Almost President

by Scott Farris

  The American Civil Liberties Union, only six years old in 1925, decided to challenge one of the anti-evolution laws not on the basis of adjudicating the correctness of evolutionary theory, but on the issue of freedom of speech. Dayton, Tennessee, meanwhile, had once been a prosperous iron and coal-mining town that had fallen on hard times. As industrial as it was agricultural, Dayton was known as a tolerant community with only a few members of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. But city leaders grasped that such a trial would bring visitors and national attention. Therefore, in order to boost the local economy, city leaders thought it would be grand if Dayton, with its lovely three-story courthouse built during better times, was the site of the trial sought by the ACLU. The local high school football coach, John T. Scopes, acknowledged that he had unintentionally violated the law while substituting for the regular biology teacher and, after meeting with town leaders, agreed to be charged with unlawfully teaching evolution—if it could help the town economy.

  Bryan agreed to assist in Scopes’s prosecution while the most famous criminal defense attorney in the nation, Clarence Darrow, agreed to assist with Scopes’s defense. Darrow had been a progressive ally and supporter of Bryan, but he was also an agnostic who found Bryan’s attack on evolution silly, dangerous, and obnoxious. Immediately dubbed “The Monkey Trial” and the focus of worldwide attention, it would be inadequate to label it a spectacle. It remains sui generis in American history.

  It was hardly a trial at all because both sides acknowledged Scopes was guilty of breaking the law. When the judge threw out the testimony of a host of scientific and religious experts as irrelevant to Scopes’s guilt or innocence, Bryan and Darrow agreed to the highly unusual idea that each would take the stand and be cross-examined by the other. Bryan took the stand first and, while he knew most of the Bible by heart, he was no theologian. He sputtered in a rare display of inarticulateness as Darrow peppered him for two hours with questions designed to show that a literal interpretation of the Bible was nonsensical. Did Bryan think God created the world in just six, twenty-four-hour days? Did he believe Jonah was really swallowed by a whale? Did Joshua literally make the sun stand still? When Darrow pressed Bryan to name the exact date of the great flood, Bryan replied, “I don’t think about things I don’t think about.” Darrow thrust a knife into the opening, “Do you think about things you do think about?”

  The New York Times called Bryan’s time on the witness stand “an absurdly pathetic performance.” Bryan at first did not seem aware of how badly he had done, but he looked forward to getting Darrow on the stand. Darrow, however, outfoxed Bryan again. The next day, he moved that the judge direct the jury to find Scopes guilty, ending the trial and beginning the appeals process. Bryan did not get to cross-examine Darrow, nor did he get to give his closing summation. Scopes was quickly found guilty and fined one hundred dollars.

  Bryan, meanwhile, had failed to make the central point of his whole crusade. During the trial, he wasted time and effort trying to disprove evolution, rather than bringing attention to the nefarious ways in which evolutionary theory was being applied outside the realm of biology. Had Bryan taken the time to read the textbook, A Civic Biology, which Scopes had used in class, he would have discovered the author providing evidence to support Bryan’s point by arguing that human beings should be bred more like horses to improve “future generations,” and lamenting that the feeble-minded, whom the author called “true parasites,” were only placed in asylums to prevent their breeding when lower order animals with comparative deficiencies would simply be destroyed.

  Had Bryan focused on how evolutionary theory was being abused, which is what drew him to the issue in the first place, he might have seemed the prophet he appeared to be in 1896. Soon, eugenics would take hold in much of the world, most notably in Nazi Germany, and the consequences would be as brutal and frightening as Bryan had imagined.

  Bryan stayed in Dayton a few days to polish the closing argument he had intended to give and which he now intended to turn into an article for publication in newspapers around the country. In his text, Bryan argued again that his quarrel was not with science, but how science was applied to human endeavors. (To prove he was not against scientific inquiry, Bryan had earlier joined the American Association for the Advancement of Science.) In language that foreshadowed an argument that would later be made in favor of nuclear disarmament, Bryan said, “Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.”

  Having finished work on the article on a Sunday afternoon, July 26, 1925, five days after the Scopes Trial had ended, Bryan took a nap and did not wake up.

  Despite Mencken’s snide obituary, Bryan’s reputation had not been immediately shredded in Dayton. Most eulogies praised his many accomplishments and his role in progressive reform. Later, both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman acknowledged the debt liberalism and the Democratic Party owed Bryan. “He kept the faith,” Roosevelt said, using one of Bryan’s favorite verses from the letters of St. Paul.

  Roosevelt made a key point. Many who admired Bryan the young progressive concluded from the Scopes Trial that he had transformed into a reactionary, “a bitter and malignant old man,” in Hofstadter’s words. In fact, his crusade against evolution was consistent with his belief in progressive politics. He believed that it was a Christian’s duty to help the weakest members of society. This was God’s will, and Bryan would cede nothing to those who might counter that it was biology’s will that there are the poor and hungry, or that society has no ability or obligation to improve their condition.

  Bryan’s reputation was badly damaged later by the cruel parody of him that appeared in the 1955 play and 1960 film Inherit the Wind, which was not, according to its authors, a play about Bryan or evolution at all, but an allegory on McCarthyism and the danger of mass movements. Unlike many mid-twentieth-century intellectuals, Bryan did not fear popular movements. He believed, “When reform comes to this country, it starts with the masses. Reforms do not come from the brains of scholars.”

  Many fail to understand Bryan because he occupies what is now a rare space in society. Much like Pope John Paul II in more recent times, Bryan saw no contradiction between traditional religious values and the need for radical social change. He saw them being in perfect harmony. Bryan did not see religion as making people small and mean, but as motivating them to be expansive and good. He believed people would be motivated to reform society, not because scientific experts told them it made sense, but because their religious faith informed them that it was the right thing to do.

  The language of Bryan is still heard today. When Al Gore claimed that his 2000 presidential slogan was “The People vs. the Powerful,” he was channeling Bryan, but so, too, was 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin when she professed to cater to the “real America.” Still, Bryan’s spirit is missing. Too liberal for today’s religious, he is too religious for today’s liberals. With the significant exception of certain civil rights leaders of the 1960s, Bryan was the last great reformer to speak in religious terms.

  There are some progressive Democrats today who are making tentative efforts to reclaim Bryan’s legacy. As Barack Obama did in his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address, they want the party to focus on a “politics of hope” that inspires people to want their government to do good. They fret about what journalist Amy Sullivan has labeled a “God gap” where the religiously observant favor conservative Republican candidates over liberal Democratic candidates. They worry that liberalism has framed the questions of the day on the rights and entitlements of individuals rather than the obligations and potential of society. Books such as What’s the Matter with Kansas? profess bafflement that the grandchildren of Bryan’s core constituencies in places like Kansas seem to place a higher priority on moral issues than policies that could improv
e their economic well-being. As these progressives consider how more religiously observant voters can be lured back into the fold, they might especially consider the example of Bryan.

  “The people do not act through gratitude, but from expectation,” Bryan said. In 1896 and in his subsequent campaigns, Bryan greatly raised the expectations of the people. He did so by appealing to something beyond their self-interest. Bryan believed “love of one’s neighbor is the only visible proof that can be given of love of God.” That he believed such a sentiment could be a catalyst for political change says much about who he was and his power to inspire; that we ridicule such a notion today as being simple and naïve may explain why modern liberalism, aiming more at the mind and the pocketbook, no longer captures the hearts and the souls of the people as it once did.

  2 Bryan would also play an essential role in securing Wilson’s re-election by barnstorming in critical states that went to Wilson in an extremely close win over Charles Evans Hughes, this even after he resigned from Wilson’s Cabinet.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AL SMITH

  1928

  The world knows no greater mockery than the use of the blazing cross, the cross upon which Christ died, as a symbol to install into the hearts of men a hatred of their brethren.

  Al Smith, the first Roman Catholic nominated for president by a major political party, did more than pave the way for John Kennedy to become the first Catholic president thirty-two years later. His 1928 campaign changed the way America viewed Catholics (and how Catholics viewed America) to such a degree that when Kennedy did run in 1960 his religion was at least as much an asset as a liability.

  Catholicism became so widely accepted in the wake of the Smith campaign that it seemed to be the preferred religion in popular culture, reaching its apex in 1944 when Bing Crosby won the Academy Award for Best Actor by portraying an extraordinarily sympathetic Catholic priest. Anti-Catholicism, which historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. has called “the deepest bias” in American life, so receded in American life that by 2012, six of nine U.S. Supreme Court justices would be Catholic—with nary a peep of protest from Protestant America.

  The burning crosses of the Ku Klux Klan that had greeted Smith all along the campaign trail—and not just in the Deep South, but also in Indiana, Montana, and Oklahoma—had illuminated a dark and ugly recess of American history that shamed many Protestants, and also lit a fire under American Catholics.

  Disturbed by the bigotry directed at Smith and the magnitude of his loss to Herbert Hoover, American Catholics began to much more aggressively assert themselves in the public square. They particularly used the new and wildly popular entertainment mediums of film and radio to redefine themselves to Protestant America. Movies featuring positive portrayals of Catholic figures, such as Crosby’s Father Charles Francis Patrick (“Father Chuck”) O’Malley in the 1944 Best Picture winner Going My Way, became so ubiquitous that movie studios received complaints that Protestants were now getting short shrift in Hollywood.

  A variety of factors contributed to this transformation in public attitudes toward Catholicism—the severity of the Great Depression made religious differences seem trifling, changes in American immigration law reduced the influx of Catholic immigrants that nativists found so threatening, and the Catholic Church took a leading role in the struggle against communism, winning many admirers. But as religious historian Martin E. Marty notes, overt anti-Catholicism demonstrably diminished after the Smith campaign, signifying its pivotal role as a catalyst in this American reassessment of Catholicism.

  Many Americans, including Smith himself, had naïvely hoped that his religion would not be an issue in the campaign and that anti-Catholicism was a relic of the previous century. They had hoped that Smith’s personal integrity and his progressive record in public service during four terms as governor of New York, particularly the reforms that revolutionized safety in the workplace, would trump any remnants of religious bigotry. But anti-Catholicism still flourished in 1928, and it is clear that Smith’s Catholicism was the defining issue of the 1928 election, prompting Raymond Fosdick, then a Rockefeller Foundation trustee and a Protestant, to lament, “Do we learn nothing from experience? Here is an issue that after three hundred years of bloody warfare was finally given a decent burial by our forefathers. And now like ghouls we drag it from the grave.”

  Some historians, including the ubiquitous Richard Hofstadter, stubbornly assert that Smith’s religion had little to do with his defeat in 1928 and that “not a Democrat alive” could have won that year. The nation was prosperous under Republican rule and Republicans had nominated for president one of the chief architects of that prosperity, Secretary of Commerce Hoover, whose work to relieve famine during World War I had made him an international hero. Others believed that Smith, a “Manhattanite,” was from too alien an environment to be embraced by Middle America—even though half of all Americans were living in cities by the 1920s. Smith had also alienated many “dry” Democrats, Hofstadter argued, especially in the South and Midwest, because of his belief that Prohibition had failed and should be at least partially repealed.3

  Yet none of these factors explain the size of Smith’s loss—he carried only eight states and won barely 40 percent of the popular vote—and they cannot mask the breadth and brazenness of the opposition to Smith because of his religion. If we follow Smith’s famous advice and the catchphrase most associated with him—“Let’s look at the record”—we see that these objections to Smith, reasonable as they may sound, were often convenient excuses for those who wished to deny they were bigots and wanted to explain their opposition to Smith in polite terms that did not raise the religion issue.

  The impact of Prohibition on Smith’s campaign is particularly misunderstood. Scientific polling did not yet exist in the 1920s, but historians generally agree, based upon analysis of local returns in elections where Prohibition was a central issue, that by 1926 a majority of American voters had become disenchanted with Prohibition. When repeal finally received a vote in 1933, it received the support of 73 percent of voters, although Prohibition still enjoyed strong support in parts of the South and Midwest.4 Even leading Prohibition activists acknowledged their problem with Smith was more his religion than his stand on Prohibition. Evangelist Bob Jones, who later founded the South Carolina university that bears his name, told crowds throughout the South, “I’ll tell you, brother, that the big issue we’ve got to face ain’t the liquor question. I’d rather see a saloon on every corner of the South than see the foreigners elect Al Smith president.”

  The truth of Jones’s candor is reflected by the radically different voting patterns that occurred in 1928, alterations that can only be ascribed to Smith’s Catholicism, according to historian Allan J. Lichtman. Reliably Democratic Southern states that had not voted Republican since Reconstruction—Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia—supported Hoover. Conversely, the overwhelming support of Catholic voters allowed Smith to carry two New England states (Massachusetts and Rhode Island) that had only gone Democratic once before, in 1912, when the Republican Party split between Taft and Roosevelt.

  Excepting Prohibition, there were few major issue differences between Smith and Hoover, yet the 1928 election drew intense interest. Voter turnout hit 57 percent after having dropped below 50 percent in the presidential elections of 1920 and 1924, while total campaign spending by both parties probably exceeded twenty million dollars—or four times what had been spent in a 1924 election that had involved three major candidates. The primary difference between 1928 and those earlier elections was the religious affiliation of one of the candidates.

  In the 1932 election, Democrats again nominated a “wet” New Yorker, the patrician Franklin Roosevelt, yet FDR brought all the prodigal Southern states back into the Democratic fold. Where Smith had lost Texas, Roosevelt carried the state with 88 percent of the popul
ar vote. Where Smith had barely carried Alabama with 51 percent of the vote, Roosevelt won the state with 85 percent of the popular vote. Even taking into account the dramatic change in political fortunes brought on by the Great Depression, if we take Smith’s opponents at their word that it was Smith’s stand on Prohibition and his status as an out-of-touch New Yorker that generated so much of their opposition, it would seem the same qualms would have remained regarding Roosevelt’s candidacy. Except, of course, that Roosevelt was a Protestant, not a Catholic.

  Roosevelt himself polled hundreds of Democratic leaders nationwide after the 1928 election and found that fully 55 percent attributed Smith’s defeat to his religion while just a third argued it was Smith’s stand on Prohibition and less than 3 percent stated it was the prosperous economy that benefited Republicans. “They wiped us off the face of the earth down here because of religion; do not let anybody tell you different [sic],” an Oklahoma official wrote FDR.

  American Protestants did not consider their anti-Catholicism irrational, and American Catholics did not find it unusual. America had been settled by Europeans in the mid-seventeenth century while Europe was engulfed in a series of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. Early English colonists, almost all Protestant, brought their mistrust of Catholicism over on the boats along with the rest of the baggage. It was a given among Protestants that the pope wanted political as well as ecclesiastical power over the Christian world. Lacking knowledge of the many nuances of Catholic dogma, Protestants misunderstood such concepts as papal infallibility, and believed all Catholics, lay or religious, owed absolute fealty to the pope. Nor did American Protestants fully understand how the American Catholic church had developed with a remarkable level of autonomy from Rome and possessed a uniquely American character that respected the Jeffersonian tradition of separation of church and state.