H.L. Mencken

The Sunday Record/March 14, 1926

. 14 Mar 1926

The Sunday Record

The Sad Case of Tennessee

Some time ago, writing in this place, I lamented the intellectual darkness that prevails in the great state of Tennessee, and proposed that measures be taken to dispel it. The reply of the state press was a deluge of abuse. I was denounced as a bolshevik, an atheist, and a scoundrel. One editor hinted I was a Russian by birth and one of the diabolical Elders of Zion. Another dared me to come down to Nashville (or was it Knoxville?) and meet twenty or thirty brave Tennesseeans in fair combat. A third demanded to know how many Liberty bonds I had bought during the war and where I got the money. The rest simply roared. 

Such arguments, perhaps, are powerful in Tennessee, but as for me, I can only say that they leave me undissuaded. I still believe that my chance and casual remarks were apposite and sound. More, I am confirmed in that belief by the tall talk that greeted them. For one of the best ways to test the enlightenment of a state, I believe, is to look at its newspapers. If they are well informed and sensible. If they see what is in front of them clearly and discuss it honestly and courageously, then you will find a general interest in ideas and a disposition to hear new ones, as well as old ones. But if they are ignorant and bellicose, if they seek to put down discontent and heresy with the weapons of the professional patriot and hedge evangelist, then you will find only idiocy.

There was a time when most of the southern states were cursed by newspapers of the latter type. It was a time of intellectual stagnation, of depressing dullness and sloth. There arose eventually, usually against great opposition, papers of different and better sort and wherever they arose, that part of the south was roused from its long sleep. It is the misfortune of Tennessee that other southern states have gone ahead of it in this matter. It has one one or two excellent papers, but the level of its state press is very low. Thus the antievolution law crept upon it, and the Scopes trial. And thus its very name is a hissing and a mocking today from pole to pole. 

There is a moral in all this for other states, and 1 believe that not a few are well aware of it. That moral is to the general effect that it is extremely dangerous to seek to dispose of evils by denying that they exist and by denouncing those who call attention to them. The barbarous ignorance that came to its final flower in the anti-evolution law had been visible in Tennessee for a long while—in fact, since before the civil war. The educational machinery of the state was defective. Its chief political offices were held by ignoramuses, chiefly out of the poor white trash. The people of its uplands, in so far as they came into contact with ideas at all, had to take them from rustic pastors, themselves on all fours intellectually with city street car conductors. The gods worshiped were such grotesque mountebanks as the late William Jennings Bryan.

Those Tennesseans who were educated and in contact with the rest of the World were not unaware of these things. They deplored the backwardness of the state and suggested remedies. They proposed that the ruling political charlatans be turned out and decent and competent men put in. They opposed the imbecile voodooism of the bucolic theologians. But to what effect? To the sole effect that they were themselves denounced raucously by the state press. Their discontent with the swinishness about them, it appeared, was unpatriotic and hence abominable. It was their duty, as good Tennesseeans, to declare that all was well and give three cheers. Anything short of that was treason.

The consequences of this nonsense are now known to everyone. Abused beyond endurance, the civilized Tennesseans took refuge in silence, and so the hillbillies and their pastors had their way. There ensued the ludicrous attempt to put down learning by law. There ensued the Scopes obscenity, with Tennessee all over the first pages of the world. And there ensued, finally, the emergence of Tennessee as a joke state, laughed at even by Haitians and Dominicans

When I argue that all this might have been prevented by an intelligent and courageous press I do indulge in mere speculation, for it has been prevented by an intelligent and courageous press elsewhere. But wherever the press is inferior—as in Mississippi, for example –the same thing is being repeated. Worse, it seems likely to be repeated in Tennessee itself. For the hillbillies and their pastors, not content with the Scopes trial, now propose to set up a Baptist Fundamentalist university at Dayton—i.e.: an immense engine for putting down intelligence, deliberately and relentlessly—and the state newspapers, far from opposing the scheme as an insult, appear to welcome it, as a boon.

What will be the effect upon the state, imagining this institution actually set up and in full function? Obviously that effect will be disastrous. All sorts of fanatics will swarm in, and all the surviving members of enlightened minority will get out. The state will become a sort of Holy Land for imbeciles, and their imbecility will color all its laws and the whole fabric of its government. Its governor, Peay, seems an absurd fellow today, with his toadying to the ignorant and his shameless defense of the antievolution law. But if the Bryanites pour in they will be giving all the state offices presently to jackasses ten times worse than Peay. 

The end is easy to discern. The very name of Tennessee will become a jest. Its more Intelligent sons—and it still has plenty of good blood—will move out, and, having moved out, they will be anything but eager to let it be known where they came from. At home there will be no opposition to the fundamentalists and their moron followers. Journalism in the state, flattering the mob as it does now, will become a mere conspiracy against sense—puerile, without dignity, and preposterous. 

The point is that nothing is more imprudent than trying to put down facts by denying them. They have a habit of breaking through even the most violent denial and of taking on force in the process. The more they are opposed the more dangerous they become. The way to deal with them is to meet them frankly and squarely. Once they are clearly understood, it is possible to deal with them effectively. But so doing as they are concealed and obscured there is no dealing with them at all. 

Herein lies the prime value of free speech. It makes concealment difficult and, in the long run, impossible. One heretic, if he is right, is as good as a host. He is bound to win the long run. It is thus no wonder that foes of the enlightenment always begin their proceedings by trying to deny free speech to their opponents. It is dangerous to them, and they know it. So they have at it by accusing those opponents of all sorts of grave crimes and misdemeanors, most of them clearly absurd—in other words by culling them names and trying to scare them off. 

Only too often, alas, they succeed. They have succeeded apparently in Tennessee. But their success is never very secure. It is always possible, given pugnacity enough in the heretics to reopen the question, and once it is fairly reopened the obscurantists are easy game. Their fury is their undoing. It leads them into extravagant excesses. They argue nonsensically. They become absurd. Thus all that is needed to unhorse them is pertinacity. They must win by assault or they can never win at all. 

In Tennessee they seem to be trying assault. Their apparent aim is to so overwhelm the state with bilge that all civilized Tennesseans will up in despair and clear out. It will be interesting to see what happens. My guess is that blackguard journalism, supported by the mob, will achieve what appears, at first glance to be an overwhelming victory, but that suddenly it will come a cropper and go down to wreck.