Second Mencken Chrestomathy (56 page)

Here I speak by the book, for I was in active practise as a journalist for more than forty years, and have an immense acquaintance in the craft. I do not say that all journalists go that route. Far from it. Many escape by failing; some even escape by succeeding. But the majority who get into the upper brackets succumb. They
begin with high hopes. They end with safe jobs. In the career of any such man, it seems to me, there are materials for fiction of the highest order. He is interesting intrinsically, for his early ambition is at least not ignoble—he is not born an earthworm. And he is interesting as a figure in drama, for he falls gradually, resisting all the while, to forces that are beyond his strength. Here is tragedy—and here is America. For the curse of this country, as of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in every public sense, is a respectable vacuum.

From J
OURNALISM IN
A
MERICA
, P
REJUDICES
: S
IXTH
S
ERIES
, 1927, pp. 13–14

The essence of a professional man is that he is answerable for his professional conduct only to his professional peers. A physician cannot be fired by any one, save when he has voluntarily converted himself into a job-holder; he is secure in his livelihood so long as he keeps his health, and can render service, or what they regard as service, to his patients. A lawyer is in the same boat. So is a dentist. So, even, is a horse-doctor. But a journalist still lingers in the twilight zone, along with the trained nurse, the rev. clergy and the great majority of engineers. He cannot sell his services directly to the consumer, but only to entrepreneurs and so those entrepreneurs have the power of veto over all his soaring fancies. Nor has he the same freedom that the lawyers and the physicians have when it comes to fixing his own compensation; what he faces is not a client but a boss.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Dec. 29, 1924

The rapid multiplication of penny tabloid papers, which now spring up all over the United States, is probably not an indication that the standards of journalism are falling, as certain sour brethren appear to believe, but rather an indication that they have been rising, of late, too fast. In other words, the newspapers have gone ahead too swiftly for their readers. The latter have, as yet, but small taste for what is offered them: extensive and accurate news reports, editorials more or less sober and thoughtful, some approach to refinement in typography. What they want is cheap, trashy and senseless stuff, in bad English and with plenty of pictures. This is provided by the tabloids, or, at all events, by most of them. Their primary assumption is that the average reader of the folk is literate only in the most modest sense—that his public school education, if it has taught him to read, has still failed to teach him to read with ease. He has to spell out all “hard” words—
i.e.
, all words of more than two syllables. His vocabulary is extremely limited. He finds any reading whatever, even if there are no “hard” words, very slow work. The tabloid paper fetches him by reducing his agony to a minimum. Its news is couched in vulgar English, and brought into a small space. Whenever possible, a picture is added. Sometimes the only text is a line under this picture. Reading it thus becomes almost as simple as watching the movies.

The low average of literacy that prevails in the big American cities is kept down, not only by the incompetence and futility of the public-schools, but also by the large number of foreigners. These foreigners sometimes, though not often, read their own languages fluently, but English is difficult for them, and they thus prefer it in small doses. All of us, going abroad, are in the same boat. Like most literary gents, I have picked up some sort of crude acquaintance with most of the modern civilized languages—enough, at least, to read street signs and make out the principal contents of the newspapers. But if I am in Holland, say, I do not turn to the
long editorials in the
Amsterdamsche Courant
or
Haagsche Post.
I content myself with the headlines and pictures in the lesser journals.

The general improvement in American newspapers that has been witnessed since the beginning of the present century—that is, in the larger and more serious newspapers—has not been due to any lofty moral purpose, but simply to the improvement of their financial position. They are richer than they used to be, and hence able to be more intelligent and virtuous. They got richer by first becoming poorer. In the year 1899, when I began newspaper work, two-thirds of the more eminent journals of the United States were in difficulties, or, at all events, suffering diminishing profits. What had brought them to this pass was, first, the devastating impact of yellow journalism, and secondly, an excess of competition in their own class. In most American cities there were four or five morning papers and as many evening papers, all struggling desperately for circulation and advertising. Even the paper that got both found the getting enormously expensive, and so profits diminished. In the end some of the most famous journals of the country began to lose heavily, and came upon the market. Their old owners, having, as a rule, no other resources, simply could not carry them on.

The men who bought them, in the main, were not professional journalists, but rich men who believed that it would be pleasant to play at molding public opinion. It was found to be pleasant, true enough, but it quickly turned out to be also very expensive, and the new owners accordingly began to sweat. The issue of their sweating was a series of consolidations. Two weak papers were combined to make one stronger one, and then a third and sometimes a fourth weak one was sucked in. As competition was thus reduced, prosperity began to return. Finally came the war boom in advertising, and the goose was run to the top of the pole. The principal newspapers of the United States are sounder financially today than they have ever been before. They are fewer than they used to be, but I know of none that is hard up. Some of them make annual profits that run into the millions. Money has given them dignity, as it gives dignity to individuals. They are no longer terrorized by advertisers. They show an increasing independence in politics. They are far more outspoken and untrammeled than they used to
be in discussing such things as business and religion. More, they have got over their old fear of the yellow journals, and have thus abandoned all attempts to be yellow themselves. Must of them look decent, and most of them, I believe, are decent, as decency goes in this world. They are not for sale. They cannot be intimidated. They try to report the news as they understand it, and to promote the truth as they see it.

It is a curious fact, but it is nevertheless a fact, that this change, which raised newspaper salaries by at least 200 per cent, and greatly augmented the dignity of the newspaper profession, was bitterly resisted by the majority of working newspaper men. That resistance, at the start, was not hard to understand. The entrance of new owners and new methods imperiled jobs, and especially it imperiled the jobs of those journalists who were most secure under the old order—the ancient, picturesque class of happy, incompetent Bohemians—the “born” newspaper men of tradition, with the intellectual and cultural equipment of City Councilmen or police lieutenants. The fact that it simultaneously benefited all men of a greater professional competence was forgotten, even by such men themselves. They all resisted the new discipline, and longed for their old irresponsible freedom.

But resistance, of course, was futile. Expensive properties, potentially worth millions a year, could not be intrusted to amiable ignoramuses. The growing salaries attracted better men, and they quickly made their way. Today the chief problem before newspaper executives is that of making these better men better still—of getting rid of the old tradition altogether and lifting journalism to genuine professional dignity. The attempts to set up schools of journalism all have that end. So far, these schools have accomplished little, but that, I believe, is chiefly because they have been manned by fifth-rate instructors—largely old-time journalists out of jobs. This, of course, is simply saying what might have been said of most medical colleges thirty years ago. The medical men have solved the problem of professional education, the lawyers are about to solve it, and soon or late the newspaper men will solve it too.

The more decorous and decent newspapers, in striving for more civilized manners, have dragged the yellows with them. They themselves
have ceased to be yellow, and so there is no longer any need for the yellows to be super-yellow. More, the yellows have learned the value of outward respectability in dollars and cents. Advertisers long ago discovered that an inch of space in a newspaper read at home was worth a foot in one read only on the street cars. Thus the yellows, when the advertising boom began, found that their quieter rivals were getting all the pickings. So they began to be quieter themselves. Today most of them seem somber indeed, if one recalls their aspect twenty years ago.

This cleaning up has not altogether pleased their public. On its lower levels it longs with a great longing for the old circus-poster headlines, the old scares and hoaxes, the old sentimentalities and imbecilities. It wants thrills, not news; pictures, not text. To meet its yearning the penny tabloids have come into being. They are cheaply produced and require little capital; they invariably attain to large circulations. But I doubt that many of them are making money. The difficulty they face is the difficulty the old-time yellows faced: advertisers are doubtful, and with sound reason, about the value of their space. They are thus forced to depend largely upon their circulation revenues for existence, and in that direction, even with a half size paper, there is little hope of profit. I believe that they’d all be better off if they raised their prices to the level maintained by the other newspapers. The boobs, in all probability, would still buy them, and with careful management they might show an actual profit on circulation.

From the
American Mercury
, Dec., 1924, pp. 505–07.
A review of M
EMOIRS OF AN
E
DITOR
, by Edward P. Mitchell; New York, 1924

Permit me, gents, an exultation and a sentimentality. Reading, the other evening, Mr. Mitchell’s charming volume, I came, on page 381, to a few words that sent a thrill through me from glabella to astragalus. The editor of the New York
Tribune
is thrilled no more when he gets a picture postcard from H.M. King George,
nor King George when he beats the chaplain of Windsor at parcheesi. And what caused all this uproar in my recesses? Simply the bald mention of my name—a line and a half of pleasant politeness—by the editor of the old New York
Sun.
I doubt that I can make you understand it. For you were not, I take it, a hopeful young newspaper reporter in the year ’99, and so your daily food and drink, your dream and your despair, was not the
Sun.
Dana was dead then, but Munsey had not yet come in to make a stable of the shrine. The reigning editor was Edward P. Mitchell—scarcely a name to the barbarians without the gates, but almost a god to every young journalist. I would not have swapped a word from him, in those days, for three cheers from the Twelve Apostles. He was to me the superlative journalist of this great, heroic land, as the
Sun
itself was the grandest, gaudiest newspaper that ever went to press. I have suffered much from heartache and heartburn in the years that have passed since then, and in consequence my store of wisdom has increased so vastly that my knees begin to buckle under it, but I still believe that my judgment of Mitchell and the
Sun
was sound, and I herewith ratify and reiterate it in the solemnest tones I can muster. The one is retired now, and puts in his mornings communing with Habakkuk, his prize turkey-gobbler, and in watching the deer come out of his woods; the other is a corpse hideously daubed to make it look like a respectable groceryman with fashionable aspirations. This Republic will be luckier than it deserves if it ever looks upon their like again.

The dull professors who write literary histories never mention the New York
Sun.
It is not even listed in the index to the Cambridge History of American Literature, though the Baltimore
American
and the New York
Staats-Zeitung
are both there. Nevertheless, I presume to believe that its influence upon the development of American literature, and particularly upon the liberation of the younger writers of its time from the so-called American tradition, was incomparably greater than that of any of the magnificos hymned in the books. What Charles Dana and his aiders taught these youngsters was double: to see and savor the life that swarmed under their noses, and to depict it vividly and with good humor. Nothing could have been at greater odds with the American tradition.
The heroes of the Stone Age were all headed in other directions. The life of their place and time interested them very little, especially the common, the ordinary life, and depicting things vividly was always far less their purpose than discussing them profoundly. Even Holmes and Walt Whitman, despite their superficial revolts, ran true to type: they were philosophers long before they were artists. The only exceptions were the humorists, and all the humorists were below the salt: even Mark Twain had to wait until 1910, when death was upon him, before the first American of any academic authority accepted him ungrudgingly. It was the great service of Dana that he stood against all this mumbo-jumbo. From its first issue under his hands the
Sun
showed a keen and unflagging interest in the everyday life of the American people—in the lowly traffic of the streets and tenements, in the tricks and devices of politicians and other zanies, in all the writings and cavortings of the national spirit. And it depicted these things, not in a remote and superior manner, but intimately and sympathetically, and with good humor and sound understanding. To Dana such a man as Big Tim Sullivan was not a mere monster, to be put in a barrel of alcohol and labeled “Criminal”; he was, above all, a human being—imperfect, perhaps, but still not without his perfections. And so, at the other end, were the communal heroes and demi-gods. Dana saw through all the Roosevelts, Wilsons and Coolidges of his time; they never deceived him for an instant. But neither did they outrage him and set him to spluttering; he had at them, not with the crude clubs and cleavers of his fellows, but with the rapier of wit and the bladder of humor. Long before “Main Street” he had discovered the street itself, and peopled it with a rich stock company of comedians. And long before “Babbitt” he had paved the way for all the “Babbitts” that remain to be written.