“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States..."

[Bernardo de La Paz]

85. "Mencken had built his career as a sharp-tongued opponent to all such established orthodoxies."

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32241

The Scopes trial gave Mencken a perfect opportunity to vent his spleen against the foibles of the U.S. masses. He concluded that most U.S. citizens remained “Homo Neanderthalensis” (p. 11). The problem at the root of the Scopes trial, Mencken argued, was that “the great majority of men” consistently and stupidly fought against “every step in human progress” (p. 12). At times, Mencken’s raw elitism still has power to shock. In denouncing the “lower orders,” who supported antievolution laws, he explained that “the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost genera” (pp. 13, 16). To Mencken, the great unwashed needed more than just a bath; they “almost” represented a lower species entirely.

For all his scorn of biblical literalists, Mencken defended the right of every person to believe in inanity, in “imbecilities” (p. 120). However, these essays show the limits Mencken placed on those rights. No person, no matter how stupidly devoted to religion, could be allowed to “inflict [those beliefs] upon other men by force.... He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred” (p. 120). For Mencken, this was the crux of the issue in Dayton. The Scopes trial served as a showdown between the enlightened, secular few and the masses with their “simian gabble” (p. 129).

Thus, Mencken had no truck with the notion that education should be rooted in the culture and experiences of children. He did not agree that schooling should be germane to children’s lives outside of school. Rather, these essays reveal that Mencken determined to use education as a weapon to combat U.S. citizens’ stubborn and intractable small-mindedness. For Mencken, there was a right answer. It lay in the spread of secular civilization and enlightenment. Education was the only hope to cure backward peoples of their inferior ways.

(emphasis added)