{"id":72753,"date":"2013-11-18T08:20:28","date_gmt":"2013-11-18T13:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=72753"},"modified":"2015-05-10T09:54:13","modified_gmt":"2015-05-10T13:54:13","slug":"the-books-the-books-a-mencken-chrestomathy-his-own-selection-of-his-choicest-writing-in-memoriam-w-j-b-by-h-l-mencken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=72753","title":{"rendered":"The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing<\/i>, \u201cIn Memoriam, W.J.B.,\u201d by H.L. Mencken"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"9780307808875_p0_v1_s260x420\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Next up on the essays shelf<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, by H.L. Mencken<\/p>\n

Poor William Jennings Bryan. History has not been kind to him. He backed the wrong philosophical horse too many times. He was a pacifist Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, which, of course, did not work out. He was pro-Prohibition. He was, to put it mildly, anti-Darwin. He was one of those politicians who turned things he believed in into Fiery Crusades. And so he basically fell on his own sword. He was beloved of the “common man”, and much of his politics came out of a resentment of city folk. We see that attitude now, alive and well, in some of our more noxious public figures. Witness Sarah Palin’s botched ridiculous telling of the Paul Revere story. She got none of it right. And yet people listen to her and feel validated by her “sticking it” to the snobby urban folk. Well I’m a snobby city folk but I actually know the Paul Revere story, I actually care about it, I am very patriotic, and you got every detail wrong, lady. What she validates in the people who think she’s smart (the mind boggles at the thought) is their own resentment at feeling inferior. And I don’t even want to get into this spectacle<\/a> and what it says about the folks who think he’s a Big Thinker, someone to listen to at all (outside of his entertainment value, I mean, which should be obvious). I’m a weird and itchy liberal at times, especially with that right-wing streak I’ve got going on, but I know I want nothing to do with people who find KNOWLEDGE suspect. William Jennings Bryan was one of those. How much of it was a pose? How much of it was pandering to his base? <\/p>\n

\"WJB\"<\/a><\/p>\n

H.L. Mencken despised him. Mencken came into close contact with Bryan during the Scopes trial. Bryan had been campaigning to get evolution banned from schools, so when the Scopes trial came, he was asked to represent the World Christian Fundamentals Association (the name alone is terrifying) at the trial. Mencken traveled to Tennessee to cover the Scopes trial and wrote back blistering reports about the know-nothing idiots who supported WCFA, and who thought Bryan was a hero. The trial was a circus. The courthouse steps crowded with screaming groups of protestors, on either side. Bryan ate it UP. Clarence Darrow, of course, was the prosecutor. Bryan himself seemed to get more and more fundamentalist (no other word for it) as the trial went on. Mencken saw this happening and wrote about it. The more Clarence Darrow elegantly and calmly tried to poke holes in the defense’s argument, the more Bryan fired up the flames of his own beliefs until he had pushed himself into a corner. “The Bible is good enough for me\u2026” was one of Bryan’s comments along those lines. He became more rigid as the trial went on. Was it armor he erected as protection? Was it a true belief? I think it was, but I’m not sure about the rest of it. It’s a familiar type. I’ve met those people, I used to have a bunch of those people who read here \u2026 and it’s a curious experience debating with them, or even just hanging out with them, because the resentment shows up in every comment. It is compulsive. They feel left out, made fun of, mocked. So you say you read James Joyce, or you link to something in The New Republic, and out pour the sneers. These are the cultural warriors, these are the people who operate SOLELY from cultural resentment. Just one very benign example in the comments section here<\/a>, which should be immediately apparent. He was a regular on my site for years before he just couldn’t take it anymore. <\/p>\n

When you take that attitude (which is its own brand of snobbery) and put it into the political realm, that’s when you get into very dangerous territory. That’s when you start dehumanizing your opponent. That’s when you go through the looking glass and you are dealing with phantom enemies, spectres and ghouls and propaganda, rather than reality. All of this was going on in the Scopes Trial. <\/p>\n

Mencken’s pieces on the Scopes trial are well worth seeking out. They are a ground-level eyewitness account of that momentous case. And the arguments will all seem eerily familiar since we still deal with this issue today with the Young Earthers and other such intellectual heavyweights. Or, even more insidious, those charlatans who want biology teachers to “Just teach the controversy.” Ugh.<\/p>\n

Interestingly enough, Bryan won the Scopes trial, but then it was reversed on appeal. And even more interesting, after the trial, Bryan went on a mad 5 day lecture tour (he was big on the chautauqua circuit). He was hailed as a hero by people who felt that he had validated their desire to Not Learn Anything New or Scary. He returned to Dayton, Tennessee after this small tour, and promptly died. In a one-horse town. Mencken thought that was fitting. A one-horse town for a third-rate man. Also, worth noting Bryan’s deep roots in the Democratic Party (he was their candidate for President three times). His prudery and proud ignorance and crusading spirit would make him a Tea Partier today, but that just goes to show you how the concepts of “right” and “left” are in flux, and always have been. <\/p>\n

William Jennings Bryan died on July 26, 1925. This piece by Mencken appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun<\/i> the following day (and then, in one of his later books, in an edited and expanded version). There is an interesting personal aspect to the essay, describing Mencken’s first meeting of Bryan, and the amiability the man showed at first. But once Mencken’s pieces started coming out, that amiability vanished. But Mencken provides eloquent glimpses of Bryan in action, not just in the courtroom, but out about town, holding court on the courthouse steps or in front of restaurants, glorying in his notoriety and the rightness of his cause. <\/p>\n

Here is an excerpt. <\/p>\n

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, “In Memoriam: W.J.B.,” by H.L. Mencken<\/big><\/p>\n

Bryan lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind who write schoolbooks. There was a scattering of sweet words in his funeral notices, but it was no more than a response to conventional sentimentality. The best verdict the most romantic editorial writer could dredge up, save in the humorless South, was to the general effect that his imbecilities were excused by his earnestness – that under his clowning, as under that of the juggler of Notre Dame, there was the zeal of a steadfast soul. But this was apology, not praise; precisely the same thing might be said of Mary Baker G. Eddy. The truth is that even Bryan’s sincerity will probably yield to what is called, in other fields, definitive criticism. Was he sincere when he opposed imperialism in the Philippines, or when he fed it with deserving Democrats in Santo Domingo? Was he sincere when he tried to shove the Prohibitionists under the table, or when he seized their banner and began to lead them with loud whoops? Was he sincere when he bellowed against war, or when he dreamed of himself as a tin-soldier in uniform, with a grave reserved at Arlington among the generals? Was he sincere when he fawned over Champ Clark, or when he betrayed Clark? Was he sincere when he pleaded for tolerance in New York, or when he bawled for the faggot and the stake in Tennessee?<\/p>\n

This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. 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 barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition – the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine.<\/p>\n

His last battle will be grossly misunderstood if it is thought of as a mere exercise in fanaticism – that is, if Bryan the Fundamentalist Pope is mistaken for one of the bucolic Fundamentalists. There was much more in it than that, as everyone knows who saw him on the field. What moved him, at bottom, was simply hatred of the city men who had laughed at him so long, and brought him at last to so tatterdemalion an estate. He lusted for revenge upon them. He yearned to lead the anthropoid rabble against them, to punish them for their execution upon him by attacking the very vitals of their civilization. He went far beyond the bounds of any merely religious frenzy, however inordinate. When he began denouncing the notion that man is a mammal even some of the hinds at Dayton were agape. And when, brought upon Clarence Darrow’s cruel hook, he writhed and tossed in a very fury of malignancy, bawling against the veriest elements of sense and decency like a man frantic – when he came to that tragic climax of his striving there were snickers among the hinds as well as hosannas.<\/p>\n

Upon that hook, in truth, Bryan committed suicide, as a legend as well as in the body. He staggered from the rustic court ready to die, and he staggered from it ready to be forgotten, save as a character in a third-rate farce, witless and in poor taste. <\/p>\n