The Sins and Sayings of E.W. Howe

by Steve Szilagyi

Edgar Watson (E.W.) Howe (1853–1937) was a small-town newspaperman who became nationally known for his plainspoken wit, tart epigrams, and relentless skepticism. “I must make everything so simple that people will see the truth,” he once said. His sayings—blunt, dry, and often astringent—were the fruit of decades spent editorializing in the Atchison (Kansas) Daily Globe and later in his one-man magazine, E.W. Howe’s Monthly.

How famous was he? Howe’s Daily Globe had subscribers not only across the U.S. but in thirty countries. His columns were praised by the likes of Heywood Broun and Mark Van Doren—who called them “the best in the language.” H.L. Mencken became a devoted admirer. At the 1915 San Francisco Exposition, his sayings were spelled out in electric lights. A 1927 testimonial dinner in New York drew a crowd of luminaries: Bernard Baruch, Ring Lardner, Walter Winchell, Rube Goldberg, and John Philip Sousa.

Though Howe also wrote novels, memoirs, and travel books, his enduring reputation rests on the sharpness of his aphorisms. These were collected in volumes like Country Town Sayings, Ventures in Common Sense, and Sinners Sermons. A few examples:

A man will do more for his stubbornness than for his religion or his country.
A loafer never works except when there’s a fire; then he will carry out more furniture than anybody.
When men are not regretting that life is so short, they are doing something to kill time.
No wonder teacher knows so much—she has the book.
The most natural man in a play is the villain.
If the women had money, how well they could get along without the men.

His personal story was every bit as compelling as his quips. Howe was the son of a hellfire Methodist preacher who forbade toys, candy, or any whiff of fun. The defining calamity of his youth came when he was eleven: his father abandoned the family and ran off with a woman from church. Howe became a tramp printer, working odd jobs and roaming the West.

He married a woman named Clara and bought a struggling newspaper in Colorado. The paper failed, and when two of their children died of diphtheria, a rival publisher paid for their burial. He eventually found success in Atchison, Kansas, where his editorials—outspoken, irreligious, and frequently cantankerous—at first drew outrage.

He wrote his first novel, The Story of a Country Town, one page at a time on his own press. Mark Twain hailed it for its raw realism. Modern critics consider it a forerunner to American realism, though Howe’s prose can feel stiff to modern readers.

His most unlikely literary ally was H.L. Mencken, whose florid, cosmopolitan style seemed to oppose Howe’s Midwestern minimalism. But Mencken was drawn to Howe’s gift for saying “the plain thoughts of a plain man” in a way that felt both modest and devastating.

Thanks in part to Howe’s relentless editorials, the Atchison Globe became the most widely quoted small-town newspaper in the country. Howe ran it for thirty-three years before selling it to his staff for $50,000.

Most new things are old things done better by painstaking men.
You can usually tell a suspicious character by the way he hates the police.
Idealism gets people in trouble; materialism gets them out.
I never knew a man so mean that I was not willing that he should admire me.
Who ever saw a man and wife who were both red-headed?
Speaking of radiantly happy brides, we do not see them as often as we see radiantly happy widows.

He launched E.W. Howe’s Monthly in 1911, a one-man magazine written entirely by its proprietor, consisting solely of one-liners, short musings, and observational paragraphs. It was a kind of proto-blog, mailed monthly and read widely—especially by businessmen, politicians, and big-city editors.

Here are some more Howe-isms:

What people say about you behind your back, that’s your standing in the community.
The real dread of men is not the devil, but old age.
A man never receives as many letters as he thinks he should.
Don’t touch a piano if you can’t play.
To be an ideal guest, stay at home.
A really dangerous man generally tries to avoid trouble.
When Americans start talking about schoolhouses and war, they go crazy.
There is only one thing people like that is good for them: a good night’s sleep.
There must be poverty to punish the shiftless and encourage industry.
Any man will claim a good stray umbrella.

Howe’s work reflected the dry wit of what critic Greil Marcus called “Old Weird America”—a world full of bizarre customs and hard-bitten wisdom.

It looks shiftless to own more than one dog.
They tell of a man who ate dinner with a chew of tobacco in his mouth.
What has become of the old-fashioned farmer who caught the woman schoolteacher who boarded at his house, and washed her face in the snow?

Howe was often accused of misogyny. He needled women relentlessly in his publications and was, according to Gene, even more bitter in private.

A woman ought to be pretty to console her for being a woman at all.
It is a mistake to think women only care for money. They want it spent on them.
Every woman is wrong until she cries, and then she is right—instantly.
The average woman is willing to put up with anything in a man except indifference.
When a man says he’s tired, he means he’s bored; when a woman says she’s tired, she means she wants sympathy.
A woman will work, but down at the bottom of her heart, she thinks it’s an outrage that she has to.

Yet he reserved his deepest disappointment for men—for their vanity, cowardice, and hypocrisy.

Men have as exaggerated an idea of their rights as women have of their wrongs.
How uninteresting men are! No wonder the women tire of us.
Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.
It is not hard to convince a man that you are clever, if you agree with him.
If a man hates women, it is because they do not care for him.
Most men are about as faithful [in marriage] as their opportunities.
The average man’s idea of being good to a woman is to give her a little more than his dog gets.
If a man’s opinion is not asked in five minutes, he will break in with it anyhow.
Men are thieves in all sexual matters.

In the absence of religion, E.W. Howe took his morality from the world of business, especially small-town business. He believed that success in business was a good metric for honesty, reliability, and usefulness, since the market weeded out cheaters and those who failed to deliver on their promises. He wrote a whole book, The Blessings of Business, defending capitalism—a book that has its modern parallel in economist Tyler Cowen’s Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero. But he was not entirely uncritical:

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
Business is a good thing—but it’s not good enough to excuse everything.
A businessman will occasionally do something for nothing, provided it will advertise his generosity.
Most businessmen say they are honest, but you will notice they seldom trade with each other without a lawyer.

The greatest wound of Howe’s life—his father’s abandonment—was repeated, in a way, when Howe all but abandoned his own family emotionally and physically. He was often cold and distant, and according to his son Gene, capable of great cruelty.

In 1941, four years after Howe’s death, Gene wrote a piece for the Saturday Evening Post titled “My Father Was the Most Wretchedly Unhappy Man I Ever Knew.” It stunned readers with its intimate portrayal of a man who tried to reform the world and failed, who rejected religion but could not find peace without it.

Gene himself was a remarkable character. He left home young, as his father had done. After some time on the road, E.W. asked him to return to Atchison and join the Globe. Gene later became one of the staff members who purchased the paper when Howe retired. He went on to found his own newspaper in Amarillo, Texas, and built it into a successful media empire that included radio and television stations. He was a family man, an early conservationist, and had no axe to grind against religion and propriety.

As a human being, Gene seemed to outshine his father in almost every way. But in July 1952, four years after publishing his famous article, Gene Howe was found dead in the back seat of his car on a country road—a Colt revolver in his hand.

The man who can keep a secret may be wise, but he is not half as wise as the man with no secrets to keep.
So many of the optimists in the world don’t own a hundred dollars—and because of their optimism, never will.
Seven out of ten men seem to think that the best way to get rich is to fool somebody. Whereas men of real sense know that the best way to get along is to not fool anybody.

E.W. Howe’s house on Potato Hill in Atchison is now on the National Register of Historic Places. But his real monument is in the yellowing pages of books and his monthly, where a deeply skeptical, deeply American mind left its trail of sharp, clean sentences.

No man has all the wisdom in the world; everyone has some.
Of living creatures, business men are nearest sane; their philosophy is as accurate as their multiplication table.
The trouble in the world is nearly all due to the fact that one-half of the people are men, and the other half women.

Howe’s books and sayings are out of copyright. Some reckless publisher ought to take a flyer and reprint them.

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