H.L. Mencken

Springfield News-Leader/February 3, 1929

Someone sends me a copy of the Register, the principal newspaper of Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. Adelaide, by the nearest route, is 12,500 statute miles from Baltimore, but the Australians are greatly interested in the United States, and so their papers print a good deal of American news, including news from Baltimore. In the issue of the Register that lies before me there is an article on Baltimore which runs to two columns, and carries what, for a newspaper in the English manner, are very conspicuous headlines.

Unluckily, the flattery lying in the space given to it is not borne out by its contents. On the contrary, it is completely derisory in tone. It depicts Baltimore as a town of sordid Babbitts, ignorant, ignoble, lacking in urbanity, and devoid of taste. Worse, it seeks to convict these Babbitts out of their own mouth, and with what must be admitted to be considerable success. For the whole article is based upon a pamphlet issued and circulated by the Association of Commerce, an organization assumed to embrace every important businessman in the city. The title of that pamphlet is “197 Reasons Why You Should Enthuse Over Baltimore.”

I wish I could defend it, but the plain fact is that it is indefensible. The Register writer, a Mr. Nicholas, does not exaggerate its humorless imbecility in the slightest. It is vulgar, bombastic, silly and vile. It presents a picture of Baltimore that is ridiculous and libelous. No truly civilized man could endure life in a town so stupid and low-down. Yet this absurd pamphlet bears the imprimatur of all of Baltimore’s acknowledged masterminds, severally and jointly. It was prepared under their direction and circulated at their expense. Already it has reached the ends of the earth, but its journeys, perhaps, are only begun. The Nichols article will be copied into other papers, in Australia, along the China coast, in South America, in Europe. It may endure for years. And everywhere it will be marked over, and everywhere it will spread the news that Baltimore is somehow a comic town, like Los Angeles and Dayton, Tenn.

II

It is hard to understand the sort of mind which views such puerilities gravely, and accepts them as intelligent and laudable. I do not believe for an instant that the average Baltimorean businessman has that kind of mind or the average businessman, anywhere else. Businessmen, in my experience, are a great deal more enlightened than they are commonly assumed to be. Taking one with another, they know quite as much as the intelligentsia, and what they know comes far closer to the truth. I’d much rather mingle with them than with authors, and so would most other authors.

But they seem to have a peculiar and inexplicable capacity for succumbing to charlatans. Maybe it is because the common assumption that they are stupid makes them distrust their own judgment, and so causes them to give heed to any mountebank with a loud voice. Whatever the fact, they are plainly extraordinarily easy marks. Any faker with a new Red scare can alarm them and get money out of them, and so can any promoter with a new scheme of booming. They are seldom led, in their own organizations, by their own best men. Almost infallibly, and by what seems to be nearly an instinct, they turn to windjammers.

It has always been so in Baltimore, though of late there are signs of a change for the better. The old Merchants and Manufacturers Association, the predecessor of the Association of Commerce, was operated for years by palpable fools. Now and then there was a revolt against one or another of these fools and he was heaved out, but almost always an even worse one was put in his place. The result was that the organization became a town joke, and that its interest was sufficient to ruin even the best of causes. Meanwhile, it converted many sorry vacuums into professional Prominent Baltimoreans, and some of them survive to this day, endlessly posturing in the complaisant newspapers as public benefactors, but never accomplishing anything of the slightest durable value to the community.

III

I marvel that the intelligent business men of America do not get together and put down these buffoons, who flourish in other towns quite as gaudily as they flourish in Baltimore. Why have they waited for the intelligentsia to protest against the dull and witless blather of Rotary and Kiwanis. Why haven’t they horned themselves, and so made it plain that such childish organizations do not actually represent them. It seems to me to be pretty certain that the men of any other profession, confronted by a like situation, would have acted promptly and effectively. Surely the doctors would have done something, or the lawyers, or the engineers. But the businessmen let the nonsense go on until they suddenly found themselves confronting Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbit”—and the assumption that all of them were like that!

I don’t believe they are. In fact, I know that they are not. But it would be easier to admire and respect them if, in the face of such a thing as the pamphlet ridiculed by the Adelaide Register, they did something about it. I can’t imagine any rational businessman wanting to be laughed at as a jackass, even by Australians 12,500 miles away. At any moment their view of him may become of importance to him, and even if it never does he is surely not eager to be regarded with contempt. Every Baltimore businessman who contributed to the cost of that ill-advised pamphlet has had contempt heaped upon him, and enough has spilled over to cover all the rest of us. But nothing, so far as I know has been done about it.

What is needed mainly, it seems to me, is to take the job of representing business before the world away from orators and other such half-wits, and to put it in the hands of actual businessman. As things stand it is far too easy for any numskull with flashing eyes and a sonorous voice to get himself accepted as a leader, and even as a prophet. The luncheon clubs appear to spend great part of their time listening to just such wind machines. They are prominent in all business organizations, and bellow their balderdash with a great show of authority. Most of them are Pecksniffs as well as Barnums, and profess to know precisely what is good and what is evil. It would be an excellent idea to clean them out and come down to earth. To some extent, I am informed, it has been attempted, and even done. But there is room for more work with the ax.

IV

There was never a time in its history when Baltimore needed intelligent leadership more than it does today. The city is growing so rapidly that it is fast getting out of hand, and no one seems to know where it is headed. If it keeps on expanding without direction. It may end as a mere gigantic Sparrows Point, without character or dignity, and hopeless as a home for civilized people. It is pleasant to see the population grow, but there are also dangers in it, and they ought to be addressed seriously, and by men above the mental level of lunch table evangelists. The best brains of the town ought to tackle the business.

It would be idle to look for leadership in public jobholders, whether large or small. The relatively intelligent ones do not last long enough to do anything; the rest care only for their jobs, and would be quite willing to ruin Baltimore in order to hold them. The newspapers, I am tempted to believe, are almost as bad. They succumb to hurrahs as quickly as Babbitts; moreover, it is their true function, in their more sober moods, to be critics rather than innovators. They can serve the town effectively by examining carefully whatever is proposed, but they crab their freedom and their usefulness every time they whoop for schemes of their own.

What we need is a steering committee representing all shades of interest, not through professional wizards, but directly. The representatives of business in all its various and frequently antagonistic phases ought to be actual businessmen, and not nobodies with the gift of gab. The working people ought to be represented, not by labor leaders, who are no more workingmen than mine-stock promoters are mining engineers, but by men who really work, and are trying to raise families and buy homes.  And so on and so on.  Such a committee, kept clear of the mountebanks who now do the talking, might accomplish something genuinely valuable. At the worst, it would bring all the schemes that are now launched so gaily to the test of unbiased and realistic discussion.