Idealist

Journalists who read the American Mercury for October went hot with pride, shame or anger. Editor Henry Louis Mencken had delivered himself of another diatribe on U. S. journalism. Once a newspaper man himself, Editor Mencken now looks down upon his former fellows and their calling with scorn and impatience. His tirades are bitter, egregrious, painfully penetrating. They are the firebrands of a studious but inactive idealist.

Provoked by recent discussions, in journalistic trade sheets, of codes of journalistic ethics, Editor Mencken launched forth upon a masterly historical account of the deliverance of journalism from commercial bondage. "The spirit spread like a benign pestilence and presently it invaded even editorial rooms. In almost every great American city some flabbergasted advertiser, his money in his hand, sweat pouring from him as if he had seen a ghost, was kicked out with spectacular ceremonies. All the principal papers, growing rich, began to grow independent, virtuous, even virginal. No -- -- -- could dictate to them, God damn ! So free reading notices disappeared, salaries continued to climb and the liberated journalist, taking huge sniffs of free air, began to think of himself as a professional man."

As a professional man, the journalist then began patronizing the schools of journalism he had hitherto scoffed; he talked of his craft's dignity; of its responsibilities, ethics. He gilded and engauded his picture of himself--but "remains, for all his dreams, a hired man." "The Kiwanian bombast of business managers" continues; likewise "the stupidity, cowardice, and Philistinism of working newspaper men."

"All the knowledge that they pack into their brains is, in every reasonable cultural sense, useless; it is the sort of knowledge that belongs, not to a professional man, but to a police captain, a railway mail clerk, or a board boy in a brokerage house. It is a mass of trivialities and puerilities; to recite it would be to make even a barber or a bartender beg for mercy. . . . Honor does not go with stupidity.

"Nevertheless [here Editor Menck.en became uncharacteristically lenient], I believe they can still acquire it. But not by drawing up codes of ethics that most of their fellows laugh at, as a Congressman laughs at a gentleman. . . . There are dozens of papers in the U. S. that already show a determined effort to get out of the old slough. Any managing editor in the land, if he has the will, can carry his paper with them. ... Is the paper trifling, ill-informed, petty and unfair? Is its news full of transparent absurdities? Are its editorials ignorant and without sense? Is it written in blowsy slipshod English, full of cliches and vulgarities--English that would disgrace a manager of prizefighters or a county superintendent of schools? Then the fault belongs plainly not to some remote man but to a proximate man--to the man who lets such drivel slide under his nose."

And so on. Editor Mencken's picture was mortifying, save to the scattered few who classed themselves among the blessed exceptions. The guilty cringed, thanking their stars that it was no more mortifying. Editor Mencken's language* has amazing potentialities. In addition, though he seldom sees anything of the country outside of Baltimore, where his office is, and New York, whither he periodically repairs to consult his publishers or to indulge his moderate taste for night life, Editor Mencken knows an enormous amount about the U. S. He is said to have friends "everywhere," who write him descriptions of life as it is lived among Kiwanians, Rotarians, journalists, farmers, all classes and conditions of men.

Here and there, an editor marveled at the zeal of Editor Mencken, at the bright and burning idealism of a man who had scouted idealism in Theodore Roosevelt, in Edward W. Bok, in Woodrow Wilson, in virtually every poor struggling figure of public life striving to accomplish something in his day with what Mr. Mencken is prone to label the sensibility of a "yokel." Idealist Mencken has been called "cynic," "iconoclast," "bad boy." His "latest utterance suggested that he had been misunderstood and sorely put upon.

*"Menckinsults" have become famous in their way, recent ones being: John W. Davis -- "Plutocratic office boy to J. P. Morgan ... a gaudy lawyer out of Wall Street and the Piping Rock Club."

William Gibbs McAdoo -- "Hawk-nosed Messiah."

President Coolidge -- "A puerile and a hollow fellow."

The late Warren G. Harding -- "Smalltown Elk."

William J. Bryan -- "Spavined, moth-eaten, mangy."