Throughout what followed, Tom Stewart constantly raised objections to Bryan’s testifying, but the more he did so, the more it looked like the great man required protection, and Bryan himself would wave him off with a plucky speech about his courage and how determined he was to face down the infidel, Darrow.
Darrow began by asking questions designed to establish Bryan as an expert on the Bible. Yes, Bryan admitted, he had studied the Bible for over fifty years and written and spoken about it widely.
‘Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?’
‘I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there. Some of the Bible is given illustratively. For instance, “Ye are the salt of the earth.” I would not insist that man was actually salt …’
‘But when you read that the whale swallowed Jonah—how do you literally interpret that?’
‘I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make both do what He pleases …’
‘The Bible says Joshua commanded the sun to stand still for the purpose of lengthening the day, doesn’t it, and you believe it?’
‘I do.’
‘Do you believe that at that time the sun went around the earth?’
‘No, I believe that the earth goes around the sun.’
‘Have you an opinion as to whether whoever wrote the book—I believe it is Joshua, the Book of Joshua—thought the sun went around the earth or not?’
‘I believe he was inspired.’
‘Can you answer my question?’
‘I believe that the Bible is inspired, an inspired author. Whether one who wrote as he was directed to write understood the things he was writing about, I don’t know … I believe it was inspired by the Almighty, and He may have used language that could be understood at that time instead of using language that could not be understood until Darrow was born.’
He got a good laugh here, and some applause, but Darrow pressed on. If the day was to be lengthened, wouldn’t it in fact be necessary for the earth to stay still? Bryan used an old chestnut to illustrate his belief in the power of God. If he, William Jennings Bryan, a mere mortal, could pick up a glass of water, thus defying the laws of gravity, imagine what God could do.
‘I read that years ago,’ said Darrow impatiently. ‘Can you answer my question directly? If the day was lengthened by stopping either the earth or the sun it must have been the earth?’
‘Well, I should say so,’ conceded Bryan.
‘Have you ever pondered what would happen to the earth if it stood still?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you know it would have been converted into a molten mass of matter?’
Bryan replied that Darrow could testify to that when he got on the stand.
Darrow began to ask questions about the Flood.
Included in the Bible admitted into evidence, the King James Bible, were the calculations of Bishop Ussher. Using these, Darrow and Bryan fixed the date of the Flood at 2348 B.C. and that of Creation at 4004 B.C.
‘You believe that all the living things that were not contained in the Ark were destroyed?’ asked Darrow.
‘I think the fish may have lived,’ replied Bryan.
Again, there was some laughter.
‘Have you any idea how old the Egyptian civilization is?’ asked Darrow.
‘No.’
Had he ever read anything about the origins of other religions?
‘Not a great deal.’
Darrow asked him if he knew anything about Buddhism or Confucianism? Did he have any idea of the number of people who lived in Egypt 3,500 years ago, or China 5,000 years ago?
‘No.’
‘Have you ever tried to find out?’
‘No, sir, you are the first man I ever heard of who has been interested in it.’
‘Where have you lived all your life?’ Darrow asked in amazement.
‘Not near you,’ said Bryan.
‘Nor near anyone of learning … You have never in all your life made any attempt to find out about the other peoples of the earth—how old their civilizations are—how long they have existed on earth?’
‘No, sir, I have been so well satisfied with the Christian religion that I have spent no time trying to find arguments against it.’
This was the essence of his defence against the charge of ignorance and he did as well with it as he could; but, as Darrow’s questions increasingly revealed not just Bryan’s ignorance, which was forgivable, but his satisfaction with his ignorance, which somehow was not, his supporters began to applaud a little less enthusiastically.
‘Have you any idea how far back the last glacial age was?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Do you know whether it was more than six thousand years ago?’
‘I think it was more than six thousand years ago.’
‘Have you any idea how old the earth is?’
‘No.’
‘The book you have introduced in evidence tells you, doesn’t it?’
‘I don’t think it does, Mr Darrow.’
Darrow pointed out that the Bible which the state of Tennessee claimed evolution was in conflict with, contained Ussher’s calculations and, as they had just agreed, these claimed the earth was created 4,004 years before the birth of Christ, thus making it less than 6,000 years old. Darrow hopped around, keeping Bryan off balance, jabbing at him and then circling around to jab again in the same place.
‘Do you think the earth was created in six days?’
Bryan hesitated.
‘Not six days of twenty-four hours.’
The crowd gasped. Bryan, the ‘Fundamentalist Pope,’ had committed blasphemy. True fundamentalists believed (as most still do, including Kurt Wise) that when the Bible says six days, it means Monday through Saturday, six literal, twenty-four-hour days. Darrow pressed on.
‘Doesn’t it say so?’
‘No, sir.’
Stewart, seeing things going badly, tried again to make another objection. What was the purpose of this line of questioning? Before the judge could answer, Bryan spoke up.
‘The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible, and I am perfectly willing that the world shall know that these gentlemen have no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian who believes in the Bible.’
‘We have the purpose,’ said Darrow, ‘of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States and you know it, and that is all.’
There were more objections from Stewart and counter-arguments from Darrow and Hays.
‘Your honor,’ intoned Bryan, trying to get himself back into the proceedings, ‘they have not asked a question legally, and the only reason they have asked any question is for the purpose—as the question about Jonah was asked—for a chance to give this agnostic an opportunity to criticize a believer in the word of God; and I answered the question in order to shut his mouth, so that he cannot go out and tell his atheistic friends that I would not answer his question. That is the only reason, no more reason in the world.’
Perhaps wearying of his protestations, or having absorbed his apostasy on the six literal days issue, or maybe even because they liked Darrow and felt Bryan’s attack was unfair, the crowd did not cheer.
Malone, the hero of Thursday, stood up. ‘Your honor, on this very subject, I would like to say that I would have asked Mr. Bryan—and I consider myself as good a Christian as he is—every question that Mr. Darrow has asked him for the purpose of bringing out whether or not there is to be taken in the court only a literal interpretation of the Bible … We are here as lawyers with the same right to our views. I have the same right to mine as a Christian as Mr. Bryan has to his, and we do not intend to have this case charged by Mr. Darrow’s agnosticism or Mr. Bryan’s brand of Christianity.’
Malone’s speech was greeted with ‘great applause.’ Bryan flinched visibly. The audience was applauding, a direct attack on him, William Jennings Bryan, t
heir ‘Peerless Leader’! Coming as it did on the heels of his own courageous bleatings, which had received none, the effect must have been devastating. Caught between wanting to please his fundamentalist supporters and not wanting to appear entirely idiotic to more educated people, had he made a terrible error in admitting he did not believe in the literal six days of creation?
Raulston told Darrow to continue.
‘Mr. Bryan, do you believe that the first woman was Eve?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you believe she was literally made out of Adam’s rib?’
‘I do.’
‘Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?’
‘No, sir, I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.’
Darrow went back to the six days of creation.
‘Does the statement, “The morning and the evening were the first day,” and “The morning and the evening were the second day,” mean anything to you?’
Again—what else could he do?—Bryan held to his previous statement. ‘I do not think it necessarily means a twenty-four-hour day … I think it would be as easy for the kind of God we believe in to make the earth in six days as in six years or in six million years or in six hundred million years.’
‘Do you think the sun was made on the fourth day?’ Darrow continued.
‘Yes.’
‘And they had evening and morning without a sun?’
‘I am simply saying it is a period.’
‘They had evening and morning for four periods without the sun?’
‘I believe in creation as there told, and if I am not able to explain it I will accept it. Then you can explain it to suit yourself.’
‘Do you believe the story of the temptation of Eve by the serpent?’
‘I do.’
‘And you believe that is the reason that God made the serpent to go on his belly after he tempted Eve?’
‘I believe the Bible as it is, and I do not permit you to put your language in the place of the language of the Almighty. You read that Bible and ask me questions, and I will answer them. I will not answer your questions in your language.’
‘I will read it to you from the Bible: “And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because you hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.” Do you think that is why the serpent is compelled to crawl upon its belly?’
‘I believe that.’
‘Have you any idea how the snake went about before that time?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not?’
The audience laughed.
Darrow had more questions, but as he was in the middle of asking the next one, Bryan launched off into another of his martyred protestations.
‘Your honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, but I will answer his question. I will answer it all at once, and I have no objection in the world, I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee …’
‘I object,’ said Darrow.
‘ … to slur at it, and while it may require time, I am willing to take it.’
‘I object to your statement,’ said Darrow, losing his temper. ‘I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes!’
Suddenly, the two men were on their feet, glaring at each other.
Everyone stared at them in shock. Was Bryan going to hit Darrow or Darrow Bryan?
Raulston banged his gavel and adjourned court until nine the following morning.
Darrow, the hero of the hour, strode away across the lawn, surrounded by the crowd and by admiring reporters, off to file their stories around the world.
‘For Bryan,’ writes Scopes in his account, ‘there was only despondency; he was left alone on that green, spacious lawn, a forgotten, forlorn man.’
Insulated by the adoration of his flock and by his own complacency, had Bryan never considered any of the questions Darrow raised? Had he entered this fight against science without once thinking about its potential for revealing the absurdities of his own faith? If this was so, and it seems possible, the experience must have been shattering. He had sought to re-invent himself with this new cause and instead had been dismantled. He must have known he did not have long to live and this would be a part, a large part, of his legacy, this humiliation at the hands of Darrow.
‘His career,’ wrote Mencken a few days after the trial, ‘brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung pile.’
Bryan comforted himself with the thought that he still had two chances left in which to redeem himself. He would put Darrow on the stand and question him and he’d dazzle the world with his closing argument for the prosecution.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Achtung, Rocky!
It’s Friday night in Dayton, exactly seventy-three years—and one irretrievable week—after Darrow humiliated Bryan, and I’m in Sheriff Sneed’s office, staring up at Deputy Sheriff Rocky Potter, who is going to take me out on a tour through the Tennessee night.
Rocky wears a tight brown uniform and resembles a 250-pound sausage with a tennis ball perched on top. He is six-foot-two and his chest and arms are so swathed in muscle that he’s forced to adopt the posture of a gunslinger, arms out from the side, elbows slightly bent, hands hanging away from his hips. His shoulders are square and wider than the average doorway. A thigh-sized neck emerges from these shoulders and on top of the neck rests a shaved head, in the middle of which are two small eyes and a Zapata moustache.
As I’m introduced to him by Sneed, the eyes check me out with the cold, almost angry suspicion of the cop. I instinctively shrink back. Rocky does not stand, he looms, and looking up at him, I’m reminded of a character in a boy’s comic book, the corporal who, at the last possible moment, comes plunging through a wall with a growl of righteous indignation and starts tossing Germans and howitzers around.
‘Achtung! It’s der Amerikaner, Herr Rocky!’
‘Yaaagh!!!’
A power-lifter for the cops, Rocky later admits that although he can bench 460 pounds, he can’t run a hundred yards without getting puffed; but God help you, I think to myself, if he gets to you before then.
A writer tends to be impressed by a cop. He’s the physical manifestation of the writer’s art. While the cowardly scribe sits in the comfort of his lair trying to envision the dramatic extremes of life, the cop is out there plunging around in them. A writer wonders what lies beyond the door—the cop kicks the door down and enters.
Sneed completes the introduction and Rocky smiles at me amiably as he reaches out to shake my hand. I’m ready for it and tense the limb to avoid injury. Rocky turns and beckons me to follow.
‘I’ll show you the jail, then we’ll go serve some warrants,’ he says, and we walk out the front of the sheriff’s office and around the back to the Soweto-like structure that lies behind.
On one side are a few cells for the trusties. On the same side are a couple of cells for men who need to be protected and the cells for the female prisoners, though I did not see any. On the other side is the meat of the place, two lines of cells known as the Grey Bar Motel. Designed to house no more than fifty men at most, it often contains sixty to seventy. I meet two jailers, an older man with a wooden leg and a strange dent in his head, and a woman, Billie, who takes my arm, grinning and laughing, and leads me back.
Tough but obviously well-liked, she’s one of those women of indomitable good
will and optimism. She unlocks a door and pushes her way in. She can’t be more than five feet and has to be approaching fifty years old. She carries no weapon.
Country boys, lots of them, stripped to the waist—lean, manipulative, whining—crowd around her as we go down the first row. Here is space. Here is space divided by bars and saturated with nicotine. Here is no space, no privacy, just time, dead time, lots of it. Bunks crammed against walls, dirty mattresses on the floor or rolled aside, eight to ten in cells built for four. Kids playing cards, kids jammed in the corridor, men in despair, lying on the six-feet-by-four-feet area to which, I suppose, they have some claim. It’s a camp, a sleepover, a bazaar, bizarre. Some are in here for a night, some for years. I wouldn’t last a week, not because of violence, not for want of comfort, but for lack of solitude.
‘Hey, Billie, can I take a shower?’
‘Hey, Billie, what about that sandwich?’
‘Hey, Billie, did my bondsman come through yet?’
She bats them aside, affectionate but firm, more den mother than jailer.
They look at me, figuring the deal. Who is he, why is he here, what can I get out of him? One of them, nineteen, long blond hair shaved along the sides, one pupil paper-white (shot out by a BB gun, I’ll bet), winks at me and grins. My nervousness gives way to a sense of camaraderie. I’ve stolen things with kids like these, worked with them in factories, dealt with them on film crews. They’re the sad adventurers, exuberant boys of unfixed ambition, losers without sufficient will or intelligence to escape their destiny; boys who, in celebration of careless youth and limited freedom, dodge this way and that for a couple of years before eventually being taken by what they dread far more than this: the inevitable mouth of the long tube of the production line, which will suck them in, set them on a march of endless days marked by 32,000 sorry punchings of a clock, and then, once they are exhausted, will blow them out the other end, into retirement and death.
We leave and go along the other row, much the same but for the added frisson of attempted murder—Jimmy McKenzie’s assailant lurking deep in the furthest cell, awaiting results of a test of his insanity.
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