Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

by Frederick Lewis Allen

The intolerance of those days took many forms. Almost inevitably it took the form of an ugly flare-up of feeling against the Negro, the Jew, and the Roman Catholic. The emotions of group loyalty and of hatred, expanded during war-time and then suddenly denied their intended expression, found a perverted release in the persecution not only of supposed radicals, but also of other elements which to the dominant American group—the white Protestants—seemed alien or “un-American.”

Nor did the methods of the local Klan organizations usually suggest the possession of a “high spiritual philosophy.” These local organizations were largely autonomous and beyond control from Atlanta. They were drawn, as a rule, mostly from the less educated and less disciplined elements of the white Protestant community.

There was something to be said for the right of the people to decide what should be taught in their tax-supported schools, even if what they decided upon was ridiculous. But the issue of the Scopes case, as the great mass of newspaper readers saw it, was nothing so abstruse as the rights of taxpayers versus academic freedom. In the eyes of the public, the trial was a battle between Fundamentalism on the one hand and twentieth-century skepticism (assisted by Modernism) on the other.

He brought to his offensive against the lowbrows an unparalleled vocabulary of invective. He pelted his enemies with words and phrases like mountebank, charlatan, swindler, numskull, swine, witch-burner, homo boobiens, and imbecile; he said of sentimentalists that they squirted rosewater about, of Bryan that “he was born with a roaring voice and it had a trick of inflaming half-wits,” of books which he disliked that they were garbage; he referred to the guileless farmers of Tennessee as “gaping primates” and “the anthropoid rabble.” On occasion—as in his scholarly book on The American Language—Mencken could write measured and precise English, but when his blood was up, his weapons were gross exaggeration and gross metaphors. The moment he appeared the air was full of flying brick-bats: and to read him for the first time gave one, if not blind rage, the sort of intense visceral delight which comes from heaving baseballs at crockery in an amusement park.

In 2020, perhaps, we need another Mencken.