When he ran for President for the third and last time in 1908, the reporter H. L. Mencken called him ‘a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity, the Fundamentalist Pope,’ and many people, including Clarence Darrow, his eventual foe in the Scopes Trial, now came to believe his presence on the ticket was what kept the presidency Republican. In the elections of 1912, Bryan, perhaps exhausted by so much defeat, supported presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson, who, when elected, rewarded him by making him Secretary of State. Three years later, Bryan resigned in protest over America’s decision to enter the First World War. He was in his mid-fifties and his political career was over.
Partly because of Mary’s ill health, he moved to Miami, where he quickly made a fortune in the Florida land boom; but the craving for applause is not satisfied by money, nor, more charitably, is the craving for a cause. The only fix he could now get was from his fellow Christians, and so, like a plant seeking the light (if I may use a biological metaphor in this context), he headed in that direction. He told his son, William Jennings Bryan Jr., ‘It’s time to move from the politics of the ballot boxes to the politics of saving souls.’ As Mencken put it, ‘Since his earliest days … his chief strength has been among the folk of remote hills and forlorn and lonely farms. Now with his political aspirations all gone to pot, he turns to them for religious consolation. They understand his peculiar imbecilities. His nonsense is their ideal of sense. When he deluges them with his theological bilge they rejoice like pilgrims disporting in the river Jordan.’
Being one of the most famous orators of his time, Bryan had no trouble getting speaking engagements. Meanwhile, his syndicated newspaper column, the ‘Weekly Bible Talks,’ reached an estimated fifteen million people.
And slowly the focus narrowed toward the trial that would kill him.
By the early 1920s it was over sixty years since The Origin of Species had come out and forty since Darwin had died. Evolution had been taught in American schools for decades. Since the turn of the century, Bryan had occasionally spoken on the subject, but generally in an ‘I’ll believe what I believe, you believe what you believe’ fashion.
In Summer for the Gods, by Edward J. Larson, which is probably the most comprehensive and intelligent book written about the trial, Larson describes how, as a man who loved peace, Bryan was not only appalled but puzzled by the brutality of the First World War. Eventually, he came upon the theory that the war was a consequence of Darwinian theories fed to German intellectuals via Nietzsche. Darwin’s concept of Natural Selection, the idea that nature destroys that which is weak and favours whatever minute adaptions strengthen the species, was rephrased by others into the more brutal-sounding Survival of the Fittest. This was then used as moral justification for violent struggle. And of course there may be some truth in this: after all, if religion can be so used, why not biology and philosophy? Further aroused by a report that students in higher education, particularly the sciences, were moving away from God, Bryan decided he had to act.
In 1921, he hit the road with a new speech, ‘The Menace of Darwinism,’ and added ‘The Bible and Its Enemies’ soon after; but still he had no concrete political objective. In 1922 he heard that Kentucky’s Baptist State Board of Missions had called for a law forbidding the teaching of evolution in public schools. He wrote the next day to offer his services on the anti-evolution bandwagon and was enthusiastically accepted. And that was it. Here was a real campaign, one that joined his two interests, religion and politics. Here was a campaign to bring him back onto centre stage.
He had fallen from the glory of ‘The Cross of Gold’ into the tawdry mud of an attempt to limit knowledge. When it was over everything he had ever done would be overshadowed by its absurdity.
The law failed in Kentucky by a single vote, but largely because of Bryan the movement rapidly gained momentum. Church leaders accused biology teachers of being atheists, anarchists and socialists who were poisoning America with their ideas. The Ku Klux Klan agreed. Six states soon considered anti-evolution laws, with William Jennings Bryan involved in most, one way or another; but only two, Oklahoma and Florida, actually succeeded in getting anything on the books. In both cases, the language of the legislation was mild and without punitive bite. Partly because of the slow nature of politics in the South of that time, it was not until 1925 that the cause was able to claim its first real victory and it was in Tennessee that it occurred.
The law that brought about the Scopes Trial was proposed by a Tennessee Democratic congressman and lay preacher named John Butler. It stated ‘that it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals, and all other public schools of the State, which are supported in whole or in any part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal.’ And the bill had some sting in it too, a real penalty, a fine of between $100 and $500 for anyone convicted of breaking the law.
To the credit of the state, the law didn’t come into existence without debate. Many modernist clerics vigorously opposed it. So did several newspapers. A congressman suggested legislation should be passed to forbid the teaching of ‘the round earth theory.’ But no amount of ridicule could overturn the forces of primitivism. The bill passed in the House, seventy-one to five, and in the Senate, twenty-four to six, and the Governor, a Baptist, signed it into law on March 21, 1925.
The recently formed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had been watching developments in the South, heard of the anti-evolutionists’ victory. In early May, it bought space in some Tennessee newspapers, the Chattanooga Times among them, and announced ‘We are looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law in the courts. Our lawyers think a friendly test can be arranged without costing a teacher his or her job.’
The ensuing trial could have taken place anywhere in the state, the somewhat liberal Nashville being the more likely venue, had it not been for the vision of a strange and interesting man who had washed up in Dayton. One of those characters in history who provoke a great event and then disappear, his name was George Washington Rappleyea.
On the evening of May 4, he read the Chattanooga Times. In the morning he hurried from his home and drove toward Robinson’s Drug Store on Main Street.
CHAPTER FOUR
What Goes On
At the Roanoke bus station, a teenage girl and her father huddle together on a bench. She is in tears and protests continually. He holds and comforts her. Eventually, she boards. I watch him sitting on a barrier. His exhausted eyes are focused on some distant hour beyond this sorrow and awkwardness. The girl sits behind me and continues to cry as the bus pulls away.
The man waves fatalistically to his daughter. I turn in my seat and watch her wave back. Then I look out of the window as the town thins out and eventually releases us into the country.
I wonder what the crying girl is crying about. I imagine paedophile stepfathers, implacable court decisions, cokehead mothers, baby brothers with cancer, shotgun suicides, bankruptcy and other dramas too numerous and depressing to mention; but before I can get up the courage to dredge her for this material and then offer comfort in return, she falls into a deep sleep from which she does not wake for a hundred miles.
I’ve picked up a copy of the Roanoke Times and start to read it. Only two marching bands played in the Vinton Dogwood Festival this year. These days, the bands aren’t interested in parades, which are boring and traditional, so much as in the big competitions at Disneyland. ‘Another Small Town to Drop Charter,’ reads another headline. Clover Town Council has voted to accept an agreement with Halifax County to dissolve the town. Clover, which has 200 residents, is basically broke and has eliminated most services except for its twenty-three streetlights. This is depressing stuff. I flip quickly to the obituaries for lighter fare.
‘McGee, Frederick. 76. After retirement he w
as a very important partner with his wife and daughter at their Macbeth Kennels in Troutville. Mr McGee will be greatly missed by his many dog and cat friends and his bird, Buck.’
That’s better.
The bus turns off Route 81, the main highway, and onto U.S. 11, an old, winding road through plump, wooded hills broken by meadows. I assume when this was the only road it forced people through the small and now forgotten town of Pulaski, a sign on the outskirts of which reads: ‘Take Heed. The Lord Is Coming. The End of Time Is Near.’
He’s coming here? He’s going to take a detour off Route 81, which leads to all the sinners in Nashville and Memphis (or better still, Atlanta with its huge gay population), just to stop off in Pulaski? Even putting aside its no doubt world-class reputation for incest, why would he? But even before we get to the sad centre of the dying town, I have a strange feeling I’ve read the name Pulaski in some interesting context … I flip through my book on the South and quickly locate the reference. A town named Pulaski was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865, but that Pulaski was in Tennessee and we’re still in Virginia. We are, however, right on the border. Could the border have moved? How many towns can there be called Pulaski? Could this really be it? And if it is, maybe Jesus would consider a detour.
As the bus leaves town, and we finally escape the malignant little place, I see a sign which says, ‘Sword of Jesus—Revival Meeting. Preaching the Book, the Blood, and the Blessed Hope.’
The blood? My God.
The crying girl wakes up and rubs her eyes. Five minutes later, I’ve got my spoon in her head and I’m scooping out segments of her life to chew on as the journey continues: she’s sixteen years old, her father is a doctor, her mother lives in Las Vegas with her new stepfather, she goes to school in Roanoke and prefers it to Vegas.
‘There’s nothing to do in Las Vegas for a teenager,’ she tells me.
Without tears, she is quite pretty and answers my questions politely but with suspicion. She is going to visit her mother for a month. The trip is going to take almost three days with no stopping in hotels to sleep. She was crying at the bus station because originally she was going to go out to Vegas by plane but her mother insisted she come by bus. It would be good for her. Crying for a plane? After all I’d imagined for her?
‘So, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ I ask.
‘I want to be a teacher,’ she says. ‘I love school, I just love it.’
I turn away, vaguely disappointed.
The first school I went to was Dartington Hall in Devon, where my father was the head of the adult education centre. I was in nursery school and can remember almost nothing of it.
When I was four and my sister, Sarah, five, my father went into business with a man who invented and manufactured scientific instruments just outside Cambridge. As this was where Clare, my mother, was brought up and where her mother still lived, she was happy to move back there.
At first, we all lived with my father’s partner in the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, where the poet Rupert Brooke once lived. Life in the village had not changed much. It was quiet and leafy with punts on the slow river nearby. (Now the Vicarage is lived in by that paragon of Conservative values, Jeffrey Archer.)
In 1954, my parents bought their own house about seven miles from the centre of Cambridge. It was a large mill house, actually two houses crudely stitched together. The back part, a cottage, was built in 1600; the front, a more imposing, red brick Queen Anne building, was added on in 1750 when the miller got rich. The mill next door was a very large off-white brick structure more reminiscent of an eighteenth-century factory than a typically quaint mill, a large cube, four floors tall if you included the one under the sloping roof. The top floor was the most exciting because at the front was a gantry used for hoisting things up from the bridge below. It jutted out dangerously and as children we’d go up there and scare ourselves by looking down through the cracks in the trapdoor.
Across the gravel yard was a large thatched barn. To one side was a wooden shed. My father bought it all, along with several acres of land, for £5,750. He and his partner now moved their business into the shed. At first it was just the two of them, then there were three, then four. Eventually, the company would colonise the entire mill and employ a hundred men.
The river ran down toward the back of the house, the cottage, through lush green fields, past the living-room windows, and under the mill, which straddled the river. In the millrace the water was channelled over a weir, rushed past the place where the mill-wheel once was, and finally emerged from under an arched bridge into a large, oval millpond. Here the current slowed, meandering and swirling, until it reached the second broad weir at the end of the pond, where, depending on the season, it either trickled over the thick weeds or sat upon the lip, fat and lethal, before descending into the shallow river below.
Many dramas occurred on the weir. Once a dead cow got stuck on it and had to be hauled out by tractor. Everyone said we should stand back as sometimes a carcass would explode if it had been in the water a long time. A short time later, however, a man upriver lost his pet donkey to the river and it too got stuck. The man came down and tried to pull it out by hand. When that didn’t work, he fetched a large saw and sawed the donkey in half. It did not explode. Another time, some debris got caught here and my father went out to clear it off with a rake. The river was high and dangerous. I watched him balancing in the middle of the weir and when he nearly toppled over I laughed at his panic-struck face and waving arms. He was furious, thinking, I’m sure, that I was being callous, was showing how little I cared for him; but it was not this. It just never occurred to me that he would not survive all accidents. He was my father and invincible.
Sarah and I did not go to the local school because our parents had found another, better one, a state primary school in a village about five miles away, and somehow managed to persuade someone to let us go there.
Kingston Village School had only one teacher. The tiny schoolhouse was on the village green behind a white picket fence with a playground to one side. There were usually fewer than twenty children here, most of them the sons and daughters of farmers or farm labourers, ranging in age from four to eleven. Each day began with a hymn or two, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and ‘Jerusalem’ come to mind. Then we’d say the Lord’s Prayer and get down to work.
Our teacher, Mrs. Marshall, was a round woman; not fat because that suggests indulgence and this woman was not indulgent, she was simply intended by nature to be spherical. She had shining brown eyes and her long dark hair was done up in a large, lustrous bun. A farmer’s daughter from the Fens, her accent was broad East Anglian and her laugh, which was frequent, was a roiling chuckle flung without censure from her plump throat.
I was her student from the age of four to seven. She was the first and only teacher from whom I learned anything.
When she was a girl, Mrs. Marshall wanted to go to university. She was a good enough student to achieve this, but in her last year of school there was an agricultural slump. Potatoes rotted across the Fens, the expense of shipping them to London being more than the profit that would be returned. Her father, a small farmer, nearly went broke and everyone had to help. To her immense disappointment, she was forced to go to work immediately as an ‘uncertificated’ teacher.
Lacking the government’s seal of approval, she always felt she had more to learn and so, as she was still learning, learning was not something static or complete which she imposed upon you, but a process of discovery which you shared with her. Her curiosity was so obviously genuine it provoked your own. There was nothing patronising about her, nothing complacent, nothing fake. She was so bad at Maths (and so uninterested in it) that to teach my sister, Sarah, who was eighteen months older than I and ten times brighter, she was forced to bone up on the lessons the night before.
What she really loved to teach was art. Each year we would enter the Daily Mail Art Contest, a nationwide competition to find the best w
ork produced by any school in the country. In the single classroom with its vaulted ceiling, Mrs. Marshall moved peaceably from group to group, sharpening pencils for the four-year-olds, discussing essays or poems, or helping the older ones to learn italic. But always, a few students would be at work on our entry, and Mrs. Marshall would inevitably drift back to them, to give advice, to praise, to encourage. Usually, our entry into the contest was a mosaic made of coloured squares cut from magazines and pasted on a piece of paper about the size of a single bed-sheet. One year it was a jungle with a vivid tiger prowling among the trees. Although we were up against schools that had hundreds of students and well-financed art departments, we won twice. This made Mrs. Marshall locally famous and eventually she wrote An Experiment in Education, a book about the school and teaching art in which can be found my first published work:
What Goes On
Outdoors On Water:
Ducks bob up and down,
And boats pass by with people chattering.
Indoors On Land:
Telephones ring and mothers rush,
Babies cry, children scream,
Only fathers work.
I was four years old, it was the Fifties, and indeed my mother didn’t work. In the morning she would drive us to school and in the afternoon around three she would pick us up. I remember her most clearly in the summer, leaning against the car, smoking. She was a striking woman, not beautiful but attractive, with dark, melancholy eyes and a proud, almost defiant bearing. Her brown hair was held back by tortoiseshell combs, and in the summer she wore cotton dresses with large bold designs. These dresses were always cinched tight below her impressive breasts.
Trials of the Monkey Page 4