A case study or a comparison never proves anything. But if it did, a comparison of the writings of John Kenneth Galbraith, Stephen Leacock, and H. L. Mencken about the Great Depression might suggest one conclusion. If a humorist understands the causes and cures for an economic depression, he is much more likely to see its humorous sides.

Galbraith and Leacock were both Canadians and professional economists. Leacock and Mencken were the leading humorists in Canada and the United States in the l920s. The Great Depression would affect their humor in different ways. Galbraith would see the Depression as a humorous commentary on the stupidity of the human race. Leacock had difficulty in seeing humor in the Depression, but saw the humor in the conflicting economic theories purporting to explain the Depression. Mencken was indifferent to the social and economic problems of the Depression and hated the cures for them proposed by the New Deal.

Like Leacock, John Galbraith (b. 1908) was raised on a farm in southern Ontario. He received his undergraduate degree in agricultural economics in Ontario and his Ph.D. at Berkeley in the early 1930s. Apparently his sense of humor developed early, as evidenced by his comments about the bitter controversy surrounding the Depression during his student days at Berkeley.

The graduates with whom I associated in the thirties were uniformly radical and the most distinguished were Communists, I listened to them eagerly and would have liked to have joined the conversation and the Party but here my agricultural background was a real handicap. It meant that, as a matter of formal Marxian doctrine, I was politically immature. . . . I sensed this bar and I knew also that pride would be deeply hurt by rejection. So I kept outside. There was possibly one other factor. Although I recognized that the system could not and should not survive, I was enjoying it so much that, secretly, I was a little bit sorry.’

Galbraith became an economics instructor at Harvard in 1943 and welcomed the new theories of John M. Keynes concerning the causes and the governmental cures for the Great Depression.

By the autumn of 1936 Keynes had reached Harvard with tidal force, There had been no such excitement among the younger economists before; there has been none such since. Here was a solution to depression and unemployment, the most urgent problem of the time. It was also a conservative one. Keynes showed that the government, by offsetting the excess of savings—the short fall in purchasing power—could prop up the economy so that it functioned at or near full employment instead of at some

painful and socially demoralizing level down below. Markets, the subject of a totemic worship by economists, continued to function as before. Private property, the social point of conservative passion, remained undisturbed.

Yet the Keynesian proposals also produced a wonderfully choleric reaction from the right. In consequence, you could be concerned with saving capitalism, be in the ultimate sense a conservative, and still be thought a vigorously innovative radical. Never was radicalism so safe.²

Perhaps Galbraith’s major contribution to depression humor is his book, The Great Crash (1954).

As a year, 1929 has always been peculiarly the property of the economist. . . . It was one of those years that marvelously illuminate human motives and the very wellsprings of human behavior. . . . One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during the panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings. Like most humans, most of the time, they did some very foolish things. On the whole, the greater the earlier reputation for omniscience, the more serene the previous idiocy, the greater the foolishness now exposed. Things that in other times were concealed by a heavy facade of dignity now stood exposed, for the panic suddenly, almost obscenely, snatched this facade away. We are seldom vouchsafed a glance behind this barrier; in our society the counterpart of the Kremlin walls is the thickly stuffed shirt.³

Galbraith has been admired for his iconoclastic assaults on such sacred topics as conventional market economic theory, the large corporation, and the symbiotic relationship between the large corporation and the federal government. He is renowned for his humor which he incorporated into his economic analysis.

I doubt that good economic writing can be devoid of humor. This is not because it is the task of the economist to entertain or amuse. Nothing could be more abhorrent to the Calvinist gloom which characterizes all scientific attitudes. But humor is an index of a man’s ability to detach himself from his subject and such detachment is of considerable scientific utility. In considering economic behavior, humor is especially important for, needless to say, much of that behavior is infinitely ridiculous.⁴

Galbraith became an American citizen in 1936. His compatriot Stephen Leacock(l869–1944) was born in England and raised on a farm in southern Ontario. He received a classical undergraduate education from the University of Toronto and his doctorate in economics and political science in 1903 from the University of Chicago, where he studied with Thorstein Veblen. Leacock was a conservative economist, but, like Galbraith, he was dubious about the theoretical perfection of the market system in orthodox economic theory.

Leacock joined McGill University in Montreal as a lecturer in the department of economics and political science in 1901 and was its

department head between 1908 and his retirement in 1936. Although he wrote few serious articles in the field of economics, he enjoyed attacking humorously the orthodox economic theory of his day. His major contribution to depression humor is probably his satire on economics, Hellements of Hickonomics in Hiccoughs of Verse, published in 1936. His title is a satire on the British economist J. R. Hicks and on Hicks’s book, Value and Capital, a mathematical analysis of the operations of "perfect competition" published in the 1930s. Leacock was not impressed by mathematical economics. In his preface he gave his reasons for writing the book:

It might be of great service if economic problems could be discussed in the form of the literature of the imagination. This would help to remove the argument from the angers and the bitterness that so often surround it. If we cannot discuss it like gentlemen, let us at least discuss it like idiots.

Of the economic basis of this book I would like to say this. Forty years of hard work on economics has pretty well removed all the ideas I ever had about it. I think the whole science is a wreck and has got to be built up again. For our social problems there is about as much light to be found in the older economics as from a glow-worm.⁵

Leacock was a conservative economist who knew that the laissez-faire market system doctrines were naive, but who also hated the "socialist planning" solutions for the problems of the Great Depression. During most of the 1930s, Leacock apparently was not aware of Keynesian theories about the Depression, and he did not consider them until the end of the decade.

Since economic poetry is rare, Leacock’s poem, "The Social Plan," in his Hellements of Hickonomics, might qualify him as one of the world’s leading writers of humorous economic verse.

                                                            The Social Plan

I know a very tiresome Man
Who keeps on saying, "Social Plan."
At every Dinner, every Talk
Where Men foregather, eat or walk,
No matter where,—this Awful Man
Brings on his goddam Social Plan.

The Fall in Wheat, the Rise in Bread,
The Social Breakers dead ahead,
The Economic Paradox
That drives the Nation on the rocks,
The Wheels that false Abundance clogs—
And frightens us from raising Hogs,—
This dreary field, the Gloomy Man
Surveys and hiccoughs, Social Plan.

222

Till simpler Men begin to find
His croaking aggravates their mind,
And makes them anxious to avoid
All mention of the Unemployed,
And leads them even to abhor

The People called Deserving Poor.
For me, my sympathies now pass
To the poor Plutocratic Class.
The Crowd that now appeals to me
Is what he calls the Bourgeoisie.

So I have got a Social Plan
To take him by the Neck,
And lock him in a Luggage van
And tie on it a check,
    Marked MOSCOW VIA TURKESTAN,
    Now, how’s that for a Social Plan?⁶

In his book, Model Memoirs and Other Sketches, published in 1938, he was still poking fun at the socialist planners. In his essay, "How Far Can We Plan," he compares the socialists to children.

Don’t you remember when you were a child and had no economic ideas and thought that a policeman was a policeman because he liked being a policeman and an engineer was on a train because he liked to make the whistle toot? Well, that dream world that you lived in was the socialist world. . . . It just can’t be. The motive is wrong. We are not like that. We don’t, we can’t, care enough for one another’s welfare. I’ll look after my grandmother, but I won’t look after yours. She’s not worth it. I’ll pay for the education of my own children because they are bright little fellows and it’s all worth while, but you’ve only to look at yours to see the difference. . . . But what is left? We must go on as we are, with our every-man-for-himself, individualist State, patching it, fixing it, somehow making it go. Blessing or curse, it’s all we have. Call it capitalism if you like and kick it. but it is all we’ve got.⁷

In his essay "Has Economics Gone to Seed?" Leacock still criticized the conservative orthodox economists, but he also shows that he has become familiar with the Keynesian theory about the problem of excess savings in an imperfect market system.

At a time when the world is in danger of collapse from the dilemma of wealth and want, the college economists can shed no light—or rather only a multitude of cross lights that will not focus to a single beam—in place of a lighthouse, wreckers’ signals, or, at best, fireworks, elaborate and meaningless. The time has come to ask, has economics run to seed?⁸

Although Leacock does not appear to have accepted most of the Keynesian theories concerning the causes and cures for the Great Depression, he does accept the Keynesian theory about the role of

saving in causing a Depression.

Saving! That, with all the economists from Adam Smith to his latest imitator, was the prime force in progress. There the interest of the individual and of the society focused to a single light. If everybody worked hard and saved money, then everybody would get rich, the future would be provided for, and rainy days be stalled off till every place would be as good as Nevada.

They never stopped to ask what happens if everyone sells and nobody buys—if we save enough to build so many machines that there’s nothing for them to do. What if we do provide for the future? It hasn’t come yet. How are we to get along till it does?

It begins to look as if a "rainy day" Were one of the best things in nature, and the more sudden the shower the better. Come on, loosen up and spend something! Have a cigarette. So it seems that the bottom is out of the saving theory. That particular pillar is undermined and falling over. You may for the moment help yourself by saving money, but you’re a poor pup in the social sense if you do. Go and buy a velvet suit and order a quart of extra dry.

I am only drawing attention to the hopeless muddle in which economic thought and practice has involved itself. It has become a mass of contradiction.⁹

Leacock was the leading humorist in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s. He considered himself a professional humorist, even though he was an economist and had written a college textbook, Elements of Political Science, (1921). Like Mencken, Leacock considered Mark Twain the leading American humorist. Leacock and Mencken apparently never mentioned each other in their writings, even though Mencken was one of the leading political columnists of the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps Mencken never mentioned Leacock because Mencken did not consider himself a humorist but a professional journalist and a critic of American society, ideas, and politics.

As the nation’s leading social and literary critic of the 1920s, Mencken reached the public through his newspaper columns, his books, and his editorship of the American Mercury from 1924 to 1933. He resigned as editor of the Mercury in 1933 when the intellectuals lost interest in his economically conservative social criticism, which showed little appreciation for the new radical thought of the 1930s. He spent most of his life as a columnist and political journalist for the Baltimore Sun (1906-1948). But he was a brilliant comic writer. As Alistair Cook stated, "If he was overrated in his day as a thinker, he was vastly underrated as a humorist with one deadly sensible eye on the behavior of the human animal."

Mencken reported the American political scene as one of gross entertainment and buffoonery. He was amused by the pretentiousness, bluster, and hypocrisy of politicians. He saw the politicians’ exploitation of human frailties, which are far more luminous in politics because there

is far less cover than in the comfortable security of the professions and the business world. His humorous analysis of the techniques of politicians was highly perceptive.

At the beginning of the Great Depression, Mencken despised President Hoover, a prohibitionist, and Mencken often commented humorously on Hoover’s inadequacies in handling the Depression. Most of Mencken’s depression humor is found in his "Monday articles," for the Baltimore Sun from 1920 to 1936. One example is the October 24, 1932, article:

Without question, Dr. Hoover is receiving rather more blame for the present discontents than he deserves, just as he would be receiving a great deal more credit than he deserved if prosperity still raged among us. But the plain people, after all, are not quite such fools as his apologists try to make them out. They do not, in fact, blame him for causing the Depression, or even for neglecting to take measures against it; they simply blame him for failing so miserably to cure it. And in so blaming him they are on ground that is surely solid enough for all practical purposes, for he was sold to them in 1928 as a wizard who could keep the ball of plenty in the air forever, and when he let it fall at its first wobble, and it cracked his head, and then knocked him down and rolled him out as flat as a pancake, they had every support in logical science for concluding that he was actually a dud, and had got their votes by false pretenses.

Dr. Hoover did not go into office as an ordinary American politician (Blatta sapiens). His agents did not represent him to be the usual and familiar amalgam of knave and imbecile, so natural and normal to public life under democracy. On the contrary, they represented him to be a most extraordinary and even miraculous character, politically speaking. They said that he had a genuine genius for public affairs of an economic nature. . . . Alas, all of these specifications turned out to be bogus.¹⁰

Mencken was indifferent to most of the social and economic problems of the Depression. However, he was well aware of the political controversy surrounding the New Deal solutions to the Depression. As a strong believer in laissez-faire and Social Darwinism, he opposed the New Deal. By 1936, he had become a strong "Roosevelt hater." His "Monday article" of November 2, 1936, illustrates this:

There are those who believe that the Hon. Mr. Roosevelt, if he is reelected, will abandon the socialist folderol that he has been advocating since 1933 and go back to the traditional program of his party. .

Roosevelt, to be sure, has flopped once, but he has now gone too far down his new road to turn back again.

The defense commonly made of him is that he confronted, in 1933, an unprecedented situation, and so had to resort to new and even revolutionary devices in dealing with it. . . . And of all the devices he employed in dealing with it the only ones that really worked were those that had been tried before. . . .

All the rest was quackery pure and unadulterated. The situation of the

country was exaggerated in precisely the same way that a quack doctor exaggerates the illness of his patient, and for exactly the same reason. .

Bit by bit, the purpose of restoring the country to its normal manner and ease of life was submerged in the purpose of bringing in a brummage Utopia, fashioned in part out of the idiotic hallucinations of the cow States and in part out of the gaudy evangel of Moscow. And simultaneously, the welfare of the American people as a whole began to be forgotten in a special concern for special classes and categories of them, all of manifestly inferior status and all willing to vote right for goods in hand.

In brief, the New Deal became a political racket, and that is what it is today—that and nothing more."

In 1936 Mencken ended his "Monday articles" and for the next few years sank into public obscurity as a humorist. His indifference to Hitler’s Germany in the l930s and to World War II, like his sympathy for the Germans in World War I, further alienated him from the American public. Not until World War II, when he wrote his humorous autobiographical series, and his return to political reporting in the 1948 election campaign, did he regain some of his old prestige. But economically, this period was very similar to the boom times of World War I and the 1920s when he was at the top of his prestige. His stroke in 1948 ended his writing career.

Mencken’s remarks about the causes of the Great Depression were few. His comments on the New Deal cures were often more bitter than humorous. Leacock, although as conservative as Mencken, tried to be humorous about the bitter controversy surrounding the recommended cures for the Depression, even when the recommended solutions were often socialistic. Galbraith, who accepted the Keynesian cures for the Depression and has recommended some cures of his own for the 1970s and 1980s "stagflation" recessions, such as price and wage controls, never seems to have lost his sense of humor about the business cycle.

Apparently Galbraith’s understanding of the causes and cures and Leacock’s understanding of the causes of the Great Depression helped them retain their sense of humor. Mencken, who was much less informed in the arena of economic theory, became bitter over solutions of the New Deal. But a comparison proves very little. To complete this comparison, we need a study of the socialist humorists. Does a well informed socialist have a sense of humor about economic depression in a market economy? Perhaps a Soviet humorist could answer this question.

¹John K. Galbraith, A Life in Our Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1981), p. 352.
²Ibid., p. 68.
  ³John K. Galbraith, The Great Crash (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1954), pp. 2–3.
⁴John K. Galbraith, Economics, Peach and Laughter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1971), p. 29.
⁵Stephen B. Leacock, Hellements of Hickonomics in Hiccoughs of Verse (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1936), pp. v–vi.
⁶Ibid., pp. 3–4.
⁷Stephen B. Leacock, Model Memoirs and Other Sketches (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1938), pp. 292–294.
⁸Stephen B. Leacock, Too Much College (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1939), pp. 109–110.
⁹Ibid., pp. 115–117.
¹⁰H. L. Mencken, A Carnival of Buncombe, ed. Malcolm Moos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), pp. 266–267.
¹¹Ibid., pp. 328–330.