The Press: Antic Dots

One day last week the head pressman at the Baltimore Evening Sun took a quick squint at one of the first copies of his paper, excitedly stopped the press and came bounding upstairs to demand: “Hey! What’s the matter with the editorial page?”

Something was the matter and its name was Henry Louis Mencken. Instead of a tidy page full of editorials, letters to the editor, etc., there was just one column of editorials. Where the other six columns have been was a great open space covered with tiny black dots, like the background of a cut—1,000,075 dots in all. In the adjoining editorial the Evening Sun explained that each dot represented one person in the Federal Government’s ”immense corps of jobholders. . . . The dots, unfortunately, had to be made very small. . . . Even so, the chart is too large for the taxpayer to paste in his hat. Let him hang it, instead, on his parlor wall, between ‘The American’s Creed’ and the portrait of Mr. Roosevelt. … If there were no jobholders at all every taxpayer’s income would be increased twenty-seven percent. Such is the bill for being saved from revolution and ruin by Wonder Men.”

Such was H. L. Mencken’s first gleeful antic during the first week of the loftiest newspaper job in his career, the editorship of the staid Evening Sun. Thus was Mencken, his pale blue eyes agoggle, his single-breasted suit stretched across his bountiful belly, cocking a snook at his eager literary undertakers. Four years ago his plentiful enemies rushed him to his grave when he ended a nine-year editorship of the American Mercury. Said an American Spectator obituary: “It was most fitting that his last pieces were contributed to an ideologically bankrupt American Mercury and that intellectual hara-kiri found him there.” Again, in 1936, when Westbrook Pegler discovered Mr. Mencken (who had stumped against Harding, Coolidge, Smith, Hoover & Roosevelt) “. . . staggering down the street under the unwieldy weight of an enormous Landon banner, a sunflower in his lapel as big as a four-passenger omelette,” the New Republic elegized him, saying: “. . . Most of his virtues have declined … all of his faults have increased.”

As a newspaperman he was still relatively unknown when the liberal sheets set about burying him, although he is a director of the Baltimore Sunpapers and has been a member of the Sun staff for 31 years. Now a Sun editor for the first time, he bites off chunks of cigars and chews them with a new relish, slings his rough language around the Sun office and continues to be thoroughly sentimental about everything except the New Deal. At least twice a week he visits a friend at some hospital, each day answers every letter in his voluminous mail, including all the cranks.

Neither the 101-year-old Sun, more noted for sound journalism than for editorial adventure, nor Mr. Mencken expects that he will last long as editor. The Evening Sun is too staid for long continued editorial acrobatics such as H. L. Mencken enjoys. And Mr. Mencken, who thinks the ideal paper would always be in a fight, doesn’t fool himself that “editorial crusading has any effect on the public— the morons.” In a few months Baltimore newspapermen expect him to be back in his old job as an Evening Sun columnist, where he can enjoy the things he likes best: calling the More Abundant Life “simply a scheme of robbing A to buy the vote of B”; the Federal Theatre Project, “bad actors on the dole”; Resettlement, “sheer jackassery.”