Conversation on Politics
By H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan (as set down by Major Owen Hatteras) in The Smart Set
Mencken and Nathan in Conversation
On the eve of the First World War, two iconoclastic young journalists were offered the co-editorship of a magazine that was clearly in trouble at the time. The magazine was The Smart Set, a monthly with literary ambitions and editorial offices in New York. The young iconoclasts were H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, two writers possessing no small ambition of their own but with little else in common save for their mutual contempt for mediocrity and pretentiousness, literary or otherwise. During their nine years as co-editors, from 1914 until 1923, Mencken and Nathan transformed The Smart Set into a must-read among the intelligentsia of the early jazz era, established themselves as two of America’s foremost critics, and became bona-fide celebrities in American popular culture. Indeed, “Mencken and Nathan” were at times as popular collectively as they were separately.
Among their many writings in The Smart Set are a jointly authored series of “Conversations,” written dialogues between Mencken and Nathan that depict their personal interactions in various circumstances and locales, chronicling a series of events perhaps both real and imagined. These “Conversations,” usually recorded by their pseudonymous alter ego Major Owen Hatteras, offer a plausible if somewhat exaggerated representation of the idiosyncratic relationship between H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan as authors, editors, and friends. Their “Conversation on Politics” is reprinted here in its entirety.
Note to Readers
Contemporary readers may find language in The Smart Set Conversations to be objectionable.
Conversation on Politics
Scene: The steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Time: 2.30 A.M.
Mencken
You should take more interest in politics. It would —
Nathan
I stopped here to rest, not to be insulted.
Mencken
I mean it seriously.
Nathan
As always. Seriousness is your worst vice. You are the sort of man who would be serious at his own wedding, even at his own hanging.
Mencken
Oh, by no means. I —
Nathan
Well, then, think what you ask. You ask me to take a serious interest in the doings of a crowd of low thieves and mountebanks down at Washington — a parcel of men almost wholly devoid of truth, decency or honour. It is precisely as if you asked me to take a serious interest in the doings of a union of piano-movers over in Long Island City. I decline to pollute my mind with such obscenities.
Mencken
As usual, you fail to fathom my doctrine. What boggles you is the word “serious,” inserted by yourself. I by no means ask you to take politics seriously. On the contrary, I commend politics to you as perhaps the most indelicate and amusing show now on view in Christendom — certainly a damned sight more naughty and rib-sticking than any of the lascivious shows you see along Broadway. I went all the way to San Francisco to see the late Democratic National Convention — eight solid days on the train, a truly horrible journey. Yet I was well repaid, I assure you — quite as well as the Methodist deacons who used to walk eighteen miles to see a decayed Midway girl do the hoochie-coochie in the altogether. The taste for the indecent is universal to man. What is more, it is one of the few tastes that never wears out: all it ever does is to change its terms. When I was young, I liked leg-shows, but that was long, long ago. Today I am anæsthetic to them. I honestly get no joy out of them. I’d just as lief go to an Ibsen play or the Lake Mohonk Conference. But politics still fetches me. It is incredibly gross, Rabelaisian, vulgar, lewd, shocking and revolting. It reminds me, in its general outlines, of the rough clinics in morbid anatomy that used to be pulled off in water-front bordellos in the days before Josephus converted every sailor into a Freudian case. It makes me laugh like the devil. More, it stimulates my patriotism. I thank God that I am an American, and thus admitted to such barbaric saturnalias. In a genuinely civilized country politics would be prohibited by law, and all politicians would be treated like pickpockets or street-walkers. But here they are honoured and prosperous, and so they perform, and I enjoy the peculiar buffoonery that is to my taste.
Nathan
I give you full privilege to go on enjoying it. But spare this old gray head! I can see nothing enjoyable in riding on the steam cars for eight days to look at a thousand idiots who believe that the way to pick out the best man for President of the United States is to rip off their undershirts, tote around banners labelled “O You Kid,” sing “Ach, Du Lieber Augustin,” squirt tobacco juice on the chairs, and periodically yell “three cheers for Kansas!” Compared with such a spectacle, the leg-show that you decry is a masterpiece of diversion. I would rather look at a pretty leg once than at Henry Cabot Lodge twice — any day. And I’d rather listen to a chorus girl warbling “Kiss Me On the Ear, Gus, My Mouth Is Full of Gum” than to a suffragette reciting the virtues of General Wood. No, my boy, you have your values mixed. You have told me in the past that you get more pleasure sleeping out of doors in a flannel nightgown, and freezing your knees, than snoozing in a comfortable warm bedroom, and that you get more pleasure talking Futurism to a forty year old baggage than chirping to a twenty year old peppermint. Now you tell me that you get more pleasure looking at William Jennings Bryan than at Ann Pennington. Next, I suppose you will inform me that you’d rather kiss Dreiser than Mary Garden.
Mencken
Never! Kiss Dreiser? It’s all I can do to look at Dreiser! However, you evade the issue. We are not discussing anatomy, but politics. You miss a lot.
Nathan
I miss a lot of imbecile statements mouthed by a lot of jackasses in behalf of a candidate who is generally a lot more of a blockhead than they. I miss reading a lot of tripe about a lot of fourth-rate micks busying themselves with the noble enterprise of getting a third-rate job for a second-rate mick. I miss seeing democracy behind the scenes in its dressing-room, clad only in its chemise. I have no taste for such vulgarity. I prefer a good dog fight.
Mencken
You prefer a dog fight simply because you’ve never seen such a spectacle as that in San Francisco. Have you, for example, ever seen a United States Senator, pickled to the ears, making an indignant speech on the League of Nations to three traveling salesmen in the lobby of the St. Francis, the foresaid traveling gents being named, respectively, Winckhauser, Eiersalat and Schnitzberger? You have not. Have you, for example, ever seen a candidate for the Presidency, boiled to the eyebrows, try to make an impression on the newspaper correspondents, grab the edge of a table to steady himself and, missing it, land plum on his Sitzfleisch? You have not. I repeat, you miss a lot.
Nathan
But you are not describing politics; you are describing Robie’s Crackerjack Burlesquers. I prefer to get such a show at first hand, not a cheap imitation. Why travel eight days on the choo-choo, at a cost of several hundred dollars, to see something that you can see done much better at the Olympic Theater in Fourteenth Street for seventy-five cents?
Mencken
Great God, but you are obtuse! You seem to be quite unaware of the nature of the comic. Its essence is the sharp contrast between dignity and ignominy — the sudden transition from self-satisfaction and importance to disaster and discomfiture. In other words, it depends upon leading its victim into a situation wherein all his habitual pretenses are brought to naught. On the stage the thing has to be managed by pretending that the comic actor is really someone of consequence — a boozy king, a rascally grand vizier, the owner of Krausmeyer’s flats, a rich push-cart kike, a gaudy coon, a member of Parliament, or something of the sort. Thus one laughs when he kicks the hat with the brick under it, or is caught by his wife kissing a chorus girl, or is beaten at epigrams by the child actor. But all the while, one’s pleasure is pumped-up and unsatisfactory, for one knows that the fellow is really only a mummer, and hence a brother to the ox. In politics the clowns are real. One sees the slapstick bounce upon the pantaloons, not of poor rogues and vagabonds, but of United States Senators, governors of great states, Ambassadors, and even Presidents.
Nathan
Nevertheless, they are also brothers to the ox, just as much as the zanies in the Robie show. If, in the pursuit of ribald humour, I have to imagine for the time being that some burlesque ham is the Count de Roquefort, owner of the Trouville Casino, you in turn have to imagine that some quondam shyster lawyer from Mead’s Pond or Saukville is a purple toga’d Marc Antony with a soupçon of Roman in his soul. The clowns of politics, in good truth, are less real than the clowns of the stage. Which, for example, is the more convincing: William H. Crane’s United States Senator or Hoke Smith’s? You exude the platitude that the essence of humour is the sharp contrast between dignity and importance on the one hand and disaster and ignominy on the other. Well, old skeezicks, where is the dignity and importance of your politician? Nowhere but in your own mind, exactly as is the case of the stage actor. In order to pave the way for a good loud belly-laugh, I pretend to myself that Russ Whytal, say, is a millionaire steel magnate and a close confidant of the King of England, while you pretend to yourself that a United States Ambassador to a great European capital is a sagacious statesman and diplomat, and not — as he more often actually is — merely an American who can wear a silk hat without looking like a French hack driver, who can stand on a polished hard-wood floor without slipping, and who has learned how to say “This soup is delicious” in two foreign languages. The platform at your San Francisco convention is just a much a stage as the platform in my Olympic Theater in Fourteenth Street. . . . Do you seriously maintain that the Governor of, say, Arkansas or Iowa is not necessarily an ass?
Mencken
I maintain nothing of the sort. So far as I know, 95 per cent of all politicians are idiots. The very desire for public office is an evidence of imbecility. It is like aspiring to be the supreme exalted archon of the Knights of Pythias, or the grand marshal of the firemen’s parade, or a social favourite in Altoona, Pa., or the editor of the leading daily in the Texas Panhandle. Such ambitions are inconceivable to a man of sound taste and genuine self-respect.
Nathan
Well, then, if 95 per cent of them are idiots, where is the fun in watching them swell themselves up and explode? In Matteawan perhaps 95 per cent of the incarcerated idiots also imagine themselves Senators, Governors, and Ambassadors. If you get amusement out of that sort of thing, why not go out there? — it takes only an hour on the train.
Mencken
One moment. What I desire to point out to you is that this intrinsic inferiority of the politician is not reflected in his public position — that under a democracy he is accepted quite gravely as the sapient and important man that he pretends to be, and that he usually deceives himself into believing quite honestly that he is. In other words, his position differs materially from that of the actor, who is regarded with loathing by everyone, including especially all other actors. This is not true of politicians. They are viewed with the highest respect by the mob, by themselves and by other politicians. The mob regards the Governor of Tennessee, say, as a far more important man than Cabell, or Borglum, or even Brahms. In the yet higher ranks of politicians it sees something almost superhuman. Two or three years ago, for example, it was seriously argued by his pediculæ that Woodrow Wilson was half-divine — a sort of latter day Messiah in spats, with an eye for an ankle, and two gold teeth. His whole politics began to take on a tone of revelation. He issued his balderdash with the air of Moses on Sinai, nay, of Jaaveh on Sinai. It was obvious that he held himself to be a cut above such second-raters as Mark, Matthew, Luke, and Deuteronomy. And then —
Nathan
And then a couple of stage-hands closed him in “one.” But, for all that, I can’t see that your argument has anything to do with the case. The circumstance that a politician is gravely accepted by three or four hundred thousand nanny-goats as the sage that he pretends to be, and that he deceives himself in the same direction, surely doesn’t make him any better material for a cultivated man’s risibilities than a mere stage anticker. There were just as many saps who believed that Richard Mansfield was a Great Intellectual and Great Master as there were saps who believed that Woodrow was a Gladstone and Bismarck. The mob may, as you say, regard a Governor of Tennessee as a more important man than Cabell, or Borglum, or even Brahms, but the same mob in turn regards Charlie Chaplin as a more important man than a Governor of Tennessee — and I’m not certain that, here at least, the mob isn’t partly right. Carrying out your argument to its logical conclusion, Elihu Root, whom several hundred thousand Americans soberly consider a Sophocles, is by that fact, and that fact solely, a droller dill pickle than Raymond Hitchcock, whom the same number of Americans openly consider a clown. When I seek humour, I put on my hat and take a short cut. You go to all the trouble of filling up a three-gallon demijohn, laying in a two weeks’ supply of shaving cream and tooth power, packing a trunk, booking a long railroad passage, and then spending eight days looking out of the window at Firestone Tire signs.
Mencken
You say that a couple of stage-hands closed in on Woodrow. You don’t go far enough. A whole herd of comedians came out, and beat him to a jelly with long strings of Deerfield sausages. With a loud sob he fell out of Heaven backwards, landing on his cofferdam. The heart of the world was broken — and the coccyx of Woodrow. The thing had humour, massive and incomparable humour. This, in brief, is what I always find in politics. I snicker when I observe the politician swelling up and rolling his eye: I know that the seltzer-siphon is being loaded behind the scenes. And I yell with delight when its appalling stream fetches him in the kishgish. Such is my taste in the droll.
Nathan
(Settling himself in his overcoat and leaning back against the main door of the Cathedral.) A vulgar show, but I grant it a certain rough jocosity. However, you have to wait too long for your laugh. It is often years between the time a politician begins to swell up and the time the gas is let out of him. In Woodrow’s case it took ten years.
Mencken
You underestimate the powers of the human mind — for example, its power of prevision. The fun starts immediately the idiot begins to swell. At that very instant the trained imagination is already capable of picturing his ultimate downfall, and so the show is on. I got a great deal of joy out of Woodrow at the time he was horning into Olympus. I could shut my eyes and see the hail of liver-puddings flying through the air. He was marked for his disaster as plainly as a man with ten per cent of sugar is marked for death. I have trained myself to savour such situations.
Nathan
I am too old to be trained in any such art. It would be difficult to train me to do what even sea-lions and elephants do — for instance, stand on my head or catch a rubber-ball in a crab-net. Fortunately, my capacity for enjoying humour in the theater is congenital. I was born with a taste for it. In my third year, when I was taken to see the Beef Trust Burlesquers for the first time, I yelled so loudly that the family doctor put me to bed and dosed me with aloes. When I was four years old I witnessed Johnnie Ray in “A Hot Old Time,” and Robert Mantell in “King Lear.” Each brought me down with spasms; they had to stop my mirth with hypnotics. For this talent I claim no credit. I merely mention it as proof that it would be silly for me to waste years trying to acquire a talent for laughing at politicians. The thing would be just as insane as for Beethoven to give up music, and devote ten or twenty years to learning how to paint on china . . . but the hour is late. Is there a taxicab in sight?
Mencken
A moment and I am done. What I further maintain is that the humour of politics belongs to a distinctly higher category that the humour of the burlesque show, not only because the comedians are real men and more eminent than actors, but also because the spectators take a hand in the performance. One gets an even more exalted joy out of the seltzer-siphoning of these spectators than one gets out of the slap-sticking of the principals. Consider, for example, the fate of the millions who honestly believed in Woodrow in the days of his annunciation. Think of their touching faith in his gaudy pishposh — their faith that he would liberate them from capitalist oppression, and put an end to war, and make them all secure and happy, and turn all of the beatitudes into amendments to the Constitution, with a hard-boiled Volstead Act behind every one of them! Think of that dog-like confidence, that colossal credulity, and then that herculean sell! It was almost Greek. It gave a new dignity to democracy. It lifted the thing to classical heights. Euripides never imagined anything more stupendous.
Nathan
Perhaps not. But Euripides knew how to get his ideas over without torturing his audience. In order to enjoy the show you describe, you had to submit to innumerable intolerable inconveniences. You had to read the New York Times every day for two or three years. You had to wade through Woodrow’s proclamations to the boobery. You had to flay your reason with the Congressional Record. And in the end you had to go to Chicago and half sweat to death, and then go to San Francisco and let George Sterling poison you with wood alcohol. All the while, I was quietly roosting here in New York, devoting myself to literature, tasty booze, and the chatter of amusing wenches. To this day I don’t know just what it was that Woodrow promised to do for the poor jakes, or why they fell on him with bladders. To this day I haven’t the slightest notion what the League of Nations is about. To me it sounds like the title of a movie staged by D. W. Griffith. When I hear it mentioned by some song-writer or boot-legger in the lobby of a theater, there comes up in my mind a picture of two thousand supers in rope whiskers and faded kimonos galloping across a Los Angeles dump made up to resemble the field of Philippi. What in hell do I care if there is a League of Nations or no League of Nations? I am not a movie director.
Mencken
Yet I see you looking through the newspapers every day.
Nathan
(Yawning.) But surely not the political parts. I haven’t read a newspaper editorial since the year of the Nan Patterson case. I read the head-lines on the murders, inform myself as to the latest developments in boot-legging, take a glance at the scandals, and then work up to a good loud laugh with the dramatic criticisms. All political news I skip, as I skip all ecclesiastical news, marriage notices, society doings, baseball reports and Lost Vigour ads.
Mencken
There’s a taxi in the distance! I can see its lights!
Nathan
That’s not a taxi; that’s the Hotel Gotham.
Mencken
Well, then, let’s walk.
Nathan
Come on. But let’s light up first. Give me one of those six cent Pittsburgh pickles.
Mencken
(Handing him one.) No wonder I am a poor man.
(They light up, stretch, and move down the Avenue.)
Notes
“Conversation On Politics” originally appeared in The Smart Set: Volume 64, Number 2 (February 1921), pp. 93-98. Authored jointly by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, it was signed under the byline “Set Down by Major Owen Hatteras.”
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