Second Mencken Chrestomathy (58 page)

The chief stumbling-block is the word “best” in the terms of the award. If it could be eliminated, the committee would have a freer hand and be less often absurd. Some of the novels that it has honored have been works of serious merit—not masterpieces, surely, but at least respectable. There was plenty of good writing, for example, in Miss Cather’s “One of Ours,” especially in the first half. It would be impossible, indeed, for her to do a book wholly bad. But when “One of Ours” was solemnly determined to be better than “Babbitt,” there could be but one answer from persons of anything properly describable as decent taste. That answer was a shout of derision.

Confronted by the word “best,” the committee is bound, at the least, to remember that it has an intelligible meaning. No award could conceivably meet the notions of all competent judges, but it should certainly be possible to avoid awards that provoke their unanimous protest. That protest was justly made when Miss Cather’s “My Antonia” was passed over in favor of Mr. Poole’s “His Family,” and it was justly made again when “Babbitt,” perhaps the best novel ever written in America, was passed over in favor of Miss Cather’s “One of Ours.”

In its award of the other prizes within its gift the committee sometimes shows a better discretion. The fact that this year’s gold medal for “the most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered by an American newspaper” goes to Julian and Julia Harris, of the Columbus (Ga.)
Enquirer-Sun
, will be applauded by all American journalists who respect their profession. More than once, in the past, I have called attention to the work of Mr. and Mrs. Harris in this place, and it has been frequently praised by the
Sunpaper
, the New York
World
, the
Nation
and other eminent journals. When they returned to their native Georgia from Europe, half a dozen years ago, the State was wallowing in the intellectual depths of Tennessee and Mississippi. Its principal newspapers were quaking before the Ku Klux Klan; Fundamentalism was spreading like a pestilence; its politics had reached the very nadir of degradation. With little money, but with stout hearts and the finest sort of journalistic skill, Mr. Harris and his extraordinary wife began a battle for the restoration of decency. It seemed, at the start, quite hopeless. All the politicians of the State were against
them; the Klan was violently against them; they were opposed with ferocity by the whole pack of evangelical clergy. Nevertheless, they kept on bravely, and in the course of time they began to show progress. Here and there a little country paper joined them; individual supporters popped up in all parts of the State. Now Georgia has turned the corner. Some hard sledding is still ahead, but, led by the
Enquirer-Sun
, it is headed in the right direction.

The principal dailies of the State gave the Harrises little if any support. Most of them are still covertly on the other side. Thus the whole credit for whatever has been accomplished belongs to the
Enquirer-Sun.
The award honors the Pulitzer Foundation far more than it honors the Harrises. That the fact is not lost upon the committee is shown by its election of Mr. Harris to membership. In so far as his voice determines future awards, it will determine them in a way satisfactory to every friend of honest and courageous journalism.

In other fields the committee occasionally shows sound discretion. Few will quarrel, for example, with its award of the $1,000 prize for “the best American biography teaching patriotic and unselfish service” to Dr. Harvey Cushings “William Osler,” albeit the work is less a formal biography than a collection of materials for one. And few, I daresay, will quarrel with its award of $500 to Edward M. Kingsbury, of the New York
Times
, for the best editorial of the year. I have not seen this editorial, but I have been familiar with Mr. Kingsbury’s work for twenty-six years, first for the New York
Sun
and more recently for the
Times
, and if he has ever written anything downright bad I have yet to hear of it. Within the limits of his peculiar interests and his highly individual manner, Mr. Kingsbury is undoubtedly the best editorial writer now living.

Unfortunately, the record shows that such sound and just awards are not common. In 1924, as all newspaper men will recall, the committee astounded the whole journalistic fraternity by awarding the prize for the best editorial to a mawkish and absurd composition called “Who Made Coolidge?”, printed in the Boston
Herald.
The motives behind this award remain mysterious, and of the piece itself the least said the better. I only wonder what the late Joseph Pulitzer, summoned back from the tomb, would have said of it. He was a man of sound journalistic judgment, and his language,
when he was annoyed, was certainly not that of a Sunday-school superintendent.

There have been other awards of equal absurdity, mingled with a few of manifest soundness. On the whole, it is doubtful that the prizes have accomplished any good. In the field of the novel they have unquestionably exalted puerile mush at the cost of honest work, and in the field of journalism they have seldom accentuated the qualities of originality and genuine courage. Newspapers have been rewarded, in the main, for “crusades” of the conventional cut, requiring only plenty of money to make them effective. The Harrises are the first editors to be honored for a public service involving grave risks of failure and disaster, and made in the face of a hostile public sentiment. Now that Mr. Harris himself has been appointed to the advisory board, there is reason for hoping that such awards will be more common hereafter—that is, that the money of the Foundation will be withheld from editorial writers who lack professional dignity and newspapers which simply do again what has been done before, and given to editorial writers who have something to say and know how to say it, and to papers which actually contribute something to the advancement of decent journalism.

From The A
MERICAN
M
AGAZINE
, P
REJUDICES
: F
IRST
S
ERIES
, 1919, pp. 177–79.
Reprinted in part from the
Smart Set
, Dec., 1916, pp. 138–40

The muck-raking magazines of the Roosevelt I era came to grief, not because the public tired of muck-raking, but because the muck-raking that they began with succeeded. That is to say, the villains so long belabored by the Steffenses, the Tarbells and the Lawsons were either driven from the national scene or forced (at least temporarily) into rectitude. Worse, their places in public life were largely taken by nominees whose chemical purity was guaranteed by these same magazines, and so the latter found their
occupation gone and their following with it. The great masses of the plain people, eager to swallow denunciation in horse-doctor doses, gagged at the first spoonful of praise. They chortled and read on when Aldrich, Boss Cox, John D. Rockefeller and the other bugaboos of the time were belabored every month, but they promptly sickened and went elsewhere when Judge Ben B. Lindsey, Francis J. Heney, Governor Folk, Jane Addams, and the rest of the saints of the day began to be hymned.

The same phenomenon is constantly witnessed upon the lower level of daily journalism. Let a vociferous “reform” newspaper overthrow the old gang and elect its own candidate, and at once it is in a perilous condition. Its stock in trade is gone. It can no longer give a good show—within the popular meaning of a good show. For what the public wants eternally—at least the American public—is rough stuff. It delights in vituperation. It wallows in scandal. It is always on the side of the man or journal making the charges, no matter how slight the probability that the accused is guilty. Roosevelt I, one of the greatest rabble-rousers the world has ever seen, was privy to this fact, and made it the corner-stone of his singularly cynical and effective politics. He was forever calling names, making accusations, unearthing and denouncing demons. Woodrow Wilson, also a demagogue of talent, sought to pursue the same plan, with varying fidelity and success. He was a popular hero so long as he confined himself to reviling men and things—the Hell Hounds of Plutocracy, the Socialists, the Kaiser, the Irish, the Senate minority. But the moment he found himself counsel for the defense, he began to wobble, just as Roosevelt before him had begun to wobble when he found himself burdened with the intricate and unintelligible programme of the Progressives. Roosevelt shook himself free by deserting the Progressives, but Wilson found it impossible to get rid of his League of Nations, and so came to present a quite typical picture of a muck-raker hamstrung by blows from the wrong end of the rake.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Aug. 11, 1923.
A review of T
HE
E
DITORIALS OF
H
ENRY
W
ATTERSON
, compiled with an Introduction and notes by Arthur Krock; New York, 1923

This is an extremely depressing book. For forty years or more Watterson was the most distinguished editorial writer on the American press, quoted endlessly and known everywhere, and yet in this large volume of his best editorials, very intelligently and fairly selected by his chief-of-staff, Mr. Krock, there is scarcely a line that is worth reading today. What ailed Watterson, of course, was that he was preëminently the professional editorial writer, engaged endlessly upon a laborious and furious discussion of transient futilities. During all the while that he wrote upon politics—and no man ever wrote more copiously or to greater immediate applause—he was apparently wholly unconscious of the underlying political currents of the country. The things he discussed were simply the puerile combats of parties and candidates; politics, to him, was scarcely to be distinguished from a mere combat for jobs. On all other subjects he was equally hollow and superficial—for example, on Prohibition, which he attacked violently without understanding it, and without the slightest apparent realization of its certainty of triumph. His editorials on foreign politics are empty mouthings of an unintelligent chauvinism. His occasional ventures into economics are pathetic.

Why editorial writing in the United States should be in such low estate is hard to understand. It enlists a great deal of excellent writing ability—Watterson himself, indeed, was an extremely charming writer—and whatever it was in the past, it is now relatively free. Nevertheless, the massed editorial writers of the United States seldom produce a new idea, and are almost unheard of when the problems of the country are soberly discussed. Of all the writers who have published important and influential books upon public affairs during the past decade, not one, so far as I can recall, was
a newspaper editorial writer, and not one owed anything to editorial writers for either his facts or his arguments. One might naturally suppose that men devoted professionally to the daily discussion of public questions would frequently achieve novel and persuasive ideas about them, and be tempted to set forth those ideas in connected and effective form, but the fact remains that nothing of the sort ever happens. What is printed in the newspapers of the United States, acres and acres of it every day, is dead the day after it is printed. Nine-tenths of it is mere babble and buncombe, and the rest seems to lack, somehow, the elements that make for conviction and permanence. The newspapers do not lead in the formation of public opinion; they either follow the mob or feebly imitate a small group of leaders. In Watterson’s book I can’t recall reading a single sensible thing that had not been said, before he said it, by some one else.

Perhaps the anonymity of editorial writing is largely to blame for its flaccidity. The lay view is that anonymity makes for a sort of brutal vigor—that the unsigned editorial is likely to be more frank and scathing than the signed article. But the truth is quite the opposite. The man who has to take personal responsibility for what he writes is far more apt than the anonymous man to be frank. He cannot hedge and evade the facts as he sees them without exposing himself to attack and ridicule. He must be wary and alert at all times, and that very circumstance gradually strengthens him in his opinions, and causes him to maintain them tenaciously and with vigor. Under the cover of anonymity it is fatally easy to be facile and lazy—to take refuge behind the prevailing platitudes. The anonymous writer gets no personal credit for it when he is intelligent, fair and eloquent; there is thus a constant temptation upon him to lighten his labors by employing formulae. Even Watterson, who was known by name to all of his readers, often succumbed to this temptation, for his actual editorials were unsigned, and when he was idiotic his admirers charitably blamed it upon his subordinates. Writing steadily over his own name, I am convinced that he would have done far better work. As it is, Mr. Krock’s collection can be regarded only as an appalling proof of the general vacuity of American journalism.

From the
Smart Set,
March, 1921, pp. 140–41