Tennessee hill folk (“queer fish,” the NYT calls them) flock into Dayton from all over the state to listen to William Jennings Bryan as he teaches Sunday school and gives an outdoor speech. He says “It is possible to carry education so far that a person will look down upon religion as a superstition.”
H. L. Mencken, who definitely looks down on religion as superstition, writes in The Baltimore Evening Sun: “It is the four Methodists on the jury who are expected to hold out for giving Scopes Christian burial after he is hanged.” But back to the NYT: “No one can yet measure the impulse and encouragement to erratic thinking which the Dayton trial is giving. It is a sort of notice, posted up so that the whole nation can read it, of the breakdown of the reasoning powers.”
Assistant Treasury Secretary (and former army general) Lincoln Andrews, the dude in charge of the federal Prohibition effort, is reorganizing that system into 22 regions, disregarding state lines. This means 22 administrators to be hired, and Republicans are determined to see 22 patronage appointments. The NYT seems to think Coolidge & Treasury Sec Andrew Mellon will back up Andrews against these pressures.
That H.L. went out of his way to report on a prayer meeting in the woods."What followed quickly reached such heights of barbaric grotesquerie that it was hard to believe it real."
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