“When I hear artists or authors making fun of business men I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.”
— Author
Unidentified
I almost missed this quote entirely. A few years ago, I was deep in a frustrating stretch — freelancing, scraping together income, quietly resenting friends who had “real jobs” and seemingly no imagination. A mentor of mine, a retired editor with an office full of cracked paperbacks, handed me a photocopied page from an old quotation anthology. He said nothing. He just slid it across the desk while I was mid-complaint. The line about the regiment and the cooks stopped me cold. I read it twice, then a third time. It wasn’t an insult — it was a mirror. That small, anonymous sentence reframed something I had been getting completely wrong, and it arrived at exactly the right moment. That’s the strange power of a well-aimed quote. Now let’s trace where this one actually came from — because the story behind it is as interesting as the line itself.
The Quote, Front and Center
Before diving into the history, let’s sit with the quote itself. The imagery is sharp and immediately legible. A military regiment depends entirely on its cooks. Without food, soldiers cannot march, fight, or survive. The regimental band, meanwhile, provides morale and ceremony — important, yes, but not survival-critical. So when the band mocks the cooks, they mock the very infrastructure keeping them alive. The analogy maps cleanly onto creative life. Artists and authors depend on commerce, on the business ecosystem that funds, distributes, and sustains their work. When they ridicule businesspeople, they ridicule the system feeding them. The quote doesn’t attack artists — it simply asks them to recognize their own position honestly.
The Earliest Known Appearance
Tracking this quote’s origin requires patience. The earliest verified appearance dates to 1942. Mencken placed it under the topic heading “Business.” However, he did not claim authorship. Instead, he labeled it with a term indicating the source matched the previous entry — which itself carried the designation “Author unidentified.” This detail matters enormously. Mencken was a compiler here, not a creator. He gathered the quote from somewhere, attributed it to no one, and moved on.
Two years later, in 1944, Robert E. Adams published a separate compilation titled How to Get Along in This World. Adams included the same quote and labeled it simply “Anon.” This independent anonymous attribution reinforces the conclusion that no known author existed by the early 1940s. Additionally, a 1952 newspaper printing in The Greenville News of South Carolina listed the quote under “AUTHOR UNIDENTIFIED.” Multiple independent sources, therefore, consistently pointed toward anonymity during this early period.
How the Misattribution to Mencken Happened
Here’s where things get genuinely interesting. Mencken’s name appeared on the cover of the 1942 anthology as editor. Readers browsing the book naturally associated quotes inside it with Mencken himself. This is a classic trap in quotation history. The editor curates; the reader assumes the editor created.
The confusion solidified in 1986. That year, The Quotable Lawyer, edited by David S. Shrager and Elizabeth Frost, included the quote. The entry listed Mencken’s name and his anthology as the source. Critically, it failed to note that Mencken himself had labeled the remark anonymous. For many readers, that omission settled the question. Mencken said it. Case closed. Except the case was never actually closed — it was just misread.
Four years later, in 1990, A Dictionary of Business Quotations compiled by Simon James and Robert Parker returned the quote to anonymous attribution. However, by then the Mencken association had already spread. Once a famous name attaches to a quote, dislodging it requires real effort. The internet later amplified the misattribution further, as sites copied from each other without checking primary sources.
Who Was H. L. Mencken, and Why Does His Name Attract Quotes?
Understanding the misattribution requires understanding Mencken’s reputation. Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) was one of America’s sharpest and most acerbic cultural critics. He wrote for the Baltimore Sun for decades and co-founded The American Mercury magazine. His style combined wit, provocation, and a genuine contempt for intellectual laziness. Mencken skewered politicians, preachers, and pretentious artists with equal enthusiasm.
Because Mencken wrote so prolifically and so quotably, his name became a magnet for unattributed witticisms. When a quote sounds clever, acerbic, and slightly contrarian, people instinctively reach for Mencken’s name. The regiment-and-cooks quote fits that profile perfectly. It’s sharp. It deflates pretension. It carries a military metaphor that feels both precise and unexpected. Of course people assumed Mencken wrote it.
Mencken genuinely respected certain kinds of commerce and despised what he called the “booboisie” — his term for the smug, anti-intellectual middle class. However, he also understood that artists who sneered at business often depended on it completely. The regiment-and-cooks sentiment aligns with his worldview, which is another reason the attribution felt plausible. But feeling plausible and being accurate are very different things.
The Deeper Meaning: Artists, Business, and Mutual Dependence
Let’s spend time with the quote’s actual argument. It makes a structural claim about interdependence. Artists and authors often cultivate an identity built on opposition to commerce. This opposition feels authentic. It signals purity, seriousness, commitment to the work over the paycheck. However, the regiment metaphor exposes the contradiction embedded in that posture.
Consider the full chain. A novelist needs a publisher. The publisher needs distributors. Distributors need retailers. Retailers need customers with disposable income. That income comes from an economy built largely by businesspeople. Meanwhile, a painter needs galleries, collectors, and grant organizations — all of which operate through financial systems. Even the most avant-garde artist working outside commercial channels typically relies on some form of institutional or personal funding.
The band-and-cooks metaphor captures this dependency with elegant economy. The band isn’t useless — music matters, morale matters, ceremony matters. However, the band cannot survive without the cooks. Mocking the cooks while eating their food is not just ungrateful — it’s strategically foolish. The quote doesn’t demand that artists love business or abandon criticism. It simply asks for honest self-awareness about who keeps the regiment fed.
Variations and Related Ideas in the Historical Record
This quote appears consistently in its original form across all verified sources. Unlike many anonymous sayings, it hasn’t spawned widely divergent variations. The regiment metaphor is too precise to easily rephrase. Change “band” to “musicians” and you lose the military register. Change “cooks” to “chefs” and the regimental flavor softens. The original phrasing locks itself in.
However, related ideas appear throughout literary and philosophical history. Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century writer and lexicographer, famously remarked that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Johnson made the commercial dimension of writing explicit without apology. Similarly, George Orwell wrote directly about the economics of authorship, insisting that writers who pretended money didn’t matter were either lying or independently wealthy. The regiment-and-cooks quote fits within this tradition of honest reckoning with creative commerce.
Why This Quote Still Resonates Today
The cultural landscape has shifted dramatically since the 1940s. Source However, the tension the quote describes has only intensified. Social media now gives artists and authors a platform to perform their disdain for commerce in real time. Meanwhile, the business infrastructure supporting creative work has grown more complex and more essential.
Streaming platforms, publishing conglomerates, gallery networks, and algorithmic distribution systems now mediate almost every artist-audience relationship. Additionally, the gig economy has pushed more creative workers into entrepreneurial roles whether they wanted that identity or not. Therefore, the question the quote raises — can you mock the system feeding you? — feels more urgent now than it did in 1942.
The quote also resonates because it avoids taking sides simplistically. It doesn’t say artists are wrong to have values that differ from business values. It doesn’t say commerce is noble or that profit is the measure of worth. Instead, it points to a specific behavioral contradiction — mocking the people whose work makes your own work possible. That precision is what gives the line its staying power.
The Lesson for Anyone Working in a Creative Field
If you create anything — writing, music, visual art, design, film — you operate inside an economic system you didn’t build and can’t entirely escape. Furthermore, some of the people running that system are doing genuinely important work. The editor who fights for your book’s budget matters. The gallery owner who cultivates collectors matters. The producer who understands distribution matters. None of these people are your enemy simply because they think about money.
This doesn’t mean surrendering artistic integrity. Source However, it does mean extending the same complexity to businesspeople that artists ask others to extend to them. The regiment needs the band. The regiment also needs the cooks. Both roles carry dignity. Both deserve respect.
Conclusion: Anonymous, But Not Accidental
We don’t know who wrote this quote. The honest answer, supported by every verified source, is that it arrived in the historical record already anonymous. Mencken gathered it, labeled it unidentified, and moved on. Later readers misread his role and handed him credit he never claimed. The 1986 misattribution in The Quotable Lawyer accelerated the confusion, and the internet cemented it.
However, the anonymity doesn’t diminish the quote. If anything, it gives the line a kind of collective ownership. Someone — possibly a working writer, possibly a soldier, possibly a frustrated businessperson tired of being caricatured — looked at the creative world’s attitude toward commerce and found the perfect metaphor. The band mocking the cooks. The image is so precise, so fair, and so quietly devastating that it has outlasted its author entirely.
That, in the end, is the mark of a genuinely good line. Source It doesn’t need a famous name to survive. It just needs to be true. This one has been circulating for over eighty years. Expect it to keep going.