Mencken on "Progress", Tuesday, September 22, 2009

     Uncle Jack wore himself out hiking the Gwynn's Falls trail yesterday so he decided to put his feet up today and continue his sedentary exploration of the voluminous writings of  H. L. Mencken,  "The Sage of Baltimore." For most of the first half of the 20th century Mencken made his opinions known on just about every subject under the sun, expressing his ideas in colorful, forceful language that made him one of the most widely read writer of his time.  Readers either loved him or hated him but he was hard to ignore.
     Much of what Mencken wrote is still relevant today which is not surprising inasmuch as knotty problems of politics, economics and society in general tend to hang around from generation to generation.  In the following quotation from a collection of  his writings called "Minority Report" (published posthumously in 1956) he holds forth on a subject that is very much alive today, using his beloved Baltimore as a cautionary example.

     It seems to be the common belief in the United States that a new factory is a valuable acquisition to a city or town, and that any man who sets up one is a public benefactor.  The local Rotarians and other such imbeciles always give him a hearty welcome and not infrequently he is accorded substantial tax exemptions. In the days following Reconstruction many of  the one-horse cotton mills that still afflict the South were built by public subscription, and large subscribers were honored as notable philanthropists. This delusion raged all over America in the high days of the Coolidge prosperity and was revived during World War II.  In consequence many a peaceful and charming town was polluted and ruined; indeed there was scarcely a town in the country that did not suffer more or less damage. The injury to Baltimore was large and palpable. The new factories brought in during boom days brought in hordes of low-grade labor and the result was a marked decline in the average intelligence and decency of the population. During World War II the effect was even worse, for nearly all the strangers recruited to man the war plants were either hill billies from Appalachia or lintheads from the more languishing Southern mill towns.  These newcomers propagated disease, filled the public schools with their filthy progeny, kept the police jumping and wrecked whole neighborhoods.  Of the 250,000 or more, white and black, who came in first and last, probably not more than 200 were of any value as citizens. They were, in fact, so uniformly inferior that even the even the constructive thinkers who at first hailed them ended by praying to a sportive and unjust God that they would quickly return home.  The patriotic entrepreneurs who afflicted Baltimore with these revolting morons made no contribution whatever to civilization in the town.  Some of them set up as civic leaders, made endless speeches and whooped up all sorts of costly and idiotic "improvements," but they never had anything worth hearing to say, and not many of them returned in taxes the extra expenses they laid on the community.  The cost of one of them, Glenn L. Martin, the airship manufacturer, must have run to many millions, but the values the city got out of him were precisely nil.  One S. Teackle Wallis........was worth more than a whole herd of such fellows. 

     Post script:  At its peak Martin Marietta employed over 50,000 persons in the Baltimore area but after the failure of its aircraft business after WWII the company's operations mostly moved elsewhere and employment has declined to a tiny fraction of what it once was. If you're curious about S. Teackle Wallis here's a picture of his statue in Mount Vernon Square in Baltimore.  Google him to find out why he went to jail but still earned a statue in the park.