26 July: 103rd anniversary of H. L. Mencken’s Baltimore Sun column predicting a “downright moron” in the White House.
Critic, journalist and satirist Henry Louis Mencken was commenting at the time on the two men then vying to be President: eventual winner Warren G Harding and Democratic candidate James M Cox, neither of whom appeared to impress him.
Cox, he wrote, was “a pliant intellectual Jenkins” (and I’m afraid I have no idea what ‘Jenkins’ means in that context — only that we know from the context that it isn’t flattering), while Harding was
a numskull like the idiots he faces.
The general gist, “in an era”, as Snopes points out, “before the advent of television and the internet, when broadcast radio was in its infancy”, was that it was difficult for ‘good’ men to get into power when they had to reach the masses to do so.
In other words, you can get a point across when you’re talking to a small group, but trying to communicate with vast numbers requires… less nuance. Thankfully, not a problem we face these days…
The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
He then concludes with his now well-known cynical (if understandable) flourish:
Snopes scrupulously points out that the word ‘narcissistic’, which crept in between the penultimate and last words when this was a meme from 2016–20, does not appear.
He is still the occupant of that office whom it best describes, though. We might also point out that that guy reached high office at a time when it was easier to get a message across to people than at any previous time in history, using media where we each feel we’re receiving information individually, not en masse.
On the topic of fine journalism, today is also the 15th anniversary of this Nicholas Lezard book review appearing in the Guardian. I didn’t buy the book, I’m afraid, but I did note down this aside, which appeared to me to contain considerable wisdom:
