When William Jennings Bryan died in 1925, H.L. Mencken wrote a scathing eulogy stating:
“There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that [Bryan’s] last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, and that death found him there. The man felt home in such scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet…He liked getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country lawyers, country pastors, all country people…The Simian gabble of a country town was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort.”The truth is that Mencken, the son of German immigrants, could never understand why William Jennings Bryan had such a strong following in the south.
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I blow hot and cold on Mencken. He was an arrogant, elitist prick. But his "Tragedy of Appomattox" was pretty spot on, and he's essentially the only one who ever gave an accurate assessment of the Gettysburg Address.
ReplyDeletehe's essentially the only one who ever gave an accurate assessment of the Gettysburg Address.
DeleteRight on.