The Triumph of Criticism
Over a period of eighty years, hundreds of critics have been laboring to improve the taste of the American people in music, literature, drama and politics. And today, as a result, Nevin, Tobani and Tosti are program favorites over Brahms, Beethoven and Bach; James Oliver Curwood is thirty thousand times more popular than James Branch Cabell; Anne Nichols is fifty thousand times more popular than Hauptmann; and Calvin Coolidge is President of the United States. [George Jean Nathan, The House of Satan (London: Knopf, 1926), p. 99.]