In The Free Press recently, Peggy Noonan recommended the 2019 book On Democracy by e.b. white (a selection of White’s writing by his granddaughter Martha). I read the Kindle edition on my airplane flights between Seattle and Washington, D.C., last week. E.B.’s 72-year-old essay reminds us that the crazy partisan personal attacks of the recently concluded Presidential campaign were sadly not unique. [And how clever a creation: “Smearbook”]
The New Yorker
October 4, 1952
Discredit of Others
We doubt that there ever was a time in this country when so many people were trying to discredit so many other people. About a year ago, we started to compile a handbook of defamation, showing who was disemboweling whom in America, but the list soon got too big for us and we abandoned the project as both unwieldy and unlovely. Discreditation has become a national sickness, for which no cure has so far been found, and there is a strong likelihood that we will all wake some morning to learn that in the whole land there is not one decent man. Vilification, condemnation, revelation—these supply a huge part of the columns of the papers, and the story of life in the United States dissolves into a novel of perfidy, rascality, iniquity, and misbehavior. The writing of this lurid tale commands more and more of the time of the citizens. And there is a living in this type of work, beyond any doubt. Pegler, who candidly disavows democracy, supports himself quite nicely by a daily variation on his theme of personal iniquity and stupidity, and by his affirmation that those whose ideas differ from his own are dangerous to have about. At this moment, we don’t know who is readying the 1953 Smearbook, to carry on where Mortimer and Lait left off, but a man can be reasonably sure these days that such a book is in process. All these things give one pause and make the scene ominous in a way the facts do not support. Lately, the preoccupation of the electorate with Senator Nixon’s finances almost completely obscured the bright, the heartening fact that in General Eisenhower and Governor Stevenson the country has a pair of candidates who have seldom been matched for distinction, for ability, and for probity, and that no matter which gets the job, we can thank our lucky stars as well as our secret booths.
In doubtful, doubting days, national morality tends to slip and slide toward a condition in which the test of a man’s honor is his zeal for discovering dishonor in another. This is always a bad fix, never worse than today. It creates a shaky structure and accentuates the basic trouble. Nobody ever acquired strength by publishing somebody else’s weakness, and to look for strength in that quarter is to grab at shadows. We hope and pray that our country, after November’s results have settled the immediate dust, will perceive the gravity of her indisposition and take a corrective.
White, E. B.. On Democracy (pp. 107-108). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
