My inbox is filling with defenses of Harding—and attacks on Mencken. This answer to Mencken I find too charming to keep to myself.

Mencken’s comments about the cultural wasteland of the South made my grandmother so furious that she and a small group of friends started the Montgomery (Alabama) Museum of Fine Arts, which all this years later has turned into a pretty good little regional museum. The butterfly wings of the chaos theory make some sense in light of that….