H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/April 27, 1931

I

BAPTISMAL and burial services are ingeniously (or is it ingenuously?) combined in the manifesto of Dr. Joseph I. France, candidate for the Presidency, issued to a somewhat unresponsive country on April 8. In the very same words which announce his candidacy he sets forth the reasons which will make his nomination and election impossible. Item, he calls for a revival of the Bill of Rights. Item, he calls for common honesty and common decency in high office, including especially the highest. Item, he—

But I have said enough, I think, to show that his chances of succeeding Lord Hoover are no greater—if,  indeed, they are as great—as those of Al Capone. The first alone is enough to damn him beyond redemption, for it arrays every great engine of opinion in the country against him, from the Supreme Court to all save two or three of the big newspapers, and from the American Legion to the bishops of state church. The Bill of Rights, quotha? I believe in all seriousness that it would be safer for an aspirant to the Presidency to advocate communism, cannibalism, or even Darwinism. In many American States they now jail men for less.

It is, however, the second item that really cooks Dr. France’s goose. Imagine a candidate trying to reach the White House by renouncing and denouncing “colorless compromise, weak negation and dishonorable equivocation!” Can it be that the hon. gentleman is actually as innocent as all that? If so, then let him give some study to the recent history of his country. He will discover that every President since Cleveland has got into office by one route or the other—that is, either by compromise, by negation or by dishonorable equivocation. Has he so soon forgotten that Dr. Wilson promised solemnly to keep us out of the war? The last candidate to fly and flaunt his true colors was the Hon. Alton B. Parker, Jr. and he was beaten ignominiously by the master trimmer, Roosevelt. Even Al Smith, let us remember sotto voce, was quite content to run as a wet on a platform that was dry, and with a client of the Anti-Saloon League as his runningmate.

II

I HALF suspect that Dr. France has more humor in him than is generally believed, and is simply trying to have some fun with Dr. Hoover, in whose knees and neck there is more rubber than in all the tire-factories of Akron. To a man of his principles the dodging, skulking, groveling type of politician is naturally revolting, and hence a fair target for ribaldry. But it is one thing to mock, and quite another thing to fetch the crowd. My fear is that Dr. France, like many an idealist before him, vastly overestimates the native decency of the American people. He seems to believe (or, at all events, to hope) that they are as much disgusted by the Hooverian politics as he is. But that is probably a gross error. They are really not offended by the Great Engineer’s limber efforts to hold his job for four years more. What offends them is simply his failure to perform a miracle.

Dr. France alludes to this failure in his manifesto—at events, so I interpret his reference to “self-advertised supermen.” But it seems to me that he makes far too little of it. That Hoover is immensely unpopular must be plain to everyone; indeed, there is evidence that it is plain to Hoover himself. The crowds in the movie parlors flatly refuse to applaud him, and so do the crowds in the streets; he had to go all the way to Porto Rico to hear really hearty cheers—and God knows what it cost young Teddy Roosevelt, in toil and moil, to produce them. The plain people blame him for all their present woes. He gets a black thought every time the roof leaks or the baby cries.

All this, of course, is very unjust to him. He is no more responsible for the present economic situation than he is for the downfall of poor Alfonso XIII, and he could not remedy it if he tried. But there are many evils that he could remedy, and very easily. He could clear out the gang of political harpies which now infests Washington, with the White House as its base. He could get some common decency into our dealings with Latin America. He could throw out the stupid hacks who pollute his Cabinet, and put in honest and competent men. Above all, he could abandon his “dishonorable equivocation” about Prohibition, and deal with it in a frank, sensible and self-respecting manner. But he does none of these things, nor anything like them. His one aim is to avoid every issue that is likely to bring him trouble in 1932, and to that end he is apparently willing to sacrifice everything that men of any dignity hold dear.

III

BUT, as I say, all of this arouses little, if any, public indignation. There is no sensitiveness to such dishonors in the communal breast. The wets, I fancy, would be quite content, and even thrilled, if the hon. gentleman came to the conclusion tomorrow that the Prohibition jig was up, and so deserted his Methodist friends between days, and began howling for personal liberty. Nor would the Methodists, I suspect, be greatly surprised. No one expects a President, in this one-hundred-and-fifty-fifth year of the Republic, to be a candid man. No one expects him to make any sacrifice of his personal fortunes to the common weal. No one expects him to be jealous of his honor.

No one, that is, save a few romantics of the school of Dr. France. They still look for honest leadership in the White House, and they count upon it to restore the American passion for justice and the dignity of American public life. France himself, it some incredible act of God put him in Hoover’s place, would strive magnificently to that end. Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, he would try to resuscitate the Bill of Rights, and make it once more a living force. He would deal honestly and courageously with the problems confronting him, if not always wisely. He would heave himself with groans and hallelujahs into a herculean effort to move the immovable, resist the irresistable, purge the unspeakable, and solve the insoluble.

He will never, of course, get the chance. He is as safely vaccinated against sueceding Hoover as I am against succeeding Pius Xl. But that is no reason, it seems to me, for laughing at him. If his somewhat grandiose programme does not voice the hopes of any considerable body of his countrymen, then it at least voices hopes that are honest, and honorable, and, in the best sense—a sense now almost obsolete in the United States—patriotic. The Republic that he dreams of would be a shade priggish, perhaps, but it would be far more worthy of a self-respecting man’s allegiance than it is today. There might be plenty of reason to be discontented with it, but there would be no reason to be ashamed of it.

IV

DR. FRANCE made a good Senator, and in difficult days. He stood against the Wilson holy war upon the Bill of Rights at a time when it took a lot of courage, and he never faltered. No Marylander of his generation has ever done more to establish and maintain the Maryland Free State scheme of things; he was battling for it pertinaciously long before most of those who now talk about it had ever heard of it. His reward was that he was thrown out of office to the tune of violent objurgations and revilings.

His concrete opponent, when he came up for reflection, was the Hon. William Cabell Bruce, another good Senator. It has always seemed to me to be a magnificently ironical fact that Dr. Bruce, who depicted him in the campaign as a kind of anarchist, was actually in full sympathy with most of his principles, and afterward maintained them with great vigor in the Senate. Some day, I hope, Dr. Bruce will review his speeches during that contest with a judicial eye, and make public amends to Dr. France. For the two men, at bottom, believe in precisely the same things: their only real difference is over ways and means of attaining them.

But this is a detail of politics, which is to say, of a science compounded of irrationalities. The important thing is that Dr. France, after eight years of retirement, has got into action again. He will not reach the White House, but there is plenty of work for him to do at home, and within the bounds of his own party. Under the leadership of that depressing nonentity, Dr. Goldsborough, it has become a mere rabble of professional jobholders, with a dismal sprinkling of prehensile Babbitts. It is years since Goldsborough last had an idea, and it will be years before he has another. If Dr. France heaves a bomb or two into that vacuum he will be doing something valuable to his party, and something also valuable to his country.