Menckeniana A Magazine About All Things H.L. Mencken Fall 2012 • No. 203 Happy Mencken Day! Richard Schrader The Scopes Trial: How the Letter Kills H. George Hahn The Campus Trials of Mencken’s Satire The H.L. Mencken Room at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore Menckeniana Table of Contents Mencken Day photos 1 A magazine Keynote Address • Richard J. Schrader “The Scopes Trial: How the Letter Kills” 2 about all things H.L. Mencken Address • H. George Hahn “The Campus Trials of Mencken’s Satire” 11 Fall 2012 Book Review • Frederick Betz “Bluebeard’s Goat Jacqueline Watts, editor and Other Stories by H.L. Mencken” 13 Bibliographic Checklist • Vince Fitzpatrick 14 COVER PHOTO Editorial board By Stacy Spaulding, member of the board of the Frederick Betz Friends of the H.L. Mencken House; homemade ornament Southern Illinois University based on an illustration by David Levine which first Vince Fitzpatrick appeared in the New York Review of Books June 11, 1981. Curator, H.L. Mencken Collection Menckeniana is published quarterly by the Enoch Pratt Fred Hobson Free Library, 400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, Maryland University of North Carolina 21201. ©2012, all rights reserved. ISSN 0025-9233. Richard Schrader Submissions and books for review should be sent by e-mail Boston College to [email protected]. FOR THOSE WHO MISSED IT: MENCKEN DAY AT THE ENOCH PRATT FREE LIBRARY Top left: Pratt Library CEO Carla D. Hayden introduced Dr. Richard J. Schrader, the keynote speaker. Top right: Prof. Schrader delivered his talk on the Scopes Trial and manipulation of the news. Middle right: Bob Brugger, president of the Mencken Society, officiated the annual meeting of the society. Bottom right: Dr. H. George Hahn delivered his talk on Mencken and the nature of satire. Bottom left: Mencken Day guests looked over exhibits on Stanley L. Harrison and Charles A. Fecher, eminent Mencken scholars who died last year. Menckeniana • Fall 2012 • 1 KEYNOTE ADDREss THE SCOPES TRIAL: How the Letter Kills BY RICHARD J. SCHRADER the Middle Ages, and so at the end I them heeded the dictum of St. Paul will try to clear the air with evidence that inspired readers of an earlier age: I want to express my gratitude to that some medievals may have had a “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth the Pratt Library for the many happy more sensible approach to the creation life” (2 Cor. 3:6, KJV). days I spent in the old Mencken story in Genesis than either William More than eighty-five years after Room and for inviting me to give Jennings Bryan or Henry Louis the events in July 1925, practically this talk, to Art Gutman for his Mencken. all that is popularly “known” about guidance and friendship during the In my harangue to the ‘gogues I the trial is what Mencken wanted last thirty years, to Vince Fitzpatrick stressed how Mencken scripted the known, just as some reference works None of them heeded the dictum “ of St. Paul that inspired readers of an earlier age: “the letter killeth, but “the spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3:6, KJV). for numerous collaborations and trial during and after the event, and still claim, thanks to Mencken, that frequent scholarly advice, to David how his version was perpetuated Millard Fillmore brought the first Thaler, another collaborator and also by Inherit the Wind, both play bathtub into the White House. One publisher, to those prodigious scholars and movie, and by historians like might say that his version of the Marion Rodgers and S. T. Joshi for Richard Hofstadter, who reduced Scopes Trial was a hoax on the order letting me in on some of their work, the trial to a case of fundamentalist of that other bit of buncombe, with and to Frank Forman, Ray Stevens, intolerance versus science or progress Mencken imagining a more colorful Jack Sanders, and Chris Wilson for or cosmopolitanism (Larson 235- drama before the real one was held, helping me form the parts of this 6). Better assessments may be found then recording the trial as it happened talk that were tried out on my fellow in the more recent books by Garry in such a way that actual events ‘gogues during the MLA annual Wills, Edward Larson, and Karen and issues would be buried beneath convention in 2000. Since then I Armstrong, all of which I have the greatest satire of the century. have benefited from recent Mencken drawn upon. My colleagues back Mencken did to William Jennings Society talks and other material to be then needed a longer introduction to Bryan what Woodrow Wilson’s found in the journal Menckeniana, both Mencken and the Scopes trial propagandists did to Kaiser Wilhelm. and I hope I will do them justice. than is necessary for this audience. The trial was the high point of They were important because of the I will make that background a Mencken’s life-long crusade to lack of a university library in my preface to discussion of what resulted discredit religion, which he saw present rustic setting–I trust that I from the literal-minded way that as retrograde, a survival from an haven’t overlooked any blockbusters. fundamentalists approached the Bible infantile stage in human development. As a professor, my primary field was and their opponents approached 2 • Menckeniana • Fall 2012 Darwin and Nietzsche. None of Continued on next page Keynote • Richard J. Schrader In other words, he viewed it (as he The image of Bryan created by did most things) through the lens of even though he probably did not Darrow and Mencken was given a nineteenth-century mindset, one break the law. (He told a reporter definitive form in Jerome Lawrence that takes the romantic evolutionary/ that he missed the class on evolution. and Robert Lee’s play Inherit the developmental model for granted and That’s why Clarence Darrow did not Wind (1955). Everyone thus knows finds its gospel in Darwin, Nietzsche, put him on the stand.) The ACLU Bryan well for such lost causes as and the positivist Higher Criticism, intended to raise a constitutional Biblical literalism and prohibition, which “subjected the Bible to the same issue and was unhappy with Darrow’s but few are aware that for thirty years sort of literary analysis as any other presence on the defense team, though he was the most important figure religious text, interpreting its ‘truths’ Scopes wanted him. Darrow, in in American reform politics (Wills in light of its historical and cultural cahoots with Mencken and the 99-100; Larson 35, 38). Among context” (Larson 34), as opposed sympathetic media, aimed primarily other things, he was nominated to treating it as the inerrant word for President three times and was of God. Born in 1880, Mencken Wilson’s Secretary of State until he claimed to have made up his mind on resigned over the country’s being led practically everything very early in into the Great War, just as he had life (Fecher 4). Though rooted in the The anti-evolution opposed militarism and imperialism past, his biases regarding the Scopes after the Spanish-American War. Trial happened to correspond to those Butler Act was He championed railroad regulation, of the leading media. Mencken’s broadly supported currency reform, state initiative and libertarianism (which is nineteenth- “ referendum, a Department of Labor, century liberalism) was not widely “when it passed in campaign finance disclosure, and condemned as reactionary until it 1925, but most opposition to the death penalty. He was directed at Franklin Roosevelt was a majoritarian and helped secure during the Depression. Paradoxically, Tennesseans did not ratification of four amendments William Jennings Bryan was twenty care one way or the to the Constitution, all “designed years older than Mencken, and yet to promote a more democratic or he was truly progressive, in that other. righteous society”: they brought a great many of his political ideas about direct election of Senators, were enacted well into the twentieth a progressive federal income tax, century, and he would certainly have prohibition, and female suffrage supported the New Deal. to discredit fundamentalism, which (Larson 38). When Bryan died of Thanks to Mencken’s script, he did in the famous grilling of diabetes on July 26, shortly after the Tennessee’s plans went awry. The Bryan on the next to last day (after trial, libertarian Mencken claimed anti-evolution Butler Act was broadly Mencken had left because he thought to have killed him, and some liberal supported when it passed in 1925, that Bryan had won [Rodgers 289]). historians tried to do the same to his but most Tennesseans did not care However, that non-testimony was legacy. one way or the other. Bryan in fact never heard by the jury or entered As late as 1920 Bryan did not opposed it because of the penalty in the trial record. It is part of that want to forbid teaching evolution; attached, and the Governor who other, shadow trial that everyone he merely desired to have it treated signed it into law understood it to knows. The prosecution won the as one biological theory, an unproven be symbolic, not punitive (Wills 97- actual trial: Darrow in fact changed theory and not a fact (Wills 100-01). 100; Ginger passim; Larson 47-48, the plea to guilty on the final day. Though his position hardened, he did 55, 191). Darwin had appeared in He did it for two reasons: to avoid a not like the punitive aspect of the case textbooks for some time; the one counter-interrogation by Bryan on the and offered ahead of time to pay any that John Scopes supposedly taught merits of Darwin, which was Bryan’s fine levied on Scopes.