Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  When I was younger I broke the law without much thought, once seriously, a crime that could have put me away for several years. I figured then that if I ended up in jail I’d have time to write. But middle age in general, and fatherhood in particular, has made both a coward and a hero of me; a hero should it be necessary to protect my daughter, a coward should it result in separation from her. Trucks rear up behind me and slam on their brakes, impatiently waiting to pass. I’m so intent on keeping within the law my eyes are on the speedometer not on the road and once I almost crash into a car ahead. The rain gets heavier. The earth rotates the invisible sun away.

  In spite of losing my way and having to cut across country through dark hills, sensed rather than seen, I arrive in Dayton and check into the Best Western. It’s an ugly, sprawling hotel out near Ayola’s, the Mexican restaurant. The woman behind the counter can’t find my name in the reservations book, but it’s not a problem. I ask for the best room in the hotel. It’s available and it’s the bridal suite. The best room in all these rural hotels seems to be the bridal suite.

  A monumental light-green plastic Jacuzzi in Grecian style occupies at least a third of the room. It’s right in, the bedroom, one tortured edge, scarred with cigarette burns, almost touches the bed. I decide to go for a drink.

  The Best Western bar is the only other place apart from Ayola’s where you can get alcohol, beer only, and so I assume it’ll be a festive place, brimming with Dayton’s fun-loving, mirthful set. Maybe there’ll even be some fellow sceptics in the bar, down here to laugh with me at the re-enactment.

  As I round the corner of the hotel in the drizzling, damp, enveloping hotness of the night, I encounter a sodden behemoth standing at the rear of his rusting car. He’s in the act of pulling a vast, sweat-stained T-shirt up over his head, revealing a pallid stomach as big as a VW Beetle but covered in matted hair. I nod at him as I go by and enter the bar.

  It’s a corridor drenched in a dull, gloomy yellow light. There’s a jukebox at one end. Two or three tables and chairs are crushed up against the wall opposite the long bar. There are five inebriates here, two women and three men. A young pregnant girl stands behind the bar, smoking voraciously. I take a stool down the far end and order a beer. Conversation starts up again. The behemoth enters in a clean shirt and engulfs a bar stool which you feel is his and his alone.

  The men are obviously manual labourers, tough and stringy, hands ingrained with dirt. Everyone’s exhausted, surfing on the sugar of alcohol, waiting for the wave to beach them. The barmaid is a pretty, dark-haired girl who can’t be much older than twenty, but this is going to be her second child. She looks up at you with her head lowered as if you might smack her, and her mouth sulks as she talks. Having noticed even more signs about the sheriff race, I ask what the general feeling is about Sneed and she tells me she’s a niece of his, but not close.

  ‘I’m a poor Sneed. I was raised by my mama.’

  Her apparent lack of loyalty to the Sneed family opens a door and the drinkers charge in to give their opinions. They don’t like Sneed at all. He’s too strict on drunk driving.

  Oh.

  I buy everyone a drink and move up closer to the big man, whom I’ll call Emerson. Emerson’s pear-shaped head reminds me of a medium-sized bag of laundry with some chins added at the bottom. He works up at the La-Z-Boy factory and just came off his shift. It’s getting on for midnight, when the bar closes, and the barflies start to drink faster and faster. Emerson and another man order beers in pairs and down them one after the other with barely a pause for breath. I try to keep up but it’s not possible.

  ‘How’s the moonshine situation down here?’ I ask, gasping at the gaseous chill of yet another beer coursing down my throat into my stomach.

  ‘You want some moonshine?’ asks Emerson. He has friendless eyes, a character actor in the play of life, Falstaff without a king, but now there’s a certain comradeship: I bought him a drink, he bought me a drink.

  ‘Damn straight,’ I say, falling easily into the vernacular.

  He says he’ll get me some tomorrow night. ‘I’ll have to go up in the hills and get it, but I’ll do it.’

  ‘I’ll pay,’ I tell him.

  He waves me aside. ‘You jes buy me a drink, we’ll talk about that. Be back here around ten o’clock tomorrow night an’ I’ll take care a ya.’

  I stumble back to my room, so drunk and exhausted I can’t even be bothered to take a Jacuzzi. I go to sleep and then wake up an hour later with a dry mouth and a headache. I lie on my back for half an hour, trying to will myself to sleep, but as usual it doesn’t work. I feel apprehensive about something but I don’t know what.

  I turn the light on. Maybe I’m anxious because the subject of my book, the trial, has faded, subsumed by the more clamorous demands of the movie business. I’ve brought the trial transcript with me. I take it out of my bag and locate a postcard of the Magnolia House which projects out of the pages about halfway through. When I stopped reading, Judge Raulston had adjourned early on Wednesday afternoon to give both sides time to prepare their arguments on the admissibility of Darrow’s vitally important expert witnesses.

  On Thursday morning, July 16, 1925, the opening prayer was typically biased and threatening. ‘We thank Thee for Thy blessings upon us all, and for Thy watch, care and protection over us; we pray Thy blessings upon the deliberations of this court, to the end that Thy Word may be vindicated, and that Thy truth may be spread in the earth.’

  William Jennings Bryan Jr. stood up and made the argument for the prosecution. From all accounts it was a lacklustre performance given in a voice so low (and so in contrast with papa’s) that there were frequent requests for more volume. In essence, he argued that expert testimony was not required in this case because the matter was simple. The defence admitted Scopes had taught evolution, which was against the law, so what was the purpose of expanding the matter? Furthermore, he claimed, expert testimony in this case was in fact only expert opinion, which, unlike other testimony, was not subject either to contradiction by fact or to the rules of perjury.

  There was a short adjournment and then the judge came back to give the floor to the defence. Well, to give it to them with a caution. ‘We have some lawyers in the case who at times indulge in a lot of wit … The floor of the courthouse building is so heavily burdened with weight … and the least vibration might cause something to happen and applause might start trouble.’

  In mock humility, Hays responded that he was embarrassed by the judge’s suggestion that his argument would cause ‘such thunderous applause that the building might come down.’ He then went on to argue that to not allow evidence on evolution was to hear only one half of the case, the prosecution’s. Bryan had stated to the press that this was to be a ‘duel to the death’ between evolution and revealed religion. If that was so, then under simple rules of fairness the defence should be allowed to ‘reveal’ their side.

  Hicks reiterated Bryan Jr.’s argument and Ben McKenzie followed. McKenzie, who later became a good friend of Darrow’s, was an amusing and likeable old Southern gentleman, and opened his argument as follows:

  ‘I want to say this. Since the beginning of this lawsuit and since I began to meet these distinguished gentlemen, I have begun to love them, every one, and it is a very easy task. In fact, it was a case when I met Colonel Darrow, a case of love at first sight. These other gentlemen come right on, but you know they wriggled around so rapidly that I could not get my love turned loose on them until I got a chance …’

  Then he began to defend the Christian version of creation against that of science, stating confidently what the defence witnesses would say if they were allowed to testify. Eventually, Hays asked him how he could possibly know what they’d say without first hearing them. McKenzie responded rather irrelevantly by asking Hays if he believed the story of divine creation.

  Hays replied, ‘That is none of your business.’

  Judge Raulston asked him to apologise to McKenzie for h
is rudeness.

  ‘Instead of those words, I will say I think it doesn’t concern General McKenzie.’

  ‘And I will say to you,’ said McKenzie, ‘that I have as little concern as to where you emanated from or where you are going to as any man I ever met.’

  ‘Now, may I ask for an apology, your honor?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  McKenzie apologised. ‘I did not mean to give offense. I beg your pardon.’

  ‘It is like old sweethearts made up,’ said Hays, mocking the old man’s protestations of love earlier in the day.

  Court was adjourned until the afternoon.

  After lunch, the judge once again warned of the dangers of applause and the possibility of it bringing down the building.

  Now, at last, the Great Commoner was to be heard.

  Bryan was so used to talking to the crowd that much of his speech was made with his back to the judge, who, by rights, he should have been addressing. In his book, Scopes says he made a poor beginning, that the brilliance he had seen when Bryan spoke in Salem was sadly diminished.

  His tone was jovial as he derided evolution and Darwin, but to an educated observer he came across as merely ignorant. As Mencken put it, ‘Somehow he reminded me pathetically of the old Holy Roller I heard last week—who damned education as a mocking and a corruption. Bryan too is afraid of it, for wherever it spreads, his trade begins to fall off, and wherever it flourishes he is only a poor clown.’

  At one point, he read from Hunter’s biology textbook, the one Scopes had used, and laughed at the enumeration of species. ‘Two thirds of all the species of all the animal world are insects and sometimes in the summertime we feel that we become intimately acquainted with all of them … Now we are getting up near our kinfolk, 13,000 fishes. Then there are the amphibia. I don’t know whether they have not yet decided to come out or have almost decided to go back.’

  This got a big laugh.

  ‘And then we have mammals, 3,500, and there is a little circle and man is in the circle. Find him, find man! There is the book they were teaching your children, that man was a mammal and so indistinguishable among the mammals that they leave him there with 3,499 other mammals.’

  He waited for the applause to die down and then added:

  ‘Including elephants,’ which got a huge laugh.

  Next he read from The Descent of Man, in which Darwin describes the way in which man may have developed. It is full of technical terms and Latin names and Bryan’s intent was clearly to make it seem nonsensical, an affront to common sense and a poor reason to ‘undermine the faith of these little children in a God who stands back of everything and whose promise we have that we shall live with Him forever by and by.’

  He spoke of Nathan Leopold and how Darrow had suggested that because Leopold read Nietzsche at university he had become a murderer. This was precisely the danger of taking God out of education and replacing Him with concepts like the survival of the fittest and Nietzsche’s morally unaccountable ‘superman.’

  ‘The Bible,’ Bryan said in closing, ‘is not going to be driven out of this court by experts who come hundreds of miles to testify that they can reconcile evolution—with its ancestors in the jungle—with man made by God in His image … The facts are simple, the case is plain, and if these gentlemen want to enter upon a larger field of educational work on the subject of evolution, let us get through with this case and then convene a mock court, for it will deserve the title of mock court if its purpose is to banish from the hearts of the people the Word of God as revealed.’

  He then sat down. The trial record noted there was ‘Great applause.’

  Once it died down, Dudley Field Malone stood up to argue for the defence. Malone, the lone Catholic on the defence, though divorced and remarried to a suffragette, was exceedingly well dressed and fastidious. He was the only attorney on either side who had never taken his jacket off in spite of the incredible heat, a fact which had been widely noted in the press.

  Malone stood in the body of the courtroom, thinking for a moment, and then slowly he removed his jacket. He folded it carefully, and laid it over the back of a chair. The court became quiet.

  He started gently, sitting on the edge of the defence table. Having chided Bryan for his anti-education bias, he pointed out that it had been seventy-five years since Darwin’s theory was first explained and that much had been learned not only to confirm it but to contradict the Bible. Cities had been discovered showing a high degree of civilisation 14,000 years ago. ‘Are we to hold mankind to a literal understanding of the claim that the world is 6,000 years old because of the limited vision of men who believed the world was flat and that the earth was the center of the universe? ’

  He spoke of how, three centuries earlier, Galileo had been prosecuted by theologians. ‘Haven’t we learned anything? … Are we to have our children know nothing about science except what the church says they shall know?’ He spoke of the burning of the library at Alexandria and how a plea had been made of Kalif Omar to spare it because it contained all the truth that had been gathered up to that point. ‘And the Mohammedan general said, “But the Koran contains all the truth. If the library contains the truth that the Koran contains we do not need the library, and if the library does not contain the truth that the Koran contains then we must destroy the library anyway.” ’

  He defended the young against the old. ‘The least our generation can do, your honor, is to give the next generation all the facts, all the available data, all the theories, all the information that learning, that study, that observation has produced—give it to the children in the hope of heaven that they will make a better world than we have been able to.’

  To everyone’s astonishment, the audience began to cheer for Malone, who now turned toward Bryan. ‘My old chief … I never saw him back away from a great issue before … We have come in here ready for battle. We have come in here for a duel … but does the opposition mean by a duel that our defendant shall be strapped to a board and that they alone shall carry the sword? Is our only weapon—the witnesses who shall testify to the accuracy of our theory—is our only weapon to be taken from us so that the duel will be entirely one-sided? That isn’t my idea of a duel.’

  Now his voice began to rise, getting louder and louder like an old-time preacher. The court was either in absolute silence, transfixed by him, or they were cheering him, and cheering him more loudly than they had Bryan. Scopes, glancing over at the old Commoner found his reaction to Malone’s speech startling. In his book, Center of the Storm, he wrote, ‘I have never seen such a great change hit a human being as fast as it did Bryan. Malone spoke for only twenty minutes. There was only dejection on Bryan’s face; the victory that had been his only a few moments before was suddenly, disastrously dissipated.’

  ‘There is never a duel with the truth,’ Malone continued. ‘The truth always wins and we are not afraid of it. The truth is no coward. The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the forces of government. The truth does not need Mr. Bryan. The truth is imperishable, eternal, and immortal and needs no human agency to support it … We are ready. We feel we stand with progress. We feel we stand with science. We feel we stand with intelligence. We feel we stand with fundamental freedom in America. We are not afraid. Where is the fear? We meet it. Where is the fear? We defy it. We ask your honor to admit the evidence as a matter of correct law, as a matter of sound procedure, and as a matter of justice to the defense in this case.’

  ‘Profound and continued applause,’ states the trial record.

  In truth, the audience—who had applauded Bryan less than an hour ago—now went completely wild. The judge banged his gavel and called for order, but could not stop the cheering and yelling and clapping. A policeman was seen banging his nightstick on a table so hard he split it. When another officer came up to help him restore order, the man said, ‘I’m not trying to restore order! Hell, I’m cheering!’

  Malone had stolen Bryan’s day.

&n
bsp; Finally, the cheering died down. Stewart tried to repair the damage done by Malone, but nothing could rise to the level of Malone’s great speech for reason and fairness.

  When court was finally adjourned, the reporters rushed off to file their stories, many of which contained Dudley Malone’s speech in its entirety. Scopes stayed behind, sitting next to Malone, and the courtroom gradually emptied out.

  Soon only Scopes, Malone, and William Jennings Bryan remained.

  Scopes reports that the ‘Peerless Leader,’ the ‘Great Commoner,’ the one-time ‘Boy Orator of the Platte,’ the author of the marvellous ‘Cross of Gold’ speech, the most brilliant speaker of his generation, sat in his rocking-chair over by the prosecution table, fanning himself with his palm leaf fan. Every now and then he would let the fan drop and just stare ahead vacantly. Eventually, without turning to look at Malone, he spoke.

  ‘Dudley, that was the greatest speech I ever heard.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Bryan,’ Malone replied softly. ‘I am sorry it was I who had to make it.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Head Symptoms

  The next morning when I wake up the light is still on and the trial transcript lies across my sour stomach. I get dressed and, exhausted and hung over, plod across the parking lot to the Frontier Diner, picking up a Herald-News on the way in. Hoping to quell a continuing feeling of dread and disorientation, I order eggs and bacon with biscuit and gravy and settle back in the damp, airless greasiness of the place to read.

  Another victim has been claimed by the railroad track. A young boy, honour student at the high school, no history of drugs. Inexplicable, the curse of Dayton.

  I look across the page.

  ‘Scopes Trial Festival Attracts Crowds.’

  Funny, I haven’t seen any crowds. The first paragraph of the article says that more than a thousand people ‘viewed the play.’ What do they mean, ‘viewed’? Today is Thursday and tonight is opening night, so how can anyone have viewed the play, let alone one thousand of them? I read the headline again. ‘Scopes Trial Festival Attracts Crowds.’