H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/October 13, 1924

I.

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.

II.

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.

III.

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.

IV.

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.