Let me offer an interesting piece by Mencken on the Conservative Democrat of the same era--the one politician whom Mencken truly admired--who was also the first Senator to rise against Wilson's League of Nations, and one whom I, as a student of his oratory since college, feel absolutely certain would be all in for Donald Trump, today.
Mencken's Tribute To James A. Reed.
Note, Reed rejected Wilson's League a full week before any Republican joined him (Borah, was the first); and as the Mencken piece makes clear, was really the master debater who more than any other destroyed the Wilsonian fallacy.
Reed was also an advocate of a strong Navy, and predicted the course of the Japanese attack in the Pacific in 1922, in opposing the Naval disarmament treaty.
Brilliant! Loved it. Thanks for posting. And glad to find another Mencken fan on this thread. Reading this piece about James A. Reed, you certainly get the sense that Trump would receive high praise from the Terror of Baltimore.
The last lines could have been written about today's Congress:
The American people have got so used to quacks in high office that they have come to feel uneasy in the presence of honest men. They will be annoyed, I suspect, by very few of that kidney hereafter. Reed struck back into an earlier and more spacious time. He was an anachronistic and disquieting reminder of the days when a Senator of the United States stood on his own legs and was his own man.