POLITICAL NOTES: Dot Dot Dot

When H. L. Mencken was slaying dragons with his weekly column in the Baltimore Sun, he seldom spoke well of politicians. But this spring H. C. (“Curley”) Byrd, football coach and later president of the University of Maryland, who is running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, is using a campaign card with a Mencken quote. The card quotes Mencken as having written of Byrd and his performance at the university that “the thing to do with a man of such talents is not to cuss him for doing his job so well; it is much wiser . . . to give him a bigger & better one.”

Last week the Sun told its readers, “purely in the spirit of exegesis, of textual criticism,” what the three dots in Curley’s campaign card stood for. It reprinted the full Mencken quote, which ended: “it is much wiser, so long as hanging him is unlawful, to give him a bigger & better one.”