H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/September 15, 1924
I.
As the campaign wears on it becomes more and more depressing to contemplate the choice before the voters of this eminent and puissant Republic. The Hon. Mr. Davis, I begin to believe, is already out of the running. If he ever becomes formidable it must be by a sort of miracle. What remains? On the one hand the citizen may vote for Senator La Follette, and so give his ballot to a scheme of reform that, viewed in the friendliest fashion, is full of highly dubious ideas. On the other hand, he may vote for Coolidge, and so give his indorsement to a political philosophy that is ignorant, selfish, narrow and dishonest.
It is common to say that Wall Street is unanimously in favor of Coolidge, and the fact is urged against him. It is not quite a fact. Wall Street, indeed, is seldom unanimously for anything. It divides as often as Main Street, and sometimes far more sharply. In the present case it shows some sturdy Davis sentiment and even a flicker or two of La Follette sentiment. There are bankers who forget their safe-deposit boxes, just as there are clergyman who forget the collection plate. But if all that is worst in Wall Street be accepted as representative of the whole, then it may be said with complete truth that the Street sweats and prays for Cal. He is the favorite of all its jackals. They believe that they will be safe if he is elected, and they are right.
Why do they distrust the Hon. Mr. Davis? For the reason, I dare say, that he is too much a member of the lodge, too familiar with the secret aspirations of the grand kleagles and imperial wizards. Once he were in the White House, Wall Street could do nothing further for him, and he would be under a strong temptation to capitalize his immense knowledge of its ways. The money changers greatly prefer a ductile ignoramus, eager for flattery: he is vastly easier to work. The ideal is one who has been tried on the track. Dr. Coolidge has been tried. And found satisfactory.
II.
One reads the speeches of the hon. gentleman and his running mate in a bruised sort of amazement. Is it actually possible that such drivel is admired, and makes votes? Turn, for example, to Dr. Coolidge’s defense of the Supreme Court, made here in Baltimore a week or so ago. His fundamental contention, it must be plain, was sound enough. The Supreme Court may be bad, but a Congress free to make laws without any constitutional check would be a hundred times worse. But consider some of his arguments. Among other things, he argues that the Supreme Court was the chief existing safeguard of the right of trial by jury!
It would be hard to imagine anything more idiotic. The Supreme Court, as a matter of fact, has done more to destroy the right of trial by jury than any other agency. The whole system of Federal courts is now engaged, and has been engaged for years past, upon a deliberate and successful effort to blow it to pieces, first at the behest of Big Business and then at the behest of the Anti-Saloon League, and the Supreme Court has stood in the forefront of that conspiracy from the start. Upon the very fact, indeed, the partisans of Dr. La Follette ground their demand that its powers be reduced and rigidly limited. Yet Dr. Coolidge stands up in public and argues solemnly that the Supreme Court is the guardian of the Bill of Rights, and that all persons who criticize it are enemies of the Constitution!
How is one to account for such dreadful nonsense? Is the eminent gentleman a numskull, or does he believe that all the rest of us are numskulls? Or can it be that he has borrowed a leaf from the book of his eminent associate, General Dawes? The scheme of General Dawes is simple: when his argument needs it, he lies. I point to his endless denunciations of Dr. La Follette as the candidate of the communists. No one knows better than Dawes that La Follette repudiated the communists long before his nomination, and that they are bitterly against him today. Nevertheless, he seldom makes a speech without trying to identify La Follette with communism. In brief, Dawes is a fraud, and yet, if Dr. Coolidge is called to glory, he will be President of the United States!
III.
Such are the two statesmen who seem destined, at the moment, to triumph in November: a man whose chief arguments are nonsensical and a man whose chief arguments are mendacious. It is a curious fact, and charmingly illustrative of American character, that such assaults upon common sense and common decency do not lose votes, but rather make them. When Coolidge talks of the Supreme Court defending the Bill of Rights there is not laughter, but applause. And when Dawes libels La Follette by depicting him as an agent of the Bolsheviks, the Rotarians do not hiss him; they cheer him.
Nevertheless, two extremely vulnerable men, and a properly planned attack, I believe, would do them great damage. So far, unluckily, it has not been made. La Follette, busy with his archaic vision of monopolies and his lamentable schemes to curse the country with more and more jobholders, has left the offensive to his running-mate, Wheeler, obviously a third-rate performer. Davis, instead of dissipating the fog with blasts of honesty and common sense, has devoted himself chiefly to academic pronunciamentos, many of them very evasive. His solitary statement of his position on the Prohibition question was disingenuous and discreditable—a plain dodging of the plain issue. It fooled neither the drys nor the wets and so got him nowhere.
What he appears to lack is simply courage—the only thing that can save his bacon, if it is to be saved at all. If he keeps on pussy-footing he will fade out of the picture completely, especially if McAdoo and Al Smith take to the stump for him. They will probably make very few votes for him; they will merely shoulder him out of the limelight, and cause the voters to forget him. His chance, slim at best, lies in a bold and vigorous attack.
IV.
The best opening for him, I believe, is offered by Prohibition. Despite all the effort to pump up other issues, the wet-or-dry issue remains the liveliest in all parts of the country. The Ku Klux issue is everywhere submerged in it, and beside it all the other issues now heard of grow pale. Not one American in a hundred is actively interested in the League of Nations; not one in a thousand is noticeably wrought up about the petty stealings of the friends of Dr. Daugherty; not one in ten thousand ever shows any excitement about states’ rights. But Prohibition is talked of everywhere, endlessly and with passion, and especially is it talked of in the big cities.
Well, it is precisely in the big cities that Dr. Davis must win, if he is to win at all. Let him pledge himself to law enforcement all he pleases. If he also pledges himself to work for a modification of the Volstead Act he will sweep New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore and a dozen other big cities, and some of these cities will carry states with them. Moreover, there will be some very populous states among them, with many votes in the Electoral College—more than enough to counterbalance the loss of half a dozen to the dry cow-States. The wet vote in most of the big cities now seems to be edging toward La Follette. In two cases out of three its loss will be borne by Davis, not by Coolidge. In other words, the wet vote Democratic.
But can Davis afford to shock the dry South? Why not? The South is helpless, as usual. It will have to vote for him, wet or dry, or see its whole political organization go to pot, with the accursed Moor triumphant. Moreover, what reason is there to believe that the South is actually dry? I know of none. The truth is that the Anti-Saloon League, like its secular arm, the Ku Klux Klan, is everywhere in difficulties in the South, and that a secret ballot tomorrow would probably show every `state south of the Potomac, with the possible exception of North Carolina, to be wringing wet. The people down there, in truth, tire of government by Methodist dervishes, and nothing would please them more than a fair chance to prove it.
Here is Dr. Davis’ chance. The prize offered to him consists of New York, Maryland, Missouri, and probably Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts—in all, 101 electoral votes, enough to give poor Cal, with La Follette on his back in the cow-States, the fan-tods. Will he grab it? My prediction is that he will not. Instead, he will continue to make speeches about American idealism and the “moral grandeur” of the late Martyr Wilson.
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