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The Indicted SouthPublic Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness$
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The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness

Angie Maxwell

Print publication date: 2014

Print ISBN-13: 9781469611648

Published to North Carolina Scholarship Online: September 2014

DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469611648.001.0001

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PRINTED FROM UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.northcarolina.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of North Carolina Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in CSO for personal use (for details see http://www.northcarolina.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 12 June 2018

The Triptych of the Twenties

The Triptych of the Twenties

Bryan, Darrow, and Mencken and What They Meant to the White South

Chapter:
(p.31) Chapter 1 The Triptych of the Twenties
Source:
The Indicted South
Author(s):

Angie Maxwell

Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
DOI:10.5149/northcarolina/9781469611648.003.0002

This chapter focuses on journalist H. L. Mencken, attorney Clarence Darrow, and politician and activist William Jennings Bryan, whose interactions contributed to a collective regional identity for white southerners. The Scopes Evolution Trial transformed the three men into regional symbols of competing cultural and political values that remain relevant today. Darrow and Mencken (and the larger body of journalists that he represented) would be demonized as liberal skeptics, embracing modernism and the debauchery and chaos that would surely follow. Bryan would come to represent the cause of religious fundamentalism and states’ rights.

Keywords:   regional identity, white southerners, H. L. Mencken, Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, Scopes Evolution Trial, modernism, religious fundamentalism

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