“The United States is essentially a commonwealth of third-rate men. . . . No sane man, employing an American plumber to repair a leaky drain, would expect him to do it at the first trial, and in precisely the same way no sane man, observing an American Secretary of State in negotiation with Englishmen and Japs, would expect him to come off better than second best. Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards.”
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But Mencken’s anti-idealism had other targets. It conspired, perhaps, with his self-consciousness as a German-American to make him scorn the “hallucination” of Woodrow Wilson–both as wartime president and maker of the League of Nations–and later to soft-pedal the threat of Hitler. And it’s chiefly what jeopardized his popularity during the New Deal, which he called “a milch cow with 125,000,000 teats.” In the 20s Mencken could merrily lacerate the Prohibitionist regimes of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Even though boobs called him un-American and some called him a Red (because he supported “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s 1924 bid for the White House), the cognoscenti cheered and he had lots of fun. But the 30s shoved him out of the Voltairean grandstand and so far into the left-versus-right fray that he dismissed the Great Depression as overblown. So: “There is, in fact, only one intelligible idea in the whole More Abundant Life rumble-bumble, and that is the idea that whatever A earns really belongs to B. A is any honest and industrious man or woman; B is any drone or jackass. On this proposition all the quacks clustered about the Greatest President Since Hoover are agreed, and on this proposition alone.”
Most of us may still take “ideology” as unseriously, but fewer trust their gut feelings as confidently as Mencken trusted his. And few hold politicians in lower esteem; to Mencken, they were “without exception, scoundrels.” That may be why those who remember him often wonder how he would react to today’s domestic scene (he wrote comparatively little about the foreign). The Moral Majority couldn’t fail to remind him of the wowsers he knew–the Anti-Saloon League, the Baptists, the Methodists and Ku Kluxers. And just as he excoriated the GOP’s one-term presidents of the 20s for their kowtowing to the Temperance Movement, he might despise the Republican party of today for its cozy symbiosis with the religious right–even if he decided the wowsers needed Reagan more than he needed them. It’s harder to guess how he would have balanced the illegality of liquor against that of cocaine, but surely he would have sharp words for an administration that finesses bizarre deals with drugs and arms.
A Cuomo candidacy may have brightly reminded Mencken of Al Smith’s, but Bush and Dukakis would probably remind him only of the colorless Dewey, who woefully lacked “zowie.” Nor would Mencken gladly suffer Dukakis’s and Jackson’s trumpeting of their humble origins. Then again, he might advise us to respect Dukakis’s reported disdain for the political tool of charisma (and to shun Jackson’s reliance on it) and assess in the governor’s record of business-government collaboration something a trifle more palatable than much else he’d see, even if “Hamiltonian.”
The case transpired in 1926; the editor of the title was Mencken; the bluenose was the formidable secretary of Boston’s formidably puritanical Watch and Ward Society, the Reverend Jason Franklin Chase: the prostitute was the title character of “Hatrack,” an amusing piece of short nonfiction by Herbert Asbury that Mencken ran in the Mercury’s April issue. Hatrack, so called because she was so shaped, lived in Farmington, Missouri. She desired religion’s consolations but was spurned by both the town’s Protestant and Catholic congregations and of course reviled by their clergy. Out not of revenge but of want for human contact, she gave her body’s scant flesh to male worshipers for any nominal sums they wished to fork over–or for nothing. Out not of irony but of decency, she serviced the Protestant brethren in the Catholic cemetery and the Catholics in the Masonic one.
At the first of several hearings the judge saw nothing obscene about the April issue and threw the case out. But Chase was not to be undone. He took a train to New York, where he prevailed upon censorious pals in the U.S. Post Office (Mencken liked to call such folk “smellers”) to ban the issue from mail going to Boston. The effect was nugatory, since the copies had already gone through. But as a matter of principle–that the Watch and Ward Society or Chase himself or anybody had the right to censor anything by any means–Mencken kept fighting on Boston and interstate fronts.
