H.L. Mencken
(1880-1956)
by Doug Linder (2004)
Journalist H. L.
Mencken
described himself as “absolutely devoid of what is called religious
feeling.” He attended a Methodist Sunday
School as a child but only, he wrote in “The Schooling of a
Theologian,” to
allow his father—an unbeliever—to have free time for a nap. The human race is so obviously imperfect, he
asserted, that man could not possibly have been the creation of an
omnipotent
God, but—at best—the bungled effort of “an incompetent committee of
gods.”
Surveying American
religious
life, Mencken found it to be a nearly endless source of material for
his
iconoclastic pen. A recent Mencken
biographer calls him “one of the last American intellectuals to speak
out
forcefully, pungently, and satirically against the follies of religion.”
The most frequent
targets of
Mencken’s flamboyant wit were fundamentalists—largely because of their
constant
efforts to employ the power of government to enforce their moral views. Like Darrow, Mencken could not tolerate
intolerance. He believed deeply that
individuals should be left to pursue happiness as they saw fit, with as
little
interference as possible from government or anyone else.
In 1922, Mencken declared, “In am, in brief,
a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right
that is
one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the
moment)
to be the truth.”
Fundamentalists, in
the view of
Mencken, belonged to the great masses of Americans who neither
appreciated, nor
contributed to, the best of American culture. They, like most people,
were
ignorant, ignoble, and cowardly. Moreover, fundamentalists lacked the
intelligence to understand their own follies and superstitions. “Homo boobiens is a fundamentalist for
the precise reason he is uneducable,” Mencken wrote.
Fundamentalists, he believed, found comfort
in the imbecilities of their creed and “no amount of proof of the
falsity of
their beliefs will have the slightest influence on them.”
They accepted Genesis because it offers a
cosmogony “so simple that even a yokel can grasp it”—it holds “the
irresistible
reasonableness of the nonsensical.”
Mencken contended
that if
“Genesis embodies a mathematically accurate statement of what took
place the
week of June 3, 4004 B.C.” then “all of
modern science is nonsense” On that
point, he had no dispute with most other intellectuals of his time. Mencken differed from other critics of
fundamentalism, however, in his insistence that science and
Christianity in
general could not be reconciled. One
supernatural event is just as implausible as another, he believed, and
once one
part of the Bible is rejected the “divine authority of the whole
disappears and
there is no more evidence that Christianity is a revealed religion than
there
is that Mohammedanism is.”
For Mencken, the
Scopes trial was
the journalistic opportunity of a lifetime.
In a letter from Dayton, the
iconoclastic
editor of American Mercury and
columnist for the Baltimore Sun told
a friend that he found the chaotic scene in Dayton almost too good to be true. “The thing is genuinely fabulous,” he
enthused. “I have stored up enough
material to last me twenty years.”
Everywhere he ventured in the Tennessee
hill country he encountered faith healers, religious fanatics, ape
handlers,
medicine men, and conspiracy theorists: all inviting targets for his
venomous
pen.
Before journeying
from Baltimore to Dayton,
Mencken worried that he might have to create humorous material for his
trial
dispatches rather than just wander about and observe.
He and poet Edgar Lee Masters (perhaps best
known for his Spoon River Anthology,
but also a former law partner of Clarence Darrow) prepared and printed
a
handbill announcing that an imagined “fundamentalist and miracle
worker,” Dr.
Elmer Chubb, would be coming to Dayton for a “public demonstration of
healing,
casting out devils, and prophesying.”
The flyer, complete with numerous made-up testimonials, bragged
that
“Dr. Chubb will allow himself to be bitten by any poisonous snake, gila
monster, or other reptile. He will also
drink any poison brought to him.” The
handbill also declared that Chubb will “preach in Aramaic, Hebrew,
Greek,
Latin, Coptic, Egyptian, and in the lost languages of the Etruscans and
the
Hittites.” Once in Dayton, Mencken hired a boy to pass
out the
one thousand copies of the handbill, and then waited to see what would
happen. Tennesseans, he soon discovered,
found the promises of Dr. Chubb to be much like those of another dozen
or more
publicity-seeking evangelists roaming Rhea County. They simply shrugged and went about their
business.
Mencken shaped, as
well as
reported, the Scopes trial. On May 14,
1925, he met Darrow in Richmond,
and—according to one trial historian—urged him to offer his services to
the
defense. Hours after discussing the case
with Mencken, Darrow telegraphed Scopes’s local attorney, John Randolph
Neal,
expressing his willingness to “help the defense of Professor Scopes in
any way
you may suggest or direct.” After
Darrow
joined the defense team, Mencken continued to offer advice. He told defense lawyers, for example, “Nobody gives a damn about that yap
schoolteacher” and urged them instead to “make a fool out of Bryan.”
Mencken’s active
interest in the
defense case is surprising in light of his views published in The Nation just a week before the Scopes
trial began. In his Nation
column, he insisted, “No principle is at stake at Dayton
save the principle that school teachers, like plumbers, should stick to
the job
that is set before them, and not go roving around the house, breaking
windows,
raiding the cellar, and demoralizing children.”
The issue of free speech “irrelevant”: “When a pedagogue takes
his oath
of office, he renounces his right to free speech quite as certainly as
a bishop
does, or a colonel in the army, or an editorial writer of a newspaper. He becomes a paid propagandist of certain
definite doctrines…and every time he departs from them deliberately he
deliberately swindles his employers.”
Mencken argued that states had the right to make curricular
choices
based what might have the greatest “utility” for students.
“What could be of greater utility to the son
of a Tennessee mountaineer,” he asked, “than an education making him a
good
Tennesseean, content with his father, at peace with his neighbors,
dutiful to
the local religion, and docile under the local mores?”
After Mencken stepped off
the train in Dayton one hot afternoon
in early
July, he ran into William Jennings Bryan and—to Bryan’s delight—reaffirmed his
printed
opinion that the Butler Act was constitutional.
The Commoner announced to a crowd that gathered around the two
men as
they chatted, “This Mencken is the best newspaperman in the country!” It was an opinion that Bryan would not hold for long. Following his chance meeting with Bryan, Mencken
completed
his stroll through town, and then retreated to his hotel room, where
four
quarts of scotch awaited him. Stripped
to his shorts, he began typing what was—especially by the standards of
this
Eastern and famously bigoted elitist—a flattering portrait of Dayton:
The
town, I must
confess, greatly surprised me. I
expected to find a squalid Southern village, with darkies snoozing on
the
horseblocks, pigs rooting under the houses and the inhabitants full of
hookworm
and malaria. What I found was a country
town full of charm and even beauty—a somewhat smallish but nevertheless
very
attractive Westminister or Belair….
Nor is there any
evidence in the town of that poisonous spirit which usually shows
itself when
Christian men gather to defend the great doctrine of their faith. I have heard absolutely no whisper that
Scopes is in the pay of the Jesuits, or that the whiskey trust is
backing him,
or that he is egged on by Jews who manufacture lascivious moving
pictures. On the contrary, the
Evolutionists and
Anti-Evolutionists seem to be on the best of terms, and it is hard to
distinguish one group from another.
The
tone of Mencken’s reports
soon changed as the trial began. He
noted more than once that the conviction of Scopes was a foregone
conclusion. The people of this Christian
valley, he wrote, “are simply unable to imagine a man who rejects the
literal
authority of the Bible. The most they
can conjure up, straining until they are red in the face, is a man who
is in
error about the meaning of this or that text.
Thus one accused of heresy among them is like one accused of
boiling his
grandmother to make soap in Maryland.” A day of watching jury selection convinced
Mencken that “it would certainly be spitting in the eye of reason” to
call the
Scopes jury impartial. As for trial
itself, it seemed to have “something of the air of a religious orgy.” Judge Raulston, who Mencken noted was a
candidate for re-election, “postured before the yokels like a clown in
a
ten-cent sideshow.” Thomas Stewart, the
chief prosecutor, acted like “a convert at a Billy Sunday revival.”
Mencken saved his
most vicious
attacked for Bryan. Bryan’s
real fear, he speculated, was education because “wherever it spreads
his trade
begins to fall off, and wherever it flourishes, he is only a poor
clown.” He dreams of “a world unanimously
sure of
Heaven and unanimously idiotic on this earth.”
He hopes, Mencken wrote, to become “the peasants’ Pope” and so
attempts
to “shake and inflame these poor ignoramuses.”
In his cruelest line of all, he said of Bryan: “It is tragedy indeed, to
begin life
as a hero and to end it as a buffoon.”
Observing the trial
firsthand
prompted Mencken to reconsider the views of the case he had expressed
in The
Nation. He wrote glowingly of
Darrow’s speech warning that upholding the Butler Act would start the
nation
down a slippery slope of intolerance.
“If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a
crime to
teach in the public schools,” Darrow said, “tomorrow you can make it a
crime to
teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a
crime to
teach it in the hustings or in the churches.”
Mencken complained the following day, “The net effect of
Clarence Darrow’s
great speech yesterday seems to be precisely the same as if he had
bawled in up
in a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.”
Mencken lamented, “The morons in the
audience, when it was over, simply hissed it.”
He had even more lavish praise for Dudley Malone’s powerful (“We
stand
with truth”) speech in support of the defense’s motion to allow expert
testimony. Striding down the courtroom
aisle to congratulate the defense lawyer after his speech, Mencken
exclaimed as
he wiped his brow, “Dudley, that was
the
loudest speech I ever heard.” In print,
he called it “the best presentation of the case against the
fundamentalist
rubbish that I have ever heard.” In his
July 17 report from Dayton,
Mencken wrote that Malone’s words “roared out of the open windows like
the
sound of artillery practice and alarmed the moonshiners and catamounts
on
distant peaks.”
Because Mencken’s
daily trial
reports were reprinted in the Chattanooga News, his constant
barrage of
insults directed at Bryan
and his followers did not escape the notice of “the local primates.” Resentment against the acerbic reporter
built to dangerous levels. Cries of “Run
him out of town!” were heard on Dayton street corners.
Chief Commissioner A. P. Haggard confided to the press, “I hope
nobody
lays hands on him.” Haggard revealed to
reporters that he was forced to intervene and persuade a mob, bent on
tar and
feathering the hypercynical reporter, to disperse.
“I stopped them once, but I may not be there
to dissuade them again if it occurs to them again,” Haggard commented. Concerns about Mencken’s safety led Kelso
Rice, bailiff for the Scopes trial, to invite Mencken to a meeting at
Robinson’s drugstore where a committee of citizens planned to voice
their
complaints against him, although apparently the journalist never showed
up.
Whether for fear of
his own
safety, or simply a belief that nothing of interest was likely to
happen on the
final day or two of trial, Mencken packed his bags and left Dayton on
the
weekend before Darrow’s dramatic examination of Bryan on the courthouse
lawn.
“All that remains of the great cause of the State of Tennessee against
the
infidel Scopes is the final business of bumping off the defendant,” he
wrote in
his last report. Then he sounded a dark
warning:
Let no one
mistake [the trial] for comedy, farcical
thought it may be in all its details. It
serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in
these
forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and
devoid of
conscience. Tennessee, challenging him
too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp
meetings
and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by sworn officers of the law. There are other states that had better look
to their arsenals before the Hun is at their gates.
Back
in Baltimore, Mencken declared
the Scopes trial “a great victory.” A
few days later, when news reached him of Bryan’s sudden death, his
private
words in response were characteristically hard-edged: “Well, we killed
the son
of a bitch.” His public statement on
Bryan’s passing revealed Mencken’s willingness to turn even the most
somber
news into an occasion for a joke: “God aimed at Darrow, missed, and hit
Bryan
instead.” He continued to launch
merciless attacks on Bryan in the weeks following the Commoner’s death.
One
Scopes trial historian, remarking on the Bryan post-mortems, wrote that
Mencken
“succeeded in shocking Bryan’s admirers as severely as if he had
literally
scalped Bryan’s corpse and done a war dance around it, waving his
bloody
trophy.”
Mencken never ceased
his advocacy
for free speech. A year after the Scopes
trial, he and Scopes defense attorney Arthur Garfield Hays traveled to
Massachusetts where they attempted—in defiance of local blue laws—to
sell
banned books in Boston Commons. He
continued to cite the Scopes trial as evidence that civil libertarians
must be
forever vigilant. “The evil that men do
lives after them,” Mencken declared.
“Bryan, in his malice, started something that will not be easy
to
stop.”