In Monday's Today section, Frank Kent (above) was incorrectly identified in a photo caption.
* The Sun regrets the error.
Washington -- For your consideration: H.L. Mencken on . . . Newt Gingrich.
It boggles the imagination.
If the literary giant and Sun columnist were around today to describe the incoming Speaker of the House, would he snuggle into the gloves he used to rough up Woodrow Wilson when he called the president a "pedagogue gone mashugga?"
Would he take up the spear he used to disembowel William Jennings Bryan, whom he called, in memoriam, "a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity"?
Or would Baltimore's beloved Henry be content to lump the Georgia Republican with all the other political leaders he so gracefully skewered on his trusty Corona: those "unmitigated scoundrels," those "swine," those "men so dreadful that it would be painful to describe them realistically?"
Mountebank or scoundrel, Mr. Gingrich is savvy enough, powerful enough, and inflated enough to know he would have been Menckenized with the best of them. "He would have been meat," says Mencken Society president Arthur Gutman.
Which may be why Mr. Gingrich has gone on the offensive, using his own style of invective on the renowned curmudgeon, calling him the archetype of the "cultural elite" -- that left-handed animal reviled by conservatives -- and a figure largely responsible for all that's wrong with American journalism today.
Mr. Gingrich, of course, is himself no stranger to stinging, Mencken-like rhetoric -- he has called Democrats "muggers" and "thugs," and the Clintons "counter-culture McGoverniks" -- and engineered the taking of Capitol Hill largely through his relentless, bellicose broadsides on the place.
Still, in interviews with journalists, and in the college course he teaches at Georgia's Reinhardt College that is broadcast via satellite around the country, Mr. Gingrich takes on the sage of Baltimore, building his thesis about politics and journalism, in fact, around "a fight between two personalities at the Baltimore Sun."
In one corner, there is Mencken, "this miserable, mean person," says Mr. Gingrich, "who wrote brilliantly but wrote with a deep cynicism . . . and despised people."
In the other corner is a Sun political reporter of the 1920s and '30s who was nearly as famed and certainly as admired as Mencken in his time, but all but unknown to the general public these days: Frank R. Kent.
Mr. Gingrich calls Kent "the greatest conservative Democratic columnist of his age." The congressman even touts Kent's 1923 book "The Great Game of Politics" as "the most realistic book ever written on the political system."
'Mencken's cynicism'
As Mr. Gingrich sees it, Kent wrote about politics from a love and understanding of the process and its players, while Mencken wrote from a hatred of, and cynicism about, the system.
It is Mencken's style, he believes, that won out and has endured -- to the detriment of the political process.
"The fact is that it is Mencken's cynicism toward human behavior rather than Kent's understanding of politics that ultimately dominated the American newsroom," Mr. Gingrich says.
He believes that Mencken, "a man who is the greatest single literary influence in modern journalism who disliked everybody" -- in combination with the turn-of-the-century moralism of the Progressive era -- produced the spirit of "anti-politics" at the heart of journalism today.
"Anti-politics is the dominant attitude of Common Cause (a government watchdog group), of Ralph Nader, of the modern newsroom," Mr. Gingrich preaches in his college lecture. "And it's an attitude that says politics is inherently bad."
His critics charge that Mr. Gingrich himself, through a career of virulent diatribes against the opposition (many captured on C-SPAN), or the "corrupt left-wing machine," helped fuel the widespread disenchantment with politics and government that led to his party's takeover of Congress in November.
But when asked by a reporter if he hasn't contributed to the public's loss of faith in government through his frontal attacks on Congress, Mr. Gingrich launches into his Mencken vs. Kent lecture and accuses his questioner of possessing a cynical, Menckenesque eye.
For all his disdain for the press and its skepticism, Mr. Gingrich has skillfully used the mainstream media to further his agenda, trying to cultivate relationships with influential journalists, setting his goal "reshaping the entire nation through the news media," and offering himself up for public viewing as often as possible.
He told the Atlantic Monthly in 1985 that a dinner he attended at the National Press Club "made no sense except that the news media could see me walking through the crowd." And he was quoted in Newsweek in 1989 as saying, "If you're not in the Washington Post every day, you might as well not exist."
All the while, he has made a public display of his low regard for the "liberal media elite." He has reveled in press-bashing stories, often leading off his speeches with a jab at the media's "constant, unending barrage of distortion." And he has advised his conservative constituency to develop "alternative means of communicating other than the elite media."
No doubt, Mr. Gingrich, who has severed ties with reporters or newspapers who have editorialized about his personal travails, believes Frank Kent would have been gentler with him than H.L. Mencken. For one thing, Kent, who started out as a liberal, became an extreme conservative by the late 1920s -- although Mencken was as vehemently opposed to big government as both Kent and Gingrich.
But perhaps more importantly, Kent excused the politician his sin or personal peccadillo -- be it hypocrisy, lying, egotism or spinelessness -- while Mencken turned such foibles into high art.
Kent wrote in 1923 that it is a fact of political life that a candidate or politician is less than honest, is an actor, in fact, "playing his part in complete makeup and wearing a full set of false whiskers."
"[F]rom the time a candidate conceives the idea of becoming a candidate until the day he is forced out of politics there is no chance for him to be wholly honest, frank, and natural with the voters," Kent wrote. "From start to finish, he humbugs them -- sometimes consciously and deliberately, sometimes unconsciously and reluctantly, humbugging himself along with the rest; sometimes deceiving them only a little and on relatively trivial matters, and sometimes becoming a complete humbug and faker, wholly insincere on the big as well as the small things."
Mr. Gingrich calls Kent's 70-year-old observations "remarkably accurate." The political reporter understood, he says, that
politics is "human beings doing human things."
Fitting the agenda
The congressman's embrace of the now-obscure Kent is consistent with his habit of unearthing and promoting figures -- from psychotherapists to futurists -- whose ideas bolster his own agenda.
"He's an assiduous student of history," says Bill Kovach, former editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and now curator of the Nieman Foundation of Journalists at Harvard. "He digs very deeply in whatever subject he's interested in -- and it's all put in the service of his bid for power. Power is the heartbeat of Newt Gingrich."
But Mr. Kovach and other media experts and historians take issue with Mr. Gingrich's thesis, especially his characterization of Mencken as a cynic who despised people. Those who knew Mencken, and those who have studied him, say he loved politics more than anything else he wrote about, and was bitingly irreverent, but not cynical.
"Politicians find the easiest way to reject an idea is to lay it at the feet of a cynic," says Mr. Kovach. "If Mencken were a cynic he would not have wasted his life trying to expose fraud and stupidity on the part of people of great power. He must have had faith in the people who read him. He must have had faith in them to do something. You can't have it both ways.
"The idea that he is a cynic is in the eye of the beholder, not in the practice of H.L. Mencken."
Mr. Kovach, a former New York Times Washington bureau chief, sees Mr. Gingrich's use of such a label as "just another effort by Gingrich to marginalize voices he disagrees with. You marginalize the opposition rather than engage their ideas. He's successfully done it to most liberal Democrats. It's a disservice to the democratic process."
Similarly, literary historians say it is wrong to credit Mencken with the adversarial spirit or "gotcha-ism" that Mr. Gingrich sees in modern newsrooms.
"If anything, Kent's style triumphed," says Mencken expert and biographer Fred Hobson. "Mencken's style was so iconoclastic, so off-the-wall. Most writers take a far more analytical, sober approach."
Mr. Hobson believes, in fact, that the "journalistic descendents" of Mencken are the bombastic conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, an honorary member of the freshman class ushered into Congress this year by Mr. Gingrich.
From a political standpoint, too, "Kent was considerably more influential," says historian William E. Leuchtenburg, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Mencken was always a loner with no political following, particularly in the '30s. Kent was one of the favorite columnists of conservatives."
Kent's column, called "The Great Game of Politics" like his book, appeared up to five times a week on the front page of the Baltimore Sun for decades and was syndicated nationally. The political reporter, who in his later years was as acid-tongued and ideological as his colleague Mencken, also started an anonymous political column in 1925 for the New Republic, under the signature "TRB," that still exists today.
Seeing merit
But some political and journalistic historians see some merit in Mr. Gingrich's theory. They believe Mencken, who was a dismal political prognosticator (he said Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't have a "Chinaman's" chance in 1932 and that Herbert Hoover's re-election was highly probable), influenced his craft by dispensing with the kid gloves that were generally donned for politicians.
"Before his time, the public treated politicians much as they treated the clergy, with a certain amoung of awe and respect," says Mencken diary editor Charles Fecher. "Mencken had no respect for them [politicians] and he made that fact entirely clear. It inevitably had an effect on the writing of others."
Although even back then -- in fact, until the 1970s -- Mencken and other political writers refrained from writing all they knew about their subjects and held to an unspoken "understanding" between reporters and politicians.
Thomas E. Patterson, author of "Out of Order," believes the literary legend and social critic was one voice in a long tradition of adversarial journalism that was born in the Progressive era and continued in the "muckraking" era of the early 1900s when writers such as Upton Sinclair published exposes and attacks on every kind of institution.
Mr. Patterson, whose book indicts the cynicism of the press (and a Bill Clinton favorite), believes reporters retreated to a quieter, more background role in mid-century, only to have their investigative juices reactivated by the Vietnam War and Watergate.
Those events, says the author and Syracuse University professor, "soured journalists on politics and reopened a door that had been closed. It brought back that skepticism."
Mr. Gingrich scoffs at that skepticism, even as he admits that, as a Republican hoping to win control of the Congress, he deliberately set out to provoke the electorate's doubts about the institution by portraying it as corrupt.
"The nature of guerrilla war," he once said, "is that you do it when it's to your advantage and don't do it when it's not to your #F advantage."
Frank Kent might have called that humbuggery. Mencken might have called it buncombe. For Newt Gingrich, it is politics.
THE RHETORIC OF MENCKEN, KENT AND GINGRICH
ON POLITICIANS:
H.L. Mencken, "A Carnival of Buncombe," 1920: "All of the great patriots now engaged in edging and squirming their way toward the Presidency of the Republic run true to form. This is to say, they are all extremely wary, and all more or less palpable frauds. What they want, primarily, is the job; the necessary equipment of unescapable issues, immutable principles and soaring ideals can wait until it becomes more certain which way the mob will be whooping."
Frank Kent, "The Great Game of Politics," 1923: "Men who run for office, both before election and afterward, are subjected to a persistent and unrelenting pressure from the groups and elements in their communities, which makes intelligent and independent conduct in office, and sincere and honest expression while seeking office, tremendously difficult -- and really impossible except in isolated cases, and by men of extraordinary character and courage."
Newt Gingrich, 1978: "You do not want to elect politicians who say 'Trust me' because you can't trust anybody, not just politicians."