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William and Mary The Alumni Gazette The College of William and Mary Winter 1981 On The Cover The selection on the cover is a photo of a plant specimen from the Conservatory of the United States Botanic Garden located at the base of Capitol Hill in the Mall in Washing- ton, D.C. The idea of a botanic garden for the nation originated with George Washington during his presi- dency, but the present conservatory which welcomes more than one million visitors every year was not completed until 1933. The Botanic Garden contains sub-tropical and tropical plants from around the world. Its purpose is to protect, cultivate, and display the plants for the benefit of the public, scientists, and garden clubs. The conservatory, display and growing areas of the Garden contain thousands of rare plants in their 47,674 square feet. Lyle Rosbotham '71, a free-lance photographer, captures in an un- usual photographic approach some of the specimens of the Garden elsewhere in this magazine. The Alumni Gazette The College of William and Mary January/February 1981 Volume 48, No. 6 2 What Would Mencken Say? By Carl Dolmetsch 9 Magic and Literature: Now You See It, Now You Don't By Howard Fraser 13 The United States Botanic Garden By Lyle Rosbotham 71 19 The Missing Throne By A. Z. Freeman 22 The Rebirth of Fine Arts By Parke Rouse, Jr. 30 The Golden Age of the Student By Thomas A. Graves, Jr. Officers of the Society are: President John H. Editor, Ross L. Weeks. Jr. Garrett, Jr., '40 Irvington, Virginia; Vice Associate Editor, S. Dean Olson President, Henry D. Wilde, Jr., '53, Houston, Managing Editor, Jim Rees 74 Texas; Secretary, Mary Miller Entwisle, '44, Meadowbrook, Pennsylvania; Treasurer, Denys Typesetting, Sylvia B. Colston Grant, '58, Richmond, Virginia; Executive Vice President, Gordon C. Vliet, '54. Board of Directors: To December 1981: James W. Established June 10, 193:!. by the Society of the Brinkley, '59, Towson, Maryland; James E. Alumni of the College of William and Mary, box Howard, '43, Richmond, Virginia; Robert H. GO, Williamsburg, Va. 23185; monthly except Land, '34, Alexandria, Virginia; Austin L. January and July. Second-class postage paid at Roberts III, '69, Newport News, Virginia; G. Williamsburg and Richmond. Subscription rates Elliot Schaubach, Jr., '59, Norfolk, Virginia. To S5.no a year. December 1982: Stewart Gamage, '72, Alexandria, Virginia; John H. Gan-ett, Jr., '40, Irvington, Virginia; Denys Grant, '58, Richmond, Virginia; Jane Spencer Smith, '48, Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan; Henry D. Wilde, Jr., '53, Houston, Texas; To December 1983: William A. Armbruster, '57, Sevema Park, Maryland; Marilyn Miller Entwisle, '44, Meadowbrook, Pennsylvania; R. Stanley Hudgins, '43, Virginia Beach, Virginia; Andrew D. Parker, Jr., JD '69, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Marvin F. West, '52, Williamsburg, Virginia. WILLIAM AND MARY WINTER 1981 What Would Mencken Say? The Twentieth Century's Most Fascinating Critic Would Have Some Keen Observations About America's Ongoing Greatest Show on Earth By Carl Dolmetsch At least once a year some news- private and communal folly" that college anthologies, and heterodox paper columnist wistfully wonders: makes this great "star-spangled students in American lit or history "What would Mencken say?" What Republic and its simian citizenry courses still occasionally re-discover might Mencken have said, for . incomparably the greatest show him with enthusiasm. He has indeed instance, had he lived to see a on earth"? become almost a cult figure. His Southern Baptist peanut farmer There is, to be sure, no dearth of books, most of them long out of elected to the highest office in the social and political commentary in print, are avidly sought by collectors land? Or, to see him turned out of newspapers nowadays, and not a of Americana. There exists a full- the White House by a former Holly- few present-day "Op-Ed" com- fledged Mencken Society with wood movie star? What would he mentators who were born twenty several hundred members scattered say, were he living now, about what years too late to have teethed across the land and a quarterly he called our "daily panorama of journalistically on H. L. Mencken journal, Menckeniana, devoted to affect Menckenisms in their style. learned articles about and reminis- Carl Dolmetsch, who joined the Nevertheless, surveying the field, cences of him. His home in Balti- faculty at the College of William one seeks vainly for a successor to more's Union Square, willed by his and Mary in 1959, is a professor of the mantle Mencken wore so gaudily surviving brother to the University of EngJish. He received his A.B. and in the Twenties and Thirties. By Maryland, is a mecca for die-hard M.A. degrees from Drake University 1948, when he was silenced by a Menckenites, and each September, and his Ph.D. from the University of thrombosis that left him, though on the Saturday nearest his birthday, Chicago. Professor Dolmetsch has mentally alert, unable to read or the Enoch Pratt Free Library, where written books and articles in the write for the last eight years of his his papers and books are housed in field of Early American Literature as life, he had already lost most of his a special Mencken Room, honors well as on H. L. Mencken and 20th old clout. Yet, he was not forgotten their city's favorite son with an endowed lecture and a day-long Century Literature. Dr. Dolmetsch is during those shadowed years and his memory is still green. program. the music columnist for the Virginia Samples of Mencken's prose- As September 12, 1980 marked the Gazette and contributes articles on a called by Joseph Wood Krutch in centenary of Henry Louis Mencken's regular basis to four different 1956 "the best prose written in arrival on earth, the Pratt's obser- magazines in this country and America during the twentieth cen- vance of the "Sage of Baltimore's" abroad. tury"—still turn up regularly in hundredth birthday was especially 2 WILLIAM AND MARY WINTER 1981 elaborate, spreading over two days and at several hinterland universities activities, and accomplishments. The instead of the customary one, and and libraries with large Mencken subject of his lifelong study was drawing thousands of local fans as collections. simply the creature he dubbed boobus well as scores of admirers from When Mencken died, on January americanus in all its aspects. Politics around the world. So sought-after 29, 1956, his erstwhile colleagues at and economics, religion and theo- were the four hundred tickets to the the Baltimore Sunpapers, Inc. logy, medicine and quackery, philo- birthday banquet in the Belvedere opened a locked tin box he had left sophy and psychology, manners and Hotel's grand ballroom on the 12th with them supposedly containing morals, the arts and their prac- that the entire affair had to be instructions for his obituary and last titioners, language and literature—all replayed next evening, when it was rites. What they found inside was a came under his purview and became again sold out. Mencken's long-time simple note saying "Don't overplay grist for his mill. He was as he friend, the British journalist and it." It is not difficult to imagine, remains—different things to different PBS-TV celebrity, Alistair Cooke, therefore, what Mencken would people. was the banquet speaker, repeating have said about all the fuss and For example, to an Englishman his witty, imaginary "Letter from feathers of these centennial celebra- like Alistair Cooke as to the Henry in Heaven" both nights. tions. He would doubtless have been University of Chicago's eminent Among the honored banquet amused, perhaps secretly flattered dialectologist, Raven McDavid, editor guests was Mencken's publisher and but outwardly disdainful, and he of The Linguistic Atlas of the United close friend throughout five decades, would certainly have found some States & Canada, Mencken's Alfred A. Knopf, whose own eighty- colorful word to epitomize what the supremely enduring contribution eighth birthday it also was. Knopf octogenarian authority on American was his monumental, pioneering published on that day under his humor, Walter Blair, the opening study of our native tongue, The famed Borzoi imprint a new volume speaker at the Newberry Conference, American Language. First produced in of essays {On Mencken) in which called "this Menckenonization." 1919, it spawned three supple- eight writers, the publisher included, Neither Dr. Blair nor anyone else in mentary volumes by 1948 and it surveyed "HIM's" diverse career. the Chicago or Baltimore commemo- stimulated hundreds of scholarly The Baltimore Sun, with which rations, however, went so far as to inquiries into what its author called Mencken was associated for nearly a suggest they were "overplaying" the "the American Vulgate"—the pecu- half-century, also announced on this centennial. Mencken was simply liar ways we Americans express occasion the establishment of an getting his just desserts. ourselves as distinct from the British annual Mencken Prize for outstand- Those too young to remember and other members of the world- ing political journalism. Mencken in his heyday may well wide English language community. Nor were these the only Mencken wonder how this somewhat raffish, There are shelves upon shelves of centennial observances in 1980. In cigar-chewing pundit can still inspire books and articles today on this May, Chicago's Newberry Library such devotion after a quarter-century subject that might not exist but for hosted a two-day conference of in the grave. Who was H. L. the stimulus Mencken gave Ameri- scholars to "reappraise" Mencken's Mencken, anyway? Certainly he is can linguistics. Still, Mencken's manifold contributions to American not easy to explain as a phe- original study—the work of a culture, though the atmosphere at nomenon, to categorize as a writer or devoted amateur, innocent of all that gathering was more one of to characterize as a person.
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