[Paleopsych] Mr. Mencken's Coverage of the Scopes Trial
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Mr. Mencken's Coverage of the Scopes Trial
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/menck01.htm et seq.
[Here are thirteen newspaper columns Mr. Mencken wrote on the trial. These
appear to have been taken from Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, _The Impossible H.L.
Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories_ (NY: Doubleday, 1999),
since the site also contains Gore Vidal's foreword to the anthology.
[S.T. Joshi's later anthology, _H.L. Mencken on Religion_ (Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 2002), contains, in addition, an earlier article, "The
Tennessee Circus," _Baltimore Sun_, 1925.6.15. It also has an article from _The
Nation_, "In Tennessee," 1925.7.1, and a further _Baltimore Sun_ article,
"Round Two," 1925.8.10, and his substantial reworking of the obituary of Bryan
for the American Mercury, 1925.10. It was revised again for _Prejudices: Fifth
Series_ (NY: Knopf, 1926) and yet again for _A Mencken Chrestomathy_ (NY:
Knopf, 1949), the last two revisions being slight.
[The final version of the obituary begins, "Has it been duly marked by
historians that William Jennings Bryan's last secular act on the globe of sin
was to catch flies?" It is one of Mr. Mencken's masterpieces as is the report
below for July 13, "Yearning Mountaineers' Souls Need Reconversion Nightly,
Mencken Finds." It was also reworked for _Prejudices: Fifth Series_ and again
for the Chrestomathy, now entitled "The Hills of Zion," an even greater
masterpiece.]
[In the Chrestomathy, Mr. Mencken added "My adventures as a newspaper
correspondent at the Scopes trial are told in my Newspaper Days, New York,
1943. pp. 214-38.]
Homo Neanderthalensis
by H.L. Mencken
* Index: [1]Historical Writings (Mencken)
* Home to [2]Positive Atheism
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 29, 1925)
I
Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee
evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention
dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very
narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects
everyone -- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows
more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more
civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated
minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of
them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized -- though I
should not like to be put to giving names -- but the great masses of
men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was
at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they
are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is
worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire
among them to increase their knowledge.
Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of
human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part
in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons
and usufructs modern medicine may offer -- that is, provided he is too
poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a
bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public
libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has
at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more
tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers,
sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do
with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in
the fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds
of the air.
On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with
immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble
stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority
of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's
possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by
them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever
heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their
hands.
II
The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against
the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than
conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very
accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to
the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life.
Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is
recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders -- that no
man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they
propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man
infamous -- by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then
by law.
Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in
them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than
the ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala
often attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states.
Their followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the
pack is on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their
puissance cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to
the mob as surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is
precisely the mob's hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the
level of their comprehension is of the devil. A glass of wine delights
civilized men; they themselves, drinking it, would get drunk. Ergo,
wine must be prohibited. The hypothesis of evolution is credited by
all men of education; they themselves can't understand it. Ergo, its
teaching must be put down.
This simple fact explains such phenomena as the Tennessee buffoonery.
Nothing else can. We must think of human progress, not as of something
going on in the race in general, but as of something going on in a
small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and
then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an
armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a
French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The
minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive -- and a
few are enough to carry on.
III
The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to
discern. He hates it because it is complex -- because it puts an
unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus
his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short
cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even
obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a
long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary
concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp
the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity
of chiropractic among the submerged -- and of osteopathy, Christian
Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they
are simple -- and every man prefers what he can understand to what
puzzles and dismays him.
The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is
explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men
toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest
outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of
thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the
city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci.
But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp
it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man,
the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it
with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.
Politics and the fine arts repeat the story. The issues that the
former throw up are often so complex that, in the present state of
human knowledge, they must remain impenetrable, even to the most
enlightened men. How much easier to follow a mountebank with a
shibboleth -- a Coolidge, a Wilson or a Roosevelt! The arts, like the
sciences, demand special training, often very difficult. But in jazz
there are simple rhythms, comprehensible even to savages.
IV
What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two
sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two
genera -- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of
taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is
thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to
the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has
to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage
is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not
apprehended at all.
That is why Beethoven survives. Of the 110,000,000 so-called human
beings who now live in the United States, flogged and crazed by
Coolidge, Rotary, the Ku Klux and the newspapers, it is probable that
at least 108,000,000 have never heard of him at all. To these
immortals, made in God's image, one of the greatest artists the human
race has ever produced is not even a name. So far as they are
concerned he might as well have died at birth. The gorgeous and
incomparable beauties that he created are nothing to them. They get no
value out of the fact that he existed. They are completely unaware of
what he did in the world, and would not be interested if they were
told.
The fact saves good Ludwig's bacon. His music survives because it lies
outside the plane of the popular apprehension, like the colors beyond
violet or the concept of honor. If it could be brought within range,
it would at once arouse hostility. Its complexity would challenge; its
lace of moral purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement
to put it down, and Baptist clergymen would range the land denouncing
it, and in the end some poor musician, taken in the un-American act of
playing it, would be put on trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers, and
railroaded to the calaboose.
_________________________________________________________________
The Scopes Trial
Mencken Finds Daytonians
Full of Sickening Doubts
About Value of Publicity
by H.L. Mencken
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 9, 1925)
Dayton, Tenn., July 9. -- On the eve of the great contest Dayton is
full of sickening surges and tremors of doubt. Five or six weeks ago,
when the infidel Scopes was first laid by the heels, there was no
uncertainty in all this smiling valley. The town boomers leaped to the
assault as one man. Here was an unexampled, almost a miraculous chance
to get Dayton upon the front pages, to make it talked about, to put it
upon the map. But how now?
Today, with the curtain barely rung up and the worst buffooneries to
come, it is obvious to even town boomers that getting upon the map,
like patriotism, is not enough. The getting there must be managed
discreetly, adroitly, with careful regard to psychological niceties.
The boomers of Dayton, alas, had no skill at such things, and the
experts they called in were all quacks. The result now turns the
communal liver to water. Two months ago the town was obscure and
happy. Today it is a universal joke.
I have been attending the permanent town meeting that goes on in
Robinson's drug store, trying to find out what the town optimists have
saved from the wreck. All I can find is a sort of mystical confidence
that God will somehow come to the rescue to reward His old and
faithful partisans as they deserve -- that good will flow eventually
out of what now seems to be heavily evil. More specifically, it is
believed that settlers will be attracted to the town as to some refuge
from the atheism of the great urban Sodoms and Gomorrahs.
But will these refugees bring any money with them? Will they buy lots
and build houses, Will they light the fires of the cold and silent
blast furnace down the railroad tracks? On these points, I regret to
report, optimism has to call in theology to aid it. Prayer can
accomplish a lot. It can cure diabetes, find lost pocketbooks and
restrain husbands from beating their wives. But is prayer made any
more efficacious by giving a circus first? Coming to this thought,
Dayton begins to sweat.
The town, I confess, greatly surprised me. I expected to find a
squalid Southern village, with darkies snoozing on the horse-blocks,
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 Westminster or
Balair.
The houses are surrounded by pretty gardens, with cool green lawns and
stately trees. The two chief streets are paved from curb to curb. The
stores carry good stocks and have a metropolitan air, especially the
drug, book, magazine, sporting goods and soda-water emporium of the
estimable Robinson. A few of the town ancients still affect galluses
and string ties, but the younger bucks are very nattily turned out.
Scopes himself, even in his shirt sleeves, would fit into any college
campus in America save that of Harvard alone.
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 whisky trust is
backing him, or that he is egged on by the Jews who manufacture
lascivious moving pictures. On the contrary, the Evolutionists and the
Anti-Evolutionists seem to be on the best of terms, and it is hard in
a group to distinguish one from another.
The basic issues of the case, indeed, seem to be very little discussed
at Dayton. What interests everyone is its mere strategy. By what
device, precisely, will Bryan trim old Clarence Darrow? Will he do it
gently and with every delicacy of forensics, or will he wade in on
high gear and make a swift butchery of it? For no one here seems to
doubt that Bryan will win -- that is, if the bout goes to a finish.
What worries the town is the fear that some diabolical higher power
will intervene on Darrow's side -- that is, before Bryan heaves him
through the ropes.
The lack of Christian heat that I have mentioned is probably due in
part to the fact that the fundamentalists are in overwhelming majority
as far as the eye can reach -- according to most local statisticians,
in a majority of at least nine-tenths. There are, in fact, only two
downright infidels in all Rhea county, and one of them is charitably
assumed to be a bit balmy. The other, a yokel roosting far back in the
hills, is probably simply a poet got into the wrong pew. The town
account of him is to the effect that he professes to regard death as a
beautiful adventure.
When the local ecclesiastics begin alarming the peasantry with word
pictures of the last sad scene, and sulphurous fumes begin to choke
even Unitarians, this skeptical rustic comes forward with his argument
that it is foolish to be afraid of what one knows so little about --
that, after all, there is no more genuine evidence that anyone will
ever go to hell than there is that the Volstead act will ever be
enforced.
Such blasphemous ideas naturally cause talk in a Baptist community,
but both of the infidels are unmolested. Rhea county, in fact, is
proud of its tolerance, and apparently with good reason. The klan has
never got a foothold here, though it rages everywhere else in
Tennessee. When the first kleagles came in they got the cold shoulder,
and pretty soon they gave up the county as hopeless. It is run today
not by anonymous daredevils in white nightshirts, but by well-heeled
Free-masons in decorous white aprons. In Dayton alone there are sixty
thirty-second-degree Masons -- an immense quota for so small a town.
They believe in keeping the peace, and so even the stray Catholics of
the town are treated politely, though everyone naturally regrets they
are required to report to the Pope once a week.
It is probably this unusual tolerance, and not any extraordinary
passion for the integrity of Genesis, that has made Dayton the scene
of a celebrated case, and got its name upon the front pages, and
caused its forward-looking men to begin to wonder uneasily if all
advertising is really good advertising. The trial of Scopes is
possible here simply because it can be carried on here without heat --
because no one will lose any sleep even if the devil comes to the aid
of Darrow and Malone, and Bryan gets a mauling. The local
intelligentsia venerate Bryan as a Christian, but it was not as a
Christian that they called him in, but as one adept at attracting the
newspaper boys -- in brief, as a showman. As I have said, they now
begin to mistrust the show, but they still believe that he will make a
good one, win or lose.
Elsewhere, North or South, the combat would become bitter. Here it
retains the lofty qualities of the duello. I gather the notion,
indeed, that the gentlemen who are most active in promoting it are
precisely the most lacking in hot conviction -- that it is, in its
local aspects, rather a joust between neutrals than a battle between
passionate believers. Is it a mere coincidence that the town clergy
have been very carefully kept out of it? There are several Baptist
brothers here of such powerful gifts that when they begin belaboring
sinners the very rats of the alleys flee to the hills. They preach
dreadfully. But they are not heard from today. By some process to me
unknown they have been induced to shut up -- a far harder business, I
venture, than knocking out a lion with a sandbag. But the sixty
thirty-second degree Masons of Dayton have somehow achieved it.
Thus the battle joins and the good red sun shines down. Dayton lies in
a fat and luxuriant valley. The bottoms are green with corn, pumpkins
and young orchards and the hills are full of reliable moonshiners, all
save one of them Christian men. We are not in the South here, but
hanging on to the North. Very little cotton is grown in the valley.
The people in politics are Republicans and put Coolidge next to
Lincoln and John Wesley. The fences are in good repair. The roads are
smooth and hard. The scene is set for a high-toned and even somewhat
swagger combat. When it is over all the participants save Bryan will
shake hands.
_________________________________________________________________
Impossibility of Obtaining Fair Jury
Insures Scopes' Conviction,
Says Mencken
by H.L. Mencken
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 10, 1925)
Dayton, Tenn., July 10. -- The trial of the infidel Scopes, beginning
here this hot, lovely morning, will greatly resemble, I suspect, the
trial of a prohibition agent accused of mayhem in Union Hill, N.J.
That is to say, it will be conducted with the most austere regard for
the highest principles of jurisprudence. Judge and jury will go to
extreme lengths to assure the prisoner the last and least of his
rights. He will be protected in his person and feelings by the full
military and naval power of the State of Tennessee. No one will be
permitted to pull his nose, to pray publicly for his condemnation or
even to make a face at him. But all the same he will be bumped off
inevitably when the time comes, and to the applause of all
right-thinking men.
The real trial, in truth, will not begin until Scopes is convicted and
ordered to the hulks. Then the prisoner will be the Legislature of
Tennessee, and the jury will be that great fair, unimpassioned body of
enlightened men which has already decided that a horse hair put into a
bottle will turn into a snake and that the Kaiser started the late
war. What goes on here is simply a sort of preliminary hearing, with
music by the village choir. For it will be no more possible in this
Christian valley to get a jury unprejudiced against Scopes than would
be possible in Wall Street to get a jury unprejudiced against a
Bolshevik.
I speak of prejudice in its purely philosophical sense. As I wrote
yesterday, there is an almost complete absence, in these pious hills,
of the ordinary and familiar malignancy of Christian men. If the Rev.
Dr. Crabbe ever spoke of bootleggers as humanely and affectionately as
the town theologians speak of Scopes, and even Darrow and Malone, his
employers would pelt him with their spyglasses and sit on him until
the ambulance came from Mount Hope. There is absolutely no bitterness
on tap. But neither is there any doubt. It has been decided by
acclamation, with only a few infidels dissenting, that the hypothesis
of evolution is profane, inhumane and against God, and all that
remains is to translate that almost unanimous decision into the jargon
of the law and so have done.
The town boomers have banqueted Darrow as well as Bryan, but there is
no mistaking which of the two has the crowd, which means the venire of
tried and true men. Bryan has been oozing around the country since his
first day here, addressing this organization and that, presenting the
indubitable Word of God in his caressing, ingratiating way, and so
making unanimity doubly unanimous. From the defense yesterday came
hints that this was making hay before the sun had legally begun to
shine -- even that it was a sort of contempt of court. But no
Daytonian believes anything of the sort. What Bryan says doesn't seem
to these congenial Baptists and Methodists to be argument; it seems to
be a mere graceful statement of the obvious.
Meanwhile, reinforcements continue to come in, some of them from
unexpected sources. I had the honor of being present yesterday when
Col. Patrick Callahan, of Louisville, marched up at the head of his
cohort of 250,000,000 Catholic fundamentalists. The two colonels
embraced, exchanged a few military and legal pleasantries and then
retired up a steep stairway to the office of the Hicks brothers to
discuss strategy. Colonel Callahan's followers were present, of
course, only by a legal fiction; the town of Dayton would not hold so
large an army. In the actual flesh there were only the colonel himself
and his aide-de-camp. Nevertheless, the 250,000,000 were put down as
present and recorded as voting.
Later on I had the misfortune to fall into a dispute with Colonel
Callahan on a point of canon law. It was my contention that the
position of the Roman Church, on matters of doctrine, is not
ordinarily stated by laymen -- that such matters are usually left to
high ecclesiastical authorities, headed by the Bishop of Rome. I also
contended, perhaps somewhat fatuously, that there seemed to be a
considerable difference of opinion regarding organic evolution among
these authorities -- that it was possible to find in their writings
both ingenious arguments for it and violent protests against it. All
these objections Colonel Callahan waived away with a genial gesture.
He was here, he said, to do what he could for the authority of the
Sacred Scriptures and the aiding and comforting of his old friend,
Bryan, and it was all one to him whether atheists yelled or not. Then
he began to talk about prohibition, which he favors, and the germ
theory of diseases, which he regards as bilge.
A somewhat more plausible volunteer has turned up in the person of
Pastor T.T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss. He has hired a room and
stocked it with pamphlets bearing such titles as "Evolution a Menace,"
"Hell and the High Schools" and "God or Gorilla," and addresses
connoisseurs of scientific fallacy every night on a lot behind the
Courthouse. Pastor Martin, a handsome and amiable old gentleman with a
great mop of snow-white hair, was a professor of science in a Baptist
college for years, and has given profound study to the biological
sections of the Old Testament.
He told me today that he regarded the food regulations in Leviticus as
so sagacious that their framing must have been a sort of feat even for
divinity. The flesh of the domestic hog, he said, is a rank poison as
ordinarily prepared for the table, though it is probably harmless when
smoked and salted, as in bacon. He said that his investigations had
shown that seven and a half out of every thirteen cows are quite free
of tuberculosis, but that twelve out of every thirteen hogs have it in
an advanced and highly communicable form. The Jews, protected by their
piety against devouring pork, are immune to the disease. In all
history, he said, there is authentic record of but one Jew who died of
tuberculosis.
The presence of Pastor Martin and Colonel Callahan has given renewed
confidence to the prosecution. The former offers proof that men of
science are, after all, not unanimously atheists, and the latter that
there is no division between Christians in the face of the common
enemy. But though such encouragements help, they are certainly not
necessary. All they really supply is another layer of icing on the
cake. Dayton will give Scopes a rigidly fair and impartial trial. All
his Constitutional rights will be jealously safeguarded. The question
whether he voted for or against Coolidge will not be permitted to
intrude itself into the deliberations of the jury, or the gallant
effort of Colonel Bryan to get at and establish the truth. He will be
treated very politely. Dayton, indeed, is proud of him, as Sauk
Center, Minn., is proud of Sinclair Lewis and Whittingham, Vt., of
Brigham Young. But it is lucky for Scopes that sticking pins into
Genesis is still only a misdemeanor in Tennessee, punishable by a
simple fine, with no alternative of the knout, the stone pile or exile
to the Dry Tortugas.
_________________________________________________________________
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/menck02.htm
Mencken Likens Trial
to a Religious Orgy,
with Defendant a Beelzebub
by H.L. Mencken
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 11, 1925)
Chattanooga, Tenn., July 11. -- Life down here in the Cumberland
mountains realizes almost perfectly the ideal of those righteous and
devoted men, Dr. Howard A. Kelly, the Rev. Dr. W.W. Davis, the Hon.
Richard H. Edmonds and the Hon. Henry S. Dulaney. That is to say,
evangelical Christianity is one hundred per cent triumphant. There is,
of course, a certain subterranean heresy, but it is so cowed that it
is almost inarticulate, and at its worst it would pass for the
strictest orthodoxy in such Sodoms of infidelity as Baltimore. It may
seem fabulous, but it is a sober fact that a sound Episcopalian or
even a Northern Methodist would be regarded as virtually an atheist in
Dayton. Here the only genuine conflict is between true believers. Of a
given text in Holy Writ one faction may say this thing and another
that, but both agree unreservedly that the text itself is impeccable,
and neither in the midst of the most violent disputation would venture
to accuse the other of doubt.
To call a man a doubter in these parts is equal to accusing him of
cannibalism. Even the infidel Scopes himself is not charged with any
such infamy. What they say of him, at worst, is that he permitted
himself to be used as a cat's paw by scoundrels eager to destroy the
anti-evolution law for their own dark and hellish ends. There is, it
appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break
down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the
level of the brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of
Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially
upon Tennessee. Scopes is thus an agent of Beelzebub once removed, but
that is as far as any fair man goes in condemning him. He is young and
yet full of folly. When the secular arm has done execution upon him,
the pastors will tackle him and he will be saved.
The selection of a jury to try him, which went on all yesterday
afternoon in the atmosphere of a blast furnace, showed to what extreme
lengths the salvation of the local primates has been pushed. It was
obvious after a few rounds that the jury would be unanimously hot for
Genesis. The most that Mr. Darrow could hope for was to sneak in a few
men bold enough to declare publicly that they would have to hear the
evidence against Scopes before condemning him. The slightest sign of
anything further brought forth a peremptory challenge from the State.
Once a man was challenged without examination for simply admitting
that he did not belong formally to any church. Another time a panel
man who confessed that he was prejudiced against evolution got a
hearty round of applause from the crowd.
The whole process quickly took on an air of strange unreality, at
least to a stranger from heathen parts. The desire of the judge to be
fair to the defense, and even polite and helpful, was obvious enough
-- in fact, he more than once stretched the local rules of procedure
in order to give Darrow a hand. But it was equally obvious that the
whole thing was resolving itself into the trial of a man by his sworn
enemies. A local pastor led off with a prayer calling on God to put
down heresy; the judge himself charged the grand jury to protect the
schools against subversive ideas. And when the candidates for the
petit jury came up Darrow had to pass fundamentalist after
fundamentalist into the box -- some of them glaring at him as if they
expected him to go off with a sulphurous bang every time he mopped his
bald head.
In brief this is a strictly Christian community, and such is its
notion of fairness, justice and due process of law. Try to picture a
town made up wholly of Dr. Crabbes and Dr. Kellys, and you will have a
reasonably accurate image of it. Its people 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. He must resign himself to being
tried by a jury wholly innocent of any suspicion of the crime he is
charged with and unanimously convinced that it is infamous. Such a
jury, in the legal sense, may be fair. That is, it may be willing to
hear the evidence against him before bumping him off. But it would
certainly be spitting into the eye of reason to call it impartial.
The trial, indeed, takes on, for all its legal forms, something of the
air of a religious orgy. The applause of the crowd I have already
mentioned. Judge Raulston rapped it down and threatened to clear the
room if it was repeated, but he was quite unable to still its echoes
under his very windows. The courthouse is surrounded by a large lawn,
and it is peppered day and night with evangelists. One and all they
are fundamentalists and their yells and bawlings fill the air with
orthodoxy. I have listened to twenty of them and had private discourse
with a dozen, and I have yet to find one who doubted so much as the
typographical errors in Holy Writ. They dispute raucously and far into
the night, but they begin and end on the common ground of complete
faith. One of these holy men wears a sign on his back announcing that
he is the Bible champion of the world. He told me today that he had
studied the Bible four hours a day for thirty-three years, and that he
had devised a plan of salvation that would save the worst sinner ever
heard of, even a scientist, a theater actor or a pirate on the high
seas, in forty days. This gentleman denounced the hard-shell Baptists
as swindlers. He admitted freely that their sorcerers were powerful
preachers and could save any ordinary man from sin, but he said that
they were impotent against iniquity. The distinction is unknown to
city theologians, but is as real down here as that between
sanctification and salvation. The local experts, in fact, debate it
daily. The Bible champion, just as I left him, was challenged by one
such professor, and the two were still hard at it an hour later.
Most of the participants in such recondite combats, of course, are
yokels from the hills, where no sound is heard after sundown save the
roar of the catamount and the wailing of departed spirits, and a man
thus has time to ponder the divine mysteries. But it is an amazing
thing that the more polished classes also participate actively. The
professor who challenged the Bible champion was indistinguishable, to
the eye, from a bond salesman or city bootlegger. He had on a natty
palm beach suit and a fashionable soft collar and he used excellent
English. Obviously, he was one who had been through the local high
school and perhaps a country college. Yet he was so far uncontaminated
by infidelity that he stood in the hot sun for a whole hour debating a
point that even bishops might be excused for dodging, winter as well
as summer.
The Bible champion is matched and rivaled by whole herds of other
metaphysicians, and all of them attract good houses and have to defend
themselves against constant attack. The Seventh Day Adventists, the
Campbellites, the Holy Rollers and a dozen other occult sects have
field agents on the ground. They follow the traveling judges through
all this country. Everywhere they go, I am told, they find the natives
ready to hear them and dispute with them. They find highly
accomplished theologians in every village, but even in the county
towns they never encounter a genuine skeptic. If a man has doubts in
this immensely pious country, he keeps them to himself.
Dr. Kelly should come down here and see his dreams made real. He will
find a people who not only accept the Bible as an infallible handbook
of history, geology, biology and celestial physics, but who also
practice its moral precepts -- at all events, up to the limit of human
capacity. It would be hard to imagine a more moral town than Dayton.
If it has any bootleggers, no visitor has heard of them. Ten minutes
after I arrived a leading citizen offered me a drink made up half of
white mule and half of coca cola, but he seems to have been simply
indulging himself in a naughty gesture. No fancy woman has been seen
in the town since the end of the McKinley administration. There is no
gambling. There is no place to dance. The relatively wicked, when they
would indulge themselves, go to Robinson's drug store and debate
theology.
In a word, the new Jerusalem, the ideal of all soul savers and sin
exterminators. Nine churches are scarcely enough for the 1,800
inhabitants: many of them go into the hills to shout and roll. A
clergyman has the rank and authority of a major-general of artillery.
A Sunday-school superintendent is believed to have the gift of
prophecy. But what of life here? Is it more agreeable than in Babylon?
I regret that I must have to report that it is not. The incessant
clashing of theologians grows monotonous in a day and intolerable the
day following. One longs for a merry laugh, a burst of happy music,
the gurgle of a decent jug. Try a meal in the hotel; it is tasteless
and swims in grease. Go to the drug store and call for refreshment:
the boy will hand you almost automatically a beaker of coca cola. Look
at the magazine counter: a pile of Saturday Evening Posts two feet
high. Examine the books: melodrama and cheap amour. Talk to a town
magnifico; he knows nothing that is not in Genesis.
I propose that Dr. Kelly be sent here for sixty days, preferably in
the heat of summer. He will return to Baltimore yelling for a carboy
of pilsner and eager to master the saxophone. His soul perhaps will be
lost, but he will be a merry and a happy man.
_________________________________________________________________
Yearning Mountaineers' Souls
Need Reconversion Nightly,
Mencken Finds
by H.L. Mencken
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 13, 1925)
Dayton, Tenn., July 13. -- There is a Unitarian clergyman here from
New York, trying desperately to horn into the trial and execution of
the infidel Scopes. He will fail. If Darrow ventured to put him on the
stand the whole audience, led by the jury, would leap out of the
courthouse windows, and take to the hills. Darrow himself, indeed, is
as much as they can bear. The whisper that he is an atheist has been
stilled by the bucolic make-up and by the public report that he has
the gift of prophecy and can reconcile Genesis and evolution. Even so,
there is ample space about him when he navigates the streets. The
other day a newspaper woman was warned by her landlady to keep out of
the courtroom when he was on his legs. All the local sorcerers predict
that a bolt from heaven will fetch him in the end. The night he
arrived there was a violent storm, the town water turned brown, and
horned cattle in the lowlands were afloat for hours. A woman back in
the mountains gave birth to a child with hair four inches long,
curiously bobbed in scallops.
The Book of Revelation has all the authority, in these theological
uplands, of military orders in time of war. The people turn to it for
light upon all their problems, spiritual and secular. If a text were
found in it denouncing the Anti-Evolution law, then the Anti-Evolution
law would become infamous overnight. But so far the exegetes who roar
and snuffle in the town have found no such text. Instead they have
found only blazing ratifications and reinforcements of Genesis. Darwin
is the devil with seven tails and nine horns. Scopes, though he is
disguised by flannel pantaloons and a Beta Theta Pi haircut, is the
harlot of Babylon. Darrow is Beelzebub in person and Malone is the
Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm.
I have hitherto hinted an Episcopalian down here in the coca-cola belt
is regarded as an atheist. It sounds like one of the lies that
journalists tell, but it is really an understatement of the facts.
Even a Methodist, by Rhea county standards, is one a bit debauched by
pride of intellect. It is the four Methodists on the jury who are
expected to hold out for giving Scopes Christian burial after he is
hanged. They all made it plain, when they were examined, that they
were free-thinking and independent men, and not to be run amuck by the
superstitions of the lowly. One actually confessed that he seldom read
the Bible, though he hastened to add that he was familiar with its
principles. The fellow had on a boiled shirt and a polka dot necktie.
He sits somewhat apart. When Darrow withers to a cinder under the
celestial blowpipe, this dubious Wesleyan, too, will lose a few hairs.
Even the Baptists no longer brew a medicine that is strong enough for
the mountaineers. The sacrament of baptism by total immersion is over
too quickly for them, and what follows offers nothing that they can
get their teeth into. What they crave is a continuous experience of
the divine power, an endless series of evidence that the true believer
is a marked man, ever under the eye of God. It is not enough to go to
a revival once a year or twice a year; there must be a revival every
night. And it is not enough to accept the truth as a mere statement of
indisputable and awful fact: it must be embraced ecstatically and
orgiastically, to the accompaniment of loud shouts, dreadful heavings
and gurglings, and dancing with arms and legs.
This craving is satisfied brilliantly by the gaudy practices of the
Holy Rollers, and so the mountaineers are gradually gravitating toward
the Holy Roller communion, or, as they prefer to call it, the Church
of God. Gradually, perhaps, is not the word. They are actually going
in by whole villages and townships. At the last count of noses there
were 20,000 Holy Rollers in these hills. The next census, I have no
doubt, will show many more. The cities of the lowlands, of course,
still resist, and so do most of the county towns, including even
Dayton, but once one steps off the State roads the howl of holiness is
heard in the woods, and the yokels carry on an almost continuous orgy.
A foreigner in store clothes going out from Dayton must approach the
sacred grove somewhat discreetly. It is not that the Holy Rollers,
discovering him, would harm him; it is simply that they would shut
down their boiling of the devil and flee into the forests. We left
Dayton an hour after nightfall and parked our car in a wood a mile or
so beyond the little hill village of Morgantown. Far off in a glade a
flickering light was visible and out of the_ he silence came a faint
rumble of exhortation. We could scarcely distinguish the figure of the
preacher; it was like looking down the tube of a dark field
microscope. We got out of the car and sneaked along the edge of a
mountain cornfield.
Presently we were near enough to see what was going on. From the great
limb of a mighty oak hung a couple of crude torches of the sort that
car inspectors thrust under Pullman cars when a train pulls in at
night. In their light was a preacher, and for a while we could see no
one else. He was an immensely tall and thin mountaineer in blue jeans,
his collarless shirt open at the neck and his hair a tousled mop. As
he preached he paced up and down under the smoking flambeaux and at
each turn he thrust his arms into the air and yelled, "Glory to God!"
We crept nearer in the shadow of the cornfield and began to hear more
of his discourse. He was preaching on the day of judgment. The high
kings of the earth, he roared, would all fall down and die; only the
sanctified would stand up to receive the Lord God of Hosts. One of
these kings he mentioned by name -- the king of what he called
Greece-y. The King of Greece-y, he said, was doomed to hell.
We went forward a few more yards and began to see the audience. It was
seated on benches ranged round the preacher in a circle. Behind him
sat a row of elders, men and women. In front were the younger folk. We
kept on cautiously, and individuals rose out of the ghostly gloom. A
young mother sat suckling her baby, rocking as the preacher paced up
and down. Two scared little girls hugged each other, their pigtails
down their backs. An immensely huge mountain woman, in a gingham dress
cut in one piece, rolled on her heels at every "Glory to God." To one
side, but half visible, was what appeared to be a bed. We found out
afterward that two babies were asleep upon it.
The preacher stopped at last and there arose out of the darkness a
woman with her hair pulled back into a little tight knot. She began so
quietly that we couldn't hear what she said, but soon her voice rose
resonantly and we could follow her. She was denouncing the reading of
books. Some wandering book agent, it appeared, had come to her cabin
and tried to sell her a specimen of his wares. She refused to touch
it. Why, indeed, read a book? If what was in it was true then
everything in it was already in the Bible. If it was false then
reading it would imperil the soul. Her syllogism complete, she sat
down.
There followed a hymn, led by a somewhat fat brother wearing
silver-rimmed country spectacles. It droned on for half a dozen
stanzas, and then the first speaker resumed the floor. He argued that
the gift of tongues was real and that education was a snare. Once his
children could read the Bible, he said, they had enough. Beyond lay
only infidelity and damnation. Sin stalked the cities. Dayton itself
was a Sodom. Even Morgantown had begun to forget God. He sat down, and
the female aurochs in gingham got up.
She began quietly, but was soon leaping and roaring, and it was hard
to follow her. Under cover of the turmoil we sneaked a bit closer. A
couple of other discourses followed, and there were two or three
hymns. Suddenly a change of mood began to make itself felt. The last
hymn ran longer than the others and dropped gradually into a
monotonous, unintelligible chant. The leader beat time with his book.
The faithful broke out with exultations. When the singing ended there
was a brief palaver that we could not hear and two of the men moved a
bench into the circle of light directly under the flambeaux. Then a
half-grown girl emerged from the darkness and threw herself upon it.
We noticed with astonishment that she had bobbed hair. "This sister,"
said the leader, "has asked for prayers." We moved a bit closer. We
could now see faces plainly and hear every word.
What followed quickly reached such heights of barbaric grotesquerie
that it was hard to believe it real. At a signal all the faithful
crowded up the bench and began to pray -- not in unison but each for
himself. At another they all fell on their knees, their arms over the
penitent. The leader kneeled, facing us, his head alternately thrown
back dramatically or buried in his hands. Words spouted from his lips
like bullets from a machine gun -- appeals to God to pull the penitent
back out of hell, defiances of the powers and principalities of the
air, a vast impassioned jargon of apocalyptic texts. Suddenly he rose
to his feet, threw back his head and began to speak in tongues --
blub-blub-blub, gurgle-gurgle-gurgle. His voice rose to a higher
register. The climax was a shrill, inarticulate squawk, like that of a
man throttled. He fell headlong across the pyramid of supplicants.
A comic scene? Somehow, no. The poor half wits were too horribly in
earnest. It was like peeping through a knothole at the writhings of a
people in pain. From the squirming and jabbering mass a young woman
gradually detached herself -- a woman not uncomely, with a pathetic
home-made cap on her head. Her head jerked back, the veins of her neck
swelled, and her fists went to her throat as if she were fighting for
breath. She bent backward until she was like half of a hoop. Then she
suddenly snapped forward. We caught a flash of the whites of her eyes.
Presently her whole body began to be convulsed -- great convulsions
that began at the shoulders and ended at the hips. She would leap to
her feet, thrust her arms in air and then hurl herself upon the heap.
Her praying flattened out into a mere delirious caterwauling, like
that of a tomcat on a petting party.
I describe the thing as a strict behaviorist. The lady's subjective
sensations I leave to infidel pathologists. Whatever they were they
were obviously contagious, for soon another damsel joined her, and
then another and then a fourth. The last one had an extraordinary bad
attack. She began with mild enough jerks of the head, but in a moment
she was bounding all over the place, exactly like a chicken with its
head cut off. Every time her head came up a stream of yells and
barkings would issue out of it. Once she collided with a dark,
undersized brother, hitherto silent and stolid. Contact with her set
him off as if he had been kicked by a mule. He leaped into the air,
threw back his head and began to gargle as if with a mouthful of BB
shot. Then he loosened one tremendous stentorian sentence in the
tongues and collapsed.
By this time the performers were quite oblivious to the profane
universe. We left our hiding and came up to the little circle of
light. We slipped into the vacant seats on one of the rickety benches.
The heap of mourners was directly before us. They bounced into us as
they cavorted. The smell that they radiated, sweating there in that
obscene heap, half suffocated us. Not all of them, of course, did the
thing in the grand manner. Some merely moaned and rolled their eyes.
The female ox in gingham flung her great bulk on the ground and
jabbered an unintelligible prayer. One of the men, in the intervals
between fits, put on spectacles and read his Bible.
Beside me on the bench sat the young mother and her baby. She suckled
it through the whole orgy, obviously fascinated by what was going on,
but never venturing to take any hand in it. On the bed just outside
the light two other babies slept peacefully. In the shadows, suddenly
appearing and as suddenly going away, were vague figures, whether
believers or of scoffers I do not know. They seemed to come and go in
couples. Now and then a couple at the ringside would step back and
then vanish into the black night. After a while some came back. There
was whispering outside the circle of vision. A couple of Fords lurched
up in the wood road, cutting holes in the darkness with their lights.
Once some one out of sight loosed a bray of laughter.
All this went on for an hour or so. The original penitent, by this
time, was buried three deep beneath the heap. One caught a glimpse,
now and then, of her yellow bobbed hair, but then she would vanish
again. How she breathed down there I don't know; it was hard enough
ten feet away, with a strong five-cent cigar to help. When the praying
brothers would rise up for a bout with the tongues their faces were
streaming with perspiration. The fat harridan in gingham sweated like
a longshoreman. Her hair got loose and fell down over her face. She
fanned herself with her skirt. A powerful old gal she was, equal in
her day to obstetrics and a week's washing on the same morning, but
this was worse than a week's washing. Finally, she fell into a heap,
breathing in great, convulsive gasps.
We tired of it after a while and groped our way back to our
automobile. When we got to Dayton, after 11 o'clock -- an immensely
late hour in these parts -- the whole town was still gathered on the
courthouse lawn, hanging upon the disputes of theologians. The Bible
champion of the world had a crowd. The Seventh Day Adventist
missionaries had a crowd. A volunteer from faraway Portland, Ore.,
made up exactly like Andy Gump, had another and larger crowd. Dayton
was enjoying itself. All the usual rules were suspended and the curfew
bell was locked up. The prophet Bryan, exhausted by his day's work for
Revelation, was snoring in his bed up the road, but enough volunteers
were still on watch to keep the battlements manned.
Such is human existence among the fundamentalists, where children are
brought up on Genesis and sin is unknown. If I have made the tale too
long, then blame the spirit of garrulity that is in the local air.
Even newspaper reporters, down here, get some echo of the call. Divine
inspiration is as common as the hookworm. I have done my best to show
you what the great heritage of mankind comes to in regions where the
Bible is the beginning and end of wisdom, and the mountebank Bryan,
parading the streets in his seersucker coat, is pointed out to
sucklings as the greatest man since Abraham.
_________________________________________________________________
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/menck03.htm
Darrow's Eloquent Appeal
Wasted on Ears That Heed
Only Bryan, Says Mencken
by H.L. Mencken
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 14, 1925)
Dayton, Tenn., July 14. -- The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great
speech yesterday seems to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it
up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan. That is, locally, upon
the process against the infidel Scopes, upon the so-called minds of
these fundamentalists of upland Tennessee. You have but a dim notion
of it who have only read it. It was not designed for reading, but for
hearing. The clanging of it was as important as the logic. It rose
like a wind and ended like a flourish of bugles. The very judge on the
bench, toward the end of it, began to look uneasy. But the morons in
the audience, when it was over, simply hissed it.
During the whole time of its delivery the old mountebank, Bryan, sat
tight-lipped and unmoved. There is, of course, no reason why it should
have shaken him. He has those hill billies locked up in his pen and he
knows it. His brand is on them. He is at home among them. Since his
earliest days, indeed, his chief strength has been among the folk of
remote hills and forlorn and lonely farms. Now with his political
aspirations all gone to pot, he turns to them for religious
consolations. They understand his peculiar imbecilities. His nonsense
is their ideal of sense. When he deluges them with his theological
bilge they rejoice like pilgrims disporting in the river Jordan.
The town whisper is that the local attorney-general, Stewart, is not a
fundamentalist, and hence has no stomach for his job. It seems not
improbable. He is a man of evident education, and his argument
yesterday was confined very strictly to the constitutional points --
the argument of a competent and conscientious lawyer, and to me, at
least very persuasive.
But Stewart, after all, is a foreigner here, almost as much so as
Darrow or Hays or Malone. He is doing his job and that is all. The
real animus of the prosecution centers in Bryan. He is the plaintiff
and prosecutor. The local lawyers are simply bottle-holders for him.
He will win the case, not by academic appeals to law and precedent,
but by direct and powerful appeals to the immemorial fears and
superstitions of man. It is no wonder that he is hot against Scopes.
Five years of Scopes and even these mountaineers would begin to laugh
at Bryan. Ten years and they would ride him out of town on a rail,
with one Baptist parson in front of him and another behind.
But there will be no ten years of Scopes, nor five years, nor even one
year.
Such brash young fellows, debauched by the enlightenment, must be
disposed of before they become dangerous, and Bryan is here, with his
tight lips and hard eyes, to see that this one is disposed of. The
talk of the lawyers, even the magnificent talk of Darrow, is so much
idle wind music. The case will not be decided by logic, nor even by
eloquence. It will be decided by counting noses -- and for every nose
in these hills that has ever thrust itself into any book save the
Bible there are a hundred adorned with the brass ring of Bryan. These
are his people. They understand him when he speaks in tongues. The
same dark face that is in his own eyes is in theirs, too. They feel
with him, and they relish him.
I sincerely hope that the nobility and gentry of the lowlands will not
make the colossal mistake of viewing this trial of Scopes as a trivial
farce. Full of rustic japes and in bad taste, it is, to be sure,
somewhat comic on the surface. One laughs to see lawyers sweat. The
jury, marched down Broadway, would set New York by the ears. But all
of that is only skin deep.
Deeper down there are the beginnings of a struggle that may go on to
melodrama of the first caliber, and when the curtain falls at least
all the laughter may be coming from the yokels. You probably laughed
at the prohibitionists, say, back in 1914. Well, don't make the same
error twice.
As I have said, Bryan understands these peasants, and they understand
him. He is a bit mangey and flea-bitten, but no means ready for his
harp. He may last five years, ten years or even longer. What he may
accomplish in that time, seen here at close range, looms up immensely
larger than it appears to a city man five hundred miles away. The
fellow is full of such bitter, implacable hatreds that they radiate
from him like heat from a stove. He hates the learning that he cannot
grasp. He hates those who sneer at him. He hates, in general, all who
stand apart from his own pathetic commonness. And the yokels hate with
him, some of them almost as bitterly as he does himself. They are
willing and eager to follow him -- and he has already given them a
taste of blood.
Darrow's peroration yesterday was interrupted by Judge Raulston, but
the force of it got into the air nevertheless. This year it is a
misdemeanor for a country school teacher to flout the archaic nonsense
of Genesis. Next year it will be a felony. The year after the net will
be spread wider. Pedagogues, after all, are small game; there are
larger birds to snare -- larger and juicier. Bryan has his fishy eye
on them. He will fetch them if his mind lasts, and the lamp holds out
to burn. No man with a mouth like that ever lets go. Nor ever lacks
followers.
Tennessee is bearing the brunt of the first attack simply because the
civilized minority, down here, is extraordinarily pusillanimous.
I have met no educated man who is not ashamed of the ridicule that has
fallen upon the State, and I have met none, save only judge Neal, who
had the courage to speak out while it was yet time. No Tennessee
counsel of any importance came into the case until yesterday and then
they came in stepping very softly as if taking a brief for sense were
a dangerous matter. When Bryan did his first rampaging here all these
men were silent.
They had known for years what was going on in the hills. They knew
what the country preachers were preaching -- what degraded nonsense
was being rammed and hammered into yokel skulls. But they were afraid
to go out against the imposture while it was in the making, and when
any outsider denounced it they fell upon him violently as an enemy of
Tennessee.
Now Tennessee is paying for that poltroonery. The State is smiling and
beautiful, and of late it has begun to be rich. I know of no American
city that is set in more lovely scenery than Chattanooga, or that has
more charming homes. The civilized minority is as large here, I
believe, as anywhere else.
It has made a city of splendid material comforts and kept it in order.
But it has neglected in the past the unpleasant business of following
what was going on in the cross roads Little Bethels.
The Baptist preachers ranted unchallenged.
Their buffooneries were mistaken for humor. Now the clowns turn out to
be armed, and have begun to shoot.
In his argument yesterday judge Neal had to admit pathetically that it
was hopeless to fight for a repeal of the anti-evolution law. The
Legislature of Tennessee, like the Legislature of every other American
state, is made up of cheap job-seekers and ignoramuses.
The Governor of the State is a politician ten times cheaper and
trashier. It is vain to look for relief from such men. If the State is
to be saved at all, it must be saved by the courts. For one, I have
little hope of relief in that direction, despite Hays' logic and
Darrow's eloquence. Constitutions, in America, no longer mean what
they say. To mention the Bill of Rights is to be damned as a Red.
The rabble is in the saddle, and down here it makes its first campaign
under a general beside whom Wat Tylor seems like a wart beside the
Matterhorn.
------------------------
Law and Freedom, Mencken Discovers,
Yield Place to Holy Writ
in Rhea County
by H.L. Mencken
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 15, 1925)
Dayton, Tenn., July 15. -- The cops have come up from Chattanooga to
help save Dayton from the devil. Darrow, Malone and Hays, of course,
are immune to constabulary process, despite their obscene attack upon
prayer. But all other atheists and anarchists now have public notice
they must shut up forthwith and stay shut so long as they pollute this
bright, shining, buckle of the Bible belt with their presence. Only
one avowed infidel has ventured to make a public address. The
Chattanooga police nabbed him instantly, and he is now under
surveillance in a hotel. Let him but drop one of his impious tracts
from his window and he will be transferred to the town hoose-gow.
The Constitution of Tennessee, as everyone knows, puts free speech
among the most sacred rights of the citizen. More, I am informed by
eminent Chattanooga counsel, that there is no State law denying it --
that is, for persons not pedagogues. But the cops of Chattanooga, like
their brethren elsewhere, do not let constitutions stand in the way of
their exercise of their lawful duty. The captain in charge of the
squad now on watch told me frankly yesterday that he was not going to
let any infidels discharge their damnable nonsense upon the town. I
asked him what charge he would lay against them if they flouted him.
He said he would jail them for disturbing the peace.
"But suppose," I asked him, "a prisoner is actually not disturbing the
peace. Suppose he is simply saying his say in a quiet and orderly
manner."
"I'll arrest him anyhow," said the cop.
"Even if no one complains of him?"
"I'll complain myself."
"Under what law precisely?"
"We don't need no law for them kind of people."
It sounded like New York in the old days, before Mayor Gaynor took the
constitution out of cold storage and began to belabor the gendarmerie
with it. The captain admitted freely that speaking in the streets was
not disturbing the peace so long as the speaker stuck to orthodox
Christian doctrine as it is understood by the local exegetes.
A preacher of any sect that admits the literal authenticity of Genesis
is free to gather a crowd at any time and talk all he wants. More, he
may engage in a disputation with any other expert. I have heard at
least a hundred such discussions, and some of them have been very
acrimonious. But the instant a speaker utters a word against divine
revelation he begins to disturb the peace and is liable to immediate
arrest and confinement in the calaboose beside the railroad tracks.
Such is criminal law in Rhea county as interpreted by the uniformed
and freely sweating agents. As I have said, there are legal
authorities in Chattanooga who dissent sharply, and even argue that
the cops are a set of numbskulls and ought to be locked up as public
nuisances. But one need not live a long, incandescent week in the
Bible belt to know that jurisprudence becomes a new science as one
crosses the border. Here the ordinary statutes are reinforced by Holy
Writ, and whenever there is a conflict Holy Writ takes precedence.
Judge Raulston himself has decided, in effect, that in a trial for
heresy it is perfectly fair and proper to begin proceedings with a
prayer for the confutation and salvation of the defendant. On lower
levels, and especially in the depths where policemen do their
thinking, the doctrine is even more frankly stated. Before laying
Christians by the heels the cops must formulate definite charges
against them. They must be accused of something specifically unlawful
and there must be witnesses to the act. But infidels are fera naturae,
and any cop is free to bag at sight and to hold them in durance at his
pleasure.
To the same category, it appears, belong political and economic
radicals. News came the other day to Pastor T.T. Martin, who is
holding a continuous anti-evolution convention in the town, that a
party of I.W.W.'s, their pockets full of Russian gold, had started out
from Cincinnati to assassinate him. A bit later came word they would
bump off Bryan after they had finished Martin, and then set fire to
the town churches. Martin first warned Bryan and then complained to
the police. The latter were instantly agog. Guards were posted at
strategic centers and a watch was kept upon all strangers of a
sinister appearance. But the I.W.W.'s were not caught. Yesterday
Pastor Martin told me that he had news that they had gone back to
Cincinnati to perfect the plot. He posts audiences at every meeting.
If the Reds return they will be scotched.
Arthur Garfield Hays, who is not only one of the counsel for the
infidel Scopes but also agent and attorney of the notorious American
Civil Liberties Union in New York, is planning to hold a free speech
meeting on the Courthouse lawn and so make a test of the law against
disturbing the peace as it is interpreted by the polizei. Hays will be
well advertised if he carries out this subversive intention. It is hot
enough in the courtroom in the glare of a thousand fundamentalist
eyes; in the town jail he would sweat to death.
Rhea county is very hospitable and, judged by Bible belt standards,
very tolerant. The Dayton Babbitts gave a banquet to Darrow, despite
the danger from lightning, meteors and earthquakes. Even Malone is
treated politely, though the very horned cattle in the fields know
that he is a Catholic and in constant communication with the Pope. But
liberty is one thing and license is quite another. Within the bounds
of Genesis the utmost play of opinion is permitted and even
encouraged. An evangelist with a new scheme for getting into Heaven
can get a crowd in two minutes. But once a speaker admits a doubt,
however cautiously, he is handed over to the secular arm.
Two Unitarian clergymen are prowling around the town looking for a
chance to discharge their "hellish heresies." One of them is Potter,
of New York; the other is Birckhead, of Kansas City. So far they have
not made any progress. Potter induced one of the local Methodist
parsons to give him a hearing, but the congregation protested and the
next day the parson had to resign his charge. The Methodists, as I
have previously reported, are regarded almost as infidels in Rhea
county. Their doctrines, which seem somewhat severe in Baltimore,
especially to persons who love a merry life, are here viewed as loose
to the point of indecency. The four Methodists on the jury are
suspected of being against hanging Scopes, at least without a fair
trial. The State tried to get rid of one of them even after he had
been passed; his neighbors had come in from his village with news that
he had a banjo concealed in his house and was known to read the
Literary Digest.
The other Unitarian clergyman, Dr. Birckhead, is not actually
domiciled in the town, but is encamped, with his wife and child, on
the road outside. He is on an automobile tour and stopped off here to
see if a chance offered to spread his "poisons." So far he has found
none.
Yesterday afternoon a Jewish rabbi from Nashville also showed up,
Marks by name. He offered to read and expound Genesis in Hebrew, but
found no takers. The Holy Rollers hereabout, when they are seized by
the gift of tongues, avoid Hebrew, apparently as a result of Ku Klux
influence. Their favorite among all the sacred dialects is Hittite. It
sounds to the infidel like a series of college yells.
Judge Raulston's decision yesterday afternoon in the matter of Hays'
motion was a masterpiece of unconscious humor. The press stand, in
fact, thought he was trying to be jocose deliberately and let off a
guffaw that might have gone far if the roar of applause had not choked
it off. Hays presented a petition in the name of the two Unitarians,
the rabbi and several other theological "reds," praying that in
selecting clergymen to open the court with prayer hereafter he choose
fundamentalists and anti-fundamentalists alternately. The petition was
couched in terms that greatly shocked and enraged the prosecution.
When the judge announced that he would leave the nomination of
chaplains to the Pastors' Association of the town there was the gust
of mirth aforesaid, followed by howls of approval. The Pastors'
Association of Dayton is composed of fundamentalists so powerfully
orthodox that beside them such a fellow as Dr. John Roach Straton
would seem an Ingersoll.
The witnesses of the defense, all of them heretics, began to reach
town yesterday and are all quartered at what is called the Mansion, an
ancient and empty house outside the town limits, now crudely furnished
with iron cots, spittoons, playing cards and the other camp equipment
of scientists. Few, if any, of these witnesses will ever get a chance
to outrage the jury with their blasphemies, but they are of much
interest to the townspeople. The common belief is that they will be
blown up with one mighty blast when the verdict of the twelve men,
tried and true, is brought in, and Darrow, Malone, Hays and Neal with
them. The country people avoid the Mansion. It is foolish to take
unnecessary chances. Going into the courtroom, with Darrow standing
there shamelessly and openly challenging the wrath of God, is risk
enough.
The case promises to drag into next week. The prosecution is fighting
desperately and taking every advantage of its superior knowledge of
the quirks of local procedure. The defense is heating up and there are
few exchanges of courtroom amenities. There will be a lot of oratory
before it is all over and some loud and raucous bawling otherwise, and
maybe more than one challenge to step outside. The cards seem to be
stacked against poor Scopes, but there may be a joker in the pack.
Four of the jurymen, as everyone knows, are Methodists, and a
Methodist down here belongs to the extreme wing of liberals. Beyond
him lie only the justly and incurably damned.
What if one of those Methodists, sweating under the dreadful pressure
of fundamentalist influence, jumps into the air, cracks his heels
together and gives a defiant yell? What if the jury is hung? It will
be a good joke on the fundamentalists if it happens, and an even
better joke on the defense.
_________________________________________________________________
Mencken Declares Strictly Fair Trial
Is Beyond Ken of Tennessee Fundamentalists
by H.L. Mencken
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 16, 1925)
Dayton, Tenn., July 16. -- Two things ought to be understood clearly
by heathen Northerners who follow the great cause of the State of
Tennessee against the infidel Scopes. One is that the old mountebank,
Bryan, is no longer thought of as a mere politician and jobseeker in
these Godly regions, but has become converted into a great sacerdotal
figure, half man and half archangel -- in brief, a sort of
fundamentalist pope. The other is that the fundamentalist mind,
running in a single rut for fifty years, is now quite unable to
comprehend dissent from its basic superstitions, or to grant any
common honesty, or even any decency, to those who reject them.
The latter fact explains some of the most astonishing singularities of
the present trial -- that is, singularities to one accustomed to more
austere procedures. In the average Northern jurisdiction much of what
is going on here would be almost unthinkable. Try to imagine a trial
going on in a town in which anyone is free to denounce the defendant's
case publicly and no one is free to argue for it in the same way -- a
trial in a courthouse placarded with handbills set up by his opponents
-- a trial before a jury of men who have been roweled and hammered by
those opponents for years, and have never heard a clear and fair
statement of his answer.
But this is not all. It seems impossible, but it is nevertheless a
fact that public opinion in Dayton sees no impropriety in the fact
that the case was opened with prayer by a clergyman known by everyone
to be against Scopes and by no means shy about making the fact clear.
Nor by the fact that Bryan, the actual complainant, has been preparing
the ground for the prosecution for months. Nor by the fact that,
though he is one of the attorneys of record in the case, he is also
present in the character of a public evangelist and that throngs go to
hear him whenever he speaks, including even the sitting judge.
I do not allege here that there is any disposition to resort to lynch
law. On the contrary, I believe that there is every intent to give
Scopes a fair trial, as a fair trial is understood among
fundamentalists. All I desire to show is that all the primary
assumptions are immovably against him -- that it is a sheer
impossibility for nine-tenths of those he faces to see any merit
whatever in his position. He is not simply one who has committed a
misdemeanor against the peace and dignity of the State, he is also the
agent of a heresy almost too hellish to be stated by reputable men.
Such reputable men recognize their lawful duty to treat him humanely
and even politely, but they also recognize their superior duty to make
it plain that they are against his heresy and believe absolutely in
the wisdom and virtue of his prosecutors.
In view of the fact that everyone here looks for the jury to bring in
a verdict of guilty, it might be expected that the prosecution would
show a considerable amiability and allow the defense a rather free
plan. Instead, it is contesting every point very vigorously and taking
every advantage of its greatly superior familiarity with local
procedure. There is, in fact, a considerable heat in the trial. Bryan
and the local lawyers for the State sit glaring at the defense all day
and even the Attorney General, A.T. Stewart, who is supposed to have
secret doubts about fundamentalism, has shown such pugnacity that it
has already brought him to forced apologies.
The high point of yesterday's proceedings was reached with the
appearance of Dr. Maynard M. Metcalfe, of the Johns Hopkins. The
doctor is a somewhat chubby man of bland mien, and during the first
part of his testimony, with the jury present, the prosecution
apparently viewed him with great equanimity. But the instant he was
asked a question bearing directly upon the case at bar there was a
flurry in the Bryan pen and Stewart was on his feet with protests.
Another question followed, with more and hotter protests. The judge
then excluded the jury and the show began.
What ensued was, on the surface, a harmless enough dialogue between
Dr. Metcalfe and Darrow, but underneath there was very tense drama. At
the first question Bryan came out from behind the State's table and
planted himself directly in front of Dr. Metcalfe, and not ten feet
away. The two McKenzies followed, with young Sue Hicks at their heels.
Then began one of the clearest, most succinct and withal most eloquent
presentations of the case for the evolutionists that I have ever
heard. The doctor was never at a loss for a word, and his ideas flowed
freely and smoothly. Darrow steered him magnificently. A word or two
and he was howling down the wind. Another and he hauled up to
discharge a broadside. There was no cocksureness in him. Instead he
was rather cautious and deprecatory and sometimes he halted and
confessed his ignorance. But what he got over before he finished was a
superb counterblast to the fundamentalist buncombe. The jury, at
least, in theory heard nothing of it, but it went whooping into the
radio and it went banging into the face of Bryan.
Bryan sat silent throughout the whole scene, his gaze fixed immovably
on the witness. Now and then his face darkened and his eyes flashed,
but he never uttered a sound. It was, to him, a string of blasphemies
out of the devil's mass -- a dreadful series of assaults upon the only
true religion. The old gladiator faced his real enemy at last. Here
was a sworn agent and attorney of the science he hates and fears -- a
well-fed, well-mannered spokesman of the knowledge he abominates.
Somehow he reminded me pathetically of the old Holy Roller I heard
last week -- the mountain pastor who damned education as a mocking and
a corruption. Bryan, too, is afraid of it, for wherever it spreads his
trade begins to fall off, and wherever it flourishes he is only a poor
clown.
But not to these fundamentalists of the hills. Not to yokels he now
turns to for consolation in his old age, with the scars of defeat and
disaster all over him. To these simple folk, as I have said, he is a
prophet of the imperial line -- a lineal successor to Moses and
Abraham. The barbaric cosmogony that he believes in seems as
reasonable to them as it does to him. They share his peasant-like
suspicion of all book learning that a plow hand cannot grasp. They
believe with him that men who know too much should be seized by the
secular arm and put down by force. They dream as he does of a world
unanimously sure of Heaven and unanimously idiotic on this earth.
This old buzzard, having failed to raise the mob against its rulers,
now prepares to raise it against its teachers. He can never be the
peasants' President, but there is still a chance to be the peasants'
Pope. He leads a new crusade, his bald head glistening, his face
streaming with sweat, his chest heaving beneath his rumpled alpaca
coat. One somehow pities him, despite his so palpable imbecilities. It
is a tragedy, indeed, to begin life as a hero and to end it as a
buffoon. But let no one, laughing at him, underestimate the magic that
lies in his black, malignant eye, his frayed but still eloquent voice.
He can shake and inflame these poor ignoramuses as no other man among
us can shake and inflame them, and he is desperately eager to order
the charge.
In Tennessee he is drilling his army. The big battles, he believes,
will be fought elsewhere.
_________________________________________________________________
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/menck04.htm
Malone the Victor, Even Though Court
Sides with Opponents, Says Mencken
by H.L. Mencken
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 17, 1925)
Dayton, Tenn., July 17. -- Though the court decided against him this
morning, and the testimony of the experts summoned for the defense
will be banned out of the trial of the infidel Scopes, it was Dudley
Field Malone who won yesterday's great battle of rhetoricians. When he
got upon his legs it was the universal assumption in the courtroom
that Judge Raulston's mind was already made up, and that nothing that
any lawyer for the defense could say would shake him. But Malone
unquestionably shook him. He was, at the end, in plain doubt, and he
showed it by his questions. It took a night's repose to restore him to
normalcy. The prosecution won, but it came within an inch of losing.
Malone was put up to follow and dispose of Bryan, and he achieved the
business magnificently. I doubt that any louder speech has ever been
heard in a court of law since the days of Gog and Magog. It roared out
of the open windows like the sound of artillery practice, and alarmed
the moonshiners and catamounts on distant peaks. Trains thundering by
on the nearby railroad sounded faint and far away and when, toward the
end, a table covered with standing and gaping journalists gave way
with a crash, the noise seemed, by contrast, to be no more than a
pizzicato chord upon a viola da gamba. The yokels outside stuffed
their Bibles into the loud-speaker horns and yielded themselves
joyously to the impact of the original. In brief, Malone was in good
voice. It was a great day for Ireland. And for the defense. For Malone
not only out-yelled Bryan, he also plainly out-generaled and
out-argued him. His speech, indeed, was one of the best presentations
of the case against the fundamentalist rubbish that I have ever heard.
It was simple in structure, it was clear in reasoning, and at its high
points it was overwhelmingly eloquent. It was not long, but it covered
the whole ground and it let off many a gaudy skyrocket, and so it
conquered even the fundamentalists. At its end they gave it a
tremendous cheer -- a cheer at least four times as hearty as that
given to Bryan. For these rustics delight in speechifying, and know
when it is good. The devil's logic cannot fetch them, but they are not
above taking a voluptuous pleasure in his lascivious phrases.
The whole speech was addressed to Bryan, and he sat through it in his
usual posture, with his palm-leaf fan flapping energetically and his
hard, cruel mouth shut tight. The old boy grows more and more
pathetic. He has aged greatly during the past few years and begins to
look elderly and enfeebled. All that remains of his old fire is now in
his black eyes. They glitter like dark gems, and in their glitter
there is immense and yet futile malignancy. That is all that is left
of the Peerless Leader of thirty years ago. Once he had one leg in the
White House and the nation trembled under his roars. Now he is a
tinpot pope in the coca-cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors
who belabor half-wits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the
railroad yards. His own speech was a grotesque performance and
downright touching in its imbecility. Its climax came when he launched
into a furious denunciation of the doctrine that man is a mammal. It
seemed a sheer impossibility that any literate man should stand up in
public and discharge any such nonsense. Yet the poor old fellow did
it. Darrow stared incredulous. Malone sat with his mouth wide open.
Hays indulged himself one of his sardonic chuckles. Stewart and Bryan
fils looked extremely uneasy, but the old mountebank ranted on. To
call a man a mammal, it appeared, was to flout the revelation of God.
The certain effect of the doctrine would be to destroy morality and
promote infidelity. The defense let it pass. The lily needed no
gilding.
There followed some ranting about the Leopold-Loeb case, culminating
in the argument that learning was corrupting -- that the colleges by
setting science above Genesis were turning their students into
murderers. Bryan alleged that Darrow had admitted the fact in his
closing speech at the Leopold-Loeb trial, and stopped to search for
the passage in a printed copy of the speech. Darrow denied making any
such statement, and presently began reading what he actually had said
on the subject. Bryan then proceeded to denounce Nietzsche, whom he
described as an admirer and follower of Darwin. Darrow challenged the
fact and offered to expound what Nietzsche really taught. Bryan waved
him off.
The effect of the whole harangue was extremely depressing. It quickly
ceased to be an argument addressed to the court -- Bryan, in fact,
constantly said "My friends" instead of "Your Honor" -- and became a
sermon at the camp-meeting. All the familiar contentions of the Dayton
divines appeared in it -- that learning is dangerous, that nothing is
true that is not in the Bible, that a yokel who goes to church
regularly knows more than any scientist ever heard of. The thing went
to fantastic lengths. It became a farrago of puerilities without
coherence or sense. I don't think the old man did himself justice. He
was in poor voice and his mind seemed to wander. There was far too
much hatred in him for him to be persuasive.
The crowd, of course, was with him. It has been fed upon just such
balderdash for years. Its pastors assault it twice a week with
precisely the same nonsense. It is chronically in the position of a
populace protected by an espionage act In time of war. That is to say,
it is forbidden to laugh at the arguments of one side and forbidden to
hear the case of the other side. Bryan has been roving around in the
tall grass for years and he knows the bucolic mind. He knows how to
reach and inflame its basic delusions and superstitions. He has taken
them into his own stock and adorned them with fresh absurdities. Today
he may well stand as the archetype of the American rustic. His
theology is simply the elemental magic that is preached in a hundred
thousand rural churches fifty-two times a year.
These Tennessee mountaineers are not more stupid than the city
proletariat; they are only less informed. If Darrow, Malone and Hays
could make a month's stumping tour in Rhea county I believe that fully
a fourth of the population would repudiate fundamentalism, and that
not a few of the clergy now in practice would be restored to their old
jobs on the railroad. Malone's speech yesterday probably shook a great
many true believers; another like it would fetch more than one of
them. But the chances are heavily against them ever hearing a second.
Once this trial is over, the darkness will close in again, and it will
take long years of diligent and thankless effort to dispel it -- if,
indeed, it is ever dispelled at all.
With a few brilliant exceptions -- Dr. Neal is an example -- the more
civilized Tennesseeans show few signs of being equal to the job. I
suspect that politics is what keeps them silent and makes their State
ridiculous. Most of them seem to be candidates for office, and a
candidate for office, if he would get the votes of fundamentalists,
must bawl for Genesis before he begins to bawl for anything else. A
typical Tennessee politician is the Governor, Austin Peay. He signed
the anti-evolution bill with loud hosannas, and he is now making every
effort to turn the excitement of the Scopes trial to his private
political uses. The local papers print a telegram that he has sent to
Attorney-General A.T. Stewart whooping for prayer. In the North a
Governor who indulged in such monkey shines would be rebuked for
trying to influence the conduct of a case in court. And he would be
derided as a cheap mountebank. But not here.
I described Stewart the other day as a man of apparent education and
sense and palpably superior to the village lawyers who sit with him at
the trial table. I still believe that I described him accurately. Yet
even Stewart toward the close of yesterday's session gave an
exhibition that would be almost unimaginable in the North. He began
his reply to Malone with an intelligent and forceful legal argument,
with plenty of evidence of hard study in it. But presently he slid
into a violent theological harangue, full of extravagant nonsense. He
described the case as a combat between light and darkness and almost
descended to the depths of Bryan. Hays challenged him with a question.
Didn't he admit, after all, that the defense had a tolerable case;
that it ought to be given a chance to present its evidence? I
transcribe his reply literally:
"That which strikes at the very foundations of Christianity is not
entitled to a chance."
Hays, plainly astounded by this bald statement of the fundamentalist
view of due process, pressed the point. Assuming that the defense
would present, not opinion but only unadorned fact, would Stewart
still object to its admission? He replied.
"Personally, yes."
"But as a lawyer and Attorney-General?" insisted Hays.
"As a lawyer and Attorney-General," said Stewart, "I am the same man."
Such is justice where Genesis is the first and greatest of law books
and heresy is still a crime.
_________________________________________________________________
Battle Now Over, Mencken Sees;
Genesis Triumphant and Ready
for New Jousts
by H.L. Mencken
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 18, 1925)
Dayton, Tenn., July 18. -- All that remains of the great cause of the
State of Tennessee against the infidel Scopes is the formal business
of bumping off the defendant. There may be some legal jousting on
Monday and some gaudy oratory on Tuesday, but the main battle is over,
with Genesis completely triumphant. Judge Raulston finished the benign
business yesterday morning by leaping with soft judicial hosannas into
the arms of the prosecution. The sole commentary of the sardonic
Darrow consisted of bringing down a metaphorical custard pie upon the
occiput of the learned jurist.
"I hope," said the latter nervously, "that counsel intends no
reflection upon this court."
Darrow hunched his shoulders and looked out of the window dreamily.
"Your honor," he said, "is, of course, entitled to hope."
No doubt the case will be long and fondly remembered by connoisseurs
of judicial delicatessen -- that is, as the performances of Weber and
Fields are remembered by students of dramatic science. In immediate
retrospect, it grows more fantastic and exhilarating. Scopes has had
precisely the same fair trial that the Hon. John Philip Hill, accused
of bootlegging on the oath of Howard A. Kelly, would have before the
Rev. Dr. George W. Crabbe. He is a fellow not without humor; I find
him full of smiles today. On some near tomorrow the Sheriff will
collect a month's wages from him, but he has certainly had a lot of
fun.
More interesting than the hollow buffoonery that remains will be the
effect upon the people of Tennessee, the actual prisoners at the bar.
That the more civilized of them are in a highly feverish condition of
mind must be patent to every visitor. The guffaws that roll in from
all sides give them great pain. They are full of bitter protests and
valiant projects. They prepare, it appears, to organize, hoist the
black flag and offer the fundamentalists of the dung-hills a battle to
the death. They will not cease until the last Baptist preacher is in
flight over the mountains, and the ordinary intellectual decencies of
Christendom are triumphantly restored.
With the best will in the world I find it impossible to accept this
tall talk with anything resembling confidence. The intelligentsia of
Tennessee had their chance and let it get away from them. When the old
mountebank, Bryan, first invaded the State with his balderdash they
were unanimously silent. When he began to round up converts in the
back country they offered him no challenge. When the Legislature
passed the anti-evolution bill and the Governor signed it, they
contented themselves with murmuring pianissimo. And when the battle
was joined at last and the time came for rough stuff only one
Tennesseean of any consequence volunteered.
That lone volunteer was Dr. John Neal, now of counsel for the defense,
a good lawyer and an honest man. His services to Darrow, Malone and
Hays have been very valuable and they come out of the case with high
respect for him. But how does Tennessee regard him? My impression is
that Tennessee vastly underestimating incredibly that a farmer who
read the Bible knew more than any scientist in the world. Such
dreadful bilge, heard of far away, may seem only ridiculous. But it
takes on a different smack, I assure you, when one hears it discharged
formally in a court of law and sees it accepted as wisdom by judge and
jury.
Darrow has lost this case. It was lost long before he came to Dayton.
But it seems to me that he has nevertheless performed a great public
service by fighting it to a finish and in a perfectly serious way. Let
no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though 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 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 its sworn officers
of the law. There are other States that had better look to their
arsenals before the Hun is at their gates.
_________________________________________________________________
Tennessee in the Frying Pan
by H.L. Mencken
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 20, 1925)
I
That the rising town of Dayton, when it put the infidel Scopes on
trial, bit off far more than it has been able to chew -- this
melancholy fact must now be evident to everyone. The village Aristides
Sophocles Goldsboroughs believed that the trial would bring in a lot
of money, and produce a vast mass of free and profitable advertising.
They were wrong on both counts, as boomers usually are. Very little
money was actually spent by the visitors: the adjacent yokels brought
their own lunches and went home to sleep, and the city men from afar
rushed down to Chattanooga whenever there was a lull. As for the
advertising that went out over the leased wires, I greatly fear that
it has quite ruined the town. When people recall it hereafter they
will think of it as they think of Herrin, Ill., and Homestead, Pa. It
will be a joke town at best, and infamous at worst.
The natives reacted to this advertising very badly. The preliminary
publicity, I believe, had somehow disarmed and deceived them. It was
mainly amiable spoofing; they took it philosophically, assured by the
local Aristideses that it was good for trade. But when the main guard
of Eastern and Northern journalists swarmed down, and their dispatches
began to show the country and the world exactly how the obscene
buffoonery appeared to realistic city men, then the yokels began to
sweat coldly, and in a few days they were full of terror and
indignation. Some of the bolder spirits, indeed, talked gaudily of
direct action against the authors of the "libels." But the history of
the Ku Klux and the American Legion offers overwhelmingly evidence
that 100 per cent Americans never fight when the enemy is in strength,
and able to make a defense, so the visitors suffered nothing worse
than black, black looks. When the last of them departs Daytonians will
disinfect the town with sulphur candles, and the local pastors will
exorcise the devils that they left behind them.
II
Dayton, of course, is only a ninth-rate country town, and so its
agonies are of relatively little interest to the world. Its pastors, I
daresay, will be able to console it, and if they fail there is always
the old mountebank, Bryan, to give a hand. Faith cannot only move
mountains; it can also soothe the distressed spirits of mountaineers.
The Daytonians, unshaken by Darrow's ribaldries, still believe. They
believe that they are not mammals. They believe, on Bryan's word, that
they know more than all the men of science of Christendom. They
believe, on the authority of Genesis, that the earth is flat and that
witches still infest it. They believe, finally and especially, that
all who doubt these great facts of revelation will go to hell. So they
are consoled.
But what of the rest of the people of Tennessee? I greatly fear that
they will not attain to consolation so easily. They are an extremely
agreeable folk, and many of them are highly intelligent. I met men and
women -- particularly women -- in Chattanooga who showed every sign of
the highest culture. They led civilized lives, despite Prohibition,
and they were interested in civilized ideas, despite the fog of
Fundamentalism in which they moved. I met members of the State
judiciary who were as heartily ashamed of the bucolic ass, Raulston,
as an Osler would be of a chiropractor. I add the educated clergy:
Episcopalians, Unitarians, Jews and so on -- enlightened men, tossing
pathetically under the imbecilities of their evangelical colleagues.
Chattanooga, as I found it, was charming, but immensely unhappy.
What its people ask for -- many of them in plain terms -- is suspended
judgment, sympathy, Christian charity, and I believe that they deserve
all these things. Dayton may be typical of Tennessee, but it is surely
not all of Tennessee. The civilized minority in the State is probably
as large as in any other Southern State. What ails it is simply the
fact it has been, in the past, too cautious and politic -- that it has
been too reluctant to offend the Fundamentalist majority. To that
reluctance something else has been added: an uncritical and somewhat
childish local patriotism. The Tennesseeans have tolerated their
imbeciles for fear that attacking them would bring down the derision
of the rest of the country. Now they have the derision, and to excess
-- and the attack is ten times as difficult as it ever was before.
III
How they are to fight their way out of their wallow I do not know.
They begin the battle with the enemy in command of every height and
every gun; worse, there is a great deal of irresolution in their own
ranks. The newspapers of the State, with few exceptions, are very
feeble. One of the best of them, the Chattanooga News, set up an
eloquent whooping for Bryan the moment he got to Dayton. Before that
it had been against the anti-evolution law. But with the actual battle
joined, it began to wobble, and presently it was printing articles
arguing that Fundamentalism, after all, made men happy -- that a
Tennesseean gained something valuable by being an ignoramus -- in
other words, that a hog in a barnyard was to be envied by an
Aristotle. The News was far better than most: it gave space, too, to
the other side, and at considerable risk. But its weight, for two
weeks, was thrown heavily to Bryan and his balderdash.
The pusillanimous attitude of the bar of the State I described in my
dispatches from Dayton. It was not until the trial was two days old
that any Tennessee lawyers of influence and dignity went to the aid of
Dr. John R. Neal -- and even then all of the volunteers enlisted only
on condition that their names be kept out of the newspapers. I should
except one T.B. McElwee. He sat at the trial table and rendered
valuable services. The rest lurked in the background. It was an
astounding situation to a Marylander, but it seemed to be regarded as
quite natural in Tennessee.
The prevailing attitude toward Neal himself was also very amazing. He
is an able lawyer and a man of repute, and in any Northern State his
courage would get the praise it deserves. But in Tennessee even the
intelligentsia seem to feet that he has done something discreditable
by sitting at the trial table with Darrow, Hays and Malone. The State
buzzes with trivial, idiotic gossip about him -- that he dresses
shabbily, that he has political aspirations, and so on. What if he
does and has? He has carried himself, in this case, in a way that does
higher credit to his native State. But his native State, instead of
being proud of him, simply snarls at him behind his back.
IV
So with every other man concerned with the defense -- most of them,
slackaday, foreigners. For example, Rappelyea, the Dayton engineer who
was first to go to the aid of Scopes. I was told solemnly in Dayton,
not once but twenty times, that Rappelyea was (a) a Bowery boy from
New York, and (b) an incompetent and ignorant engineer. I went to some
trouble to unearth the facts. They were (a) that he was actually a
member of one of the oldest Huguenot families in America, and (b) that
his professional skill and general culture were such that the visiting
scientists sought him out and found pleasure in his company.
Such is the punishment that falls upon a civilized man cast among
fundamentalists. As I have said, the worst of it is that even the
native intelligentsia help to pull the rope. In consequence all the
brighter young men of the State -- and it produces plenty of them --
tend to leave it. If they remain, they must be prepared to succumb to
the prevailing blather or resign themselves to being more or less
infamous. With the anti-evolution law enforced, the State university
will rapidly go to pot; no intelligent youth will waste his time upon
its courses if he can help it. And so, with the young men lost, the
struggle against darkness will become almost hopeless.
As I have said, the State still produces plenty of likely young bucks
-- if only it could hold them! There is good blood everywhere, even in
the mountains. During the dreadful buffooneries of Bryan and Raulston
last week two typical specimens sat at the press table. One was Paul
Y. Anderson, correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the
other was Joseph Wood Krutch, one of the editors of the Nation. I am
very familiar with the work of both of them, and it is my professional
judgment that it is of the first caliber. Anderson is one of the best
newspaper reporters in America and Krutch is one of the best editorial
writers.
Well, both were there as foreigners. Both were working for papers that
could not exist in Tennessee. Both were viewed by their fellow
Tennesseeans not with pride, as credits to the State, but as traitors
to the Tennessee Kultur and public enemies. Their crime was that they
were intelligent men, doing their jobs intelligently.
_________________________________________________________________
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/menck05.htm#SCOPESC
Bryan
by H.L. Mencken
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 27, 1925)
I
It was plain to everyone, when Bryan came to Dayton, that his great
days were behind him -- that he was now definitely an old man, and
headed at last for silence. There was a vague, unpleasant manginess
about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty, though a close glance
showed him carefully shaved, and clad in immaculate linen. All the
hair was gone from the dome of his head, and it had begun to fall out,
too, behind his ears, like that of the late Samuel Gompers. The old
resonance had departed from his voice: what was once a bugle blast had
become reedy and quavering. Who knows that, like Demosthenes, he had a
lisp? In his prime, under the magic of his eloquence, no one noticed
it. But when he spoke at Dayton it was always audible.
When I first encountered him, on the sidewalk in front of the Hicks
brothers law office, the trial was yet to begin, and so he was still
expansive and amiable. I had printed in the Nation, a week or so
before, an article arguing that the anti-evolution law, whatever its
unwisdom, was at least constitutional -- that policing school teachers
was certainly not putting down free speech. The old boy professed to
be delighted with the argument, and gave the gaping bystanders to
understand that I was a talented publicist. In turn I admired the
curious shirt he wore -- sleeveless and with the neck cut very low. We
parted in the manner of two Spanish ambassadors.
But that was the last touch of affability that I was destined to see
in Bryan. The next day the battle joined and his face became hard. By
the end of the first week he was simply a walking malignancy. Hour by
hour he grew more bitter. What the Christian Scientists call malicious
animal magnetism seemed to radiate from him like heat from a stove.
From my place in the court-room, standing upon a table, I looked
directly down upon him, sweating horribly and pumping his palm-leaf
fan. His eyes fascinated me: I watched them all day long. They were
blazing points of hatred. They glittered like occult and sinister
gems. Now and then they wandered to me, and I got my share. It was
like coming under fire.
II
What was behind that consuming hatred? At first I thought that it was
mere evangelical passion. Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows,
is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon
love. But even evangelical Christians occasionally loose their belts
and belch amicably; I have known some who, off duty, were very
benignant. In that very courtroom, indeed, were some of them -- for
example, old Ben McKenzie, Nestor of the Dayton bar, who sat beside
Bryan. Ben was full of good humor. He made jokes with Darrow. But
Bryan only glared.
One day it dawned on me that Bryan, after all, was an evangelical
Christian only by sort of afterthought -- that his career in this
world, and the glories thereof, had actually come to an end before he
ever began whooping for Genesis. So I came to this conclusion: that
what really moved him was a lust for revenge. The men of the cities
had destroyed him and made a mock of him; now he would lead the yokels
against them. Various facts clicked into the theory, and I hold it
still. The hatred in the old man's burning eyes was not for the
enemies of God; it was for the enemies of Bryan.
Thus he fought his last fight, eager only for blood. It quickly became
frenzied and preposterous, and after that pathetic. All sense departed
from him. He bit right and left, like a dog with rabies. He descended
to demagogy so dreadful that his very associates blushed. His one
yearning was to keep his yokels heated up -- to lead his forlorn mob
against the foe. That foe, alas, refused to be alarmed. It insisted
upon seeing the battle as a comedy. Even Darrow, who knew better,
occasionally yielded to the prevailing spirit. Finally, he lured poor
Bryan into a folly almost incredible.
I allude to his astounding argument against the notion that man is a
mammal. I am glad I heard it, for otherwise I'd never believe it.
There stood the man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presidency
of the Republic -- and once, I believe, elected -- there he stood in
the glare of the world, uttering stuff that a boy of eight would laugh
at! The artful Darrow led him on: he repeated it, ranted for it,
bellowed it in his cracked voice. A tragedy, indeed! He came into life
a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. Now he was passing out
a pathetic fool.
III
Worse, I believe that he somehow sensed the fact -- that he realized
his personal failure, whatever the success of the grotesque cause he
spoke for. I had left Dayton before Darrow's cross-examination brought
him to his final absurdity, but I heard his long speech against the
admission of expert testimony, and I saw how it fell flat and how
Bryan himself was conscious of the fact. When he sat down he was done
for, and he knew it. The old magic had failed to work; there was
applause but there was no exultant shouts. When, half an hour later,
Dudley Field Malone delivered his terrific philippic, the very yokels
gave him five times the clapper-clawing that they had given to Bryan.
This combat was the old leader's last, and it symbolized in more than
one way his passing. Two women sat through it, the one old and
crippled, the other young and in the full flush of beauty. The first
was Mrs. Bryan; the second was Mrs. Malone. When Malone finished his
speech the crowd stormed his wife with felicitations, and she glowed
as only a woman can who has seen her man fight a hard fight and win
gloriously. But no one congratulated Mrs. Bryan. She sat hunched in
her chair near the judge, apparently very uneasy. I thought then that
she was ill -- she has been making the round of sanitariums for years,
and was lately in the hands of a faith-healer -- but now I think that
some appalling prescience was upon her, and that she saw in Bryan's
eyes a hint of the collapse that was so near.
He sank into his seat a wreck, and was presently forgotten in the
blast of Malone's titanic rhetoric. His speech had been maundering
feeble and often downright idiotic. Presumably, he was speaking to a
point of law, but it was quickly apparent that he knew no more law
than the bailiff at the door. So he launched into mere violet
garrulity. He dragged in snatches of ancient chautauqua addresses; he
wandered up hill and down dale. Finally, Darrow lured him into that
fabulous imbecility about man as a mammal. He sat down one of the most
tragic asses in American history.
IV
It is the national custom to sentimentalize the dead, as it is to
sentimentalize men about to be hanged. Perhaps I fall into that
weakness here. The Bryan I shall remember is the Bryan of his last
weeks on earth -- broken, furious, and infinitely pathetic. It was
impossible to meet his hatred with hatred to match it. He was winning
a battle that would make him forever infamous wherever enlightened men
remembered it and him. Even his old enemy, Darrow, was gentle with him
at the end. That cross-examination might have been ten times as
devastating. It was plain to everyone that the old Berseker Bryan was
gone -- that all that remained of him was a pair of glaring and
horrible eyes.
But what of his life? Did he accomplish any useful thing? Was he, in
his day, of any dignity as a man, and of any value to his fellow-men?
I doubt it. Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker.
The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was
ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to
take up new ones at a moment's notice. For years he evaded Prohibition
as dangerous; then he embraced it as profitable. At the Democratic
National Convention last year he was on both sides, and distrusted by
both. In his last great battle there was only a baleful and ridiculous
malignancy. If he was pathetic, he was also disgusting.
Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant,
bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him
into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company
of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton,
that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized
societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a
poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full
of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity,
all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to
the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything
that he was not.
The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails,
they will devour it.
_________________________________________________________________
Aftermath
by H.L. Mencken
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, September 14, 1925)
I
The Liberals, in their continuing discussion of the late trial of the
infidel Scopes at Dayton, Tenn., run true to form. That is to say,
they show all their habitual lack of humor and all their customary
furtive weakness for the delusions of Homo neanderthalensis. I point
to two of their most enlightened organs: the eminent New York World
and the gifted New Republic. The World is displeased with Mr. Darrow
because, in his appalling cross-examination of the mountebank Bryan,
he did some violence to the theological superstitions that millions of
Americans cherish. The New Republic denounces him because he addressed
himself, not to "the people of Tennessee" but to the whole country,
and because he should have permitted "local lawyers" to assume "the
most conspicuous position in the trial."
Once more, alas, I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal
thought. What the World's contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply
the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be
very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to
deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it
with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever
infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who
should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the
light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they
flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.
True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights.
He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he
pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men
by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in
season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his
children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the
free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to
demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them
without challenge. Did Darrow, in the course of his dreadful
bombardment of Bryan, drop a few shells, incidentally, into measurably
cleaner camps? Then let the garrisons of those camps look to their
defenses. They are free to shoot back. But they can't disarm their
enemy.
II
The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly
misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from
governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets
himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits
such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If
so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most
intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool,
once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit,
by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes
on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us.
I do not know how many Americans entertain the ideas defended so
ineptly by poor Bryan, but probably the number is very large. They are
preached once a week in at least a hundred thousand rural churches,
and they are heard too in the meaner quarters of the great cities.
Nevertheless, though they are thus held to be sound by millions, these
ideas remain mere rubbish. Not only are they not supported by the
known facts; they are in direct contravention of the known facts. No
man whose information is sound and whose mind functions normally can
conceivably credit them. They are the products of ignorance and
stupidity, either or both.
What should be a civilized man's attitude toward such superstitions?
It seems to me that the only attitude possible to him is one of
contempt. If he admits that they have any intellectual dignity
whatever, he admits that he himself has none. If he pretends to a
respect for those who believe in them, he pretends falsely, and sinks
almost to their level. When he is challenged he must answer honestly,
regardless of tender feelings. That is what Darrow did at Dayton, and
the issue plainly justified the act. Bryan went there in a hero's
shining armor, bent deliberately upon a gross crime against sense. He
came out a wrecked and preposterous charlatan, his tail between his
legs. Few Americans have ever done so much for their country in a
whole lifetime as Darrow did in two hours.
III
The caveat of the New Republic is so absurd that it scarcely deserves
an answer. It is based upon a complete misunderstanding of the
situation that the Scopes trial revealed. What good would it have done
to have addressed an appeal to the people of Tennessee? They had
already, by their lawful representatives, adopted the anti-evolution
statute by an immense majority, and they were plainly determined to
uphold it. The newspapers of the State, with one or two exceptions,
were violently in favor of the prosecution, and applauded every effort
of the rustic judge and district attorney to deprive the defense of
its most elemental rights.
True enough, there was a minority of Tennesseeans on the other side --
men and women who felt keenly the disgrace of their State, and were
eager to put an end to it. But their time had passed; they had missed
their chance. They should have stepped forward at the very beginning,
long before Darrow got into the case. Instead, they hung back
timorously, and so Bryan and the Baptist pastors ran amok. There was a
brilliant exception: John R. Neal. There was another: T.R. Elwell.
Both lawyers. But the rest of the lawyers of the State, when the issue
was joined at last, actually helped the prosecution. Their bar
associations kept up a continuous fusillade. They tried their best to
prod the backwoods Dogberry, Raulston, into putting Darrow into jail.
There was but one way to meet this situation and Darrow adopted it. He
appealed directly to the country and to the world. He had at these
recreant Tennesseeans by exhibiting their shame to all men, near and
far. He showed them cringing before the rustic theologians, and afraid
of Bryan. He turned the State inside out, and showed what civilization
can come to under Fundamentalism. The effects of that cruel exposure
are now visible. Tennessee is still spluttering -- and blushing. The
uproar staggered its people. And they are doing some very painful
thinking. Will they cling to Fundamentalism or will they restore
civilization? I suspect that the quick decision of their neighbor,
Georgia, will help them to choose. Darrow did more for them, in two
weeks, than all their pastors and politicians had done since the Civil
War.
IV
His conduct of the case, in fact, was adept and intelligent from
beginning to end. It is hard, in retrospect, to imagine him improving
it. He faced immense technical difficulties. In order to get out of
the clutches of the village Dogberry and before judges of greater
intelligence he had to work deliberately for the conviction of his
client. In order to evade the puerile question of that client's guilt
or innocence and so bring the underlying issues before the country, he
had to set up a sham battle on the side lines. And in order to expose
the gross ignorance and superstition of the real prosecutor, Bryan, he
had to lure the old imposter upon the stand.
It seems to me that he accomplished all of these things with great
skill. Scopes was duly convicted, and the constitutional questions
involved in the law will now be heard by competent judges and decided
without resort to prayer and moving pictures. The whole world has been
made familiar with the issues, and the nature of the menace that
Fundamentalism offers to civilization is now familiar to every
schoolboy. And Bryan was duly scotched, and, if he had lived, would be
standing before the country today as a comic figure, tattered and
preposterous.
All this was accomplished, in infernal weather, by a man of
sixty-eight, with the scars of battles all over him. He had, to be
sure, highly competent help. At his table sat lawyers whose peculiar
talents, in combination, were of the highest potency -- the brilliant
Hays, the eloquent Malone, the daring and patriotic Tennesseean, Neal.
But it was Darrow who carried the main burden, and Darrow who shaped
the final result. When he confronted Bryan at last, the whole combat
came to its climax. On the one side was bigotry, ignorance, hatred,
superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable
of. On the other side was sense. And sense achieved a great victory.
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