Page "Scopes Trial" Paragraph 55

Famously vituperative attacks came from journalist H. L. Mencken, whose syndicated columns from Dayton for The Baltimore Sun drew vivid caricatures of the " backward " local populace, referring to the people of Rhea County as " Babbits ," " morons ," " peasants ," " hill-billies ," " yaps ," and " yokels.

" He chastised the " degraded nonsense which country preachers are ramming and hammering into yokel skulls.

" However, Mencken did enjoy certain aspects of Dayton, writing, " 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.

" He described Rhea County as priding itself on a kind of tolerance or what he called " lack of Christian heat ," opposed to outside ideas but without hating those who held them.

He pointed out, " The Klan has never got a foothold here, though it rages everywhere else in Tennessee.

" Mencken attempted to perpetrate a hoax, distributing flyers for the " Rev.

Elmer Chubb ," but the claims that Chubb would drink poison and preach in lost languages were ignored as commonplace by the people of Dayton and only the Commonweal bit.

Mencken continued to attack Bryan, including in his famously withering obituary of Bryan, " In Memoriam: W. J. B.

", in which he charged Bryan with " insincerity "— not for his religious beliefs but for the inconsistent and contradictory positions he took on a number of political questions during his career.

Years later, Mencken did question whether dismissing Bryan " as a quack pure and unadulterated " was " really just.

" Mencken's columns made the Dayton citizens irate and drew general fire from the Southern press.

After Raulston ruled against the admission of scientific testimony, Mencken left Dayton, declaring in his last dispatch, " 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.

" Consequently, the journalist missed Darrow's cross-examination of Bryan on Monday.