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On April 10, 1922 a strange new publication appeared on the Berkeley
campus. “Herewith,” its anonymous editors proclaimed,
is presented “The Laughing Horse,” a magazine of polemics,
phillippics [sic], satire, burlesque and all around destructive
criticism, edited, written and financed by four more or less like-minded
young persons, who find education as it is perpetrated in America, and
especially at California, a somewhat gaudy farce with lachrymose
overtones but withal a spectacle par excellence.
We propose to take nothing too seriously, to hold nothing sacred, to
subject anything or everything which seems to affect too pontifical an
air, too solemn an attitude, to ribald ridicule. Our aim is frankly
destructive, regardless of the attitude of the English Club on that kind
of criticism. We are not reformers; we are not architects. We are the
wrecking gang, hurlers of brickbats, shooters of barbs, tossers of
custard pie. We are not bitter; we are not ill-natured; we are not
soreheads. We are simply tired of the incessant bleating of
professorial poloniuses and their spineless imitators, the blather of
campus politicians, the palpable tosh of [the Daily] Cal. and Pelly
[Pelican] and Occident editorials, the silly chatter of our half-baked
Hobsons, Bryans and Orison Swett Mardens. We seek not simply to shock
by our derisive irreverence of sacred things which are largely
ridiculous in their very nature, but merely to come out with a merry
horse-laugh.
The editors listed themselves as Jane Cavendish, Noel Jason, Bill Murphy
and someone known only as L13, but they were in reality Spud Johnson and
two friends: Roy Chanslor and James Van Rensselaer, Jr. The publication
was financed by fifty dollars which Johnson had managed to save from his
brief stint as a reporter for the Richmond Independent. It was printed
“on Genuine Wrapping Paper” and cost twenty-five cents an issue. The
publication sold well enough to pay their bills, and to allow the
editors to come out with a second issue the following month.
A native of Colorado, Walter Willard Johnson arrived in Berkeley in 1920
after two years at Colorado State Teachers College and a brief stay at
the University of Colorado in Boulder. He came to the University of
California determined to connect with the West Coast bohemians and
literati, and found his entree in the person of poet Witter Bynner. Little is known of how the two came to meet; by 1920 Bynner was
no longer teaching at the University, but he had maintained his rooms in
the Carlton Hotel. Despite Johnson’s continued influence as chief
editor (and his on-going sexual relationship with Bynner), The
Laughing Horse did not shrink from criticizing the effete
aestheticism that Bynner represented at the time. The attacks could be
pointed and frankly homophobic:
In the University of California, the gals outnumber the boys at
least five to one in all courses in art, literature and education.
Literature is looked upon as a plaything for women and half-baked
“queer-ducks,” who sleep in baby-blue silk pajamas. Real men as a rule
take courses in bookkeeping or plumbing or the selling of malthoid
roofing and leave literature to the women and the men who should have
been women.... Show me a man who is forever prattling about art and the
little theatre and the poetic drama, and seven times out of ten I will
behold an ardent admirer of root beer and a frequenter of maiden ladies’
teas.
Though Spud Johnson was editing the journal long-distance from Sante Fe,
The Laughing Horse was nominally being published at the
University of California, and the UC administration viewed each issue
with growing alarm. Finally, with the fourth issue, which appeared in
December of 1922, the University felt it had to act, and
banned the publication from the campus.
Links on This Page
Read More About It
- The Laughing Horse (Berkeley, CA, etc.), vol. 1 - 20 (April 1922-December 1938)
- Spud Johnson. History of The Laughing Horse ([Taos, New Mexico : South Dakota Review, 1968])
- Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall. Spud Johnson & Laughing
Horse (Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 1994)
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