[On Warren G. Harding:] He writes the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.

Mencken’s famous put-down of Warren G. Harding comes from his coverage of the early 1920s, when Harding—first as a presidential candidate and then as president—was widely criticized for platitudinous speeches and for the prose of his public messages. Mencken, a leading journalist and stylistic purist, used Harding as a prime example of what he saw as the debasement of American public language: inflated, vague, and mechanically “uplifting.” The remark appears in Mencken’s book of political reportage and commentary drawn from the Harding era, where he anatomizes Harding’s rhetoric as symptomatic of a broader cultural taste for empty, sentimental political English.

Mencken’s insult is not merely that Harding’s writing is bad, but that it is bad in a peculiarly revealing way. The piling-up of grotesque similes (“wet sponges,” “tattered washing,” “stale bean soup,” “dogs barking”) conveys prose that is simultaneously limp, messy, and grating—language without structure, freshness, or thought. The final twist—“a sort of grandeur creeps into it”—is Mencken’s sardonic paradox: the incompetence becomes so extreme it achieves an almost sublime magnitude, like a monument to emptiness. Implicitly, Mencken suggests that such language is not an accident but a symptom of political culture: inflated diction masking thin ideas, rewarded because it sounds “presidential” to an undiscriminating public.