately and disingenuously silent.
The omission does not escape his auditors, even at meetings packed with ward heelers, and the fact was shown some time ago in Chicago.
In the midst of the hon. gentleman’s most affecting eloquence, at the exact moment when he began to hymn liberty in words that would have moved a lieutenant of cossacks or even a Federal judge, the gallery began to yell “Give us beer!”
The eminent speaker, as I say, was eloquent, but that gallery was still more eloquent.
It said more in three austere, pathetic words than he had been saying in a thousand.
But he was unaffected.
He took no notice of the interruption.
Instead, he kept on arguing, lawyer-like, that liberty was ordained by law, and citing statute and precedent to prove it.
I daresay, though I don’t know, that he quoted various Federal judges.
The man simply lacks humor.
If he had it he couldn’t make any campaign at all.
His job is really too grotesque.
A lawyer on leave from the ante-room of J. P. Morgan, with a brief waiting for him against the day he is beaten, he has to posture before the populace as a Liberal.
A jobholder under the late Woodrow, and hence privy to the colossal stealing that went on in Washington in that idealistic era, he has to gabble about its “moral grandeur” and to pretend to be indignant over the puerile purse-snatching of Fall and the friends of Daugherty.
A candidate dependent upon the votes of Southern Methodists and Northern Catholics, he has to be against the Ku Klux Klan without being against it, and to whoop for liberty without scaring the Anti-Saloon League.
I lack the honor of the gentleman’s acquaintance, but all who know him say that he is, in private, a man of the highest and sweetest tone, a fellow marked by rectitude in all its more delicate varieties, one who would neither rob an orphan nor let a guest go dry — in short, a gentleman.
My reply to that is that going into politics is as fatal to a gentleman as going into a bordello is fatal to a virgin.
As he stands before us he is not in the locker-room at Piping Rock; he is rampant upon a stump, discharging certain ideas.
My contention is that those ideas are full of evasion and hypocrisy, that uttering them is incompatible with intellectual integrity — to get to the heart of it at once, that gentlemen do not do such things.
Why, indeed, should they?
Running for office is not obligatory; the man who does it does it voluntarily.
Well, if it is impossible to do it without going upon the streets intellectually, then why do it at all?
What is the prize in the present case?
A public office that has been held, in the recent past, by such blobs as Harding and Coolidge.
I can imagine, nevertheless, a man wanting it.
He may put Harding and Coolidge out of his mind, and think of McKinley, Taft and Rutherford B. Hayes, or even, if he is vain enough, of Washington and Adams.
But why should he be willing to sacrifice his freedom and his honor in order to get it?
What is there in it that is worth the blush seen in the shaving-glass?
The concept of honor, of course, is foreign to the professional politician, as it is, indeed, to the average and normal American — foreign and also abhorrent, as becomes evident every time the Anti-Saloon League, the American Legion or any other such organization is heard from.
But the man before us is not a professional politician, nor even an average American: he is put in the showcase as a gentleman.
Why should a gentlemen try to get votes by false pretenses?
I can’t imagine any situation justifying it; certainly, there is none before us now.
Is Davis wet or is he dry?
If he is wet, as I hear, then he is trying to hornswoggle Prohibitionists into voting for him.
And if he is dry, then he is trying to bamboozle the wets.
The attempt, I believe, will not work. If, as appears plain, his campaign is making no progress, it is chiefly because he has shown no frankness and courage — because his transparent evasions and his deliberate misstatements of known fact have made all the more reflective varieties of men suspicions of him.
He will carry the Southern States, where thinking is forbidden by law, and he will get the support of the jobholders and jobseekers of his party in the North.
But he has obviously aroused no enthusiasm in other circles.
Compared to him, even the dreadful Coolidge is a candid man.
Coolidge says nothing, true enough, but that is simply because he has nothing to say.
His complete lack of ideas is what delights the sort of men who favor him, for they have learned by bitter experience that ideas are dangerous.
Davis is blowing up for the same reason that Governor Ritchie blew up at the Democratic National Convention: because he is playing close to the board at a time when only boldness could help him.
Dr. Ritchie had an excellent chance to make a stir in the convention by tackling the Anti-Saloon League, the Ku Klux Klan and all the other branches of the Methodist-Baptist political machine head-on, and I daresay that his private inclination was to do it, for he is a frank man.
But the professional politicians among his advisers were all against it, for politics is incurably evasive, and so his candidacy came to nothing.
When the deadlock was at its height, one blast upon his bugle horn might have started a stampede for him.
Instead, he was given a sleeping drought and locked in a room.
Davis goes the same route and for the same reason.
The politicians who manage his campaign are all plainly in favor of pussyfooting.
It is their notion that if he is careful and avoids scaring anyone, he may slip through — partly by the aid of the Hon. Al Smith in New York and partly by the aid of the Hon. Mr. La Follette in the Bible Belt.
This notion, I presume to opine, is full of holes.
The Hon. Al Smith ran ahead of the Cox-Roosevelt ticket by a million votes; he’ll probably run ahead of the Davis-Bryan ticket by even more, and so leave it on the beach in New York.
And the Hon. Mr. La Follette, when the time comes to count the ballots, will probably turn out to have captured almost as many of them from Davis as he has captured from Coolidge.
https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/2 ... -campaign/
H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/October 13, 1924
Every day, for at least a month past, I have heard the whisper that the Hon. John W. Davis was about to bust loose and shake the country with some hot stuff.
And every day he has kept on prattling his amiable nothings.
Surely, by this time, even his most devoted partisans must begin to notice the plain fact that the hon. gentleman has blown up, and is no more.
As for me, I can recall no candidate for the Presidency, not even the Hon. Alton B. Parker, who ever carried on a more ineffective campaign.
It is not that the Hon. Mr. Davis has made an amateur’s blunders.
It is not that he lacks eloquence.
It is not that he has come under suspicion of grave crimes and misdemeanors.
It is simply that he is too timorous a man to rise to the situation that confronts him — that he is ruining himself by playing safe.
All of his speeches that I have read, probably two dozen, might have been made just as well by a university president or by one of the wind-jamming Babbitts who address Kiwanis and Rotary.
Here, perhaps, I libel the university presidents.
As a class, they are platitudinous and nonsensical enough, God knows, but there is at least one among them, Dr. Butler, of Columbia, who actually says something when he speaks.
Dr. Davis says precisely nothing.
Even his girlish flings at the Ku Klux Klan are without substance.
What he says is simply what everyone now says.
If he is really against the Klan, why doesn’t he give it a wallop where it is tender?
That is to say, why doesn’t he denounce its connection with the sinister enterprises of the Methodist and Baptist churches, and with the Anti-Saloon League?
If he is opposed to the entrance of religion into politics, here is his chance to say so plainly.
Instead, he is content to poll-parrot academic objurgations that are five years old, and so thin that even the Southern newspapers now bawl them.
The learned gentleman is still worse when he gets upon the subject of what he calls personal liberty.
His pleas for this great boon have all the heat and force of a flapper’s demand that her beau stop kissing her.
They almost recall the sermons on Ibsen and Maeterlinck that used to be delivered by intellectual suburban rectors twenty-five years ago.
The orator, it appears, is hot for something, but it never becomes clear just what that something is.
Does he favor personal liberty?
Then precisely what personal liberty?
Only one brand of it has been subverted of late in anything approaching a wholesale and public manner.
This one brand he never mentions.
About it he is elaborately and disingenuously silent.
The omission does not escape his auditors, even at meetings packed with ward heelers, and the fact was shown some time ago in Chicago.
In the midst of the hon. gentleman’s most affecting eloquence, at the exact moment when he began to hymn liberty in words that would have moved a lieutenant of cossacks or even a Federal judge, the gallery began to yell “Give us beer!”
The eminent speaker, as I say, was eloquent, but that gallery was still more eloquent.
It said more in three austere, pathetic words than he had been saying in a thousand.
But he was unaffected.
He took no notice of the interruption.
Instead, he kept on arguing, lawyer-like, that liberty was ordained by law, and citing statute and precedent to prove it.
I daresay, though I don’t know, that he quoted various Federal judges.
The man simply lacks humor.
If he had it he couldn’t make any campaign at all.
His job is really too grotesque.
A lawyer on leave from the ante-room of J. P. Morgan, with a brief waiting for him against the day he is beaten, he has to posture before the populace as a Liberal.
A jobholder under the late Woodrow, and hence privy to the colossal stealing that went on in Washington in that idealistic era, he has to gabble about its “moral grandeur” and to pretend to be indignant over the puerile purse-snatching of Fall and the friends of Daugherty.
A candidate dependent upon the votes of Southern Methodists and Northern Catholics, he has to be against the Ku Klux Klan without being against it, and to whoop for liberty without scaring the Anti-Saloon League.
I lack the honor of the gentleman’s acquaintance, but all who know him say that he is, in private, a man of the highest and sweetest tone, a fellow marked by rectitude in all its more delicate varieties, one who would neither rob an orphan nor let a guest go dry — in short, a gentleman.
My reply to that is that going into politics is as fatal to a gentleman as going into a bordello is fatal to a virgin.
As he stands before us he is not in the locker-room at Piping Rock; he is rampant upon a stump, discharging certain ideas.
My contention is that those ideas are full of evasion and hypocrisy, that uttering them is incompatible with intellectual integrity — to get to the heart of it at once, that gentlemen do not do such things.
Why, indeed, should they?
Running for office is not obligatory; the man who does it does it voluntarily.
Well, if it is impossible to do it without going upon the streets intellectually, then why do it at all?
What is the prize in the present case?
A public office that has been held, in the recent past, by such blobs as Harding and Coolidge.
I can imagine, nevertheless, a man wanting it.
He may put Harding and Coolidge out of his mind, and think of McKinley, Taft and Rutherford B. Hayes, or even, if he is vain enough, of Washington and Adams.
But why should he be willing to sacrifice his freedom and his honor in order to get it?
What is there in it that is worth the blush seen in the shaving-glass?
The concept of honor, of course, is foreign to the professional politician, as it is, indeed, to the average and normal American — foreign and also abhorrent, as becomes evident every time the Anti-Saloon League, the American Legion or any other such organization is heard from.
But the man before us is not a professional politician, nor even an average American: he is put in the showcase as a gentleman.
Why should a gentlemen try to get votes by false pretenses?
I can’t imagine any situation justifying it; certainly, there is none before us now.
Is Davis wet or is he dry?
If he is wet, as I hear, then he is trying to hornswoggle Prohibitionists into voting for him.
And if he is dry, then he is trying to bamboozle the wets.
The attempt, I believe, will not work. If, as appears plain, his campaign is making no progress, it is chiefly because he has shown no frankness and courage — because his transparent evasions and his deliberate misstatements of known fact have made all the more reflective varieties of men suspicions of him.
He will carry the Southern States, where thinking is forbidden by law, and he will get the support of the jobholders and jobseekers of his party in the North.
But he has obviously aroused no enthusiasm in other circles.
Compared to him, even the dreadful Coolidge is a candid man.
Coolidge says nothing, true enough, but that is simply because he has nothing to say.
His complete lack of ideas is what delights the sort of men who favor him, for they have learned by bitter experience that ideas are dangerous.
Davis is blowing up for the same reason that Governor Ritchie blew up at the Democratic National Convention: because he is playing close to the board at a time when only boldness could help him.
Dr. Ritchie had an excellent chance to make a stir in the convention by tackling the Anti-Saloon League, the Ku Klux Klan and all the other branches of the Methodist-Baptist political machine head-on, and I daresay that his private inclination was to do it, for he is a frank man.
But the professional politicians among his advisers were all against it, for politics is incurably evasive, and so his candidacy came to nothing.
When the deadlock was at its height, one blast upon his bugle horn might have started a stampede for him.
Instead, he was given a sleeping drought and locked in a room.
Davis goes the same route and for the same reason.
The politicians who manage his campaign are all plainly in favor of pussyfooting.
It is their notion that if he is careful and avoids scaring anyone, he may slip through — partly by the aid of the Hon. Al Smith in New York and partly by the aid of the Hon. Mr. La Follette in the Bible Belt.
This notion, I presume to opine, is full of holes.
The Hon. Al Smith ran ahead of the Cox-Roosevelt ticket by a million votes; he’ll probably run ahead of the Davis-Bryan ticket by even more, and so leave it on the beach in New York.
And the Hon. Mr. La Follette, when the time comes to count the ballots, will probably turn out to have captured almost as many of them from Davis as he has captured from Coolidge.
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