Second Mencken Chrestomathy (69 page)

At the start, obviously, he had the advantages of a singularly favorable terrain. In Southern California the density of people thirsting for novel and unprecedented gospels is greater than anywhere else on earth. All the messiahs of new religions, new diets, new schemes of healing, new economic theories, new systems of logic, new values for
pi
and new technics in amour gravitate thither as surely as pickpockets gravitate toward a Shriners’ Convention. It is
the chosen seat of hundreds of advanced thinkers of the highest eminence, ranging from Aimée Semple McPherson to Upton Sinclair. It is the Holy Land alike of the Rosicrucians and the mental telepathists, the yogis and the New Thoughters, the vegetarians and the anti-vivisectionists. One of the largest hospitals in Los Angeles is operated by the osteopaths, and the Christian Scientists have a voice in all matters of public health. Thus the soil was ready for Dr. Townsend’s evangel—but so was it ready for the tilling of the thousand and one other messiahs who worked it when he did. Why did he succeed so much better than any of the others? Why did he bulge out of Southern California so quickly, and begin to roll up converts in all parts of the United States? Why was he riding herd on Congressmen and United States Senators at a stage when all his rivals were still cadging nickels in Los Angeles gospel-tents and public parks?

The answer, it seems to me, must be divided into two parts. The first is that his scheme, from the standpoint of the customers, was enormously simpler, cheaper and juicier than what any of the other messiahs had to offer. He did not promise the underprivileged a vague Utopia in some indefinite future on this earth or another; he promised them the exact sum of $200 a month, here and now. And he didn’t demand that they build a vast and expensive tabernacle or elect him to some high and glittering public office, or buy unintelligible text-books of his new arcanum, or clownish uniforms or even badges; he told them he wanted nothing for himself, and convinced them that he meant it, and the most he ever asked them to chip in for expenses was 25 cents a year.

That was half of his advantage over his rivals. He offered poor and hopeless people quick and cheap relief, and he offered it to them in amounts that, to them, seemed almost unlimited. How many of them, in the days of their youth, had ever earned so much as $200 a month? Probably not two per cent. But now all of them were to get it regularly—and not only get it, but be free (and even obliged) to spend every cent of it. No wonder they rushed up to sign their names. Here at last, so to speak, was Utopia with teeth in it. Here was salvation in hard coin, payable on the nail. No more painful figuring! No more longing and waiting! No more ifs or buts! The thing was magnificently specific, detailed, concrete, categorical.

The other half of the doctor’s advantage lay in his transparent honesty. The poor fish had been listening for years to evangelists of a wholly different sort. All the theologians they patronized were made up like chorus girls in a Biblical play, all the medical revolutionaries were duplicates of the corn doctors they had encountered at county fairs, and all the politicians were patently porch climbers. But here was an elderly man who looked and talked like themselves—a soft-spoken and decent-appearing fellow in a neat gray suit, who expounded his gospel without heat and yet without the faintest shadow of a doubt—a man so earnest, so calm and confident, so lacking in all the familiar hocus-pocus, so curiously and astoundingly respectable that they fell for him as easily as a delirium tremens patient falls for a kindly nurse who sponges his red-hot head and sneaks him a jug.

Does Dr. Townsend, after five or six years of heavy campaigning, still believe in the Townsend Plan? I am convinced that he does. He is no longer, to be sure, the innocent that he must have been when he began. Hard experience with chiselers and worse has revealed to him the dangers of too much trustfulness. He has ceased to be willing, as he once was, to listen to racketeers with oily tongues, full of intelligent self-interest. His subordinates today are all subordinates, and not partners. He keeps a tight rein upon them and punishes contumacy without mercy. But he still believes.

Two lessons that he has learned serve to keep his movement alive today, and will probably keep it alive for a good while to come, despite the rise of formidable imitators and competitors, and a series of crushing legislative reverses. The first is that his followers are
his
followers, and no other’s. When they meet in convention they never debate anything; they simply wait for him to make his will known, and then sustain it unanimously. Let him give the word and they are for it; let him shake his head and they are agin it. The other thing he has learned is the danger of compromise. Three years ago he nearly came to grief by an imprudent alliance with Father Coughlin, William Leimke, and a large assortment of other such sorcerers; today he will have nothing to do with any of them. It is not sufficient that a Congressman in his pen holler vaguely for old-age pensions; he must holler specifically for the Townsend Plan, and for nothing else. John L. Lewis, it is
announced, is planning to collar him by offering to support him; it will be as easy as collaring Tom Girdler, and no easier.

How long will he last? I refuse to guess. In the long run, the plain people always turn upon and butcher their messiahs. But of one thing I am certain: that the Townsend movement is not dead yet, nor even seriously sick. The old folks still hope, trust and believe.

From the
American Mercury
, Sept., 1931, pp. 35–36

As soon as Congress reassembles a gang of shabby politicians will arise upon their hind legs in the hall of the House and heap encomiums upon the late Nicholas Longworth, LL.D. Not one of them, I suppose, will think to mention that his chief distinction among American statesmen lay in this: that he regarded nearly all men of their order as rogues and asses, and dealt with them habitually as such.

Here, of course, I do not accuse the deceased of entertaining moral ideas: they were, indeed, completely foreign to his nature. To understand him one must always remember that a rogue, to him, was not a sinner to be scorned but a clown to be enjoyed, and that above all other varieties of clowns he loved and cherished the ass political. In Washington, given such tastes, he was in Paradise, and so he stayed there as much as he could. From his pulpit in the House he could look up at any moment and see a dozen of the most talented mountebanks in Christendom. Moreover, his official powers were such that he could set them to performing whenever he chose, and in a curious and stupendous manner. No wonder he stuck to politics. It gave him, I believe, one of the pleasantest lives ever led by mortal man. Existence, to him, was an endless and ever charming circus, with clowns five deep in the ring. Nor was he above slipping on a piebald nightshirt on occasion, and reddening his nose, and grabbing a slapstick, and leaping into the ring to do some amiable clowning himself.

When he died (alas, before his time) some of the Washington
correspondents hinted delicately that his cynicism was a blot upon his patriotism, and ill became a Speaker of the House. What nonsense! It was precisely his cynicism that
made
him Speaker of the House, and it was the same that made him a good one—the best, perhaps, since Tom Reed. He was always clearly superior to the quacks he enjoyed so vastly, and knew so well how to lead, and they were all well aware of it. There was nothing mysterious about his influence over them, and, above all, there was nothing ignominious. He was anything but a back-slapper. What they sensed in him was simply a kind of intellectual security that they themselves longed for but could never attain—the easy and safe confidence of a man who has sized up his world with great accuracy and knows his way about in it. They called him Nick, and cherished the privilege with naïve exultation, but in their secret hearts, I am convinced, they always thought of him as Mr. Longworth. He was not as they were, and they knew it.

So far as I have heard, there is no Longworth Act in the law-books; the hon. gentleman, in fact, was against most of the more salient laws of his country, and violated some of them without apology. That attitude, I believe, was not the least of his contributions to current statecraft. He knew that the American belief in laws was a superstition too profound to be dissipated, and so he went along with it when he had to, but there is no record that he ever sought to reënforce it. Plainly enough, he’d have been happy if he could have blown it up altogether. But that was impossible, and so he contented himself with keeping its operations within bounds. That is to say, he hampered and crippled the mountebanks in front of him as much as he could, all the while taking his delight in their gyrations. The ideal House of his dreams was one in which a few realistic men made a few inescapable laws, and the rest of the brethren gave a bawdy and harmless show. That ideal was never realized, but I think it came nearer realization than most. The Longworth House, at its worst, was at least innocent of the grosser sort of false pretenses. In the hands of its realistic Speaker it came to be presented to the country as precisely what it was: a conglomeration of puerile political hacks, most of them asses and many of them rogues. Even the Washington correspondents, perhaps the most romantic men on earth, ceased to be
fooled by it. Turning from it in horror they sought their world-savers in the Senate.

It seems to me that this achievement was a public service of a high order, though it will get no notice in the history books. If we had a dozen Longworths in Washington we’d have a far more sensible grappling with the difficulties which now beset the country. If there were two or three in the Cabinet, to police the Doaks, Hydes, Andy Mellons and other such zanies, even the Hoover administration would take on a certain intellectual dignity, not to say integrity. It is silly to call the Longworth attitude cynicism, and to assume that giving it that evil name has disposed of it. There was a great deal more to it than mere shirking. It did not seek to evade the facts; it sought, rather, to expose them and make them plain. It was the philosophy of a man who revolted instinctively against the blather that is wisdom to ordinary politicians. He knew, on occasion, how to use that blather too, but not even his worst enemy—if he left an enemy—will argue that he ever believed in it. His point of view, first and last, was that of a thoroughly civilized man. His values, whether at work or at play, were at once more subtle and more solid than those of the general, whether in or out of office. He was one of the few men of any genuine culture to succeed in politics in our time. He will be missed.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Nov. 21, 1932

The late Albert Hildebrandt, who died last Thursday, had barely turned sixty, but he really belonged to an elder Baltimore, and it was far more charming than the Rotarian Gehenna we endure today. He was one of its genuine notables, though he got into the newspapers very seldom. What kept him out was mainly his own surpassing amiability: he was completely innocent of that yearning to harass the neighbors which commonly passes among us as public spirit. If he ever made a speech it must have been before I met him, which was more than thirty years ago. When the Babbitts of the town held a banquet and afflicted one another sadly he stayed
at home, playing the violoncello, or went to a beerhouse for a decent evening with his friends. When a public committee was appointed to improve mankind and solve the insoluble he was not on it.

Nevertheless, there were few Baltimoreans of his time who were better worth knowing, for he stood in the first rank of a very difficult profession, he practised it all his life with unfailing devotion and complete honesty, and that practise not only engrossed him but also pleasantly entertained him, and made him content. He enjoyed violins as other men enjoyed pictures or books. When he encountered a good one he would strip off his coat and have at it with the enthusiasm of a Schliemann unearthing a new Troy, and when a bad one came into his hands he would demolish its pretensions with a gusto but little less. If his judgment was ever questioned, it was not by sensible men. He was so obviously the master of his subject that, once he had exposed his views and offered his reasons, there was no answer short of complaining to the police. There were chances in his business for considerable killings, but he seldom took advantage of them. His attitude toward the violins that passed through his hands was commonly far more sentimental than commercial, and he spent a lot of time and energy upon labors that brought him little profit, and sometimes not even thanks. It always seemed to me that a sort of professional delicacy stayed him—that he was too sensitive about the honor of his distinguished house, and had too much respect for violins themselves, to traffic in them too brutally. When the impulse to pile up money came upon him he always turned to some other enterprise, usually highly speculative. That other enterprise was never a shining success, but while it lasted it at least gave him the feeling that, within the bounds of his vocation, he could remain the free artist, and suffer no compulsion to approach the unseemly, which was to him the impossible.

His instrument, as I have said, was the cello, which he mastered in early youth, and stuck to faithfully all his life. Violins were always in his hands, but he never ventured to play them, and in fact had no talent for the business. But as a cellist he had great skill, and in the Baltimore of his day there was no amateur to match him. He was a big fellow, tall, muscular, handsome and imposing,
and he had a tone to go with his size. When he would get a good grip upon his bow and fall upon a passage to his taste the sounds that came out of his cello were like an army with banners. Moreover, they were always the precise sounds in the score, for he had a fine ear and he played in tune all the way up the scale, even to the treacherous peaks of the A string.

He remained strictly an amateur to the end. He was often besought to play professionally, but he always refused. Years ago he was a member of the Haydn and Garland Orchestras and other such amateur organizations, and often appeared in public, sometimes as a soloist, but as he grew older he withdrew from this activity, and confined himself to playing with his family and his friends. So long as St. Mary’s Seminary was in operation in Paca street, he played there at the midnight mass every Christmas Eve. He was completely empty of piety, but he got on very well with the clergy, and one of his close friends was the late Dr. Theodore C. Foote, of St. David’s, Roland Park, another amateur cellist. More than once I have done accompaniments to their duets, with each exhorting the other to lay on, and the evening ending with the whole band exhausted.