Loving Liebling
Owen, Kent
i 0I0Q0•Q0D000IO000000000Q0QO0000000000Q000o00000000Q0000000QB00Q00QO0Q000D00Q000QQQ00Q000I0QD0Q000o0000000000Qoo000Q00OQQOO000Q00Q0Qg0000Q0000o000DI Kent Owen Loving Lie blin g "The...
...How to do it is your own business...
...Liebling wrote, "is well...
...The American Spectator May 1979 fidences in a cockalorum style, all the while quaffing away at what he called "Gambrinian amber...
...Liebling had that to say in 1961 at Dartmouth, whence he had been expelled 40 years earlier for cutting chapel once too often...
...never were and never have been considered as sovereign entities...
...He was indeed a rare amalgam of reporter and stylist, bent on getting the facts right and the phrases exact...
...Rediscoverers of the mid-range past, especially nostalgists hankering after the halcyon days of the 40s and 50s, are luckily happening upon the writings of Abbot Joseph Liebling (1904-1963...
...Yet Chief Justice Warren argues that, due to the compromises made at the Constitutional Convention, the system of representation required of the national government by the Constitution has absolutely no relevance to the state reapportionment discussion...
...Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970...
...E] A LIEBLING BIBLIOGRAPHY Back Where I Came From...
...New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962...
...In such cases, as it became clear that the students had the teacher on the run, he would say, "Don't confuse me with all these facts, 'cause I got my mind made up regular...
...Although Liebling rarely wrote fiction (his imagination may well have been too firmly grounded in the strictly factual, too keyed to what he had actually observed), he was unsurpassed at collecting characters from every direction and relating their sportive, often raffish, affairs: "Once The Clutch was a good light heavyweight, but he had a peculiar difficulty in training...
...New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963...
...Without being a prig about it he was a stickler for standards...
...By drawing from the City's inexhaustible array of curiosities and amusements, Liebling measured urban dimensions on a human scale and framed a vividly appealing representation of the good life...
...Whenever Liebling chose to write about politics, he paid more attention to the jostling of personalities than to ideologies...
...In 1946 Liebling enjoyed himself hugely when Senator Fulbright, keenly enamored of the British parliamentary system, confronted the challenge of the GOP-controUed Congress by calling on Harry Truman to appoint a Republican as Secretary of State and then to resign as President so that Messrs...
...They chased one another on and off the stage like characters in a Shakespearean battle scene, full of alarums and sorties...
...He discovered his classic subject in Earl Long, the crazy-like-a-fox exhibitionist who had clowned his way to power in Louisiana after the demise of his slightly more sedate brother, the Kingfish...
...Charged as his pieces so often were with romping irony, he never pretended to be wholly objective...
...The Court dictated that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires both houses of a state legislaturemany state legislaturemto be apportioned on a "one man, one vote" basis, meaning that state legislators must represent equal numbers of people...
...Liebling wrote in a personal style that for all its special markings avoided self-indulgence and self-advertisement...
...As Justice Frankfurter had painstakingly shown two years earlier in Baker v. Cart: However desirable and however desired by some among the great political thinkers and framers of our government, [equal population districting] has never been generally practiced today or in the past...
...Taft, Vandenberg, Dewey, Stassen, and company might have to shoulder the burdens of government...
...In any case, Stingo delivered himself of his conKent Owen is senior editor of The American Spectator...
...It should surprise no one that they failed to discover any...
...Between Meals...
...Stingo is Liebling's most memorable source, his "Wayward Press" pieces are in many ways the quintessential Liebling...
...The Justices frequently fashion the facts to fit the desired outcome, and they fashion the desired outcome to fit their private notions of appropriate public policy, which serve as a substitute for the mandates (or at least the spirit) of the Constitution...
...This happy thought, coming as it did from Arkansas' deepest thinker, was vociferously endorsed by Marshall Field, the publisher of PM and the Chicago Sun, who thereby proved to Liebling that liberals could be just as addlepated as conservatives...
...The book that emerged from Liebling's reportage, The Earl of Louisiana, can be read as much as an account of pathological populism as a character study of a ludicrous and pathetic demagogue...
...Just how many of Stingo's recorded utterances actually originated with the old gentleman's amanuensis, namely Liebling, is difficult to say...
...New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961...
...With this standard as its guide, the Reynolds majority scoured the constitutional terrain for such qualifying considerations as would justify significant deviation from the equal population standard...
...Orlando Edgar Miller, my principal in a campaign of religious education, had been laid by the heels in California...
...yet he also thought it redeemed in part by something like a Spenglerian cycle of eternal return: "News is like the tilefish, which appears in great schools off the Atlantic Coast some years and then vanishes no one knows whither, or for how long...
...but he was too wise to think such workaday competence signified transcendent wisdom and supernal goodness...
...Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972...
...He seemed well aware of the ephemeral nature of the news...
...Those qualities hereputed only to one Colonel John R. Stingo, n6 James Aloysius Macdonald, a picaresque racing writer and failed confidence man of advanced years...
...The Honest Rainmaker: The Life and Times of Colonel John R. Stingo...
...In them, he levied magisterial judgments on a press he once described in a speech as "the weak slat under the bed of democracy...
...Although Col...
...The bullets did no real harm, he ~:arefully explains, but they often caused him to ask for postponements...
...Someone once told the story of a high school history teacher who liked to hold discussions and arguments in class on various topics...
...Liebling was on hand for Long's return to the fray: "It is difficult to report a speech by Uncle Earl chronologically, listing the thoughts in order of appearance...
...The instructor, who -~ would array himself against the class in bear-pit style, ended up losing many of the disputes...
...Liebling was moved to inquire into Long's "affairs when in the midst of a reelection campaign the governor was trussed up and spirited off to a Texas hospital at the behest of his wife and nephew...
...It was not the English system, it was not the colonial system, it was not the system chosen for the national government by.the Constitution, it was not the system exclusively or even predominantly practiced by the states at the time of adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, it is not predominantly practiced by the states today...
...And for certain publishers he reserved almost pathological invective: There was, for instance, "Adolph Ochs' colorless, odorless, and especially tasteless Times of 1923, a political hermaphodite capable of intercourse with conservatives of both parties at the same time...
...New York: Doubleday, 1947...
...The Earl of Louisiana...
...at the heart of our constitutional system remains the concept of The American Spectator May 1979...
...Garden City: Doubleday, 1952...
...The Liebling they encounter reported anything he set his capacious mind to in a style that fused precision, vivacity, and wit with a truly Rabelaisian appetite for food and drink, vaudeville, newspapers, boxing, horse racing, wars, crimes, and comely women...
...The Wayward Pressman...
...Then, with a wave of its newly constructed rule, the Court declared the legislatures of all 15 states under review to be unconstitutionally apportioned...
...The so-called federal analogy is inapposite, says the Chief Justice, because, whereas "[p]olitical subdivisions of States...
...New York: Sheridan House, 1938...
...Despite his random asides about the more egregious deeds of public men, Liebling was not markedly political in outlook, that is, if one allows for a sort of free-form liberalism...
...In Reynolds v. Sims (1964) the Court took it upon itself to remedy the disregard shown by the Alabama legislature (and 14 others) for the provisions of its state constitution requiring periodic legislative reapportionment...
...The way to write," he once said, "is well...
...Liebling paid his respects to anyone who did his job well, whether it was making rain or making book...
...It was this approach to politics, with its stress on the , burlesque and the grotesque, that made Liebling share the perspective of H.L...
...Cakewalkers, minstrels, "Telephone Booth Indians," jockeys, seafarers, waiters, shopkeepers, "people in trouble, people getting by"--such were the subjects of his city sketches...
...All the same, Liebling's evident fondness for ordinary citydwellers never turned bathetically warm and runny, probably because he refused to regard individuals as mere instances of a generality...
...Mencken, even if the younger journalist's angle was skewed slightly leftward...
...As much as anyone at the New Yorker, Liebling was responsible for contriving the beguiling illusion that the City was really little old New York, a slightly overgrown village replete with agreeable eccentrics and charming folk-types...
...Whether or not Liebling ever thought he needed to justify the fourth estate in intellectual terms, he had absolutely no hesitation about lambasting his fellows for their sins when it came to matters of accuracy, style, tone, decenc#, and fair play...
...The Most ofA.J...
...In writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice Warren repeatedly Steven R. Scblesinger is assistant professor and Bradford Wilson is a doctoral candidate in the department of politics at the Catholic University of America...
...Liebling...
...Steven R. Scblesinger & Bradford Wilson The Supreme Court: Fact-free Justice The high court'sprocedural dilemma resolved...
...He was in durance vile, as a result of persecution by the American Medical Association, which contended he could not prolong people's lives by swinging them in a hammock, thus extending their vertebrae...
...And although he gained a firm purchase on an extraordinary range of subjects from boxing to gastronomy, he left the posture of omniscience to others...
...Moreover, as this excerpt from "The Great American Hog Syndicate" shows, his recollections could often lapse into "labyrinthine digressions": "Old Dr...
...Women," he wrote, "are best at room temperature...
...The starchier pronouncements of the National Association of Manufacturers regularly set him off, not because he wasn't wild about capitalism (his father, after all, had done a sporadically thriving business as a furrier), but because he just couldn't abide smugness and pomposity...
...The problem with Warren's opinion lies not with the inferences he draws from his basic premise, but rather with the premise itself...
...It is the sort of thing that helps prevent revolution...
...asserted the basic premise that "the fundamental principle of representative government in this country is one of equal representation for equal numbers of people...
...It is fair to say that the Supreme Court often has its mind made up "regular" and is not aboutto be dissuaded by facts or evidence...
...After mastering the newspaper trade in New York and Providence, Liebhng joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935, where his skills for reporting and feature-writing combined perfectly for a steady outpouring of"Talk of the Town" casuals, "Profiles," and, eventually, "Wayward Press" columns, a department he took over from Robert Benchley...
...One has only to consider a few of the Court's most significant decisions to see how little difference the facts can make...
...i 0I0Q0•Q0D000IO000000000Q0QO0000000000Q000o00000000Q0000000QB00Q00QO0Q000D00Q000QQQ00Q000I0QD0Q000o0000000000Qoo000Q00OQQOO000Q00Q0Qg0000Q0000o000DI Kent Owen Loving Lie blin g "The way to write, " A.J...
...He was constantly getting shot, which was an occupational disease in the live poultry business in which he was employed...
...No friend Of republican institutions would wish to see "the fundamental principle of representative government" vitiated by substantial exceptions to that principle...
...After one sportswriter had indulged himself in an especially maundering account of Bill Dickey's woes as manager of a mediocre set of Yankees, Liebling observed: "It is good for the public to know the secret sorrows of the great...
...What galled him was authoritarianism of any kind, whether he came across it among the Vichy French in North Africa, in Chicago's Tribune Tower, or within the coteries of New York's Marxist-Leninists...
...It was all great fun, of course, to portray the place as an eminently manageable, inhabitable community somewhat on the scale of Pepys' London, instead of treating it asthe MetrOpolis qua Menace according to latter-day conventions...
...Next to breaking fingers, The Clutch enjoys showing his bullet wounds...
Vol. 12 • May 1979 • No. 5
