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
...more
In 2020, perhaps, we need another Mencken.
