Those terrible mountebanks.

I questioned whether I'd ever seen the word "mountebank" in the newspaper, so I searched the NYT archive — all the way back to 1852 — and got 782 hits, beginning with "Really, this Louis NAPOLEON is a very provoking fellow" ("the appearance of the mountebank in the character of a king").

Quite a few of the hits were repetitions of H.L. Mencken's 1926 description of William Jennings Bryan: "a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity . . . deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, . . . all beauty, all fine and noble things. . . . Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."

One often encounters "mountebank" in a string of contradictions about a person, for example, Theodore Roosevelt: "He transformed the 20th century; no, he overextended the 19th. He was a progressive trust buster; no, an imperialist demagogue. He was a defender of liberty; no, a power-hungry mountebank — a pioneer environmentalist, a bloodthirsty hunter; a farseeing visionary, an energetic clerk."

I see that future President Woodrow Wilson — upon hearing of the death of President McKinley in 1901 — said: "What will happen to the country with that mountebank as President?"
Later, in 1915, the word was turned upon him: "... President Wilson is a desperate mountebank intent on bolstering up his tottering Administration by an appeal to race prejudice and musical hall patriotism...."

"Mountebank" comes up a lot describing actors. We see "the cheerfully nervous mountebank Muffin T. Ragamuffin" (played by Dom DeLuise).  And: "Although 'Waiting for Godot' is an uneventful, maundering, loquacious drama, [Bert] Lahr... has a thousand ways to move and a hundred ways to grimace... [and] long experience as a bawling mountebank...."

And therefore: "In France Hitler is represented as a mountebank and a stage comedian..." (in "What Drives the Giant Hitler Machine" (1938)).

The word comes up often in news of Hitler, for example in January 1933: "Progress of Germany's 'great political adventure' is being watched here [in Britain] in an atmosphere of doubt as to whether history will fix the new Chancellor as a mountebank or hero." That was the potential range? Maybe a hero, but maybe a mountebank!

Meanwhile, FDR has avoided "anything like the tricks of a political mountebank," as we see in this piece on the eve of the the 1932 election, which is good to see as a clipping, next to news of another election:



Also not a mountebank was Grover Cleveland, according to one 1891 assessment of the ex-President, at the point when Democrats were considering making him their candidate again: "The strength and solidity of his character make him the easy leader of the common people of the country. He is no mountebank or juggler. He never poses. He is not playing upon the vanities or ambitions of any part of his countrymen."

This one — from February 1936 — works best as a picture:



The 18th century rears its head-cuttingly ugly head, even as the man of the 20th century is dragging a woman by the hair.

Elsewhere in the 20th century, Radovan Karadzic was "a prosaic nobody. A mediocre psychiatrist, a minor poet and a petty embezzler before the war, at the time of his arrest he was a grotesque mountebank." And Henry Ford (when, in 1923, he withdrew as a presidential candidate and threw his support to Calvin Coolidge) "has been regarded as a political mountebank."

And Maureen Dowd used the word on Al Sharpton:

It was a bad sign for the Democrats that the most appealing and commanding figure was Al Sharpton. You know you're in trouble when Mr. Sharpton is the class of the field. He has had his moments as racial divider, mountebank and Louis Farrakhan ally. But at least the minister... is not smaller-than-life or humorless.

It was a "bad sign for the Democrats" that Sharpton was the best they had. The year was 1997 and — according to Dowd — the Democratic Party was "full of pipsqueaks, opportunists, complainers and namby-pambys who are barely able to project an image."

What do you want — your  pipsqueaks and namby-pambys or a good old-fashioned mountebank?

ADDED: The word "mountebank" shows its literal meaning, monta in banco, that is, to mount on a bench, or get up on a platform, and the oldest meaning — I'm looking at the (unlinkable) OED — is "An itinerant charlatan who sold supposed medicines and remedies, freq. using various entertainments to attract a crowd of potential customers." That led to the figurative use: "A charlatan, a person who falsely claims knowledge of or skill in some matter, esp. for personal gain; a person who pretends to be something he or she is not, in order to gain prestige, fame, etc." Americans are more likely to say "snake-oil salesman," and everyone immediately understands that, unlike "mountebank." And unlike "mountebank," "snake-oil salesman" doesn't make you sound old-time-y — W.C. Fieldsish — even though it calls up the image of an old-time folk character: