Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  After a while, she went back to graduate school and got a degree in special education and then went on to work with disturbed and abused children who had been taken away from their homes because they were in such bad shape.

  I point out that she left New York to escape pain but ended up in an even more painful environment and that maybe what she couldn’t take in New York was not the pain but her inability to do anything about it.

  ‘That’s a very good observation,’ she congratulates me. But even after she had her job, she was still searching. She went to a seminary so she could learn more about the scriptures, and that’s where she met her husband. For the first few years of her marriage, she avoided even going to the theatre. She wanted to put it out of her mind; but, she tells me, if you give something up for God, he’ll often give it back to you. When she got to Dayton, the opportunity to be in a community theatre production of Neil Simon’s play Rumors came up and she took it.

  She met a lot of actors and then the director of Rumors asked her to direct The Crucible, up at Bryan College. Because she knew the actor who played Darrow, she went to watch ‘The Scopes Trial.’ She found some of it confusing and asked Bryan College if she could stage a new version the following year.

  ‘How can I see it?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, um, I don’t have a videotape available and I don’t really feel comfortable giving a videotape to anyone, um …’

  ‘So, there is a videotape?’

  ‘There will be, yes, for the actors.’

  I tell her I bought the tickets, I just couldn’t make it. I’ll pay her for a tape, give money to her favourite charity. She smiles unyieldingly. I tell her about the book, my desire to show what Dayton was like seventy-five years ago as opposed to how it is now. I’ve done a lot of research, I know things about Rappleyea that could be helpful to her …

  ‘I don’t have him in my play.’

  I try to hide my shock. ‘No? You should. He’s a fascinating guy.’

  ‘Oh, he is, there’s a lot of colourful people. H. L. Mencken, I don’t have him in either, for other reasons, because sometimes his relatives come and visit and we didn’t want anyone to be uncomfortable by portraying him …’

  No Mencken!? I can’t believe this. Two of the story’s most interesting characters, gone, the men who started it and the man who reported it. It’s incredible.

  I tell her a lie. I tell her my daughter was sick. The re-enactment was central to my book, but I couldn’t leave. I just couldn’t make it. This is a disaster for me. Please, won’t she give me the tape?

  She laughs. ‘I don’t know how the re-enactment will really help in the book. I mean, are you going to have any of the arguments in there?’

  Yes, I am. But I want the tape because the other half of the book is about modern Dayton and the re-enactment seems like a large part of that.

  ‘Well, one of the things about my play,’ she begins, as if answering my question, but, in fact, simply changing the subject, ‘is we had street scenes, placards …’ She goes on to tell me about a scene between two reporters, one of whom is ‘more pro-Bryan and the other one is a cynic.’ She tells me about how long she rehearsed, how hard it was to work with amateurs. She tells me Sheriff Sneed is great, totally relaxed, but won’t rehearse, just turns up for final dress rehearsal. She tells me they pass out sheets to the audience, telling them to react as the real audience did in 1925. She tells me people came this year from the Mencken Society in Baltimore, people from Nashville, people from Washington. One time, not this year, a group of atheists came up from Atlanta on a bus called ‘The Atheist Bus.’ This year, she felt there were more pro-Bryan people.

  ‘We didn’t see any reaction from the audience that was overtly in favour of Darrow.’

  She suggests people for me to visit, old men who were at the real trial when they were five.

  She doesn’t want to give me the tape. She has no mercy.

  I decide to drop the subject and come back to it later. I ask her if she had any complaints. She tells me some people from the Mencken Society were upset because she did not include a part of the trial where Darrow asks Bryan if he believes the six days of creation were twenty-four-hour days or periods. It is perhaps the most important moment in the whole trial, revealing how the Bible can be interpreted differently by different people. ‘I wasn’t trying to avoid that,’ says Gale, innocently, ‘it was just it seemed to me it flowed better if I went in this direction …’

  I ask again if I could have something to help me write about the re-enactment, even just the script. ‘You’ve got to help me,’ I plead as fetchingly as I can, hoping to appeal to some Christian mercy in the woman, or pity.

  ‘Well, um …’ she says. ‘How long will you be in town?’

  ‘I’m supposed to go back Sunday lunchtime but I’d stay if you were going to be nice to me.’

  She laughs almost flirtatiously, it’s like a burst of light, a flashback. And it gets switched off fast.

  ‘Well, I say … I’m just trying to think … I’m going out of town and I’m not going to have … if you could come back, maybe … and … I just wonder though how’s the script? … Is it that it would just shorten things for you because you wouldn’t have to … ?’

  She’s calling me lazy now?!

  No, I tell her, I know as much about the trial as she does, probably more. I’m just interested in her angle on the thing. It’s all a little strange to me. Had I been there, I would have seen it. I wasn’t there—now I can’t. Where’s the logic? (Where’s the logic? There’s a question.)

  ‘Okay, why don’t we do this?’ she suggests efficiently. ‘If you can be back like when I’m back from out of town, the video will be available and you and I could watch it together?’

  I tell her I’m going to be out of the country until at least September.

  ‘Well, you can just call me when you’re in town and we’ll watch it together.’

  Like I’m just going to be passing through Dayton some time and we’ll … But I can see I’m not going to get anywhere with this today and start paying the bill.

  She asks me if I’d like to come and see her husband preach on Sunday.

  She has me by the balls. That’s not entirely fair; she does have me by the balls, yes, but the offer is made sweetly and includes lunch afterwards. Anyway, I’m curious. She seems such a poignant character, a pretty, sexy cheerleader wounded by the big city, washed up in Dayton. I wonder what the husband will be like.

  However, sympathetic as I am to her, as I drive off to see Joe Wilkie, the John Scopes of the modern high school, I feel angry and resentful. Her refusal to help me is un-Christian. The whole enterprise starts to irritate me. The very word ‘re-enactment’ is a lie. It isn’t a re-enactment—the trial took two weeks, this takes a couple of hours—it’s an interpretation and there’s something sly about the concept, neither fact nor art.

  Joe Wilkie is a big man. He has a large face with a beard around it. He’s brought his wife along and she’s large too and they’re both hunched over a table at the Frontier Diner. Their faces are inexpressive, the eyes watchful, as if some other being lurks inside, hidden and suspicious. To try and warm them up, I ask some general questions about Dayton kids. Do most of them want to get out of Dayton when they leave high school? No, he tells me, most of them want to go work at La-Z-Boy. It’s pretty good money. About 30 per cent of them go on to college or trade school. He cites as an example of a Rhea County high school success, a man who’s now Vice-President of the Sara Lee cake-making company.

  Joe, who is a Baptist, went to Rhea County High himself and has now been teaching there for sixteen years. He mainly teaches regular science classes but he has also developed one class called ‘Ideas and Issues in Science,’ based on a book he wrote. He had to get special permission from the state of Tennessee to teach it. In the science classroom, he teaches evolution. ‘As far as teaching creationism in the science class room, no; but in the class that I’ve developed, of course
that’s the whole point of it.’

  His wife watches me with mistrust from the side, as if she came here to protect him. I ask him what he himself believes and he tells me he ‘chooses’ to believe in creationism. He cites a couple of examples of phenomena which would seem to suggest a younger earth. One has to do with how the earth’s magnetic field ‘can’t flip in two thousand, four thousand years,’ but a creationist working out west was working in some lava and his ‘magnetic compass flipped as he went through the layers.’

  Then there’s delta filling. Given how much sediment comes out of the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico would have filled up by now if the world was much older than ten thousand years old. Hmm …

  When I mention Kurt Wise, Joe is full of admiration.

  ‘I think he committed academic suicide. If you talk to some of the evolutionists, they will tell you—I’m not going to say any names but one of them did tell me this—he said that in his opinion Kurt did do just that.’

  Suicide … It keeps coming up. I mention this to Joe and wonder out loud what kind of despair might have lead to the most recent death on the tracks. He tells me there’s been a general rise in teen suicide in the area. Why does he think this is, I ask.

  ‘It’s because they don’t know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour,’ states Joe the Baptist with absolute certainty. ‘They don’t have anything to look forward to, they don’t have inner peace. Living like that, of course you’d look at the world and say, “What’s the use?” That’s my personal take on it, and I guess you would think I would have that personal take because I am a Christian and I believe that Jesus Christ is … He is the difference. He is the difference.’

  I thank him for talking to me and then depart, leaving the two of them at their table, staring after me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Where Did Cain Get His Wife?

  I came down here to see if anything has changed in seventy-five years and the longer I’m here, the more apparent it becomes that little has. There must be Daytonians who believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, but I’ve yet to meet one. There must be people here who don’t believe in God, but I haven’t met one of them either. In fact, it seems to me that the religious and political mood of the town is worse now than it was then. In Dayton in 1925, as well as the unchanging Fluffs and Mikes and preachers and literalists, you also had George Rappleyea and John Scopes, and even those who disagreed with them did so with a certain regard for good manners and fair play. Scopes went swimming with William Jennings Bryan Jr., one of his prosecutors; Darrow stayed at the house of one of the witnesses against his client; and the whole event was cooked up in an amiable, exploratory fashion. Now such a thing would be unthinkable. There’s been a narrowing of views and a widening of the division between them. On afternoon television shows designed to provoke violence, people howl at each other about personal matters as the audience goads them on, but in bars and restaurants, even in homes, it is considered impolite to discuss any matter of importance, and politics and religion are taboo. The colourful habit of friendly debate has been bleached out by the incessant, unifying glare of television, and in consequence people are ill-equipped to deal with dissent.

  If something like the Scopes Trial was staged now, people would be afraid for their lives.

  Perhaps to describe the trial as taking place under conditions of ‘fair play’ is overstating it. Judge Raulston ruled against Darrow’s expert witnesses. Having come all the way down to Dayton, they would not be allowed to testify before the jury. This was a disaster. If the testimony of Darrow’s expert witnesses was not in the trial record, it could not become part of an appeal, which would thus become much narrower and less capable of bringing about change. The defence argued vociferously and finally won the right to read some scientific testimony into the record, but not with the jury present. It was Friday and Darrow asked for the day off so his expert witnesses could prepare their statements. After further argument it was agreed the defence could have until Monday to prepare and court adjourned for the weekend.

  Mencken, whose scathing remarks about the ‘primitives,’ ‘yokels,’ and ‘Neanderthals,’ as he referred to the locals, had so angered Dayton there was talk of running him out of town, now decided to leave voluntarily. ‘All that remains,’ he wrote, in his final despatch, ‘of the great cause of the State of Tennessee against the infidel Scopes is the final business of bumping off the defendant.’

  The next morning, he caught a train back to Baltimore and so missed one of the great dramas of legal history. He had underestimated Darrow.

  Although Tom Stewart was claiming a ‘glorious victory’ for having excluded the defence witnesses from appearing before the jury, Darrow guessed that personally William Jennings Bryan did not feel victorious at all. His pride had been hurt by Malone’s great speech, and in his sense of failure, in his perceived humiliation, lay the possibility of a comeback for the defence. Bryan wanted an opportunity to redeem himself and Darrow would provide one.

  He issued a press statement taunting Bryan for not wanting the jury to hear the defence’s expert witnesses. ‘Bryan has not dared to test his views in open court under oath … Bryan, who blew the loud trumpet calling for a “battle to the death,” has fled from the field, his forces disorganized and his pretensions exposed.’ Bryan shot back with a statement that included the remark that ‘jungle ancestry’ struck at the root not only of Christianity but of civilisation itself. The stakes were raised back up again, from legal detail to philosophical war.

  Other factors were putting pressure on Bryan to make a good showing down here. A few days earlier, he had spoken to friends about founding a Christian college for young men on the hill above Dayton. Now a philanthropist in Florida had come through with a pledge of $10,000. Bryan College might actually become a reality, and if it was to carry his name, he’d surely like that name to be associated in the minds of the locals with grand oratory and rousing victory. He was ripe for what was to follow.

  On Monday, Hays was allowed an hour to read excerpts from the scientific and religious scholars into the trial record. He actually read for over two hours in the overwhelming heat of this the hottest day. In their statements, an anthropologist, a psychologist, three zoologists, an agronomist, and two geologists, all eminent in their fields, described in detail how evolution occurred, how it had been proved, and how it was almost universally accepted in the academic world.

  Professor Newman, a zoologist from the University of Chicago, tried in his statement to explain not only evolution but the nature and methods of science itself. ‘When we admit that the evidences of past evolution are indirect and circumstantial, we should hasten to add that the same is true of all other great scientific generalizations. The evidences upon which the law of gravity are based are no less indirect than those supporting the principle of evolution … The law of gravity has acquired its validity through its ability to explain, unify and rationalize many observable facts of physical nature. If certain facts entirely out of accord with the law of gravity were to come to light, physicists would be forced either to modify the statement of the law so as to bring it into harmony with the newly discovered facts, or else to substitute a new law capable of meeting the situation.’

  In other words, science, unlike religion, is fluid, and in teaching it you can only teach what is best understood at the time.

  By midday the heat was intolerable and many of the reporters who had stayed on in Dayton left court and did not come back for the afternoon session, a fact they would regret for the rest of their lives.

  After lunch, when court reconvened, the air was so hot and the courtoom so stuffy and overcrowded that Judge Raulston suggested they all move down onto the courthouse lawn beneath the shade trees. As soon as they were down there, Darrow got into a fight with the court about a sign under which the jury would now sit, saying READ YOUR BIBLE in large letters. It was clearly prejudicial and Darrow wanted it removed.

  J. G.
McKenzie accused the defence of being ‘aligned with the Devil and his satellites,’ but Darrow won the battle and the sign was taken down.

  And now came the high point of the trial, the moment which has made it famous to this day. As Hays stood up to make a request, Malone leaned in to Scopes and whispered, ‘Hell is going to pop now!’

  ‘The defence,’ said Hays, ‘desires to call Mr. Bryan as a witness.’

  After the babble of surprised voices died down, Hays explained that if the defence was to be prevented from presenting their experts on science, then they wanted to call Bryan as an expert on the Bible.

  Calling a lawyer from the other side to be your own witness was so unusual that all the prosecution lawyers immediately jumped to their feet. All around the world people listening to the trial on their radios moved closer. There were so many people talking in court that the court reporter could not transcribe every word.

  According to Scopes, General Stewart was the most vociferous in objecting to Bryan’s being called, but Ben McKenzie appears more in the record. For a moment it looked as if the judge might sustain their objections, but Darrow’s brilliant assessment of Bryan’s state of mind proved entirely correct. The Great Commoner got to his feet. Here was his chance and he wasn’t going to let it go. Raising his arms for quiet, he declared himself more than willing to take the stand, so long as he had the right to call Darrow, Hays and Malone as witnesses when his turn came.

  ‘Call anybody you desire,’ said Raulston, ‘ask them any questions you wish.’

  ‘Then we will call all three of them,’ Bryan stated.

  ‘Not at once?’ mocked Darrow.

  ‘Where do you want me to sit?’ Bryan snapped back.

  News that Darrow was putting Bryan on the stand radiated out from the courthouse. Five hundred people had left the courtroom and taken their chairs down onto the lawn. Within an hour, there was a crowd of three thousand, standing and sitting wherever they could.