Byron In Exile
Frederick Fucking Chopin
- Joined
- May 3, 2002
- Posts
- 66,591
by H.L. Mencken, from "A Mencken Chrestomathy"
From Wizards, Baltimore Evening Sun, May 27, 1935. I offer this as a specimen of my polemic against the New Deal, which started in the Spring of 1933 and went on until the approach of the American entrance into World War II adjourned free speech on public questions. I choose the following because it recalls facts about the New Deal personnel and modus operandi that tend to be forgotten.
I take the following from the celebrated New Republic:
And the following from the eminent Nation:
The money began to pour out on November 16, 1933, to the tune of a deafening hullabaloo. By December 1 more than 1,000,000 men were on the CWA pay roll; by January 18, 1934, the number reached 4,100,000. Press agents in eight-hour shifts worked day and night to tell a panting country what it was all about. The Depression, it was explained, was being given a series of adroit and fatal blows, above, below, and athwart the belt. In six months there would be no more unemployment, the wheels of industry would be spinning, and the More Abundant Life would be on us. Brains had at last conquered the fear of fear.
What actually happened belongs to history. By the opening of Spring, Hopkins had got rid of his billion, and the whole scheme had blown up with a bang. The wheels of industry resolutely refused to spin. The More Abundant Life continued to linger over the sky line. There ensued a pause for taking breath, and then another stupendous assault was launched upon the taxpayer. This time the amount demanded was $4,880,000,000. It is now in hand, and plans are under way to lay it out where it will do the most good in next year's campaign.
Go back to the two clippings and read them again. Consider well what they say. Four preposterous nonentities, all of them professional uplifters, returning from a junket at the taxpayers' expense, sit in a smoking car munching peanuts and talking shop. Their sole business in life is spending other people's money. In the past they have always had to put in four-fifths of their time cadging it, but now the New Deal has admitted them to the vast vaults of the public treasury, and just beyond the public treasury, shackled in a gigantic lemon-squeezer worked by steam, groans the taxpayer. They feel their oats, and are busting with ideas. For them, at least, the More Abundant Life has surely come in.
Suddenly one of them, biting down hard on a peanut, has an inspiration. He leaps to his feet exultant, palpitating like a crusader shinning up the walls of Antioch. How, now, comrade, have you bitten into a worm? Nay, gents, I have thought of a good one, a swell one, the damndest you ever heard tell of. Why not put everyone to work? Why not shovel it out in a really Large Way? Why higgle and temporize? We won't be here forever, and when we're gone, we'll be gone a long while.
But the Fuehrer? Wasn't he babbling again, only the other day, of balancing the budget? Isn't it a fact that he shows some sign of wobbling of late -- that the flop of the NRA has given him to think? Well, we can only try. We have fetched him before, and maybe we can fetch him again. So the train reaches Washington, the porter gets his tip from the taxpayer's pocket, and the next day the four brethren meet to figure out the details. But they never get further than a few scratches, for the Fuehrer is in one of his intuitive moods, and his Christian Science smile is in high gear. Say no more, Harry, it is done! The next morning the money begins to gush and billow out of the Treasury. Six months later a billion is gone, and plans are under way to collar five times as much more.
Such is government by the Brain Trust. Such is the fate of the taxpayer under a Planned Economy. Such is the Utopia of damned fools. I have been careful to take the evidence from unimpeachable sources. If it had come from the Congressional Record I'd have been suspicious of it, for both Houses, as we heard lately from the Fuehrer himself, are full of liars. But the Nation and the New Republic always tell the precise truth, and in the precise sense that it is defined by all idealistic men. Both were howling for a Planned Economy long before the Fuehrer himself ever heard of it, and both hailed the setting up of the Brain Trust as a step forward in government comparable to the Northern Securities decision or the emancipation of the slaves.
Well, then, who is this Hopkins who had that facile inspiration on the train, and made off with that billion so swiftly and so light-heartedly, and is now preparing to get rid of $4,800,000,000 more? I turn to the Nation and the New Republic again: the former printed a monograph on him on May 22, and the latter on April 10. He is, it appears, the son of an honest harness-maker in Sioux City, Iowa. In 1910 or thereabout he was graduated from a fresh-water college in his native wilds, and made tracks for New York. In a little while he had a nice job with the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and then, in 1918, he got a nicer one with the Board of Child Welfare. By 1922 he was beginning to be known as a promising uplifter, and in that year, the Red Cross made him its divisional manager and wikinski at New Orleans. In 1924 he was back in New York to take a better job with the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and a few years later he fell into a still better one as director of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association. Here he shined so effulgently that when, in 1932, the Fuehrer, then Governor of New York, set up a Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, good Harry was made its director at $12,500 a year. His translation to Washington followed naturally. When he arrived there, according to the New Republic's biographer, he was "received uproariously by the Administration's left wing, and within three months was a national figure." Of such sort are the wizards who now run the country. Here is the perfect pattern of a professional world-saver. His whole life has been devoted to the art and science of spending other people's money. He has saved millions of the down-trodden from starvation, pestilence, cannibalism, and worse -- always at someone else's expense, and usually at the taxpayer's. He has been going it over and over again at Washington. And now, with $4,800,000,000 of your money and mine in his hands, he is preparing to save fresh multitudes, that they may be fat and optimistic on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November, 1936, and so mark their ballots in the right box.
About his associates in this benign work for humanity I can tell you less, for the Nation and the New Republic have failed, so far, to print treatises on them, and "Who's Who in America" is silent about them. "Who's Who" is so hospitable that no less than 31,081 head of Americans, male and female, qualify for its present edition. They include all sorts of one-book authors, third-rate clergymen, superannuated Chautauqua lecturers, and neighborhood busybodies, but a diligent search fails to reveal the Hon. Messrs. Jacob Baker, Aubrey Willians, and Corrington Gill. There is an Ezra Baker who is chairman of the Bunker Hill Monument Association and was formerly chairman of the Boston Licensing Board, and a Rev. George Randolph Baker who is associate secretary of the Board of Education of the Northern Baptist Convention, but the ineffable Jacob is non est. Among the Williamses there is an Anita who is a professional uplifter down in sunny Tennessee and refuses coyly to give the date of her birth, and a Charles B. who is professor of Greek and ethics at Union "University" in the same great State, and an Edward L. F. who is a lecturer in Summer schools, a Rotarian and the editor of the Kadelphian Review of Tiffin, Ohio, but I can't find the genius, Aubrey. Finally, there are eight Gills, including one who wrote "Forest Facts for Schools" and another who is an Elk, a Knight of Pythias, and a Woodman of the World, but nowhere in the book is there any mention of that inspired young man, Corrington.
Of such sort are the young wizards who now sweat to save the plain people from the degradations of capitalism, which is to say, from the degradations of working hard, saving their money, and paying their way. This is what the New Deal and its Planned Economy come to in practise -- a series of furious and irrational raids upon the taxpayer, planned casually by professional do-gooders lolling in smoking cars, and executed by professional politicians bent only upon building up an irresistible machine. This is the Fuehrer's substitute for constitutional government and common sense.
From Wizards, Baltimore Evening Sun, May 27, 1935. I offer this as a specimen of my polemic against the New Deal, which started in the Spring of 1933 and went on until the approach of the American entrance into World War II adjourned free speech on public questions. I choose the following because it recalls facts about the New Deal personnel and modus operandi that tend to be forgotten.
I take the following from the celebrated New Republic:
In the Autumn of 1933, after General Johnson and his Blue Eagle had done their part, business began rapidly to decline. On a train coming back from a social workers' meeting, Harry Hopkins and his assistant, Aubrey Williams, discussed with apprehension the coming Winter. ... Hopkins said: "Let's take a real crack at this. Let's give everyone a job." The title, the Civil Works Administration, was contributed by Jacob Baker.
And the following from the eminent Nation:
It is characteristic of Hopkins that he wasted no time meditating upon the stupendous problems and conflicts such a revolutionary scheme might engender. He talked it over with his aides -- Baker, Williams, and Corrington Gill -- and from their discussion there emerged an equally brief memorandum outlining the scheme. With this memorandum in hand he trotted off to the White House one Wednesday afternoon in November. He went merely to enlist Roosevelt's interest. He expected to be told to develop the idea and come back with a fuller outline. He still expected that when he left the White House that evening. But it so happened that he had caught the New Deal Messiah in one of his periods of infatuation with the spending art, and Hopkins literally woke up the next morning to discover that Roosevelt without furthur ado had proclaimed the CWA in effect.
The money began to pour out on November 16, 1933, to the tune of a deafening hullabaloo. By December 1 more than 1,000,000 men were on the CWA pay roll; by January 18, 1934, the number reached 4,100,000. Press agents in eight-hour shifts worked day and night to tell a panting country what it was all about. The Depression, it was explained, was being given a series of adroit and fatal blows, above, below, and athwart the belt. In six months there would be no more unemployment, the wheels of industry would be spinning, and the More Abundant Life would be on us. Brains had at last conquered the fear of fear.
What actually happened belongs to history. By the opening of Spring, Hopkins had got rid of his billion, and the whole scheme had blown up with a bang. The wheels of industry resolutely refused to spin. The More Abundant Life continued to linger over the sky line. There ensued a pause for taking breath, and then another stupendous assault was launched upon the taxpayer. This time the amount demanded was $4,880,000,000. It is now in hand, and plans are under way to lay it out where it will do the most good in next year's campaign.
Go back to the two clippings and read them again. Consider well what they say. Four preposterous nonentities, all of them professional uplifters, returning from a junket at the taxpayers' expense, sit in a smoking car munching peanuts and talking shop. Their sole business in life is spending other people's money. In the past they have always had to put in four-fifths of their time cadging it, but now the New Deal has admitted them to the vast vaults of the public treasury, and just beyond the public treasury, shackled in a gigantic lemon-squeezer worked by steam, groans the taxpayer. They feel their oats, and are busting with ideas. For them, at least, the More Abundant Life has surely come in.
Suddenly one of them, biting down hard on a peanut, has an inspiration. He leaps to his feet exultant, palpitating like a crusader shinning up the walls of Antioch. How, now, comrade, have you bitten into a worm? Nay, gents, I have thought of a good one, a swell one, the damndest you ever heard tell of. Why not put everyone to work? Why not shovel it out in a really Large Way? Why higgle and temporize? We won't be here forever, and when we're gone, we'll be gone a long while.
But the Fuehrer? Wasn't he babbling again, only the other day, of balancing the budget? Isn't it a fact that he shows some sign of wobbling of late -- that the flop of the NRA has given him to think? Well, we can only try. We have fetched him before, and maybe we can fetch him again. So the train reaches Washington, the porter gets his tip from the taxpayer's pocket, and the next day the four brethren meet to figure out the details. But they never get further than a few scratches, for the Fuehrer is in one of his intuitive moods, and his Christian Science smile is in high gear. Say no more, Harry, it is done! The next morning the money begins to gush and billow out of the Treasury. Six months later a billion is gone, and plans are under way to collar five times as much more.
Such is government by the Brain Trust. Such is the fate of the taxpayer under a Planned Economy. Such is the Utopia of damned fools. I have been careful to take the evidence from unimpeachable sources. If it had come from the Congressional Record I'd have been suspicious of it, for both Houses, as we heard lately from the Fuehrer himself, are full of liars. But the Nation and the New Republic always tell the precise truth, and in the precise sense that it is defined by all idealistic men. Both were howling for a Planned Economy long before the Fuehrer himself ever heard of it, and both hailed the setting up of the Brain Trust as a step forward in government comparable to the Northern Securities decision or the emancipation of the slaves.
Well, then, who is this Hopkins who had that facile inspiration on the train, and made off with that billion so swiftly and so light-heartedly, and is now preparing to get rid of $4,800,000,000 more? I turn to the Nation and the New Republic again: the former printed a monograph on him on May 22, and the latter on April 10. He is, it appears, the son of an honest harness-maker in Sioux City, Iowa. In 1910 or thereabout he was graduated from a fresh-water college in his native wilds, and made tracks for New York. In a little while he had a nice job with the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and then, in 1918, he got a nicer one with the Board of Child Welfare. By 1922 he was beginning to be known as a promising uplifter, and in that year, the Red Cross made him its divisional manager and wikinski at New Orleans. In 1924 he was back in New York to take a better job with the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and a few years later he fell into a still better one as director of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association. Here he shined so effulgently that when, in 1932, the Fuehrer, then Governor of New York, set up a Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, good Harry was made its director at $12,500 a year. His translation to Washington followed naturally. When he arrived there, according to the New Republic's biographer, he was "received uproariously by the Administration's left wing, and within three months was a national figure." Of such sort are the wizards who now run the country. Here is the perfect pattern of a professional world-saver. His whole life has been devoted to the art and science of spending other people's money. He has saved millions of the down-trodden from starvation, pestilence, cannibalism, and worse -- always at someone else's expense, and usually at the taxpayer's. He has been going it over and over again at Washington. And now, with $4,800,000,000 of your money and mine in his hands, he is preparing to save fresh multitudes, that they may be fat and optimistic on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November, 1936, and so mark their ballots in the right box.
About his associates in this benign work for humanity I can tell you less, for the Nation and the New Republic have failed, so far, to print treatises on them, and "Who's Who in America" is silent about them. "Who's Who" is so hospitable that no less than 31,081 head of Americans, male and female, qualify for its present edition. They include all sorts of one-book authors, third-rate clergymen, superannuated Chautauqua lecturers, and neighborhood busybodies, but a diligent search fails to reveal the Hon. Messrs. Jacob Baker, Aubrey Willians, and Corrington Gill. There is an Ezra Baker who is chairman of the Bunker Hill Monument Association and was formerly chairman of the Boston Licensing Board, and a Rev. George Randolph Baker who is associate secretary of the Board of Education of the Northern Baptist Convention, but the ineffable Jacob is non est. Among the Williamses there is an Anita who is a professional uplifter down in sunny Tennessee and refuses coyly to give the date of her birth, and a Charles B. who is professor of Greek and ethics at Union "University" in the same great State, and an Edward L. F. who is a lecturer in Summer schools, a Rotarian and the editor of the Kadelphian Review of Tiffin, Ohio, but I can't find the genius, Aubrey. Finally, there are eight Gills, including one who wrote "Forest Facts for Schools" and another who is an Elk, a Knight of Pythias, and a Woodman of the World, but nowhere in the book is there any mention of that inspired young man, Corrington.
Of such sort are the young wizards who now sweat to save the plain people from the degradations of capitalism, which is to say, from the degradations of working hard, saving their money, and paying their way. This is what the New Deal and its Planned Economy come to in practise -- a series of furious and irrational raids upon the taxpayer, planned casually by professional do-gooders lolling in smoking cars, and executed by professional politicians bent only upon building up an irresistible machine. This is the Fuehrer's substitute for constitutional government and common sense.
