Education: Mencken v. Gogues

In his private life, homely Henry Louis Mencken was never an ogreish misanthrope. It did not take marriage with Sara Powell Haardt, two and one-half years ago, to mellow him. At 52 Editor Mencken is little changed—stocky, slovenly dressed, wearing the best cravats that 50¢ can buy, still fond of draught beer and Baltimore seafood. He enjoys playing the piano with the loud pedal pushed down, singing bass in his cups, playing the fiddle Saturday nights in a parlor orchestra. But he keeps more regular hours now, leaves Baltimore less often. He reads The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn once a year, enjoys talking philosophy and theology with Baltimore priests. For shrewd Bishop James Cannon Jr., whose Methodist Episcopal Church, South, along with the Baptists, Editor Mencken used to bait and belabor so vociferously, he now has a genuine admiration (“I’d hardly call him a merry fellow, but he is amiable, intelligent. . . . Very few living Americans are so interesting.”).

Perhaps it was Bishop Cannon, whose brain Publisher William Randolph Hearst has called “the best in America,” who was responsible for Mencken’s diminishing fire on the religious booboisie. And perhaps it was his own tax bills which inspired Editor Mencken suddenly to start firing in his American Mercury last week, with all his oldtime noise but with not quite the cleverness of his oldtime savagery, at a new national target: the High Cost of Public Education.*

Excerpts: “In the year of my advent upon these scenes, the annus mirabilis 1880, they took but $78,094,687 for flogging the elements into 15,065,767 pupils, which worked out to but little more than $5 per capita per annum. … In 1914. the year of fate, there were 26,002,153 boys and girls in the schools, and making them fit for democracy cost $555,077,146 . . . four times as much as in 1880. . . . But then the pedagogues began to fall upon the taxpayer in real earnest, and presently they had him down and were turning his pockets inside out. By 1920 they were taking a billion of his money, by 1926 they had advanced to two billions, and now they are somewhere between three and four billions . . . something close to $100 [a pupil a year]. … If, as Admiral Byrd was lately saying, the total cost of government in the United States, Federal, State and local, reached the fabulous sum of $14,000,000,000 last year, then the gogues actually made off with nearly a fourth of it.

“What do we get for all that money? We get a huge array of expensive buildings, a huge horde of expensive quacks, an immeasurable ocean of buncombe . . . high-salaried experts in solving the insoluble and achieving the impossible … a truant officer to fetch [the pupil] and police him, a dietitian to save him from scurvy and pellagra, a surgeon to remove his adenoids and tonsils, a dentist to plug his teeth, and a psychologist to chart the movements, if any, of his IQ . . . multitudes of special classes for backward pupils . . . struggling with the uneducable … ten or twelve years of intensive tuition (or, at all events, of pleasant recreation) for downright idiots.”

The gogues themselves Mr. Mencken calls “bureaucrats, irresponsible and unintelligent quacks . . . enemies of all genuine intellectual enterprise . . . silly babus. . . . The babu can give his pupils only what is in his own head, and that is surely not much. . . .”

After a lot more such Menckenese came the recommendation: that because free education-for-all has failed completely and miserably, the “bogus experts” be thrown out and the pedagogues be restored to their proper function of teaching only the elements, only the three R’s. Can it be done? Says H. L. M.: “Any publicist bold enough to flout them would be posted instantly as an agent of the Pope, if not, indeed, of Beelzebub. . . . The remedy, I suspect, is in the hands of God alone. . . . I begin to see significant signs. … In dozens of American communities, large and small, they [gogues] are now being paid in hopes alone: there is no money left in the treasury to meet their salaries. Perhaps the only way out lies in that direction. . . . They are being hoisted by their own petard, hexed by their own magic, drowned in their own juices. It is a desperate remedy, but there seems to be no other.”

* Mr. Mencken was privately tutored, attended Knapps Institute (no longer existent) and Baltimore Polytechnic (high school).