West Morris Central High School
Department of History and Social Sciences
"Al" (1928)
H. L. Mencken
From: Malcolm Moos, ed., On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (New York, 1960), 153–57.
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Satirist H. L. Mencken predicted that if Catholic New York Governor Al Smith received the presidential nomination,
largely anti-Catholic southern Democrats would forego their opposition to him and make "leaps for the
bandwagon" in order to gain access to presidential civil service appointments. Mencken contrasts the Southern
attitude toward Smith when he was a possible presidential candidate to the attitude toward him six months later
when he was the probable Democratic nominee. Smith's critics warned that his nomination would lead to a split in
"Solid South," a Democratic stronghold since the end of the Reconstruction, but Mencken argued against such a
split, claiming that no "self-respecting" southerner would join the Republican Party. Mencken, a longtime foe of
Prohibition, also cited Smith's ability, if he were elected, to appoint anti-Prohibition federal judges as a means of
chipping away at the law.
April 23, 1928
Has the art and mystery of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish,
sordid, obscene and low down, and its salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not
forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of
entertainment.
I point to the spectacle now unfolding before the judicious in Moronia Felix, the late Confederate States.
Six months ago all the principal statesmen down there were warning the Northern Democrats, in
hushed, dissecting-room tones, that any effort to make Al Smith the party nominee this year would bust
the Solid South wide open, and revive all the miseries of the Civil War. But now, suddenly confronted by
the practical certainty of his nomination, whole regiments of them are leaping upon the bandwagon
with shrill, eager hosannahs, and before the ides of June those who yet linger will be leaping too!
Perhaps I ought to except a few hardboiled and consecrated men, pledged against the Pope until Hell
freezes over—for example, the Hon. J. Thomas Heflin, of Alabama. Their pastors still encourage them to
stand firm; there is a great deal of earnest praying in their behalf. But I have grown so cynical with
senility that I begin to doubt even these. Good Tom, it must be apparent, faces a very trying situation. If
he carries his struggle against the Vatican to the floor of the Houston convention, and is there put to
rout, he will be in difficulties indeed. For he must then either swallow Al and so desert the Bible, or lead
a bolt and so commit mayhem upon the Democratic party. In either case, he'll be sure to get a dreadful
beating for it later on.
The other Confederate publicists are more prudent. They believe it to be highly probable that Al will be
nominated, and they know very well that if he is the Solid South will support him, Rome or no Rome. So
they make the aforesaid leaps for the bandwagon. Closeted in their praying-rooms, they have been told
by the angels that intolerance is a wicked thing, and, what is more, unprofitable to men aspiring to
offices of public trust. As I hint, these first converts were only the shock troops. The main army will
begin to march anon.
It seems to me that all gabble about splitting the Solid South is nonsense. Wherever its solidity is actual,
it will remain solid, and perhaps for another generation to come. It is simply impossible, in most
Southern States, for a self-respecting man to be a Republican. His neighbors of that party are either
black rascals who live by preying upon their own people, or white rascals who live by flattering and
victimizing the black ones. The jobholders foisted upon him when the Republicans are in power at
Washington are almost unanimously rogues. He regards them, high and low, as the rest of us regard
Prohibition agents.
This man naturally desires to see a Democratic President in the White House, if only because the
phenomenon relieves him of the oppression of such vermin, and puts what he regards as measurably
decenter men in their places. If in addition, he is one who aspires to public office himself, his yearnings
in that direction take on the quality of holy zeal. So long as a Republican is in the White House he must
content himself with State offices. All the Federal jobs are monopolized by go-getters who, in his view,
are but little above the menacing hordes of blacks.
Most politicians, as everyone knows, are of low intellectual visibility, but not many of them are so stupid
that they can't tell a hawk from a handsaw. In the South they are all acutely aware that the votes of the
region are necessary to the Democratic party—that it can't win without them. And when it loses, they
get no Federal jobs, and the reign of Republican blacklegs continues. Thus they always support the
national ticket and roar for the national platform, no matter how violently both outrage their private
pruderies. They supported Bryan and they supported Alton B. Parker. They whooped it up for Cox and
they whopped it up for Davis. If the Devil were nominated, they would swallow him. And when the time
comes they will swallow Al.
I am inclined to suspect that his chances of being elected are very good. He will not only have the Solid
South behind him—a bit scared and reluctant, perhaps, but still essentially solid—he will also have all
the big cities of the North, which means that he will carry easily five or six of the most populous States.
Nor will he lack support in the Southwest or even in the Northwest. Best of all, he will probably have
Hoover in front of him, and that means that he will have one of the most transparent and vulnerable
frauds in American history. The man is a Republican only by a prudent afterthought,just as he is an
American only by a prudent afterthought. He looks hollow, and he is hollow. The Democrats should be
able to blow him up in six weeks of campaigning.
I have heard it argued that Al, if he wins at the polls, will be elected by false pretenses—that he really
can't do anything for the wets who will be his chief supporters. But that is not altogether true. Those
who point out that, as President, he will confront dry majorities in both houses of Congress, and that in
consequence he will be unable to get rid of the Eighteenth Amendment or even to materially modify the
Volstead Act—these pessimists forget that despite all such burdens, a President still has plenty of
power. There is, for example, his power to appoint Federal judges. It is sufficient alone to get him almost
anything he wants in the way of law.
At present, as everyone knows, the Anti-Saloon League claims a sort of right of veto over Federal judges,
and over Federal district attorneys and other law officers with them. In most cases, I suppose, it doesn't
actually name Dr. Coolidge's appointees—though certainly it has done so in a few cases—but it seems
pretty clear that he seldom if ever appoints a judge to whom it actively objects. With Al in the White
House, the Anti-Saloon League will lose that right of veto, along with its other vast and extra-legal
powers, and so will the notorious Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals. Al's
view of these indecent organizations is that of any other rational man. He regards them as vile, and he
will certainly not adorn the bench with their nominees and partisans.
Instead he will appoint judges whose general ideas are in accord with his own—men free from
wowserian influences, and with a proper respect for the Bill of Rights. There are plenty of such men on
the bench of his own state: that bench, indeed, is noted for its enlightened Liberalism, as the bench of
the Maryland Free State is, and it can show some jurists of very high learning—for example,—Cardozo, J.
The next President will have to replace a majority of the justices of the Supreme Court and perhaps a
majority of the inferior Federal judges. They are, in the main, elderly men, and suffer in health, like the
rest of us, from the current scarcity of potable light wines and beers.
If Al names lawyers of genuine learning and independence, instead of the fourth-raters whom, in the
main, Dr. Coolidge has appointed, the Senate will confirm them despite the Anti-Saloon League. It has
seldom, in history, rejected a nominee of notably sound qualifications; even the desperate fight made
against Mr. Justice Brandeis failed in the end. Five Liberal justices on the bench of the Supreme Court
would be sufficient to pull the teeth of Prohibition. For it is the bench, not Congress, that has made the
Volstead Act the dreadful reductio ad absurdum of sound law and decent government that it is today. In
their complaisant eagerness to give its outrageous oppressions force and effect, the judges have fallen
perforce into an almost complete sacrifice of the Bill of Rights. But a few decisions would be enough to
restore that battered charter. And restored, it would reduce the Methodist frenzy to flog and harass the
rest of us to impotence.
Perhaps the soundest of all reasons for voting for Al in November lies in the probability that he will thus
rehabilitate the bench, which has been badly damaged by Prohibition, both in legal dignity and in public
respect. But that is not why the Southern Ku Kluxers will vote for him. They will vote for him because
they (or their leaders) are hungry for jobs—because they will conclude, after due prayer, that it is better
to risk being sold down the river to the Pope and the Jesuits than to go on gaping at the swill-trough
from afar, and mourning sadly like a calf taken away from its mamma.
Text Citation:
"'Al'."American History Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?
ItemID=WE52&iPin=E14320&SingleRecord=True (accessed December 19, 2011).
Primary Source Citation:
Mencken, H. L. "'Al'." Malcolm Moos, ed., On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (New York, 1960), 153–57. American History Online. Facts On File,
Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?
ItemID=WE52&iPin=E14320&SingleRecord=True (accessed December 19, 2011).