The Word That Came to Dinner

Only the radio commentators, fearful of the rule in the 1934 Communications Act against profanity, worked hard to keep their language more sedate than the President's. Newspapers, including the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") boldly printed the initials "S.O.B." in headlines. A phrase long taboo in newspapers had been given a kind of sanction by passing through the President's mouth; S.O.B. had become editorial S.O.P.

It had long seemed to be all right--even profitable--to use much gamier words, including blasphemy and obscenity, in U.S. novels. "Son-of-a-bitch" had quite a literary past, going back at least to Shakespeare (in King Lear). Owen Wister sounded it more discreetly in The Virginian (1902), where it was cloaked as "son-of-a --." The Virginian's ringing retort was well remembered: "When you call me that, smile." The only question was: Was it quite the proper phrase for the President to use in public, with or without smiling?

The newspapers, having spread the initials on their front pages, dutifully clucked about it on their editorial pages. A few gave it cautious approval. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch applauded: "We can well understand the President's use of the term S.O.B. as applied to a certain showman and think that, considering all the circumstances, it was very well applied." There was no great outcry from churchmen and no noticeable explosion from the public, all of which caused the anti-New Dealing New York Sun's George Sokolsky to complain virtuously: "The reaction to the President's language is indecent, even more indecent than the remark itself."

By the doctrine of one hardy expert on the burning word, the President had not been daring at all, but unforgivably commonplace and unimaginative. In The American Language, H. L. Mencken complained: "Our maid-of-all-work in [the profanity] department is son-of-a-bitch, which seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or a Latin as fudge does to us. There is simply no lift in it, no shock, no sis-boom-ah . . . Put the second person pronoun and the adjective old in front of it and scarcely enough bounce is left in it to shake up an archdeacon. Worse, it is frequently toned down to s.o.b. ... In Standard Italian there are no less than forty congeners of son-of-a-bitch, and each and every one of them is more opprobrious, more brilliant, more effective."

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