Darrow was always watchful of Bryan, and composed an open letter that was printed in the Chicago Tribune in the summer of 1923. “I have … followed Mr. Bryan’s efforts to shut out the teaching of science from the public schools,” Darrow wrote. “A few questions to Mr. Bryan and the fundamentalists if fairly answered might serve the interests of reaching the truth.” He followed with a questionnaire that listed Old Testament tales—the garden of Eden, Noah’s ark, the whale and Jonah, and others—and asked Bryan if he believed they were literally true. Some of Darrow’s queries were rooted in science (“Are there not evidences in writing and hieroglyphics … which show that man has been on the earth more than 50,000 years?”), but others were sarcastic (“Did God curse the serpent for tempting Eve and decree that thereafter he should go on his belly? How did he travel before that?”). Bryan declined the bait. “I am not worried about an atheist” like Darrow, he told reporters.3
TENNESSEE EMERGED AS the battleground for the anti-evolution cause in early 1925. A rural state representative named John Washington Butler, the clerk of the Round Lick Association of Primitive Baptists, introduced a bill making it illegal for public schools “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 animals.”
Folks like Butler bridled when the public schools used textbooks that challenged their faith in Genesis. One of the nation’s most popular biology texts—A Civic Biology by George W. Hunter—was in use in Tennessee high schools. Later generations would find much to deplore in Hunter’s claim that the Caucasian race was “the highest type of all,” or in his argument that progeny of feeble-minded and “immoral” families are “parasites” who should be kept from breeding. But that was not what bothered the fundamentalists. They objected to the section on evolution.
“Geology teaches that millions of years ago, life upon the earth was very simple, and that gradually more and more complex forms of life appeared,” the text said. “The group of mammals which includes the monkeys, apes and man we call the primates.” The fundamentalists wanted the mighty Lord of Genesis in the classroom, not monkeys. “Man’s spiritual nature is not even referred to, and the child would very readily get the idea that the proof of man’s connection with the monkey was complete and the Bible record false,” Bryan said.
The cocklebur vote had shown its clout in recent years: freethinking professors had been expelled from the faculty of the University of Tennessee. Butler’s legislation passed the Tennessee House with little fanfare. The Nashville Banner noted how the representatives that day “covered a wide range of territory, from a local measure to prohibit suck-egg dogs from running at large … to a general measure prohibiting the teaching of evolution.” The House action stirred a few editorial writers to object, but the Senate fell in line. The bill was signed into law by Governor Austin Peay, who, with atrocious misjudgment, pronounced it a matter of no consequence. “Probably the law will never be applied,” he said.4
AFTER DEFENDING Leopold and Loeb, Darrow had spent much of the fall of 1924 and the early months of 1925, as he liked to say, loafing. At the end of September he made a sentimental trip to Kinsman, where the local bar association, apparently not recalling his aversion to poultry, held a chicken dinner in his honor. Judges and childhood friends joined a crowd of eighty people, and Darrow spoke for about an hour, of how fate and chance had taken him from the Western Reserve to national celebrity.5 He remembered his first case in court, which was held in the shadow of a coffin that hung on the wall awaiting the demise of its farsighted owner, the marvelously named Riverious Bidwell. Darrow told how his legal practice in Chicago had been transformed by his fascination with criminal law. There was little to keep an attorney awake at night when the stakes were merely credit or property, he said. But in criminal law “you are dealing with flesh, blood, reputations, shame, disgrace, honor” and with “wives, fathers, mothers and children.” It was “vital” work, though “wearing on your nerves and sympathies,” he said. “You must learn to endure criticism and to be callous to spiteful remarks.”6
The Leopold and Loeb case had added immensely to his fame. Darrow was traveling widely, speaking to large audiences. He presided at a liberal campaign rally that brought ten thousand to Madison Square Garden in New York in 1924.7 He decried capital punishment in debates before audiences of three thousand at the Metropolitan Opera House and seven thousand in St. Petersburg. He spoke on Prohibition in New York, on crime in Philadelphia and Miami, and on capital punishment in Montreal and New Orleans.
Mary came to see Darrow in New York and found his room thronged with admirers. “The incense was burning,” she told her diary. “The Great One was enveloped in praise.” He was regularly in New York alone, and often they would meet at his hotel. From Florida, where he and Ruby fled to escape a Chicago winter, Darrow wrote to her: “There is enough of me left to remember you … as long as I can remember anyone and with all the love of the old days.”8
IN EARLY MAY of 1925, the American Civil Liberties Union issued a press release decrying the signing of the Butler Act and offering to defend any teacher prosecuted for teaching evolution. “We are looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law,” the ACLU announced. “Distinguished counsel have volunteered their services. All we need now is a willing client.” On May 4, the Chattanooga Times reported how the ACLU was “agitating for a test case.” A few miles up the road, in the valley town of Dayton, the story caught the eye of George Rappleyea, a spirited thirty-one-year-old engineer with bushy hair and Coke-bottle glasses. He was a transplanted Yankee worried about the lingering economic torpor brought on by the closing of the local ironworks and, truth be told, missing the razz and dazzle of New York. Why not take the ACLU up on its offer? Rappleyea asked a group of fellow idlers gathered in wire-backed chairs around a wood-topped table at Robinson’s Drug Store (“Stationery—Soda—Cigarettes—Kodaks—Candies”) the following afternoon. Why not stage a showdown in Dayton? It would garner their town some lucrative attention. At the very least it would liven up the summer. Little did they know.
From its inception, the Scopes trial was conceived and promoted and staged as a circus stunt. No one presumed that a Dayton jury would have the final say on the matter. All agreed that John Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old high school science teacher who was summoned to Robinson’s pharmacy from a nearby tennis court and coaxed to stand trial, would be found guilty—giving the ACLU a martyr whose conviction it could take to a higher court. The local constable, prosecutors, and superintendent of schools were among those sipping Coca-Cola and working on the scheme at the drugstore, for Dayton was that kind of small town. F. E. Robinson was not just the druggist, but doubled as the textbook vendor who supplied the schools with A Civic Biology. His sales were made easier by the fact that he also chaired the Rhea County board of education, and so purchased the texts from himself.
“You have been teaching ’em this book?” Rappleyea asked Scopes as they paged through a volume of A Civic Biology.
“Yes,” said Scopes.
“Then you’ve been violating the law,” said Robinson.
Scopes agreed to take the fall. “Justice of the Peace will find him guilty and he will appeal,” Rappleyea promised in a telegram to the ACLU.
Yet lawyers being what they are—constitutionally combative and not much caring to lose in the glare of public attention—the staged skirmish evolved into a genuine struggle and then, to Dayton’s delight, a national spectacle. The schemers had originally presumed that ol’ Judge Godsey, a corpulent retired jurist, would defend Scopes. But then Bryan agreed to lead the prosecution. And that compelled Darrow to shoulder his way onto the Scopes defense team.9
THE SIXTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD BRYAN’S once glorious and vibrant baritone was diminished by age, and the tousled head of hair of his youth had thinned to a monkish fringe. He was slowed by diabetes. But he still had the fight of a
snapping turtle, a species that, with the dome of his forehead, beak nose, and broad mouth, he somewhat resembled—especially when, in deference to the temperature, he took to wearing a collarless shirt.
It would be, Bryan prophesied, “a duel to the death” between Christianity and “this slimy thing, evolution.” He stepped off the train—the Royal Palm Limited from Miami made an unscheduled stop for him—at the Dayton depot like a figure out of Kipling, with a pith helmet and a leather satchel. Hundreds of people waited and, in a caravan of automobiles, paraded him through town. He spoke the next night at a mountaintop retreat to an audience gathered on a lawn, as thunder growled and bolts of lightning split the sky behind him. At a dinner at the Hotel Aqua, hosted by the Dayton Progressive Club, Bryan announced his plans to campaign for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to prohibit the teaching of Darwinism in any public school. He leaned across the table to where a stagestruck Scopes was sitting and told the teacher: “You have no idea what a black and brutal thing this evolution is.”
He also displayed his prodigious appetite: “John, are you going to eat your side dishes?” he asked and helped himself to the defendant’s corn and potatoes.10
With Bryan in the fray, “Darrow was keen to be included,” Scopes remembered. “Deeply religious people he was afraid of because he said the next step was fanaticism,” Mary recalled. “With fanaticism came persecutions and abridgement of liberty.”
Darrow had discussed the case with the liberal lawyers Arthur Garfield Hays and Dudley Malone, the journalist H. L. Mencken, and others. He feared, at first, that the Civil Liberties Union would prefer a counsel who wasn’t such a lightning rod for strife. Indeed, the ACLU hoped that a respectable lawyer like former New York governor Charles Evans Hughes would present a “quiet, strictly legalistic” case, Scopes recalled.
Mencken wanted none of that. He was, like Darrow, a pronounced libertarian and religious skeptic. In addition to his newspaper work for the Baltimore Evening Sun, Mencken was editor of a hip, style-setting magazine, the American Mercury. His slashing copy helped make the Scopes case a national phenomenon. “Bryan … is a bit mangey and flea-bitten, but by no means ready for his harp,” Mencken wrote. “The fellow is full of such bitter, implacable hatreds that they radiate from him like heat from a stove. He hates the learning that he cannot grasp. He hates those who sneer at him. He hates in general, all who stand apart from his own pathetic commonness. And the yokels hate with him, some of them almost as bitterly as he does himself.
“This year it is a misdemeanor for a country school teacher to flout the archaic nonsense of Genesis. Next year it will be a felony. The year after the net will be spread wider,” Mencken warned. “The clowns turn out to be armed, and have begun to shoot.”11
Mencken met up with Darrow in Richmond, where Darrow was speaking to the American Psychiatric Association, and urged him to head for Dayton. And why not? The drugstore conspirators were displaying their own love of hoopla, choreographing fistfights at town meetings and staging gunplay on Main Street for the benefit of visiting reporters. John Randolph Neal, a defrocked University of Tennessee law professor, had gone to Dayton, nudged Godsey aside, and declared himself the lead defense counsel. Rappleyea was trying to get former secretary of state Bainbridge Colby or English novelist H. G. Wells to serve on the defense.
Darrow saw his chance to outflank the ACLU. He and Malone sent a telegram to Neal (with a press-pleasing dig at Bryan’s Florida land deals) offering their services: “We have read the report that William Jennings Bryan has volunteered to aid the prosecution, and in view of the fact that scientists are so much interested in the pursuit of knowledge that they cannot make the money that lecturers and Florida real estate agents command, in case you should need us, we are willing, without fees or expenses, to help the defense of Professor Scopes in any way.” Neal quickly accepted the offer.12
BRYAN WAS SURE he could defeat the man he liked to call the nation’s foremost atheist. Darrow “is an outspoken believer in evolution and has the courage to carry the logic of evolution to its legitimate course,” Bryan wrote a Tennessee associate. “He will furnish us with abundant material.” The faint hearts at the ACLU tended to agree. Scopes had accepted Neal, Darrow, and Malone “before we got our grip on the case and without any consultation,” griped the ACLU’s Forrest Bailey, in a letter marked “Confidential” to journalist Walter Lippmann. “We did the very best we could to undo it.” In the holy chuch of liberalism, Darrow and Malone were irreverent “fakes,” Mencken explained to a friend. “Darrow is hated by all Liberals as a renegade. Malone is simply an Irishman who likes a fight.”
Reporters were pulled aside and reminded of Darrow’s faults. “The report that Mr. Darrow is an atheist … has led to grave shaking of heads,” wrote Philip Kinsley in the Tribune. “The spectacle of Mr. Darrow being questioned by Mr. Bryan before a jury of Tennessee hill men, almost certain to be old fashioned religionists, is not pleasant.” That seemed a silly thought—when did lawyers put each other on the stand? But Darrow felt the need to tell the press: “I am not an atheist. When it comes to the question of knowing whether there is a God, I am ignorant.”
The decision was left to Scopes. The “yokel”—as Mencken called him—showed his mettle at an ACLU parley in New York. “The arguments against Darrow were various: that he was too radical, that he was a headline hunter,” Scopes recalled. Nevertheless, “I wanted Clarence Darrow.” The thing was a circus already. Bryan’s entry had guaranteed that. “We should expect a gouging, roughhouse battle … a real gutter fight,” said Scopes. “Darrow had been in many such situations.” And so Hughes and Wells remained on the sidelines and Colby—aghast at the signs of hellzapoppin’—withdrew on the eve of the trial.
“There shortly will descend upon Dayton, Tenn., the greatest aggregation of assorted cranks, including agnostics, atheists, communists, syndicalists and new-dawners, ever known in a single procession,” the New York Post reported. “Greenwich Village is on its way … Men of science are being smothered in the rush of long-haired men and short-haired women, feminists, neurotics, free thinkers and free lovers … The vital issues on trial in Tennessee are being lost in the stampede of professional martyrs and a swarm of practicing egoists.”
The best that the ACLU could do was add Hays, its counsel, to the defense team. It proved to be a fortuitous choice. Hays was bright and combative. He and Darrow had complementary talents, became lasting friends, and would join in the defense of civil rights and liberties in several notable cases to come. Before he left New York, Scopes was feted at a City Club dinner, where Manhattan’s liberals gathered to raise money. Mary went as Darrow’s escort and sent Sara a description of Darrow’s speech. “His position is that only those men, and women, who bring light to man’s darkness are important: the great men of science—Darwin, Pasteur, Pavlov—men of knowledge who dispel superstition, fanaticism, disease, cruelty, who make the human race more intelligent,” she wrote. The cause of labor, which he had upheld so long, left men as it found them, “jungle creatures fighting for a bone more, a breathing spell more—but not the least bit more intelligent about their bondage, as addicted to their religions and fetishes, their political and social myths, as ever.” At the end of the night Darrow gave her “a little silver—not enough—for taxi fare,” she noted caustically. But she was back for breakfast the next day, and a ride along the Hudson. And Darrow promised to “skin the pants off old Bryan.”13
THE MONKEY TRIAL now became the talk of the English-speaking world. Dayton was swept and dusted, and hung with billboards and bunting. (“Read Your Bible” said a sign on the courthouse—no good omen for the defense.) The streets were jammed with flivvers; the sidewalks with gawkers and grifters. Traveling tent shows came to town. Chimpanzees did tricks, and hucksters sold lemonade, an infinite variety of monkey souvenirs—and redemption.
“The sweetheart love of Jesus Christ and Paradise Street is at hand,” one proselytizer promised. “Do you want to be
a sweet angel?” He listed the terms of a heavenly contract (“Forty days of prayer,” “Itemize your sins and iniquities”) and guaranteed results (“If you come clean, God will talk back to you in voice”). Even the public privies were decked with religious banners. And from the rich bottomland and the precarious farms of the Cumberland ridges came the Bible-toting folk of the soil in buggies and high-wheeled cars, women in their bonnets and gingham, men in slouched felt hats and overalls—there to swear to the power of the Book, the faith of their fathers, and the unchallengeable, literal authority of Genesis.
There came, as well, the legions of Mammon. Robinson hung a sign (“Where It Started”) outside the drugstore and supervised the distribution of a promotional pamphlet—Why Dayton of All Places?—that had been printed to drum up business.14 Mencken, who had christened himself a “consulting Man of Vision” for the defense, was unimpressed. “I am leaving for the Hill of the Skull,” he told a friend. “I shall put up at Chattanooga to avoid the hookworm,” he promised. “I hear that 100 bootleggers and 250 head of Chicago whores will be in attendance.”15
Summoned by “the sportive gods of news,” as one of them put it, scores of reporters arrived, with their cheap suits, smart-aleck ways, and illicit whiskey, from the big-city papers of the East, Midwest, and South. Many of them slept on cots (and shared the single outhouse) at Bailey’s hardware store, which they christened the “Press Hall” and filled with the clacks and dings of typewriters. Telegraph wires were strung from the upper floors of the redbrick Rhea County courthouse, and two dozen telegraph operators at the local Western Union office prepared to move 400,000 words a day. Microphones were set about the cavernous, freshly painted courtroom—the second largest in Tennessee, folks noted proudly, and newly scrubbed of tobacco juice—so that the trial could be broadcast by radio: an American first.16
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