Spitzer’s Aspirations

When the attorney general of New York, Eliot Spitzer, has a moment to spare from his grandstanding against 80-year-olds, he’s prone to quote H.L. Mencken. So far as we can tell, Mr. Spitzer first rolled out the sage of Baltimore in a September 16, 2003, speech to the Association for a Better New York: “As H.L. Mencken so eloquently put it, ‘New York is the place where all of the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration.'”The attorney general has since made the line a staple of his speeches at campaign fund-raisers. “It is a campaign based upon a premise that we can be, and must be, once again what H.L. Mencken said we used to be, which is the place where all aspirations come together,” Mr. Spitzer says in an audio clip from a recent campaign event that is posted on his Web site. Another audio clip from another recent campaign event included the line: “It was H.L. Mencken who said, ‘New York is the place where all aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration.’ That is New York and that is the dream we have for New York and we will make it that once again.”Mr. Spitzer’s fondness for the quote sent us scrambling to the library for the original context, which is an essay called “Metropolis” that appeared as Chapter 9 of the Sixth Series of Mencken’s “Prejudices,” published in 1927 by Alfred Knopf. There we found some food for thought in the governor’s race. To begin with, it’s always a danger to quote a Baltimorean on the essence of New York City. What does Mencken know about New York?His essay – the one of which Mr. Spitzer is apparently so fond – contains plenty of insults to our fair city. “There is little in New York that does not issue out of money,” Mencken wrote. “It is not a town of ideas; it is not even a town of causes.” The Baltimorean wrote, “I can imagine an Iowan loving the black, fecund stretches of his native State, or a New Englander loving the wreck of Boston, or even a Chicagoan loving Chicago, poets, Loop, stockyards and all, but it is hard for me to fancy any rational human being loving New York.”As if those weren’t enough darts aimed at New York and those of us who love it and know it as a town of causes and ideas, Mencken went on – in the same essay that Mr. Spitzer is citing on the campaign trail – to call our city “immensely trashy.”Nor was Mencken what we would today call politically correct. New York, he wrote,”pays more for a meal than an Italian or a Pole pays for a wife, and the meal is better than the wife.” Now who’s the trashy one, Mr. Mencken?Not that Mencken was entirely bereft of insights into New York that may resonate for some today. He did say, “There are more frauds and scoundrels, more quacks and cony-catchers,* more suckers and visionaries in New York than in all the country west of the Union Hill, N.J., breweries.” That may accord with Mr. Spitzer’s prosecutorial view of New Yorkers, but for our part we’d emphasize that the honest citizens far outnumber the charlatans.Mencken wrote that New York “is no longer a place of work; it is a place of pleasure.” No doubt the flight of private-sector jobs from New York is something Mr. Spitzer and the rest of the gubernatorial candidates will want to address, but our own sense as New Yorkers is that there are plenty of hardworking citizens here.Mencken wrote that New York “is too expensive” for authors, an issue that even today is raised as a concern by groups such as the Center for an Urban Future, which earlier this month released a report on the issue of how New York can hang on to its creative class. It’s something the gubernatorial candidates may want to address by moving more aggressively to end rent stabilization and rent control, which, rather than making the city more affordable, distort the market for housing in New York in a way that makes market rate housing more expensive.As for the section of the essay that Mr. Spitzer apparently finds most attractive, it is worth quoting in full. “It is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.”We’ve praised Mr. Spitzer for his willingness, as attorney general, to assure that government is not hostile to religion, but even he might find this description of New York as “the icing on the pie called Christian civilization” to be a bit much. We’ve had and no doubt will continue to have our differences with Mr. Spitzer over the years, but we’ve always enjoyed Mencken – as a stylist, if not as a thinker. So in this case we owe the attorney general thanks for the pleasure of being introduced to Mencken’s essay on New York. Here’s hoping that over the course of the campaign, Mr. Spitzer confronts the essay in its full complexity as it extends far beyond the line he’s been quoting. Maybe Mr. Spitzer can make doing that part of his vast aspirations.* A cony-catcher is “a cheat; sharper, swindler,” according to Webster’s Second Unabridged.

Spitzer’s Aspirations

Spitzer’s Aspirations

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