It’s hard to argue with this Mencken quote
H. L. Mencken was a famous pundit in the first half of the 20th Century, known for caustic wit.
I’ve never been a Mencken fan, and I don’t share his contempt for people in general and for Americans in particular. However, the guy had a gift for the turn of phrase. And maybe half the time he was right. So I give him that.
For example, in the following quote from 1920, he makes a prediction about the presidency. He blames the problem he’s describing on the stupidity of the American people – Mencken, ever the cynic who thought himself highly superior, looked down on what he called the booboisie, which was the general American public. I don’t think the problem lies primarily with the public – although there certainly are problems there – so much as in the mendacious and arrogant press and “elites,” who are the main conduits from which the public receives its information.
Here’s Mencken’s prediction from about 100 years ago:
But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or count himself lost. … All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
It’s hard to argue very strenuously with that.
Mencken thought Harding came quite close to that unlofty goal. I contend that Biden makes Harding look like a giant:
Describing the prose of President Warren Harding, Mencken quipped: “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.”
Better than Biden, I’d say.
Mencken may be something of an acquired taste, and definitely not easy to categorize politically (although, were he alive today, he would be far more scathing in his denunciations of the left than of the right), but he was a truly brilliant man, erudite, witty, deeply-read, and seemingly able to write well about almost any topic, although his elitist condescension towards the uncultured is certainly unappealing to many. The fact that so many Californians prefer the utterly incompetent Newsom to the alternative and that the senile Biden, whose administration is, on every level, feckless and mendacious and destructive, continues to enjoy uncritical support from every center of power in our republic and from roughly half the electorate might lead one to a cynicism concerning the good sense of the American citizenry worthy of the “Sage of Baltimore” himself.
“Better than Biden”, now THERE’s a lofty goal!
In fairness, a yellow lab with a bell around his neck would be “Better than Biden” as a president. I’d prefer executive orders requiring free tennis balls and bacon for all citizens than the idiotic, destructive policies that are explained in authentic frontier gibberish that we currently have.
That’s definitely a thought provoking Menken quote.
On the Pres. Harding issue: I’ve never studied the man or his presidency to any extent. He got ridiculed on Boardwalk Empire (big surprise). But Harding did push a comprehensive civil rights bill in the 1920’s. I’m not sure about the House, but it failed in the Senate twice, both times with most GOP members voting for it, and Dems against it. It’s an inconvenient bit of history for the Democrats.
Nonapod,
The term “Blue Dog Democrat” is credited to Texas Democratic representative Pete Geren (who later joined the Bush Administration). Geren opined that the members had been “choked blue” by Democrats on the left.[18] It is related to the political term “Yellow Dog Democrat”, a reference to Southern Democrats said to be ‘so loyal they would even vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for any Republican’.
Maybe you knew that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Coalition
Looking at the picture painted by the news, it is hard not to take an elegiac view of where we are right now in the history of our imminently failing American experiment in democracy.
From my reading I believe that a large proportion of the 18th century men who originated our experiment were not fools and blowhards, but were hard-working, tempered by pioneering, settling, and the Frontier, were hard, and experienced men–many of them well educated for their time, and that meant well-aware of the histories of ancient Greece and Rome, of philosophy, religion, English history and the English common law, and the cautionary lessons and precedents they all provided; they paid attention, and knew what was significant and what was not.
All their work, and all the unremitting toil and sacrifice of all the ten or so generations since then–it appears–are in the very rapid process of being thrown away by far too many members of today’s too often soft, ignorant, propagandized, easily distracted, and incompetent generations.
@TommyJay. No, I actually didn’t know that. Sort of funny though.
Sometimes problems really are the fault of the general public. Almost everything that’s wrong with modern sports, professional and amateur, flows from adults investing way too much time, passion, and money watching other people play games mostly intended for children.
Most of today’s political problems, however, stem from a degenerate elite offering the voter nothing but bad choices.
Mike
The best thing about Harding’s administration was his Vice President, Calvin Coolidge. When Harding died from a heart attack in 1923, there were rumors that he had actually been poisoned by his wife Florence as an act of revenge. Florence knew about Harding’s affair with his secretary, Nan Britton, which began when he was a U.S. senator. Harding’s only child, a daughter born in 1919, was the result of this affair. Harding’s paternity was proved by DNA testing in 2015.
Harding’s campaign for the presidency had one thing in common with Biden’s; he did not travel and conducted the campaign from his front porch– which was at least located outdoors rather than in a basement.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Blink,” argues humans have two levels of cognition: fast and slow, which makes sense. Under possible immediate threat one must find a shortcut answer to fight or flight. Otherwise, better to mull things over.
Anyway, Gladwell had a chapter on Warren Harding, whom Gladwell claims was selected to run for President because he passed the “blink” test (fast cognition) — he looked like a president.
As I recall, Gladwell shed light on Harding I hadn’t encountered before. Harding might have been a dim bulb and had a yum-yum on the side, but he stopped short of the Teapot Dome Scandal. Gladwell reported Harding grabbing Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, (the real perp behind Teapot Dome), shaking him, while crying, “What have you done?”
I don’t have my copy of “Blink” anymore and I can’t back it up from the web, but I remember thinking, “Good for you, Warren.” That’s a scene I can’t ever imagine Joe Biden playing.
People who are clever with words, work with books and their own writing, value above all else facility with words in politicians and statesmen. History has graced us with Lincoln and Churchill, for example, whose thoughts and actions and leadership were augmented with powerful command of language.
Many fine and important leaders have people skills, good instincts, or other qualities that do not include literary or rhetorical excellence. The Menckens of this world and many others (George Will, Jay Nordlinger for example) are incapable of fairly assessing leadership qualities of those who do not rely on the gift of words.
George Patton, Margaret Thatcher, Dwight Eisenhower, US Grant were leaders of consequence, and only Grant’s autobiography produced at the end of his life met the needs of these literary-obsessed critics.
I was preparing to state something similar in part to what Ed states above. To that I’ll add that when the average person fails to respond with understanding, it reflects a failure upon the speaker’s part. The difficulty in describing the issues, lies with the Menckens of the world, not Joe Sixpack’s understanding.
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Albert Einstein
No one ever had trouble understanding what Churchill had to say.
Perhaps the quality I most admire in Thomas Sowell is the simplicity and clarity he brings to issues others describe as ‘complex’.
Read Lincoln’s 1854 Peoria speech and observe that he didn’t speak down to his listeners, yet even the less educated of his day understood him perfectly.
https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm
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Geoffrey Britain,
I actually encountered something quite similar to the Einstein quote in a freshman physics lab, except it was delivered (less artfully) by a cantankerous feminist coed. My first impulse was to dismiss it, but a minute later I thought it was pretty smart, and I’ve remembered it ever since. She was talking about the purely mathematical explanation, but the point is very nearly the same.
Never thought I’d see the day 🙂
Warren Harding actually was a much better President than people assume. His speech in Birmingham, Alabama was one of the greatest by any President. He stated that black and white are equal in front of a crowd as many as 100,000 in the very center of the deep South.
He led the negotiations for the Washington Naval Treaty, the first world-wide arms control treaty.
He solved the depression left by Wilson, by letting the economy right itself.
He initiated the Office of the Budget (now OMB) so that a single coordinated budget was sent to Congress each year instead of each agency sending its request independently to their friends in Congress.
Etc.
In Mencken’s time there was no welfare state and people knew they had little choice other than to find ways to make a living.
Individual initiative, unlike today amongst many, was not a bizarre concept. The Protestant work ethic held sway over most of society and within government. And at that time there was no massive federal bureaucracy.
The voters back then may have cast votes for the “wrong” reasons, but they knew their livelihood depended upon their own initiatives. There was small chance the govt would be bailing them out.
You can thank FDR for taking the first steps in creating a massive, unresponsive, unaccountable federal govt. His policies were lauded by no other than Il Duce himself, Benito Mussolini, as well as by Hitler and, of course, his Nazi press.
@ huxley –
“Blink” Chapter Three:
pp 72-73: “In that instant, as Daugherty [lawyer and lobbyist] sized up Harding, an idea came to him that would alter American history: Wouldn’t that [fine looking] man make a great President?”
p 75: at the deadlocked 1920 Republican convention, the Party bosses wanted someone they could all agree on, “And one name came immediately to mind: Harding! Didn’t he look just like a presidential candidate?”
No Teapot Dome reference, though, and I haven’t come up with that particular quote on-line. I judge it to be unlikely because of this:
Wikipedia: “Like most of the administration’s scandals, it came to public light after Harding’s death, and he was not aware of the illegal aspects….Hearings into Teapot Dome began in October 1923, two months after Harding’s death.” The “Teapot Dome” article says explicitly that Harding was unaware of Fall’s corruption, and it had no affect on his presidency until the trials began.
Aesop-Check rates this claim Partly True.
Here is an interesting article about Harding, but it concentrates on the scandal, and does not mention his accomplishments (nor did Gladwell, as that was not his purpose).
https://www.thoughtco.com/teapot-dome-scandal-4158547
And this one just proves that two-level justice is not new.
https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/teapot-dome-scandal
Scanning through the Wikipedia bio, Roland is correct that Harding didn’t retain the credit he deserved, due to the scandals that broke after his death, including Britton’s “tell all” book about their child.
Also from Wikipedia: Murray argued that Harding deserves more credit than historians have given: “He was certainly the equal of a Franklin Pierce, an Andrew Johnson, a Benjamin Harrison, or even a Calvin Coolidge. In concrete accomplishments, his administration was superior to a sizable portion of those in the nation’s history.”
In the beginning of his tenure, “he was given a hero’s welcome when Congress opened in early December as the first sitting senator to be elected to the White House”
His worst legacy is probably setting this precedent.
I couldn’t find huxley’s Harding quote here, but I discovered that prominent Democrats before Biden have been plagiarizing other people.
https://www.azquotes.com/author/6246-Warren_G_Harding
“We need citizens who are less concerned about what their government can do for them, and more concerned about what they can do for the nation.”
https://speakola.com/political/john-f-kennedy-inauguration-1961
“I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you.”
Or at least some speechwriters do the plagiarizing for them.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/11/john-f-kennedys-inaugural-address-who-wrote-jfks-speech.html
Harding can’t get no respect, nor even a footnote.
Don’t know much at all about Harding, but it’s clear that the political ideology of an historian or critic will determine how their subject (e.g., a president) will be evaluated.
If the critic’s ideology is in conformance with that of the president being critiqued, than, more than likely, that president will be lauded by the critic.
The opposite is also true.
“it’s clear that the political ideology of an historian or critic will determine how their subject (e.g., a president) will be evaluated.” JohnTyler
Clearly and especially in the ‘modern’ era, that’s often the case.
However such a treatise is propaganda not history. A historian who fails to strive for objectivity has invalidated his claim to be a historian.
What happened, what did the various parties do and what were the actual results and the consequences of those events… is and ought to be, the whole of it.
No need for colorful assertions, if events are not noteworthy in and of themselves, there’s no purpose in highlighting them.
Example: what makes the Battle of Thermopylae arguably the most historically significant battle in history is not the bravery of the 7300 Greeks who fought against 50,000-250,000 invading Persians. Nor is it even the time it provided for the Athenians to gather their Navy and destroy the Persian supply fleet at Salamis.
Rather it is the potential consequences that rest upon how those events are resolved. For if the Greeks are defeated, democracy itself is stillborn and all of the events that follow are derailed. Most significantly, the American revolution has no historical precedent upon which to base a Republic with democracy as its foundation.
Most significantly, the American revolution has no historical precedent upon which to base a Republic with democracy as its foundation.
Elected conciliar bodies at all levels were a Medieval innovation. The federal constitution was inspired by colonial charters, antecedent to which were the chartered boroughs of England.
Neo you do not have to agree with someone or even like them to admit that they are at times very astute. Mencken comes across like a curmudgeon “get off my lawn type” but he can be very prescient.
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