Trials of the Monkey
Page 16
This interdenominational squabbling reminds me of the South American writer’s comment on the Falklands War: ‘It’s like watching two old bald men fighting over a comb …’
When I finally get back outside, clutching my tracts and the tape, the jail preacher’s children are jamming on the stage. It’s One Step of Faith, and you can hear honky-tonk and the blues in there. They’re good-looking kids, but there’s something wary and worn down about them, particularly a twelve-year-old boy, draped over a too-big guitar, watching me through narrowed eyes.
Now the jail preacher comes rolling up. He’s rough and wild, a thick-skinned, laughing old boy and whatever his purpose—and jail work can hardly be profitable, so I don’t doubt his sincerity—the rogue lives on behind his eyes. He slaps me on the back and I slap him on the back and he laughs and winks at me. He knows I’m not saved but he’s ministering to a fourteen-year-old right now who knocked off an entire family just for the fun of it, so one dissolute Englishman is small beer. The difference between him and Leland is that he has a sense of humour and I can forgive almost anyone almost anything if they’re funny. There has never been a monster of the Hitlerian type who has had a sense of humour. Humour, celebrating not only the imperfection of human life but also its imperfectability, is a kind of objectivity and so the antithesis of fanaticism.
After a while, I take a bone-crushing from his big calloused hand and bid him goodbye.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Monkeyville
It’s still too early to go visit Kurt Wise, so I hurry down to the courthouse to see if I can find Jim McKenzie. Shot six times! I’ve never met a man so comprehensively riddled. I catch him scurrying around taking care of business, but manage to get him to sit down in the hallway and talk for a minute. He’s a small grey-haired man and a little twitchy. His eyes dart this way and that, checking the hallway as we talk.
When I ask him what it was like getting shot, he tells me, ‘Well, it’s not fun, let’s put it that way. You know the only reason I’m here today is that the Lord decided it wadn’t my time ’cause the man had more bullets in there and the seventh one jammed, so I only got six of them.’
‘But what does it feel like?’ I ask. ‘Is it like a burning sensation or what?’
‘Oh, yeah, it’s burning, I still burn today if I start perspiring.’
‘And all the bullets, they got ’em out?’
‘No, they just dug one of ’em out. The rest of ‘em all went through.’
I notice that he’s beginning to perspire, but I’m still fascinated by the whole thing. I mean getting shot, Jesus …
‘So you were walking across the courthouse lawn and this total stranger just …’
‘Oh, no, I’d seen him before. I knew who it was right when he came out from behind the pickup. I didn’t know he had a gun because he had it behind his right leg and when he got close to me, just a little bit further than between you and me, he pulled it out and started shooting.’
He’s looking increasingly uneasy and the beads of sweat on his forehead are beginning to trickle down toward his eyes and I’m thinking he probably isn’t enjoying reliving this thing, which opinion is confirmed when he shifts uncomfortably in his chair and asks in a businesslike fashion, ‘What else can I do for you?’
I’m too embarrassed to ask for a viewing of the bullet holes, which is what’s on my mind, so I thank him for sharing his experiences with me and go into the basement to check out the Scopes Trial Museum in more detail. It’s dark down here, and dank. Towards the back is a boiler room and sitting in it an old man, a very pretty girl, and what looks to be an imbecile. They are all smoking and when I ask them how they’re doing, they don’t reply, just stare at me with the blank resentment of the profoundly bored. I turn around and examine some of the pictures of the trial and their accompanying texts.
The trial of John Scopes was set to begin on Friday, July 10, 1925, and by mid-June, you can see that Dayton was pumping with promotional zeal. There is a photograph of J. R. Darwin’s Everything to Wear Store, above which a newly painted sign states ‘Darwin is right—Inside,’ while F. E. Robinson has one above his drugstore saying ‘Where It Started.’ Inside the store, another photograph shows him selling a Simian Soda. The town’s motorcycle cop smiles at the camera from astride his steed, upon which he has painted ‘Monkeyville Police.’ And a pin sold at the time states ‘Your Old Man’s a Monkey.’
Within a week of creating this carnival, Rappleyea had wired H. G. Wells inviting him to attend, but Wells declined. H. L. Mencken, however, one of the funniest and most biting of reporters, announced he was on his way to cover the trial for the Baltimore Evening Sun. An argument about evolution broke out in the town’s barbershop, the alternative meeting place to the drugstore, and a man ran out into the street followed by his adversary shooting at him with a pistol. Scopes believed it was a stunt organised by the enterprising Rappleyea and called him to suggest he stop.
A vacant lot was designated as a campground for tourists. An airstrip was created. The state sent a mobile chlorination unit and the railways scheduled extra trains from Chattanooga. Rappleyea took over a large, abandoned house and started making it fit for the defence experts. Judge John Tate Raulston, the Baptist judge who would hear the case, got so overexcited he suggested constructing a vast temporary court so an estimated 20,000 spectators could observe his judicial brilliance. (Darrow described Raulston as ‘an affable man … who had been elected on a fluke due to some political mix-up.’) The existing courthouse got a fresh coat of paint and 500 extra seats were installed, along with a platform for movie cameras.
Before long, the hucksters and the crazies began to arrive: John the Baptist the Third came, along with Lewis Levi Johnson Marshall, ‘Absolute Ruler of the Entire World without Military, Naval, or other Physical Force.’ Next up were Joe Mendi, the trained chimp and his handler and a man who called himself ‘The Champion Bible Demonstrator.’ Wilbur Glenn Voliva, of the flat-earth school of geology, and the Anti-Evolution League came, the latter hawking pamphlets like Hell and the High Schools and Jocko-Homo Heaven-Bound. All these and more were joined by a horde of Bible-thumpers from out of the hills and way beyond, along with purveyors of hot dogs and sandwiches, ice cream, lemonade and popcorn.
Nor was the excitement confined to Dayton. Debate raged across the nation. The New York Times gave over most of its front page to letters expressing conflicting views. Modernist Christians distanced themselves from Bryan and the fundamentalists, saying you could accept the moral and religious precepts of the Bible without having to accept its opinions on nature. During a debate in London, George Bernard Shaw said: ‘The great American statesman, William Jennings Bryan, the sort of man only America can produce, has suddenly taken the lead in the movement against evolution and called himself a Fundamentalist … What he calls Fundamentalism, I call Infantilism.’ Even Hollywood got in on the act, offering Scopes $2,000 a week to appear in Tarzan movies.
As the trial date came closer, telegraph wires were run into the courthouse and three microphones were installed and connected to loudspeakers outside so people on the lawn could hear what was going on inside. Using these microphones, WGN, a radio station in Chicago, planned to send the first live coverage of a trial to the nation, then on to Europe and Australia. Sixty-five telegraph operators were employed and eventually would transmit more words on the subject than had ever been sent about any other American event.
Two hundred reporters, all needing accommodation, soon chuffed into town with their secret stashes of whisky, chief among them the mischievous Mencken. Mencken brought with him 1,000 handbills advertising a fictitious evangelist named the Rev. Elmer Chubb, LL. D., D.D. who would perform miracles, such as speaking Coptic, and swallowing poison without harm. At the designated time and place—the courthouse lawn one evening—only a very few people turned up for the non-existent event. Discreet enquiry revealed this was because there was nothing unusual about such claims in Tennessee.
Scopes, who was seated next to him for dinner, was amazed to discover that Bryan recognised and remembered him from the commencement address he had given over five years earlier at Scopes’ high school in Salem. He lightly reprimanded Scopes and his friends for having laughed at him. Having told Scopes he was a diabetic and could eat neither starch nor sugar, Scopes watched in alarm as Bryan quickly scarfed down all his food, refusing only bread, then glanced at Scopes’ plate and asked if he could finish his uneaten mashed potatoes and corn, not knowing, or so it seemed, that both contained far more starch than the bread he had refused. As Scopes says in his book, ‘The incident was a good tip-off to Bryan’s scientific knowledge.’ Bryan had a ferocious appetite and reportedly carried a large bag of radishes with him wherever he went so he need never go hungry.
The next day, Bryan, ever the good American, joined in the spirit of commercial enterprise by having a loudspeaker truck, a thing never before seen in Dayton, driven around town advertising Florida real estate!
For two days, Bryan had Dayton to himself and made the most of it, giving speeches all over the place and wandering the town, shirtsleeves rolled up, pith helmet on bald pate, a palm fan waving in his hand. As Mencken put it, ‘Bryan has been oozing around the country … presenting the indubitable word of God in his caressing, ingratiating way, and so making unanimity doubly unanimous.’ Everything Bryan said was widely reported and went unanswered until Scopes’ attorneys arrived on the day before the trial.
Darrow and Bryan would not be facing each other alone in court.
On Darrow’s side were two Tennessee lawyers, the notoriously scruffy chief counsel John Neal, a radical, committed law professor from Knoxville who pledged himself to the case from the day it began, and F. B. McElwee, an ex-student of his. From New York came Arthur Garfield Hays and his law partner, Dudley Field Malone.
Dudley Malone, who would figure prominently in the trial, had worked for Bryan for a while at the State Department. Now he spent much of the year in Paris handling the European end of his and Hays’ international divorce business. Malone was an elegant, convivial man, rarely seen without his jacket and tie, even in the overwhelming summer heat of Dayton. A divorced Irish Catholic, he was married to suffragette Doris Stevens, who, much to the titillation of the town, checked into his room at the Aqua under her own name.
Hays, in his early forties, was a good-looking man resembling the young Spencer Tracy. Hays, who was Jewish, was the most respected lawyer on the ACLU executive committee and was their official representative at the trial. Made rich by his successful New York practise, he got his real pleasure from the passionate defence of civil liberties. He was agnostic.
On Bryan’s side, A. T. (‘General’) Stewart, Attorney General for the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit in Tennessee, was in charge of the prosecution team. Assisting him was Bryan himself; his son, William Jennings Bryan Jr., an attorney in Los Angeles; and from Dayton, Ben McKenzie; his son, J. Gordon McKenzie; Sue K. Hicks, Herbert Hicks, and Wallace C. Haggard.
Malone and Hays arrived in Chattanooga on a train loaded with reporters. They were met by George Rappleyea and driven to Dayton. Darrow meanwhile took off from Chicago but not before lashing out at the ‘narrow, mean, intolerable and brainless prejudice of soulless religio-maniacs.’ By the time Darrow arrived in Dayton that afternoon, the population of the town had swollen from 1,800 to 5,000, almost its size in the boom days of Dayton Coal and Iron. Whatever else his faults, Rappleyea had delivered an event.
Although there had been a well-planned banquet for Bryan, no such affair had been arranged for the atheistic Darrow. A small dinner was quickly organised at which Darrow spoke, charming all who listened with a folksy speech about coming from a town just like this and ‘falling into the law.’ As no one on the defence side was getting paid (nor was Bryan on the prosecution side) and as Darrow was not a rich man, he and his second wife, Ruby, roomed with the Morgan family, whose son, Howard, attended the high school and was one of the witnesses against Scopes.
The next day, Friday, July 10, everyone set off for the centre of town and the tall red-brick building in the shaded square. As each of the participants entered the courthouse, they stopped to pose for the numerous photographers and newsreel cameramen. The show was about to begin in earnest.
The court transcript, which was first published in 1925 and is now reprinted by Bryan College, can be purchased in Dayton. Its title is, The World’s Most Famous Court Trial, and under that it says, ‘A word for word report of the famous court test of the Tennessee anti-evolution act, at Dayton, July 10 to 21, 1925, including speeches and arguments of attorneys, testimony of noted scientists, and Bryan’s last speech.’
It is a fantastic document which can be read for sheer enjoyment.
As soon as the court was stuffed beyond capacity, the record tells us that Judge Raulston called upon a Reverend Cartwright to open court with a prayer. Which suggested to Darrow that he didn’t have one.
‘Help us to remember that Thou art on Thy throne and that Thou knowest the secrets of our hearts, and that Thou are acquainted with the motive back of every act and thought; and may we also be conscious of the fact, our Heavenly Father, that there is coming a day in which all of the nations of the earth shall stand before Thy judgement bar and render an account for the deeds done in the body …’
Added to this sly spiritual threat was Judge Raulston’s reading of the charges to the grand jury convened to re-indict Scopes. Since the law which had been broken stated it was unlawful to teach any theory denying the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, he felt it proper to read into the record the entire first chapter of Genesis. He then went on to say: ‘In making this declaration I make no reference to the policy or constitutionality of the statute, but to the evil example of the teacher disregarding constituted authority in the presence of the undeveloped mind whose thought and morals he directs and guides … Now, gentlemen of the jury, it is your duty to investigate this alleged offense without prejudice or bias and with open minds.’
As my daughter would say: ‘Yeah, right.’
Darrow insisted that if the lead prosecution lawyer, ex-Attorney General A. T. Stewart, was going to be referred to as ‘General,’ when in fact he was not a general, then he, Darrow, should also be given some equally meaningless title. ‘Colonel’ was agreed on and, much to his amusement, Darrow was referred to as such whenever anyone remembered.
The grand jury returned the new indictment and the rest of the morning was taken up with discussion on the admissibility of scientific testimony. Stewart said he would object to it; Darrow wanted to know immediately if it would be allowed so that he could bring in his witnesses, or not. The prosecution agreed to a quick disposal of the matter on Monday and the court adjourned for lunch.
Outside on the courthouse lawn, preachers preached and vendors vended, and tracts were offered, all to the accompaniment of various musicians, including a black string quartet and a blind man with a guitar and a mouth organ. Four steers were roasting over a barbecue pit and two planes, commissioned to take newsreel footage to the cinemas in the North, buzzed the town.
In the afternoon, the jury was selected. Darrow, who would sometimes spend months on jury selection, now spent a few hours at most. Only white males were eligible and none were impartial. All he could hope for was a modicum of honesty from the wholly religious pool. One man was asked if he’d ever read anything by Bryan on the subject of evolution.
‘No,
sir, I can’t read.’
‘Well, you are fortunate,’ said Darrow and then asked him why he couldn’t read.
The man replied frankly, ‘Because I’m uneducated.’
Darrow picked him right away. Another, a preacher, was asked if he preached for or against evolution. ‘Well, I preach against it, of course!’ He got a lot of applause but no seat in the jury box. Only one juror, a part-time teacher, seemed to have any real understanding of, let alone sympathy for, the concept of evolution. ‘Such a jury, in the legal sense,’ wrote Mencken, ‘may be fair. That is, it may be willing to hear the evidence against Scopes before bumping him off. But it would certainly be spitting into the eye of reason to call it impartial.’
The court adjourned until Monday. Bryan had not spoken the entire day. He was saving himself for closing arguments and would, for the moment, content himself with sermons and speeches made outside the courtroom.
On Sunday morning Bryan preached at a Methodist church. Judge Raulston and his family sat among the cheering crowd as Bryan reiterated his position on the irrelevance of Darrow’s so-called ‘expert witnesses.’ In the afternoon, he gave another speech to an estimated 3,000 listeners on the courthouse lawn where, on Saturday, a freethinker had been arrested for giving a speech critical of the church. By all accounts, Bryan’s speech delivered him the required tonic of applause.
Mencken went up to the mountains to watch a revival. He thought he would be amused, but instead returned to town depressed. He found the clashing theologians monotonous and expressed a longing for ‘a merry laugh, a burst of happy music, the gurgle of a decent jug.’
On Monday, the 13th, after the obligatory prayer, the defence made a motion to quash the indictment on the grounds that the law violated numerous articles of the constitution of Tennessee, fourteen of them to be precise. A typical example was Section 12, Article 11 of the Tennessee constitution which, in reference to education, states, ‘it shall be the duty of the general assembly … to cherish literature and science.’ The defence also believed the law violated the part of the constitution guaranteeing the right to ‘worship Almighty God according to the dictates of his own conscience.’ In banning the teaching of evolution because of something said in the Bible, the law favoured one form of religion over another. Neal laid out the legal details, Hays then followed with a more impassioned plea. He argued that if the law was against not evolution but the Copernican ‘theory’ that the earth moved around the sun it would be clearly unconstitutional. ‘The only distinction you can draw between this statute and the [hypothetical] one we are discussing is that evolution is as much a scientific fact as the Copernican theory, but the Copernican theory has been fully accepted.’