by Philipp Blom
Darrow had two reasons to throw his hat into the ring: while the case chimed with his personal agnosticism and his lifelong advocacy of individual rights, he may also have sought the brief in an attempt to clear his own name, which was ambiguously associated with the most sensational criminal trial of the decade, held only one year earlier. In the Leopold and Loeb case, two affluent and educated young men had brutally murdered a fourteen-year-old boy from their neighborhood, simply to see whether they could get away with it.
Leopold and Loeb confessed, and Darrow took on their defense in a trial in which their guilt was no longer in question. Their amateurish approach to committing the perfect crime and a trail of clues leading straight to them had been outlined at the beginning of a trial that kept the newspapers and their readers breathlessly excited for weeks. In his twelve-hour closing statement, Darrow argued that the two defendants were clearly mentally ill, and that as neither had reached the age of twenty-one, they were too young to be sentenced to death. The judge agreed with the eloquent defense lawyer, much to the irritation of the popular press, which had called for the defendants’ execution. As a result of that trial, the sixty-eight-year-old lawyer had become a household name nationwide, and so he could pick and choose the cases that interested him.
Another reason he did not hesitate to offer his services in the Scopes trial was that it gave him the opportunity to confront Bryan, his political and ideological antithesis. Darrow’s father had been a freethinker known locally as “the village agnostic,” and Darrow himself had given fiery speeches against the “slave morality” of Christianity. As a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union, founded in 1920 with the goal of defending individual rights and freedom of speech, he saw a great opportunity for his cause in the publicity generated by the Dayton trial.
Like the Christian fundamentalists, the civil rights activists had also coalesced due to the war, and the ACLU was the successor of an organization set up in 1917 to protect conscientious objectors and antiwar protesters. While Bryan and his allies considered it the right of every state to determine its own laws, the civil liberties advocates saw the outlawing of the teaching of evolution not only as scientifically wrong and educationally unsound but also as a dramatic infringement of teachers’ freedom of speech. The absolute certainty in one’s own righteousness and the truth of one’s beliefs that comes with faith was a great danger, Darrow believed. “The origin of what we call civilization is not due to religion but to skepticism,” he argued. “The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.”6
The ACLU, however, was initially not pleased that Darrow had taken the case. Though not opposed to him personally (their National Committee had been preparing to invite him to join them), they were annoyed not to have been consulted about his appointment. They also feared the negative publicity that the Leopold and Loeb case had garnered for Darrow in the South.
The Circus
FOR DAYTON, the preparations for the trial were a mixture of national emergency and the circus coming to town. With dozens if not hundreds of journalists expected to cover the proceedings, many hospitable townspeople moved out of their houses to give them to the reporters for the duration, and the journalists themselves were amazed by what they found. “The town, I confess, greatly surprised me,” wrote the polemical journalist H. L. Mencken, in town to cover the trial. “I expected to find a squalid Southern village, with darkies snoozing on the horse blocks, pigs rooting under the houses and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I found was a country town full of charm and even beauty.”7 He also reported, with almost palpable regret, that Daytonians were by no means Bible-thumping hillbillies, but friendly and intelligent people who fully realized that as far as they were concerned, the most important thing about the trial was the publicity it brought to their town.
Scopes was duly indicted by a grand jury, and the trial was set for July 10, during the summer holidays, to allow scholars and scientists to attend as witnesses, as the presiding judge explained. Both prosecution and defense began a period of intense preparation. Bryan in particular began a barrage of pretrial publicity, arguing that it “isn’t proper to bring experts in here to try to defeat the purpose of the people of the state” and bellowing his usual arguments against the wickedness of Darwin and godlessness.
As the trial began, the public interest was extraordinary. More than two hundred reporters crowded into the little courthouse. The center of the courtroom was given over to microphones, and the proceedings were relayed to four outside auditoriums and, by special telephone line, to a Chicago radio station, which broadcast the entire trial live. A nearby pasture was marked out as an airstrip to transport exposed photographic plates to the big cities, where they were incorporated into the reporters’ wired and telephoned reports. Despite the fact that the world-renowned British novelist H. G. Wells had declined an invitation to appear as a witness for the defense, there was little doubt that the trial and its international coverage would put Dayton on the map.
On the morning of the first day of the trial, the temperature inside the freshly painted courtroom was stifling. A publicity-savvy firm for dental hygiene products had distributed free fans with the slogan “Do Your Gums Bleed?” printed on them, and the tightly packed reporters, members of the public, legal teams, jury members, and other attendants fanned themselves furiously during the proceedings. A photo shows the two opponents, Darrow and Bryan, sitting at a table in their shirtsleeves and suspenders, looking each other in the eye as if they could win their contest by staring down the other side. It was a strangely intimate scene between two men who were so similar in age, character, and background and so very different in outlook. (In the photograph, Bryan is holding a fan.)
The trial began with a long prayer delivered by a local minister. Darrow objected, calling a religious observance in a trial about religion a strong bias. His intervention lost him sympathy with both the judge and the assembled townspeople. He plowed on, undeterred.
As the defense made its case in front of the packed court, the New York Times reported in sensational tones: “Clarence Darrow bearded the lion of Fundamentalism today, faced William Jennings Bryan and a court room filled with believers of the literal word of the Bible and with a hunch of shoulders and a thumb in his suspenders defied every belief they hold sacred.”8 Darrow’s main argument was simple: by effectively making one interpretation of the Bible the basis of the school curriculum, the state had violated its own constitution, which granted to all men “a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their conscience.” That, he stated, “takes care even of the despised modernist, who dares to be intelligent,” but it certainly meant that no holy scripture, including “the Koran . . . , the Book of Mormon . . . , or the Essays of Emerson,” could be privileged over others.
The Times had bowed in admiration of Darrow’s eloquence and passion, but those in the courtroom did not. “The net effect of Clarence Darrow’s great speech yesterday seems to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan,” wrote Mencken; though the journalist had found the little town of Dayton beautiful, he was growing increasingly impatient with its inhabitants. It was the purpose of the defense team to turn the trial into a trial of evolution, not of a modest high school teacher. “Scopes himself was quickly overshadowed by the eminent characters who heaved and howled in the courtroom. . . . Once, after he had been unseen and unheard for two or three days, the judge stopped the proceedings to inquire what had become of him. He was found—in his shirtsleeves like everyone else—sitting in the middle of a dense mass of lawyers, infidels, theologians, biologists and reporters, and after he had risen and identified himself the uproar was resumed.”9
The defense team called in expert witnesses to explain the science behind the theory of evolution, but the judge consistently attempted to limit the lawyers’ opportunities for grandstandin
g and tried instead to keep the trial focused on determining whether Scopes had indeed taught evolution to his pupils. The witnesses, three boys from his class (no girls were allowed to testify), stated that he had. They had been carefully coached by Scopes himself, who, as he admitted after the trial’s end, had not actually said anything about evolution during the class in question, but was willing to pretend he had done so for the sake of testing the law.
Finally it was Bryan’s turn to speak. Dripping with sweat, his bald pate glistening, the portly old warrior rose to his feet to deliver his address and defend the literal truth of the Bible. “The Christian believes man came from above, but the evolutionist believes he must have come from below,” he thundered. The audience lapped up his every word. The truth, he asserted, does not require experts and difficult scientific concepts: “The one beauty about the Word of God is, it does not take an expert to understand it.”10
“The whole course of the trial of Scopes was marked by gorgeous oratory,” Mencken recorded.11 But as the dramatic arguments flew back and forth it became increasingly clear that there were no opinions to be swayed. “All that remains in the great cause of the State of Tennessee against the infidel Scopes is the final business of bumping off the defendant,” noted a pessimistic Mencken. “There may be some legal jousting on Monday and some gaudy oratory on Tuesday, but the main battle is over, with Genesis completely triumphant.”12
Darrow had kept his greatest weapon for last: calling his opponent, Bryan, as a hostile witness, he tried to put fundamentalism on the stand. But despite his sharp questioning Bryan would not budge from his literalist position, and the jury was no more convinced by the cross-examination than it had been by the expert witnesses or by Darrow’s speech. The case, the seasoned lawyer began to realize, was lost. The jury found Scopes guilty of having broken the law as it stood, and fined him one hundred dollars. The event that many papers had dubbed the “trial of the century” had ended without the spectacular rhetorical victory of either side.
Despite being exhausted by the trial and severely diabetic, William Jennings Bryan immediately set off to give more speeches, traveling hundreds of miles, working relentlessly, and eating like a horse. He returned to Dayton five days after the end of the trial, took a large meal at his hotel, went to his room to rest, and died in his sleep. Christian conservatives saw him as a martyr to the cause and began collecting funds for a college in his name, which would open in 1930.
In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court quashed Scopes’s conviction on a technicality: the fine had been set by the jury, not by the judge. In his ruling, the presiding judge added: “The court is informed that the plaintiff in error is no longer in the service of the state. We see nothing to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case. On the contrary, we think that the peace and dignity of the state, which all criminal prosecutions are brought to redress, will be the better conserved by the entry of a nolle prosequi herein.”13
THE “MONKEY TRIAL” was followed closely and publicized by the international press, partly out of simple sensationalism and partly because it resonated strongly with the discussions between faith and science that were being conducted in many countries around the globe. In Europe, the case for evolution had been decided three decades earlier, but it touched on other issues that were very much alive and raw. Those issues focused on the two individuals William Jennings Bryan had regarded as the archenemies of religion and of all morality: Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche.
If it is almost impossible to fathom the profound influence these two thinkers had on the culture of the first half of the twentieth century, it is only because their influence is still so deeply ingrained in our culture that we can hardly imagine it without their presence. It is only possible to understand modernity and its ideological expression, modernism—or communism and fascism, or other social, political, and artistic movements—if one begins to realize the profound and seminal importance these two deeply private and often deeply misunderstood thinkers had on the generations that came after them.
It is an intellectual curse that individuals are rarely ever remembered for more than what fits into one or two short slogans, regardless of how complex and subtle their work is. In Darwin’s case, these were “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection”; in Nietzsche’s, they were “will to power” and “beyond good and evil,” if not simply “superman,” a term so easily distorted that it was hardly ever used as anything but a caricature of its original meaning.
Even before the war, these two quite unrelated theoretical edifices—one strictly scientific, the other more poetry than philosophy—had been fused into a single monstrosity, usually known as social Darwinism. The idea was almost distressingly simple: if Darwin says that the fittest are destined by nature to survive and if Nietzsche says that only the fittest should survive and that ideas such as empathy or solidarity are nothing but “slave morality,” then the only natural and moral result is rule by a race of strong and ruthless supermen, weeding out everything that is, or is perceived to be, weak and unable to impose itself on others.
Of course, neither thinker had said any such thing. Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” (a term coined not by him but by his admirer Herbert Spencer) in no way precluded altruism and cooperation, and Nietzsche’s superman was not a rampant proto-Nazi but an ideal of self-transcendence more akin to Buddhist teachings than to anything his followers made it out to be. It did not help that Darwin’s theories appeared to raise as many questions as they settled (a fact eagerly exploited by his creationist opponents) and that Nietzsche’s genius circled the core of his philosophical ideas apparently unconcerned by the occasional contradiction and was understandable only by reading the entirety of his works, such as his immensely popular but easily misunderstood Thus Spake Zarathustra. To aggravate this already almost impossibly confused situation, Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, not only cared for the philosopher after his complete mental breakdown but also took to editing his works, effectively rewriting them in the light of her own great admiration for the rising star of German politics, Adolf Hitler.
If social Darwinism was a monstrous deformity born out of ill-digested ideas, it became hugely popular not despite but because of its simplistic message of total domination by a race of ideal humans (the particular race magically always coincided with the imagined race of whoever was promoting the idea). It was made all the more attractive by the apparent degeneration engendered by modernity, and by the apparent superiority of Western civilization over other cultures, particularly in the colonial empires of the European countries.
Even before the war, a whole scientific industry had been generated by the need to prove racial superiority over others. Lectures were given, systems devised, skulls measured, ideal features described, brains weighed, Greek sculptures analyzed as ideals of beauty, and spurious archeological artifacts passed off as proof of racial purity and superiority of the Germans, the French, the Italians, the Russians, or whoever else happened to be conducting and financing the research.
The results of this activity not only had been used by all sides to justify the war itself (apart from the Bible, Thus Spake Zarathustra was the book most frequently read by German soldiers at the front) but also had inspired political theories and social programs, particularly eugenics, the theory of breeding biologically perfect human beings by encouraging those of “superior stock” to breed while others, believed to be inferior, were either to be discouraged from having children or even prevented from doing so through programs of mass sterilization, or worse.
Eugenics was widely accepted and promoted across the political spectrum, and it is worth remembering that from a purely biological perspective, eugenic ideas appeared justified at the time. Even toward the end of the nineteenth century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of heredity claiming that learned characteristics can be passed on genetically to future generations had significant support in the scientific community, and the research
conducted with peas by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel had shown that traits were indeed passed on through the generations. In the light of these findings and ideas it seemed reasonable to look at Europe’s urban slums with their alcoholism, rickets, high crime rates, poverty, and misery and conclude that these “traits” should not be passed on to future generations.
Theories about the nature of heredity and of evolution were hotly discussed in the scientific community, and the existence of random mutations was as yet only one among several competing concepts. Amid this welter of ideas, eugenicists captured not only the public imagination but also to a large degree the attention of those in power. Many members of the social elite, across the entire political spectrum, were active supporters of eugenic ideas.
In Britain, the Galton Institute, named after the nineteenth-century eugenicist Francis Galton, counted among its members economist John Maynard Keynes, future prime minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain and former prime minister Arthur Balfour, Charles Darwin’s son Leonard and his grandson Charles Galton Darwin, the sexologist Havelock Ellis, the American doctor and cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg, and the birth control activists Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes. Other prominent supporters were George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, philosopher Bertrand Russell, and novelist H. G. Wells; the list goes on to form a virtual who’s who of British intellectual life.
Less efficiently organized in France but nevertheless very vociferous, the eugenics movement had strong supporters there, too. In a lecture at the Sorbonne given in 1932, eugenicist Just Sicard de Pauzole summed up the purpose of his work: “The lower classes, the poorer classes, have a much higher birthrate than the upper, richer classes. . . . Misery, along with alcoholism, syphilis and tuberculosis, is a powerful factor in degeneration . . . and children of poorer classes compared to children of rich classes show an inferiority of physical, intellectual and moral development . . . caused by fatigue and deprivation of the mother during gestation, by insufficient feeding in early years, by poor housing conditions and by working at an early age.”14