The chief stumbling-block is the word “best” in the terms of the award. If it could be eliminated, the committee would have a freer hand and be less often absurd. Some of the novels that it has honored have been works of serious merit—not masterpieces, surely, but at least respectable. There was plenty of good writing, for example, in Miss Cather’s “One of Ours,” especially in the first half. It would be impossible, indeed, for her to do a book wholly bad. But when “One of Ours” was solemnly determined to be better than “Babbitt,” there could be but one answer from persons of anything properly describable as decent taste. That answer was a shout of derision.
Confronted by the word “best,” the committee is bound, at the least, to remember that it has an intelligible meaning. No award could conceivably meet the notions of all competent judges, but it should certainly be possible to avoid awards that provoke their unanimous protest. That protest was justly made when Miss Cather’s “My Antonia” was passed over in favor of Mr. Poole’s “His Family,” and it was justly made again when “Babbitt,” perhaps the best novel ever written in America, was passed over in favor of Miss Cather’s “One of Ours.”
In its award of the other prizes within its gift the committee sometimes shows a better discretion. The fact that this year’s gold medal for “the most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered by an American newspaper” goes to Julian and Julia Harris, of the Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer-Sun, will be applauded by all American journalists who respect their profession. More than once, in the past, I have called attention to the work of Mr. and Mrs. Harris in this place, and it has been frequently praised by the Sunpaper, the New York World, the Nation and other eminent journals. When they returned to their native Georgia from Europe, half a dozen years ago, the State was wallowing in the intellectual depths of Tennessee and Mississippi. Its principal newspapers were quaking before the Ku Klux Klan; Fundamentalism was spreading like a pestilence; its politics had reached the very nadir of degradation. With little money, but with stout hearts and the finest sort of journalistic skill, Mr. Harris and his extraordinary wife began a battle for the restoration of decency. It seemed, at the start, quite hopeless. All the politicians of the State were against them; the Klan was violently against them; they were opposed with ferocity by the whole pack of evangelical clergy. Nevertheless, they kept on bravely, and in the course of time they began to show progress. Here and there a little country paper joined them; individual supporters popped up in all parts of the State. Now Georgia has turned the corner. Some hard sledding is still ahead, but, led by the Enquirer-Sun, it is headed in the right direction.
The principal dailies of the State gave the Harrises little if any support. Most of them are still covertly on the other side. Thus the whole credit for whatever has been accomplished belongs to the Enquirer-Sun. The award honors the Pulitzer Foundation far more than it honors the Harrises. That the fact is not lost upon the committee is shown by its election of Mr. Harris to membership. In so far as his voice determines future awards, it will determine them in a way satisfactory to every friend of honest and courageous journalism.
In other fields the committee occasionally shows sound discretion. Few will quarrel, for example, with its award of the $1,000 prize for “the best American biography teaching patriotic and unselfish service” to Dr. Harvey Cushings “William Osler,” albeit the work is less a formal biography than a collection of materials for one. And few, I daresay, will quarrel with its award of $500 to Edward M. Kingsbury, of the New York Times, for the best editorial of the year. I have not seen this editorial, but I have been familiar with Mr. Kingsbury’s work for twenty-six years, first for the New York Sun and more recently for the Times, and if he has ever written anything downright bad I have yet to hear of it. Within the limits of his peculiar interests and his highly individual manner, Mr. Kingsbury is undoubtedly the best editorial writer now living.
Unfortunately, the record shows that such sound and just awards are not common. In 1924, as all newspaper men will recall, the committee astounded the whole journalistic fraternity by awarding the prize for the best editorial to a mawkish and absurd composition called “Who Made Coolidge?”, printed in the Boston Herald. The motives behind this award remain mysterious, and of the piece itself the least said the better. I only wonder what the late Joseph Pulitzer, summoned back from the tomb, would have said of it. He was a man of sound journalistic judgment, and his language, when he was annoyed, was certainly not that of a Sunday-school superintendent.
There have been other awards of equal absurdity, mingled with a few of manifest soundness. On the whole, it is doubtful that the prizes have accomplished any good. In the field of the novel they have unquestionably exalted puerile mush at the cost of honest work, and in the field of journalism they have seldom accentuated the qualities of originality and genuine courage. Newspapers have been rewarded, in the main, for “crusades” of the conventional cut, requiring only plenty of money to make them effective. The Harrises are the first editors to be honored for a public service involving grave risks of failure and disaster, and made in the face of a hostile public sentiment. Now that Mr. Harris himself has been appointed to the advisory board, there is reason for hoping that such awards will be more common hereafter—that is, that the money of the Foundation will be withheld from editorial writers who lack professional dignity and newspapers which simply do again what has been done before, and given to editorial writers who have something to say and know how to say it, and to papers which actually contribute something to the advancement of decent journalism.
The Muck-Rakers
From The AMERICAN MAGAZINE, PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp. 177–79.
Reprinted in part from the Smart Set, Dec., 1916, pp. 138–40
The muck-raking magazines of the Roosevelt I era came to grief, not because the public tired of muck-raking, but because the muck-raking that they began with succeeded. That is to say, the villains so long belabored by the Steffenses, the Tarbells and the Lawsons were either driven from the national scene or forced (at least temporarily) into rectitude. Worse, their places in public life were largely taken by nominees whose chemical purity was guaranteed by these same magazines, and so the latter found their occupation gone and their following with it. The great masses of the plain people, eager to swallow denunciation in horse-doctor doses, gagged at the first spoonful of praise. They chortled and read on when Aldrich, Boss Cox, John D. Rockefeller and the other bugaboos of the time were belabored every month, but they promptly sickened and went elsewhere when Judge Ben B. Lindsey, Francis J. Heney, Governor Folk, Jane Addams, and the rest of the saints of the day began to be hymned.
The same phenomenon is constantly witnessed upon the lower level of daily journalism. Let a vociferous “reform” newspaper overthrow the old gang and elect its own candidate, and at once it is in a perilous condition. Its stock in trade is gone. It can no longer give a good show—within the popular meaning of a good show. For what the public wants eternally—at least the American public—is rough stuff. It delights in vituperation. It wallows in scandal. It is always on the side of the man or journal making the charges, no matter how slight the probability that the accused is guilty. Roosevelt I, one of the greatest rabble-rousers the world has ever seen, was privy to this fact, and made it the corner-stone of his singularly cynical and effective politics. He was forever calling names, making accusations, unearthing and denouncing demons. Woodrow Wilson, also a demagogue of talent, sought to pursue the same plan, with varying fidelity and success. He was a popular hero so long as he confined himself to reviling men and things—the Hell Hounds of Plutocracy, the Socialists, the Kaiser, the Irish, the Senate minority. But the moment he found himself counsel for the defense, he began to wobble, just as Roosevelt before him had begun to wobble when he found himself burdened with the intricate and unintelligible programme of the Progressives. Roosevelt shook himself free by deserting the Progressives, but Wilson found it impossible to get rid of his Leagu
e of Nations, and so came to present a quite typical picture of a muck-raker hamstrung by blows from the wrong end of the rake.
Acres of Babble
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 11, 1923.
A review of THE EDITORIALS OF HENRY WATTERSON, compiled with an Introduction and notes by Arthur Krock; New York, 1923
This is an extremely depressing book. For forty years or more Watterson was the most distinguished editorial writer on the American press, quoted endlessly and known everywhere, and yet in this large volume of his best editorials, very intelligently and fairly selected by his chief-of-staff, Mr. Krock, there is scarcely a line that is worth reading today. What ailed Watterson, of course, was that he was preëminently the professional editorial writer, engaged endlessly upon a laborious and furious discussion of transient futilities. During all the while that he wrote upon politics—and no man ever wrote more copiously or to greater immediate applause—he was apparently wholly unconscious of the underlying political currents of the country. The things he discussed were simply the puerile combats of parties and candidates; politics, to him, was scarcely to be distinguished from a mere combat for jobs. On all other subjects he was equally hollow and superficial—for example, on Prohibition, which he attacked violently without understanding it, and without the slightest apparent realization of its certainty of triumph. His editorials on foreign politics are empty mouthings of an unintelligent chauvinism. His occasional ventures into economics are pathetic.
Why editorial writing in the United States should be in such low estate is hard to understand. It enlists a great deal of excellent writing ability—Watterson himself, indeed, was an extremely charming writer—and whatever it was in the past, it is now relatively free. Nevertheless, the massed editorial writers of the United States seldom produce a new idea, and are almost unheard of when the problems of the country are soberly discussed. Of all the writers who have published important and influential books upon public affairs during the past decade, not one, so far as I can recall, was a newspaper editorial writer, and not one owed anything to editorial writers for either his facts or his arguments. One might naturally suppose that men devoted professionally to the daily discussion of public questions would frequently achieve novel and persuasive ideas about them, and be tempted to set forth those ideas in connected and effective form, but the fact remains that nothing of the sort ever happens. What is printed in the newspapers of the United States, acres and acres of it every day, is dead the day after it is printed. Nine-tenths of it is mere babble and buncombe, and the rest seems to lack, somehow, the elements that make for conviction and permanence. The newspapers do not lead in the formation of public opinion; they either follow the mob or feebly imitate a small group of leaders. In Watterson’s book I can’t recall reading a single sensible thing that had not been said, before he said it, by some one else.
Perhaps the anonymity of editorial writing is largely to blame for its flaccidity. The lay view is that anonymity makes for a sort of brutal vigor—that the unsigned editorial is likely to be more frank and scathing than the signed article. But the truth is quite the opposite. The man who has to take personal responsibility for what he writes is far more apt than the anonymous man to be frank. He cannot hedge and evade the facts as he sees them without exposing himself to attack and ridicule. He must be wary and alert at all times, and that very circumstance gradually strengthens him in his opinions, and causes him to maintain them tenaciously and with vigor. Under the cover of anonymity it is fatally easy to be facile and lazy—to take refuge behind the prevailing platitudes. The anonymous writer gets no personal credit for it when he is intelligent, fair and eloquent; there is thus a constant temptation upon him to lighten his labors by employing formulae. Even Watterson, who was known by name to all of his readers, often succumbed to this temptation, for his actual editorials were unsigned, and when he was idiotic his admirers charitably blamed it upon his subordinates. Writing steadily over his own name, I am convinced that he would have done far better work. As it is, Mr. Krock’s collection can be regarded only as an appalling proof of the general vacuity of American journalism.
XXIII. PROFESSORS
The Public-School
From the Smart Set, March, 1921, pp. 140–41
EDUCATION in the highest (and rarest) sense—education directed toward awaking a capacity to differentiate between fact and appearance—is and always will be a more or less furtive and illicit thing, for its chief purpose is the controversion and destruction of the very ideas that the majority of men—and particularly the majority of official and powerful men—regard as incontrovertibly true. To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches. Progress consists precisely in attacking and disposing of these ordinary beliefs. It is thus opposed to education as the thing is now managed, and so there should be no surprise in the fact that the generality of pedagogues in the public-schools, like the generality of policemen and saloon-keepers, are bitter enemies to all new ideas.
Think of what the average American schoolboy is taught today, say of history or economics. Examine the specific orders to teachers issued from time to time by the School Board of New York City—a body fairly representative of the forces that must always control education at the cost of the state. Surely no sane man would argue that the assimilation of such a mess of evasions and mendacities will make the boy of today a well-informed and quick-minded citizen tomorrow, alert to error and wary of propaganda. This plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda—a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas readymade. The aim is to make “good” citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens. Let a teacher let fall the slightest hint to his pupils that there is a body of doctrine opposed to the doctrine he is officially ordered to teach, and at once he is robbed of his livelihood and exposed to slander and persecution. The tendency grows wider as the field of education is widened. The pedagogue of Emerson’s day was more or less a free agent, at all events in everything save theology; today his successor is a rubber-stamp, with all the talent for trembling of his constituent gutta-percha. In the lower schools the thing goes even further. Here the teachers are not only compelled to stick to their text-books, but also to pledge their professional honor to a vast and shifting mass of transient doctrines. Any teacher who sought to give his pupils a rational view of the late Woodrow Wilson at the time Woodrow was stalking the land in the purloined chemise of Moses would have been dismissed from his pulpit, and probably jailed. The effects of such education are already distressingly visible in the Republic. Americans in the days when their education stopped with the three R’s, were a self-reliant, cynical, liberty-loving and extremely rambunctious people. Today, with pedagogy standardized and school-houses everywhere, they are the herd of sheep (Ovis aries).
The War upon Intelligence
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Dec. 31, 1928
The American public-schools inculcate far more nonsense than sense, and the great majority of American colleges are so incompetent and vicious that, in any really civilized country, they would be closed by the police. In all American States save a few anyone who has the yearning may start a college and, with the full consent and authority of the State, grant degrees. There is no official machinery for testing the competence of the professors and none for scrutinizing what they teach. Thousands of such burlesque colleges are scattered over the country, and in some States they are the only kind that exist. Their graduates, armed with formidable diplomas, go out into the world in the character of educated men and women. What they really know is less than the average bright policeman knows.
The public-schools are even worse. In the typical American State they are staffed by quacks and hag-ridden by fanatics. Everywhere they tend to become, not centers of enlightenment, but simply reservoirs of idiocy. Not one professional pedagogue
out of twenty is a man of any genuine intelligence. The profession mainly attracts, not young men of quick minds and force of character, but flabby, feeble fellows who yearn for easy jobs. The childish mumbo-jumbo that passes for technique among them scarcely goes beyond the capacities of a moron. To take a Ph.D. in education, at most American seminaries, is an enterprise that requires no more real acumen or information than taking a degree in window-dressing.
Most pedagogues male, and the overwhelming majority of the female ones, are not even Ph.D.’s. They are simply dull persons who have found it easy to get along by dancing to whatever tune happens to be lined out. At this dancing they have trained themselves to swallow any imaginable fad or folly, and always with enthusiasm. The schools reek with this puerile nonsense. Their programmes of study sound like the fantastic inventions of comedians gone insane. The teaching of the elements is abandoned for a dreadful mass of useless fol-de-rols, by quack psychology out of the uplift. No one ever hears of a pedagogue protesting against this bilge. The profession is almost completely lacking in professional conscience. If physicians, by some fiat of Demos, were ordered to dose all of their patients with Swamp Root, most of them would object and a great many of them would refuse. Even lawyers, I daresay, have a limit of endurance: there are things that they would decline to do, even at the cost of their incomes. But the pedagogues, as a class, seem to have no such qualms. They are perfectly willing, on the one hand, to teach the nonsense prescribed for them by frauds, and they are immensely fertile, on the other hand, in inventing nonsense of their own. Anything that will make their jobs secure seems good enough to inflict upon their pupils.
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