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Extremism and Evolution: Mencken on the Scopes Trial

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Extremism and Evolution: Mencken on the Scopes Trial H. L. Mencken. A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Introduction by Art Winslow. Hoboken: Melville House Publishing, 2006. xxii + 206 pp. $19.95, paper, ISBN 978-1-933633-17-6. Reviewed by Adam Laats Published on H-Education (June, 2011) Commissioned by Jonathan Anuik (University of Alberta) When the famous journalist H. L. (Henry Lippmann, the most famous name in Jazz Age Louis) Mencken alighted from his train in the American journalism. He did not come to Dayton small town of Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925, he with an eye to evenhanded reporting. Rather, he expected to fnd a squalid backwater. Instead, he hoped to use his fame and talent to assist in the discovered “a country town full of charm and decapitation of the viper of Protestant fundamen‐ even beauty” (p. 29). His assessment of the town talism. To a great extent, he succeeded. The image did not dull his caustic pen as he reported on the of both the Scopes trial and of fundamentalism, in events of the Scopes trial. The town, Mencken re‐ both academic historiography and popular cul‐ ported, was plagued by its population of “yokels,” ture, remained mired for decades in the partisan “hillbillies,” and “the lower orders,” and “igno‐ stereotype Mencken described. rant,” “dishonest,” “cowardly,” “ignoble,” and “im‐ Due to his lasting influence, this new collec‐ mortal vermin” (pp. 11-13, 45, 62). Mencken had tion of Mencken’s Scopes trial reporting is a wel‐ reluctantly abandoned the civilized environs of come addition. It collects seventeen short pieces, Baltimore to report frsthand on the latest “Trial fifteen from the Baltimore Evening Sun, one that of the Century.” At issue in the Scopes trial was a appeared in The Nation, and one from the Menck‐ recent Tennessee law that had prohibited the en-founded American Mercury. It includes ten teaching of any idea--including but not limited to pages of trial photos and an excerpt of the most evolution--that threatened the dominant Protes‐ dramatic part of the trial: the interrogation of tant theology. prosecution attorney William Jennings Bryan by Mencken had built his career as a sharp- defense attorney Clarence Darrow. The editors tongued opponent to all such established ortho‐ have also added in a few helpful notes that do not doxies. His irreverent wit and remorseless icono‐ get in the way of Mencken’s steamroller style but clasm had made him, perhaps along with Walter H-Net Reviews help fll in modern readers on some obscure ref‐ down between the enlightened, secular few and erences from 1920s popular culture. the masses with their “simian gabble” (p. 129). Mencken’s essays will not give much new in‐ Thus, Mencken had no truck with the notion formation about the trial to historians already fa‐ that education should be rooted in the culture and miliar with it but they do provide a useful glimpse experiences of children. He did not agree that into Mencken’s eclectic ideology and mercurial schooling should be germane to children’s lives style. His attacks on the opponents of evolution outside of school. Rather, these essays reveal that education, for instance, demonstrate Mencken’s Mencken determined to use education as a penchant for lumping together his intellectual op‐ weapon to combat U.S. citizens’ stubborn and in‐ ponents without concern for factual accuracy. In tractable small-mindedness. For Mencken, there reporting on “The Tennessee Circus,” for example, was a right answer. It lay in the spread of secular he calls all conservative Protestants “Ku Klux the‐ civilization and enlightenment. Education was the ologians” (p. 3). This in spite of the fact that the only hope to cure backward peoples of their infe‐ leader of the prosecution and Mencken’s bête rior ways. noire, Bryan, opposed the powerful 1920s Ku Klux Mencken’s relentless prose in these essays Klan. helped push Protestant fundamentalists into nar‐ Even more intriguing is Mencken’s vision of rower stereotypes than many fundamentalists the nature of humanity. The Scopes trial gave would have liked. Mencken’s essays were vicious Mencken a perfect opportunity to vent his spleen indictments of fundamentalism and did more to against the foibles of the U.S. masses. He conclud‐ discredit it than long efforts by more temperate ed that most U.S. citizens remained “Homo Nean‐ critics. The title of this collection, taken from a col‐ derthalensis” (p. 11). The problem at the root of umn in the Baltimore Evening Sun, from July 11, the Scopes trial, Mencken argued, was that “the 1925, gives one example of Mencken’s tactics. By great majority of men” consistently and stupidly calling the trial a “Religious Orgy,” Mencken fought against “every step in human progress” (p. snatched away fundamentalists’ high moral 12). At times, Mencken’s raw elitism still has pow‐ ground. Calling it an “orgy” may have been utterly er to shock. In denouncing the “lower orders,” untrue, unfair, and baseless. But it was powerful who supported antievolution laws, he explained and effective nonetheless. that “the human race is divided into two sharply Mencken mercilessly attacked what he called differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, fundamentalist religion in these essays. He de‐ almost genera” (pp. 13, 16). To Mencken, the great scribed for his Baltimore readers a religious ser‐ unwashed needed more than just a bath; they “al‐ vice in which one woman denounced the reading most” represented a lower species entirely. of books. Another “brother” argued that “educa‐ For all his scorn of biblical literalists, Menck‐ tion was a snare. Once his children could read the en defended the right of every person to believe Bible, he said, they had enough. Beyond lay only in inanity, in “imbecilities” (p. 120). However, infidelity and damnation. Sin stalked big cities. these essays show the limits Mencken placed on Dayton itself was a Sodom” (p. 54). Their religious those rights. No person, no matter how stupidly meeting, in Mencken’s telling, soon degenerated devoted to religion, could be allowed to “inflict into a mere “barbaric grotesquerie,” with one “fe‐ [those beliefs] upon other men by force.... He has male ox in gingham” going into inspired convul‐ no right to demand that they be treated as sacred” sions (pp. 55, 57). (p. 120). For Mencken, this was the crux of the is‐ Mencken argued that the dull-witted “funda‐ sue in Dayton. The Scopes trial served as a show‐ mentalist mind” could no longer even understand 2 H-Net Reviews opposition to its religious beliefs (p. 75). It had movement and the Scopes trial held sway even created a stark Manichean universe of good and among academic historians. The frst academic evil, and Mencken believed all civilization re‐ historian to tackle the subject was Stewart G. Cole, mained outside fundamentalism’s narrow bound‐ whose History of Fundamentalism appeared in aries. Fundamentalists, Mencken noted, “believe, 1931. Cole repeatedly described the World’s Chris‐ on the authority of Genesis, that the earth is fat tian Fundamentals Association, a leading umbrel‐ and that witches still infest it” (p. 97). He argued la group for fundamentalists, as a “cult.” He re‐ that “everyone” knew “Evangelical Christianity ... ferred to the leaders of the movement as “dis‐ is founded upon hate” (p. 105). turbed men.” Referring to the Bible schools, he Mencken argued in his essays on the Scopes wrote that “their passion for saintliness often trial that such backward, evil notions derived leads to near hysteria ... a psychotic condition.”[1] their power from cultural stagnation. The East Cole’s argument was supported and given Tennesseans that he met in Dayton did not dis‐ greater legitimacy by H. Richard Niebuhr’s influ‐ suade him from this opinion. Mencken informed ential essay in the 1931 Encyclopedia of the Social readers that such “Tennessee mountaineers” had Sciences. In his analysis, one that was to hold not been “debauched by the refinements of the sway in academic and popular understanding for toilet” (pp. 85, 128). They were nothing more than almost forty years, fundamentalism became a “gaping primates from the upland valleys of the largely rural phenomenon. Further, fundamental‐ Cumberland Range” (p. 129). Mencken lumped his ists did well in certain areas because rural people vicious critiques of Appalachian culture and his and preachers had no access to educational insti‐ savage contempt for conservative Protestantism tutions and because they lived in a “static” social into a wholesale denunciation of fundamentalism. environment. The movement was seen as a lack His charges against Protestant fundamentalism of something; in this case, it was a lack of expo‐ became part of the legacy of the Scopes trial. sure to the ideas of modern urban culture.[2] Ironically, one of those lasting charges was The next widely read academic history of the that the antievolution side in the Scopes trial rep‐ fundamentalist movement of the 1920s came in resented the side of extremism. The irony derives 1954. Norman F. Furniss, in The Fundamentalist from the fact that it was Mencken himself who de‐ Controversy, 1918-1931, concluded that the move‐ livered some of the most extreme language of the ment was made up of ill-educated, violent, and ru‐ trial. For instance, the day after prosecution lead‐ ral thugs. He argued, for example, that “violence er Bryan died, Mencken delivered a stinging eulo‐ in thought and language was another outstanding gy in one of his Sun columns. Instead of respect‐ feature of the fundamentalist movement.” This vi‐ ing his opponent, even grudgingly after Bryan’s olent thought, according to Furniss, was a product sudden death, Mencken attacked the late Bryan of “ignorance, even illiteracy.” Furniss, in agree‐ with renewed vigor.
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