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The Eastern Shore and Mencken
By E. CLARKE FONTAINE
Reprinted from The Evening Sun. Baltimore
Chestertown, Md.—After sober re- j mire the Shore's representative in the
flection and many hours of earnest' Upper House, the Hon. Phillips Lee
. . . .. , I Goldsborough, but we shouldn t get
prayer on the subject, it seems to me j ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ m he ^
that we of the Eastern Shore are j lor;gs the entire Uniteci states Senate somewhat silly to have worked our- j jn the categorical statement that selves, as we have apparently done, j "the average Senator .... is simply into a spumy lather over the denun- J a party hack, without ideas and with-ciations of Dr. Mencken. We have jout anything rationally describable as reacted to his fulminations in a way ! self-respect.
to lead the world to judge that the j It naturally stirs some resentment Shore really cares what Dr. Mencken ' and ire on the Shore to read that it thinks of us. We have fired back! has "no apparent intelligence on the with a gusto of rage, much as if he j bench," that the Shore must depend has singled out the Shore for his ! for its ideas on "clowns in the pulpit, choice maledictions and castigations. ! clowns on the stump and clow«s in In so doing we have failed to take j the editorial chair." It doesn't im-into consideration that the Doctor has ! prove our disposition to read that our for years heen "cussing" almost ev- I duly elected District Attorneys are ery-body and everything, from I just so many Dogberrys, but Dr. American democracy to jazz, from I Mencken has often said things just Hoover, from j as harsh concerning the entire Amer-
Woodrow Wilson to Rotary International to the Anti-Saloon League.
It is very difficult to discover from his writings anything that he likes. The publisher of his book characterizes him as "the most uncompromising and devastating of all critics of American democracy." He's just a natural-born hater and derives his sustenance, (spiritual and, incidentally, material) from perpetually and perennially laying about him with a
ican judicial system. Thus on page 112 of the same sweet tome from which I have been quoting we read: "The judiciary, under the American system, sinks quite as low. Save when hy some miscarriage of politics, a Brandies or a Holmes is elevated to the bench, it carries on its dull and preposterous duties quite outside the stream of civilized thought." And again, on pages 113 and 114: "The average American judge, in his days
heavy and ruthless bludgeon, cracking at the bar, was not a leader but a
and splitting whatever heads may happen in his path. We of the Shore shouldn't think for a minute that we have been uniquely put on the target for the Doctor's darts. The Shore, though "the world's gar-
trailer. The judicial office is not attractive, as a rule, for the better sort of lawyer. . . . Thus the bench tends to be filled with duffers, and many of them are also scoundrels." The irrepressible and incorrigible
den spot," is, we'll have to admit, | Doctor has much to say about "mobs."
•only a small part of America. Read what Dr. Mencken says about the American people as a whole: "The
In fact, the hardpressed reader is finally led to conclude that at least in the Doctor's sober judgment, the
American people, true enough, are i entire American public can be divided sheep. Worse, they are donkeys. Yet j into two classes. On one side, "the worse, to borrow from their own dia- 1 eternal mob"; on the other, Henry lect, they ar goats." (Notes on Dem- j Louis Mencken. The Shore should cracy, page 78 (. He thinks little more | relish what he says about "the city of women, at least in their political j mob" (the black letters mine) on
sphere. "Giving women the ballot, as everyone knows, has brought in none of the great reforms promised by the suffragists. It has substituted adultery for drunkenness at political conventions, but it has accomplished iittle else." (Ibid., page 83).
There are other sections of the country that he thinks as little of as he does of the Eastern Shore. Thus
page 44 of his "Notes on. Democracy": "When the city mob fights it is not for liberty, but for ham and cabbage. When it wins, its first act is to destroy every form of freedom that is not directed wholly to that end." The obvious implication here is that though a mob of yokels may fight at times for honor, for -liberty, for the protection of their homes, or to
on page 89 of the same work from i avenge a dastardly crime, the typical
which we have quoted above, he speaks contemptuously of Nevada and Delaware as "small and measly States," and on page 130 he says that "no Senator of any genuine dignity and ability could come out of the Georgia of today, and none could come out of the Vermont." Again, the Shoreman might indignantly conclude that Dr. Mencken does not entertain a very good opinion of our Representative in the Lower House,
city mob fights only because it rages to get hold of something that the other fellow owns—it lashes itself into a fury only because it is envious and greedy. In short, the city mob, according to Mencken, is made up of anarchists, communists and bolsheviks —a sort of revolutionary Paris rabble, as it were.
Sufficient has been said, I trust, to suggest the possibility that Dr. Mencken not only has a contempt
the Hon. T. Alan Goldsborough, and j for the Shore, but rather in his vitu-singles him out maliciously for sar- j perations takes in. all Amerier. and castic innuendoes. But we're wrong ] practically everything American. It again, for on page 124 of this same j has already been hinted that he takes pleasant and edifying book we have i no shine to American Presidents. In it straight from the shoulde hat i The Evening 'Sun of November 1°
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