WJB: H. L. Mencken's Diatribe on Bryan's Death

Mencken did not write a eulogy, he wrote an infamous screed libeling a good man:

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.
The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.

http://www.peeniewallie.com/2005/06/h_l_menckens_ob.html

Since Bryan attacked the East Coast monied interests, who was Mencken but the white knight for the East, living and writing and publishing in New York. Mencken was only familiar with the old Bryan of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Of the Populist, anti-Imperialist he was gleefully ignorant. Mencken was nothing but a learned purveyor of literate cynicism.

And today all we know is the learned Mencken and the quasi-literate Beck... but whatever we have, we have lost anything like the Populist and Progressive Bryan and have people with nothing but attitude.

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Other William Jennings Bryan posts
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/03/wjb-william-jennings-bryan-against.html

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/01/wjb.html