Though he has been dead and gone for 48 years, H.L. Mencken's trenchant observations on attending national political conventions was recalled earlier this week in a New York Times column by R. W. Apple Jr.
The Houston Chronicle, Agence France-Presse and the Australian Financial Review also conjured up the Sage of Baltimore's convention reportage during the past week.
Mencken was 23 years old when he covered his first conventions in 1904, when the Baltimore Herald sent him to the Republican convention in Chicago and the Democratic gathering in St. Louis.
He ended his convention coverage with the 1948 Democratic, Republican and Progressive conventions in Philadelphia.
"It is hard to imagine Boston 2004 living up to Mencken's classic description of the conventions," Apple wrote.
"There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging," Mencken wrote after surviving the 1924 Democratic National Convention, where delegates took 17 days and 193 ballots to select John W. Davis as their standard bearer.
"It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming. One sits through long sessions wishing all the delegates and alternates were dead and in hell - and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour," he wrote.
Mencken actually enjoyed the grand show. He'd set up shop at the press table in the hall with his noiseless portable Corona and stack of copy paper.
He'd then spend hours between typing and slowly puffing on an Uncle Willie cigar while observing the passing show and endless buffoonery.
Joseph C. Goulden, in his 1976 book, Mencken's Last Campaign: H.L.Mencken on the 1948 Election, wrote, "Writing in the era before television took de facto possession of the conventions, transforming them into living-room entertainment, Mencken made politics an acutely visual - and visceral - experience.
"Persons who read The Sun, Mencken's primary outlet for politics, knew not only the color of the bunting on the hall but also the relative pulchritude of lady politicians of each party. (Not infrequently, he marveled, they resembled `British tramp steamers dressed for the King's birthday.')"
