These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Fundamentalism did not die when Bryan’s head fell on his pillow. Fundamentalism endured, and the challenge it posed to the nation’s founding principles and especially to the nature of truth would be felt well into the twenty-first century. Darrow was not among those who believed that the Scopes trial, followed so swiftly by Bryan’s death, had closed the book on fundamentalism. “I am pained to hear of Bryan’s death,” said a sober Darrow. “I have known Bryan since 1896 and supported him twice for the Presidency.” But the idea that modernity had killed William Jennings Bryan took hold, and, mere weeks after his death, big-city reporters and above all H. L. Mencken were back to lampooning Bryan and his followers as dumb hicks, while privately, Mencken confessed that he was terrified of the people he’d met on that courthouse lawn in Dayton—their bigotry and fury set him shuddering. “I set out laughing,” Mencken wrote to a friend, “and returned shivering.”