But reading his speeches in cold blood offers a curious experience. It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicality. Hale produces sentence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all--stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of the Hon. Gamaliel Harding. When Wilson got upon his legs in those days he seems to have gone into a sort of trance, with all the peculiar illusions and delusions that belong to a frenzied pedagogue. He heard words giving three cheers; he saw them race across a blackboard like Socialists pursued by the Polizei; he felt them rush up and kiss him. The result was the grand series of moral, political, sociological and theological maxims which now lodges imperishably in the cultural heritage of the American people, along with Lincoln’s "government for the people, by the people," etc., Perry’s "We have met the enemy, and they are ours," and Vanderbilt’s "The public be damned." The important thing is not that a popular orator should have uttered such grand and glittering phrases, but that they should have been gravely received, for many weary months, by a whole race of men, some of them intelligent. Here is a matter that deserves the sober inquiry of competent psychologists. The boobs took fire first, but after a while even college presidents--who certainly ought to be cynical men, if ladies of joy are cynical women--were sending up sparks, and for a long while anyone who laughed was in danger of the calaboose. Hale does not go into the question; he confines himself to the concrete procession of words. His book represents tedious and vexatious labor; it is, despite some obvious defects, very well managed; it opens the way for future works of the same sort. Imagine Harding on the Hale operating table!
"The Style of Woodrow" by H.L. Mencken originally appeared in The Smart Set, January 1921, as part III ("The Late Master-Mind") of "Consolation."
