The Life and Riotous Times of H.L. Mencken by William Manchester

Author:William Manchester [Manchester, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780795335648
Publisher: RosettaBooks, LLC
Published: 2013-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

To the men and women of the mountains—the instigators and passionate defenders of the anti-evolution law—Dayton was, indeed, a sort of Babylon, to be viewed much as a bumpkin from upstate New York would view Broadway. The religion of the Freemasons they regarded as tame and, after a fashion, sinful; the approach of Scopes’ defenders set their spines tingling. Surely, they felt, Darrow would be fetched by a lightning bolt before the trial was ended. Indeed, to believe Mencken, the night Darrow arrived in Tennessee “there was a violent storm, the town water turned brown, and horned cattle in the lowlands were afloat for hours. A woman back in the mountains gave birth to a child with hair four inches long, curiously bobbed in scallops.”

As the clamor grew louder, as the crowds of visiting crackpots doubled and doubled again, as hysteria mounted, even the soberer of Dayton’s citizens began to share their apprehension. The trial had not yet begun, but already it was apparent it would not take the turn for which the town promoters had hoped. When the indictment was first handed down, the Freemasons had entertained ideas of a great Boost Dayton carnival; some of the prominent visitors, it was believed, might even take to the countryside and come to settle in Rhea county. With this in mind the Progressive Dayton Club laid plans for “monkey medals,” to be presented to the participants; in this spirit, J. R. Darwin decorated his Everything-To-Wear store with a gigantic banner proclaiming “DARWIN IS RIGHT—inside.” When it developed that the trial would be a grim and bitter battle and not, as hoped, a pleasant farce, the promoters began to get panicky, and it was on this disillusion that Mencken keyed his first dispatch.

On the eve of the great contest Dayton is full of sickening surges and tremors of doubt. Five or six weeks ago, when the infidel Scopes was first laid by the heels, there was no uncertainty in all this smiling valley. The town boomers leaped to the assault as one man. Here was an unexampled, almost a miraculous chance to get Dayton upon the front pages, to make it talked about, to put it upon the map. But how now?

Today, with the curtain rang up and the worst buffooneries to come, it is obvious to even town boomers that getting upon the map, like patriotism, is not enough….

I have been attending the permanent town meeting that goes on in Robinson’s drug store, trying to find out what the town optimists have saved from the wreck. All I can find is a sort of mystical confidence that God will somehow come to the rescue to reward His old and faithful partisans as they deserve—that good will flow eventually out of what now seems to be heavily evil. More specifically, it is believed that settlers will be attracted to the town as to some refuge from the atheism of the great urban Sodoms and Gomorrahs.

But will these refugees bring any money with

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