Among the Intellectualoids / Wild About Henry

...Common Cause lost the first round in late August when the federal district court in Washington, D.C., rejected its challenge...

...He spoke scathingiy of liberals ("also my enemies") with " t h e i r jugs of Peruna" and "their brummagem Utopias...

...Who is to say how much money is too much...

...Some of his most withering blasts were discharged at what he saw as the social degeneration spreading in ever widening circles from Washington...

...Those who now have thought to please his ghost go about it in ways that may well be causing the same roars of derision in Gehenna that the living Mencken emitted so freely when he walked the earth...

...A dozen universities and colleges are even now spreading themselves with lectures, courses, exhibitions, and other academic vaudeville of the sort that made him hoot when he paid any attention to it at all...

...Needless to say, the banquet room of the Belvedere, with its $150 tables, is a long cry, in style and ambience, from Mencken's own idea of afterhour conviviality...

...penditures "loophole" in the ways that Reagan's supporters intend...

...Money is being translated by a political campaign into communicative activity...

...In short, it is the free speech of Reagan's supporters which is at stake: It is their speech--not Reag a n ' s - t h a t Common Cause would abridge...

...Mencken by the gifted thespians of the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting...

...Nevertheless, bevies of chalky pedagogues, choosing to disregard Mencken's opinion of their breed, rallied round the pentecostal observances...

...The sole constitutional justification for restricting campaign financing, the Court rightly argued, is the prevention of corruption or of the appearance of corruption on the part of a candidate: An expenditure made independent of a candidate affords no such possibility...

...And if quality were to be our main concern, as a policy question alone, the argument would have to run toward spending more money, not less...

...But of course the First Amendment is interested in liberty, not equality...

...It followed that he had a grim opinion of Franklin Roosevelt and the whole political apparatus erected in his name...

...specifically, they worry that without effective limits on campaign spending too much money will be wasted or badly spent, drowning the American people in a distorting and mindless mass media campaign...

...The Act as amended was challenged in 1976 by a diverse group of plaintiffs (and for a variety of reasons), but was largely upheld by the Supreme Court in an excruciatingly long, and, even for the Court, boring opinion...

...He was forever cuffing, tweaking, and bludgeoning the types he once capsulized as "bishops, college professors, Rotary lecturers and other such professional damned fools...

...Inevitably the case against these independent expenditures is put forward as if grounded in democratic principles...

...Upon closer examination, however, it betrays the tendentious reasoning and specious logic that so often lie behind causes advanced in the "public interest...

...But his fundamental and enduring antagonism was reserved for the intrusion of the state into the livingspace of the individual...

...And then wink at her...

...To argue that Reagan is unfairly helped by independent expenditures is to ignore the legitimate interests of Reagan's supporters...

...Those of us who may feel inclined to observe the Mencken centenary without oratory or guided tours carj easily find ways of doing so...

...He himself never got beyond Baltimore Polytechnic...

...Independent expenditures, they point out, make effective limits impossible...

...The demand for tickets to the rites, at 15 dollars a throw, turned out to be so overwhelming that an identical orgy was arranged Richard Hanser is a documentary film writer and author of A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students Against Hitler...

...And he characterized one of America's most highly regarded professors, a veritable ornament of academia, as " a geyser of pishposh...

...He began one of his blowtorch commentaries with the words: "Next to the clerk in holy orders, the fellow with the foulest job in the world is the school m a s t e r . " He publicly proclaimed his sympathy for college boys who, he said, were "daily and hourly affronted with balderdash by chalky pedagogues...

...CONFIRMATIONS OF INDEPENDENCE by A r t h u r F. Fergenson I n 1974 Congress amended the Federal Election Campaign Act to include, among other things, limits on contributions to candidates for federal office...

...Or perhaps an unbuttoned romp at Shellhase's saloon where "after an opening bust of melody we slide to the beer table, and stick there until the last kidney gives o u t . " There was nothing Belvedere or Chesterfleldian about Henry Mencken on his nights out...

...Whether their efforts in fact benefit Reagan or work against him, their right to make those efforts stands firm...

...But Common Cause can be expected to press its case ill other forums through judicial appeal or by other legal or legislative harassments...

...Moreover, the First Amendment is indifferent to the quality of speech...

...Long before his death, in one of the playful obiter dicta he used to scatter among his longer pieces, he gave his own idea of how he might best be saluted post mortem...

...It is hard--it is impossible--to think of a contemporary writer who will be equally celebrated when the calendar registers the 100th anniversary of his birth...

...High on his ample list of prejudices was the teaching profession...

...They may, after all, run independent campaigns that are not entirely pleasing to Reagan...

...In his lifetime he left it only with the greatest reluctance wben his editorial duties--at the Smart Set and American Mercury--called him to Manhattan...

...I still believe firmly," he said in 1937, "that the two greatest intellectual possessions of modern man are the idea of personal freedom and the idea of the limitation of government...

...Thus, Common Cause could not object on purely constitutional grounds, but instead must rely on other kinds of criticisms, the sort which aim at discrediting the "loophole" to such an extent as to make it appear illegal...

...T h e First Amendment's protection against governmental abridgement of free expression cannot properly be made to depend on a person's financial ability to engage in public discussion...

...As the Court reasoned in 1976, the right to political speech, comprising in part the right to spend money on behalf of a candidate, stands at the highest level of our constitutional system...

...George's sword, buckler, and hostile intent, should gather him to its bosom with happy cries of "Atta boy, George...

...A refined and intellectual struggle with the Rum Demon," he called one such bash, "with music by Haydn...

...The centenary observances, cluttered as they are with rites, formulas, and associations which he himself found absurd, and which in consequence take on a tinge of burlesque, nevertheless attest to the enduring place of Mencken in American life...

...After forgiving the sinner of our choice, we have only to keep an eye out for a homely girl...

...But that is not the worst...

...But the liberal community took over the centenary revels from the start and marked them for its own...

...Did he regard oratory as "the lowest of all the arts" and ask: "What genuinely civilized man would turn our to hear even the champion orator of the country...

...After all, it argues, Carter and Reagan are given the same amount of federal money to run their campaigns (almost $30 million each) and that equality should be preserved...

...On both occasions the role of champion orator was assumed by Alistair Cooke, whose Chesterfleldian suavity remains miraculously untarnished after some 45 years on these shores...

...An "H.L...

...Among the many silly arguments advanced against independent expenditures, this is perhaps the silliest --but it is also dangerous...

...Which should lead Reagan supporters to consider taking up another THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 25...

...Mencken Forensic Tournament," complete with debates and speech contests, is to be held this December at Towson State University, which is also offering a course called "H.L...

...WILD ABOUT HENRY F o r the passage of time to turn an iconoclast into an icon is not all that rare, but there is always a cruelly comical element in the process when it happens...

...Well, oratory was the centerpiece of the Mencken epiphany that was celebrated on September 12 at the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore...

...The Court did, however, rule certain parts of the Act unconstitutional, among which, the limitation on independent expenditures, that is, on expenditures by people who have not coordinated their political activities with the candidate they are supporting...

...Unfortunately, Common Cause enjoys a cultural legitimacy that the "merits" of its theories hardly justify...

...Or they may devote part of their efforts to keeping him "honest," preventing him, to the extent they can, from moving to the left...

...The centenary of his birth in September 1980 has been taken as a cause for pious celebration by many of the same folk he spent a lifetime knocking in the head...

...One winces to think how he would rend heaven with his howls could he know that something called the National Endowment for the Humanities, one of Washington's more redundant cultural agencies, has shelled out government grant money for a convocation of Mencken Ge lehrten in Chicago and has lavished further public funds on a television drama called 7"he Ghost of H.L...

...Certainly the $60 million the federal government gives to the two major parties is a tiny amount to spend on the most important educative process this country engages in...

...if, after I depart this vale," he said, "you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl...

...Mencken: Bad Boy of Baltimore," conducted by one of the distinguished members of the English faculty...

...One of a red-brick row of identical dwellings typical of Baltimore, the Hollins Street house is the sanctum of Menckeniana, the shrine, the fount from which flowed that dazzling outpouring of vituperation upon what he called " t h i s glorious commonwealth of morons...

...Despite the pernicious absurdity of its case against independent expenditures, Common Cause does threaten the fight to make them...

...It is as if the dragon, disregarding St...

...To begin with, the right to make independent expenditures is not a "loophole...

...Come to Papa...

...It is only necessary that Carter's followers be as free as Reagan's to speak their minds and spend their money on behalf of their candidate...

...They worry also about other things, like money...

...The opponents of independent expenditures do not stop there, of course...

...For one thmg, we can heed his own suggestion...

...Common Cause and its allies maintain that the sheer number of independent expenditures for Reagan renders them illegal, and that the Supreme Court could not have anticipated the use of the independent exArthur F. Fergenson is Associate Professor at the University of Maryland Sdooo/ of Law at Ba/tiraore...

...Consider: Mencken's home at 1524 Hollins Street has been taken over by, and now is in the custody of, the University of Maryland's School of Social Work and Community Planning...

...by Richard Hanser He was wonderfully eclectic in his antipathies, and if he hooted at socialists and uplifters he was also contemptuous of "the wealthy bounders who run the United States" and who, he said, threatened to " r a i s e the boobery in revolt" with their "intolerable hoggishness...

...Even so, this summer Common Cause filed suit in federal court to prevent several groups from making independent expenditures on behalf of Ronald Reagan, and, in spirit at least, it was joined by a host of others who would like to see the benefits Reagan supposedly derives from these independent expenditures end...

...This was far too engaging and unconventional a notion to be taken seriously, of course...

...For the celebranon, it has been made into a tourist attraction of sorts, catering to what he once called "the inferior man's unquenchable desire to grovel and admire...

...Always, whether as reporter or editor, as literary critic or social commentator, Mencken was an outright and relentless adversary of just about everything the ruck of his fellow Americans cherished and revered...

...It maintains, for instance, that independent expenditures are unfair, giving one candidate an advantage over the other...

...It is, thus, of no constitutional weight that Carter may come to be at even a substantial disadvantage in the election because of pro-Reagan independent expenditure committees...

...for the following day to accommodate the overflow of idolators...

...Or as if the Christian Endeavor, in pious conclave assembled, should rise to its feet to acclaim Robert Ingersoll for spreading truth and wisdom...

...But perhaps ~he crowning, and crushing, irony is manifest in what has happened to the Mencken home 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 at 1524 Hollins Street in West Baltimore, the place which, as he told one of his biographers, was "as much a part of me as my own two hands...

...Hotbeds of the higher literacy like the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Goucher, and, of course, the University of Maryland are projecting their flattering unctions upon the Geburtstagkindwell into 1981...

...Those are fantasies, of course, but something that lags not far behind them for irony and incongruity has in fact befallen Henry Louis Mencken, of all people...

...What he relished was a shirt-sleeve session of his beloved Saturday Night Club in the back room of Hildebrandt's music shop...

...He was a dedicated foe of Big Brother before the name was minted...

...With more money, candidates might well become less concerned with the most cost-effective ways of communicating with the public, like television spots, and might be able to afford more meaningful (literally) kinds of communication, like the distribution of position papers...

...I incline to the Right," he once wrote, "and am a Tory in politics...

...As the Court stated in its 1976 decision: The concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment...

...There is no difference between saying that too much money is spent on politics and saying that there is too much political speech...

...The will to worship," he said, "never flags...

...Besides, money itself is not being tossed at the American people...