an eminent man.......................

Most of the rewards of the Presidency, in these degenerate days, have come to be very trashy.  The President continues, of course, to be an eminent man, but only in the sense that Jack Dempsey, Lindbergh, Babe Ruth and Henry Ford are eminent men.  He sees little of the really intelligent and amusing people of the country, most of them, in fact, make it a sort of point of honor to scorn him and avoid him.  His time is put in mainly with shabby politicians and other such designing fellows—in brief, with rogues and ignoramuses.  When he takes a little holiday his customary companions are vermin that no fastidious man would consort with—dry Senators with panting thirsts, the proprietors of bad newspapers in worse towns, grafter praying on the suffering farmers, pawer and movie magnates, prehensile labor leaders, the more pliable sort of journalists, and so on.

-Henry Louis Mencken, from his 8/17/1931 essay, Imperial Purple