Mencken's Musings on the Presidents

Here are some passages from H. L. Mencken's many years of journalistic excellence, commenting on five presidents from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

1. Ulysses S. Grant. "Intelligence has been commoner among American presidents than high character, though Grant ran against the stream by having a sort of character without any visible intelligence whatever. He was almost the perfect military man--dogged, devoted and dumb. In the White House he displayed an almost inconceivable stupidity. Whatever was palpably untrue convinced him instantly, and whatever was crooked seemed to him to be noble....A more honest man never lived, but West Point and bad whiskey had transformed his cortex into a sort of soup."

2. Chester Alan Arthur. Arthur was a Broadway character on the order of Jimmie Walker--fond of good living, full of humor, but with no more character than a Prohibition agent. He made, on the whole, a good president--certainly a better one than Garfield would have made. He was too intelligent to attempt any great reforms, and so the country got on very well during his term....Washington, in his time, was gayer than it has ever been since. The oldtimers there still talk about his parties."

3. Theodore Roosevelt. "He was, by long odds, the most interesting man who ever infested the White House. He was full of odd impulses, fantastic ideas, brilliant phrases. He was highly intelligent, and, for a politician, very widely read....

"Unfortunately, Roosevelt's extraordinary mentality was not supported by a character of equivalent voltage. He was, on occasion, a very slippery fellow, and he knew how to sacrifice principle to expediency. His courage, which he loved to display melodramatically, was largely bluster: he could retreat most dexterously when ballot-boxes began to explode. He seems to have had no settled convictions: he was, for example, both for a high tariff and against it. He belabored the trusts publicly but granted them favors behind the door."

4. Warren G. Harding. "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale-bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless night. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it."

And then there is this: "The whole inaugural address reeked with just such nonsense. Thw thing started off with an error in English in its very first sentence--the confusion of pronouns in the one-be combination, most beloved of bad newspaper reporters. It bristled with words misused: civic for civil, luring for alluring, womanhood for women, referendum for reference, even task for problem. 'The task is to be solved'--what could be worse? Yet I find it twice. 'The expressed views of world opinion'--what irritating tautology!"

5. Calvin Coolidge. "If anything is plain today, it must be that another Coolidge administration, if it is inflicted upon us, will end inevitably in scandal and disaster. The day good Cal is elected every thieving scoundrel in the Republican party will burst into hosannas, and the day he is inaugurated there will be song and praise services wherever injunctions are tight and profits run to 50%. There will follow, for a year or two, a reign of mirth in Washington, wilder and merrier, even, than that of Harding's time. And then there will come an explosion."

And later: "The Coolidge Administration will be worse than that of Harding for the plain reason that Cooliodge himself is worse than Harding. Harding was an ignoramus, but there were unquestionably good impulses in him....Coolidge is simply a professional politician, and a very petty, sordid and dull one. He has lived by job-seeking and job-holding all his life; his every thought is that of his miserable trade. When it comes to a conflict between politicians and reputable folk, his instinctive sympathy always goes to the politicians."

Note: Mencken's analysis is noteworthy for its use of the characteristics of intelligence and good character in evaluating presidents. However, if that is all there is, than FDR would be considered a poor president and Jimmy Carter a good one. There is a third, equally important, consideration, and that is the ability to get along with people. In a democracy this trait is the most important, and when it is taken into account FDR becomes a good president and Jimmy Carter a poor one.