“Cease Firing!” (E71)

Originally printed: The Forum, February 1929
First reprinted: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; or, David Copperfield
Original Byline: Robert Benchley (Forum Table Talk)

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Comments:

A truly fascinating slice of American discourse from the last month of the Coolidge Administration, in which Benchley startlingly asserts that the country’s satirists have more than made their point and can retrieve their pitchforks from the dead horse of Babbittry. In February 1929! After 8 years under the unchecked pro-business “normalcy” of Harding and Silent Cal? With that ballooning Wall Street ticker fixing to burst into a billion useless purchase slips in every “onset-of-the-Depression” movie montage you’ve ever seen? With Herbert Hoover and his disastrous platitudes a week or two away? Hard to discern any hint of this triumph of the public intellectuals over the chamber of commerce on any Jazz Age electoral map.

Of course, that’s not really Benchley’s concern. We’re very far from class analysis in this essay. It’s a matter of aesthetics. He was all for the Sinclair Lewis school, he tells us, when they undertook to bore into the moribund minds of businessmen, opening up a belated, and purely psychological, new front in the Progressive critique of America. One which has outlasted the political death of Progressivism at the polls in late 1920. This made for quite a literary trend, and perhaps a necessary one, what with the cultural overvaluation of the entrepreneurial ethos that had persisted like a bad hangover from the Gilded Age. Then, as now, business jargon was ridiculous, and eminently worthy of a send-up, but what gets sent up must eventually come down. How many of these searching parodies did we need? Not nearly as many as we got, he contends. We all know what’s wrong with these guys now. Even they know it! With Babbitts and Rotarians policing each other’s philistinism on golf courses and at country club luncheons across the nation, who needs satirical novelists? Better to declare mission accomplished, Benchley argues, before the public starts wondering how much these vaunted writers are earning by running up the rhetorical score on Main Street.

Favorite Moment:

For there was a time, not so long ago as the crow-eater flies, when the man who wrote for his living was the butt for jokes around the very conference table which he now throws pop bottles at. There was a time when anyone who made his living by writing was an impractical sap, gifted along certain lines, perhaps, but lines which led nowhere and contributed nothing to the State. If he was spoken to at all by the geniuses of business and organization, it was with fine scorn and in words of two syllables.

Reprint Notes:

Illustration on page LXVI of The Forum was not reprinted.

“Busy as Bees” (E66)

Originally printed: The New Yorker, July 12, 1930
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Guy Fawkes

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Comments:

Guy Fawkes gives no quarter (no Sunday edition nickel either) to his nemeses on the New York Times editorial staff, who found themselves hoist by their Boys’ Own Adventure headline policy during the summer of 1930. After years of flogging takeoffs, landings, ascents, and polar perambulations, a perfect storm of derring-do caught the “paper of record” short of frontpage real estate, allowing The Herald Tribune, The World, The Telegraph, and The American to latch their lousy linotypes onto the gravy plane. Roger Williams’ non-stop Bermuda journey and the Hunter Brothers’ 553-hour endurance flight were among the exclusive “scoops” that slipped through the Times’ clutches while they were busy chasing that aeronautic will-o’-the-wisp Charles Kingsford-Smith.

In other non-news, Benchley raps knuckles on both sides of the political aisle for the epidemic of bad faith arguments propounded by the Democans in support of and in opposition to the latest tariff law. Apparently, Hoover’s supporters contended that the new act had no connection whatsoever to an unfortunately timed dip in the already anemic 1930 Stock Market, while the Democratic organs naturally averred that Hoover’s policy would merely compound his economic felonies. Then, everyone turned on a dime (Benchley wouldn’t pay that either), adopting the opposite positions when trading ticked upward the next week. Through it all, much was made about the impact (or irrelevance) of “dominant bear” activity on Wall Street.

The author also takes the Treasury Department to task for pretending there’s no such thing as a “deficit” until the American people (in this case, the soon-to-be-famous Great War bonus veterans) actually need financial assistance. Then, suddenly, all of those Chamber of Commerce prosperity tales about bountiful national surpluses evaporate into hysterical mists of austerity. Some things never change.

Guy Fawkes isn’t all gunpowder this time out, though. He finds space for a paragraph in praise of the New York Times’ “French Correspondent”, who delivered an unaccustomedly graceful appraisal of the Allied evacuation of the Rhineland in the July 1^st edition of the paper. And he ends on a note of mock-exhilaration in anticipation of keeping cool with ex-president Coolidge’s daily column for the remainder of the summer!

Favorite Moment:

Just as we were beginning to worry about light paragraphs for this department and to wonder if it might not be well to discontinue for the summer, the Herald Tribune starts in on daily sermonettes by Calvin Coolidge. So far, we have seen only followups to his old “Have Faith in Massachusetts” routine, evidently extending the series into “Have Faith in the Republican Party,” “Have Faith on the Lower Mississippi,” and “Have Faith in the Rockies,” but they are sufficient to make us cancel our passage to Europe. We can’t miss those.

“The Beginning of the Slump” (E39)

Originally printed: The New Yorker, September 3, 1927
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Guy Fawkes

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Comments:
Guy Fawkes takes stock of the calm that descended upon the New York papers in the days following the flashpoint execution of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. The author expresses admiration for the purity and elegance of the “pre-war” layout (8 discrete one-column heads) which graces the front page of The Times, whenever that paper finds itself with nothing to say.

There had certainly been plenty to say earlier in August, and Benchley had read every word of it with ever-deepening disenchantment. The humorist had played an unusually active role in the public furor surrounding the fate of the railroaded Italian immigrants. Abandoning his customary observer’s stance, RB had returned to Massachusetts in order to offer testimony against Judge Webster Thayer’s conduct while presiding over this celebrated miscarriage of justice. All to no effect, of course, and The Times edition for August 23rd, 1927 had carried the following headline across the entire width of the front page: “Sacco and Vanzetti Put To Death Early This Morning: Governor Fuller Rejects Last-Minute Please For Delay After A Day of Legal Moves and Demonstration.”

Taking a last look back at this defining defeat for roaring twenties liberals and radicals alike, Fawkes applauds the Times’ unusually fair-minded coverage of the affair’s dire denouement. Meanwhile, in The World, Benchley’s fellow Vicious Circler Heywood Broun found his column contradicted at every turn by the copy that surrounded it, due to the paper’s cowardly capitulation to the supposedly neutral Lowell Report, which rubber stamped the preordained exoneration of Judge Thayer. Broun and The World would soon part ways. But Benchley singles out The Sun’s piece of Thayer theatre for particular censure, citing comments praising the judge’s gentlemanly conduct and refusal to engage in controversy with the “persons [i.e. Robert Benchley] who have most maliciously assailed him.” Satire of the first order, RB asserts.

In the article’s second page, Fawkes examines the kinds of stories that were apt to find their way into 1927 newspapers whenever the state found itself temporarily deprived of opportunities to engage in red-baiting show trials and judicial murder – notably, picture laden spreads on young female competitors at the Caledonian Games and other rural contests involving farm implements. Oh yes, and the Herald Tribune saw fit to sound an utterly unnecessary front page alarm when President Coolidge spent a little bit longer than usual on a fishing trip and found himself without an overcoat as the evening cool fell upon Lake Yellowstone.

Favourite Moment:
As if this were not enough news for one day, The World, in the same issue and even on the very next page, gives us a two-column photograph of Miss Helen Barnaby, of North Danville, NH, who is the champion woman scythe-swinger and, “until a day or so ago” [that would make it about August 23 – ED.] “the champion mower of New Hampshire.”