Professor H L Mencken

Writings in the Baltimore Evening Sun, 1924-1925 Professor H L Mencken

This volume of Mencken's writings in the Baltimore Evening Sun opens with his writings on the presidential election of 1924, which resulted in the overwhelming victory of the incumbent Republican, Calvin Coolidge, over the Democrat John W. Davis, whose candidacy was marred by support from the Ku Klux Klan. The campaign over, Mencken turned his attention to broader issues of political malfeasance ("Government by Jackass"), the continuing assault on civil liberties represented by Prohibition, and the infusion of religion into politics. This last issue comes to the fore in Mencken's scintillating writings on the Scopes trial, which are reprinted here in their entirety. Mencken, Clarence Darrow, and others essentially put the state of Tennessee on trial over its law prohibiting the teaching of evolution, and Mencken's fiery screeds-especially his vicious obituary of the prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan, who died only days after the trial concluded-had much to do with the demise of religious fundamentalism over the next several decades.