H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/November 9, 1931

9 November 1931

The Evening Sun

The Ritchie Campaign

I

The sudden and dramatic jump in Governor Ritchie’s presidential prospects is proof of two things: first, that a really sagacious candidate, once he spits on his hands, can always do more for himself than anyone else can do for him, and second, that even in politics frankness sometimes pays. This last is not generally believed by professional politicians. They hold, as a rule, that it is safest for a candidate to avoid all the more controversial issues as much as possible, and to confine his public remarks to hollow nothings, and they point, in support of their doctrine, to the success of such adept dodgers as Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. But they forget that dodging is profitable only when the other fellow dodges, too—which, alas, is usually the case. When, by some accident of politics, a frank and able man enters the combat, he not uncommonly wins handsomely, as the examples of Cleveland and Roosevelt the elder well demonstrate. 

Dr. Ritchie, having acquired a habit of plain speaking, is at a marked tactical advantage today, for the two men that he must dispose of to get to the White House, the Hon. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lord Hoover, are both dodgers by nature and training, and it he pursues them with sufficient vigor he will undoubtedly sweat them into panic and disaster. Of the pair, I believe that Dr. Roosevelt is the more vulnerable and by far, for his artful duckings and dissemblings have manifestly aroused the suspicions of both wets and drys, and many politicians who were for him a few months ago are now in doubt about him. The wets distrust him because everyone remembers that he bowed his neck to the Anti-Saloon League in 1920, and the drys are uneasy because, under pressure of dire political necessity, he turned wet in 1930. 

If, after turning wet, he had kept up a loud wet clatter, he’d be far better off today than he is. The drys, to be sure, would be hot against him, but they are really against him now, and they will prove it when, as and if some really dry candidate leaps into the ring—say, Cordell Hull or the perennial William G. McAdoo. The wets, if they could get rid of their doubts, would be for him uproariously and almost unanimously, and he would be so strong in New York that Tammany wouldn’t dare to oppose him. But he has been horribly mum on Prohibition for more than a year, and so the wet misgivings increase daily, and such practical politicians as Governor Ely of Massachusetts and Mayor Cermak of Chicago plainly conclude that he must be thrown overboard. 

II

Why Dr. Roosevelt has not spoken out I don’t know. It may be because of temperamental defects, and it may be because he has listened to bad advice. Politicians are always making such mistakes, and then wondering what has happened to them. The trade they practice is anything but an exact science. If Dr. Roosevelt ever seriously believed that he could line up both the Eastern wets and the Southern drys, then he is foolish beyond the common. It was obvious from the start that he would have to choose sides soon or late. But he kept on postponing his decision, and now his chance is probably gone. My prediction is that when he is forced into a corner at last he will turn out to be quite as much a dry as a wet, and that he will thus go to the convention as a two-headed Law Enforcement candidate. But that won’t get him the nomination, for the wets will boil with rage, on the other side Bishop Cannon is already unequivocably against him, and so are most of the lesser Methodist luminaries.

His gradual collapse opened the way for a less vacillating aspirant, and Governor Ritchie stepped into the situation with great skill. He knows far more about politics than any other performer ever seen in these parts, and has a farsighted eye and a cool head. So far as I can make out, he has got very little help from the local professionals. If they were really for him, which I doubt, they should have been organizing his campaign six months ago—collecting money, seeing the party bosses in doubtful States, and preparing to enter the primaries. Instead they confined themselves to hatching vague and unworkable plans and making complimentary speeches. If Ritchie is now a really formidable candidate, as I believe, he owes the fact to himself alone, and if he gets to the White House he will land there without any of the inconvenient obligations which bound Harding to Daugherty and Coolidge to Butler. He will be as clear of such embarrassments as Lord Hoover, who paid his own way and had no benefactors, but only hirelings. 

III

The Governor’s mettle will be sorely tested during the next few months. Everywhere he goes he will be cautioned to lay low on this or that issue. In one place there will be uneasiness about his views on government ownership; in another place he will collide with the local prejudices about the World Court and the League of Nations; in a third he will find that the very phrase, States’ Rights, savors of simony, atheism and blasphemy. Multitudes of earnest men, some of them of the first importance, will try to convert him into another Hoover, pussy-footing and puerile. He will have to listen to a great deal of alarmed whispering in wash-rooms. 

My hope and belief is that he will disregard all this nonsense, and continue to speak out. In particular, I hope and believe that he will continue to speak out the subject of Prohibition—more, that he will speak out more plainly and resolutely than ever before. For that is the issue on which he must win, if he is to win at all. That is what will fetch him the votes when the time comes. He can well afford to let the Southern drys be damned, for they have no candidate who can conceivably beat him, and once he is nominated, four-fifths of them will vote for him anyhow. The votes he needs must come from the North and the more civilized parts of the Middle West, and both regions are overwhelmingly and incurably wet, and pray nightly for a hero to lead them out of the Methodist bullpen. 

What is needed is not a decorous constitutional argument against the Prohibition infamy, with references to cases and quotations from authorities. What is needed is a series of clarion and electrifying whoops, comparable to the performance of an evangelist at a Georgia revival, or of Monsignor Cannon before a committee of scared Senators. Let the Governor now gird himself for this disturbance. Let him think up some blistering phrases to hurl at Cannon, at Hoover, at the whole rabble of brummagem world-savers. Let him invent opprobrious names for them. Let him fling himself upon them head-on-horse, foot and dragoons. Let him make such an uproar that the whole country will attend, and the endocrines of every wet will boil. 

IV

What the wets want, in brief, is not logic: they already know all the arguments. What they want is consolation, with hope peeping alluringly over the fence. What they want is some positive and indubitable assurance, altogether beyond the slightest peradventure of doubt, that they have at last found a champion brave and strong enough to lead them. Al disappointed them by turning publicist on the stump: they poured out by the thousand to hear him skin Hoover and damn the Anti-Saloon League, and he tortured them with essays written by his staff of pseudo-intellectuals. And Roosevelt is battling and enraging them by trying to fool them: they would like him better if he came out flatly against them. 

Here is a grand chance, and I cherish the confidence that Dr. Ritchie will prove equal to it. The field is clear before him. There is no other wet of his stature who is so little burdened with encumbrances. He has no Tammany or Anti-Saloon League on his back, he has no long record of deceit and failure to live down, and his economic ideas, however disturbing they may be to this or that faction, are not well enough known to do him any general harm. The country knows him as a wet, and as a wet only. He has done as much as any man to make Prohibition suspect and disreputable. And he has done it sincerely, believing thoroughly in his case. Let him now loose the Word, and the wet majority, increasing every day, will rise to a man (and woman: I do not forget the lovely wet gals!) and heave him gloriously into the White House. 

It is, as I say, a grand chance, and for one I find it pleasant to reflect that the man has earned it, and thus deserves it. He would make an excellent President, as he has made an excellent Governor. He is no innocent idealist, but a hardboiled and highly skillful politician; nevertheless, there is a fine integrity in him, and he is so intelligent as to be a sort of miracle in American public life. Few politicians alive at this moment have so good a claim on the suffrages of their countrymen. He is plainly worth a whole herd of Hoovers. Nominate him, and Hoover will be ready to go back to England. For if the plain people are deficient in the higher cerebral centers, they at least have eyes, and once they look at the rival candidates they will be in no doubt about which way they ought to vote.