Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

by Edward Larson

  Two of Darrow’s co-counsels also spoke freely with the press and public during the weeks before trial, reinforcing Darrow’s efforts to communicate the significance of the case. “No more serious invasion of the sacred principle of liberty than the recent act against the teaching of evolution in Tennessee has ever been attempted,” Dudley Field Malone told a Knoxville women’s group during his pretrial visit to the state.90 About the same time, John Neal warned a Chicago audience, “If the state’s charges against Scopes are sustained you will see other evolution trials and perhaps a movement in congress to control the thought as well as the actions of people.”91 Following a pretrial visit to Dayton, Darrow’s best-known co-counsel, Bainbridge Colby, issued a statement decrying the “holiday atmosphere surrounding the approaching trial,” adding “the issue is grave in character, embodying principles at the base of our security of happiness and American citizenship.”92 The press resisted this characterization of events, and persisted in treating the entire episode as a joke. Editorial cartoons inevitably depicted the Great Commoner embroiled with monkeys—and the monkeys usually winning. Syndicated political humorist Will Rogers brushed aside an invitation to Dayton with the comment, “Bryan is due back here in the New York zoo in July.”93

  Malone assumed responsibility for pressing the defense contention that the theory of evolution did not conflict with the biblical account of creation. Taking this message to Baptist Tennessee during his pretrial visit presented a challenging role for a twice-married Roman Catholic divorce lawyer with Socialist ties, but Malone was a highly effective public speaker and the only professing Christian among the defense lawyers at Dayton. “I daresay that I am just as strong a believer in Christianity ... as Mr. Bryan,” Malone told a Chattanooga luncheon audience. “I find no difficulty in holding with devotion to Christianity and also to evolution. Theology is concerned with the aspiration of men and their faith in a future life. Science is concerned with the process of nature.” These separate spheres need never cross, he added in an evening address to the local Civitan Club: “There should be no more conflict between religion and science than between the love a man gives to his mother and to his wife.”94 Prosecutors countered this message by attacking the messenger. “I read in today’s Banner Mr. Sue Hicks’ interview wherein he scored Darrow, Malone and other atheists,” a Nashville legal advisor for the prosecution wrote to the Hicks brothers. “This is the line to attack, and you will find it most vulnerable and will strike the responsive chord with the people.”95

  Neal, for his part, kept the focus on academic freedom. He claimed to “represent the protest of the intellectuals of the south against the antievolution legislation,” which he blamed on the “arrested [intellectual] development” of the region. “It is not a case of religion against irreligion, not a case of Fundamentalism against Modernism, but a case for the freedom of speech and thought,” Neal told a New York audience. 96 Neal gained widespread attention in early June when he tried to delay the selection of new biology textbooks for Tennessee public schools until after the Scopes trial. His legal threats were ignored by the state textbook commission, which replaced Hunter’s Civic Biology with texts that barely mentioned evolution.

  Except for an occasional press release, the usually talkative Colby said little in public about the upcoming trial. He appeared ill at ease in Dayton during his pretrial visit and positively appalled when observing a criminal prosecution in Kingston, Tennessee, on the drive back to Knoxville. An accompanying reporter from the Chattanooga Times described it as a murder trial; Scopes recalled it as a rape case. By either account, a young defendant (of whom Scopes said, “At best he was a moron; more likely he was an imbecile”) was being railroaded without proper representation in a courtroom filled with gun-toting spectators. Darrow had to be physically restrained from intervening, while Colby hung back moaning, “Those poor, poor unfortunate people.” Upon his return to New York, he convinced the ACLU to seek an injunction to remove the Scopes case to a “sedate” federal court on the flimsy grounds that the antievolution statute applied to an institution receiving federal funds, namely, the University of Tennessee. After a federal judge abruptly denied this last-minute petition, a ruling even the other defense lawyers viewed as correct, Colby quietly resigned from the case. The Chattanooga Times reporter had predicted this development: “When he took one look at the hardy Tennessee mountaineers assembled in the Kingston courtroom, [Colby] departed in haste for the effete east, with the mental reservation that ‘this is no place for me.’ Colby saw at Kingston what he thought he would see at Dayton.”97 Darrow felt right at home, however, while Malone and the ACLU representative Arthur Garfield Hays approached the pending trial with a spirit of adventure.

  Having survived a second attempt “to rob Dayton of the big show,” as one reporter described it, townspeople eagerly completed preparations for the expected throng.98 Officials roped off six blocks of the town’s main street as a pedestrian mall, which quickly filled with hucksters and proselytizers. The state sent a mobile chlorination unit to provide an adequate supply of safe drinking water and a sanitary engineer to oversee waste disposal. Chattanooga contributed a fire brigade and six constables. A temporary tourist camp opened on vacant land owned by the coal company. Dayton’s finest hotel, the Aqua, placed cots in its hallways, while the Ladies’ Aid Society prepared to offer one-dollar lunches at a downtown church. Rappleyea fixed up an abandoned eighteen-room house known as the Mansion to accommodate visiting defense experts, leading some townspeople to joke that they used to think that the house was haunted, but now they knew it was. Mencken described it as “an ancient and empty house outside the town limits, now crudely furnished with iron cots, spittoons, playing cards and the other camp equipment of scientists.”99 The Morgan Springs Hotel, a nearby mountain resort, engaged a jazz orchestra to perform nightly during the trial. The local cinema screened The She Devil.

  Dayton bustled with activity. Workers erected a speaker’s platform on the courthouse lawn and marked off the county’s first airstrip on a nearby pasture. Robinson’s drugstore stocked up on books by both Bryan and Osborn, and hung out a banner declaring, “Where It Started.” No need to define It. Other signs appeared along the main street, including several large banners proclaiming, READ YOUR BIBLE, one of which adorned the courthouse itself. A cavernous storage loft above a downtown hardware store became a makeshift press room for visiting reporters. Western Union stationed twenty-two key operators in town to transmit news reports and strung extra telegraph wires to nearby cities. The telephone company and post office hired additional staff. The Southern Railway added extra passenger service to Dayton and advertised free stopovers in town on all tourist tickets. The Progressive Dayton Club struck a souvenir coin bearing the likeness of a monkey wearing a straw hat.

  The courtroom received a face-lift for the trial. A fresh coat of cream-colored paint brightened the walls. Five hundred additional spectator seats and a movie camera platform crowded the chamber. Telegraph wires ran into the courtroom for minute-by-minute transmissions of the proceedings, much like those used to broadcast big-league baseball games. The telephone company installed a bank of phones in an adjoining room, and new public toilets went in downstairs. In a move symbolic of the trial itself, the jury box was removed from the center of the chamber to make room for three central microphones, which fed loudspeakers on the courthouse lawn and in four public auditoriums around town. WGN, the radio voice of the Chicago Tribune, arranged to transmit the message from the microphones through special telephone lines to Chicago, from where the station broadcast the proceedings live over the airways. “The event will be the first of its kind in the history of radio,” the Tribune boasted, “undertaken as a demonstration of the public service of radio in communicating to the masses great news events.” It dismissed concerns about the propriety of such a broadcast. “This is not a criminal trial, as that term is ordinarily understood,” the announcement added. “It is more like the opening of a summer unive
rsity.... The defendant, Scopes, is already a negligible factor. Nothing serious can happen to him. The contest is entirely over ideas.”100

  John Scopes, left, and his initial defenders, John Neal, middle, and George Rappleyea, right, beneath a trial-related poster on the way to a court hearing. (Courtesy of Bryan College Archives)

  The composition of the town’s population also changed. Many residents left Dayton during the trial, leasing their homes to visitors. The Bryan family, for example, occupied the modern home of a druggist, F. R. Rogers, who took his family to their cottage in the mountains. Darrow initially stayed in the Mansion but after his wife arrived from Chicago moved with her into the vacated home of a local banker. Malone checked into the Aqua Hotel with a striking woman who registered as Doris Stevens, which created quite a stir until townspeople realized that the woman (who registered under her own last name) was his wife. Hays and Neal spent most of their time at the Mansion, which served as headquarters for the defense team throughout the trial.

  A diverse array of journalists, evolutionists, and antievolutionists trailed in behind the attorneys. Approximately two hundred reporters covered the trial for newspapers across America and as far away as London. Press photographers and newsreel camera crews also appeared in abundance. T. T. Martin preached in the streets, as did a Brooklyn rationalist who shouted about the evils of Christianity, and a Detroit man who billed himself as the Champion Bible Demonstrator. A small contingent of black Pentecostalists camped near town, attracting the attention of reporters who apparently thought that speaking in tongues was an indigenous Tennessee religious phenomenon, when in reality the great black church leader Charles Harrison Mason had brought Pentecostalism to the Tennessee African-American community from Los Angeles a decade earlier. “It sounds to the infidel like a series of college yells,” Mencken wrote.101 For a fee, anyone in Dayton could pose with a live chimpanzee or view fossilized remains of “the missing link.” Most visitors, however, had nothing in particular to say or sell but, as one African-American tourist from Atlanta told a New York Times reporter, simply “wanted to see the show.” After surveying the crowd, the reporter concluded, “Whatever the deep significance of the trial, if it has any, there is no doubt that it has attracted some of the world’s champion freaks.”102

  Bryan, the star attraction, arrived three days before the trial began. A summer heat wave pushed temperatures into the nineties that day and throughout the trial—twenty degrees above normal. While waiting for Bryan’s noon train, a reporter asked a nearby bootblack, “Why all the crowd at the depot?” The reporter recorded the following response: “Des wait’n fur Willum Jennums Bryan, sir.... He’s a hard-shell preacher, ... a stand-patter, ... a non-skidder, and de’s no movin’ uu’m when de thinks um right.”103 The Royal Palm limited from Miami finally arrived at 1:30 P.M. and made its first stop ever in the small town that it usually passed through at full throttle. “As Mr. Bryan stepped from the rear platform,” one reporter observed, “he was greeted with applause and flutters of handkerchiefs. He was met by at least half the normal population of the town, and the temporary increase composed of newspaper people and photographers.” Bryan wore a tropical pith helmet to protect his balding head from the sun and heat, and doffed it frequently to the crowd. “Just say that I am here,” he declared with a broad smile. “I am going right to work, and I am ready for anything that is to be done.”104 This work consisted of a series of antievolution speeches around town.

  Once the prosecution decided to oppose the admission of expert testimony at trial and narrowly limit the legal issue to majoritarian control over public education, out-of-court speeches and statements became the only sure way for Bryan to proclaim his message in Dayton. By arriving early, he now had the stage (and scores of news-hungry reporters) to himself. Bryan made the most of this opportunity. He strolled around town in his shirtsleeves greeting well-wishers and talking with reporters. He posed for pictures at Robinson’s drugstore and lectured the school board on the dangers of teaching evolution. Bryan gave two public addresses before the trial began, one at a Progressive Dayton Club banquet in his honor and another in a dramatic mountaintop setting near the Morgan Springs Hotel. “The contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death,” Bryan said in explaining his view of the trial’s significance to the Progressive Club. “The atheists, agnostics and all other opponents of Christianity understand the character of the struggle, hence their interest in this case. From this time forth Christians will understand the character of the struggle also.”105 On the mountaintop, he added, “Evolutionists, though admittedly in a minority, are intolerant enough to demand that the school teach their views, and their views really constitute their religion.”106

  The Commoner professed his faith in the judgment of the people, once the public was informed of the significance of the issue. “I have been quoted as saying that I think the decision of this case will be of importance,” Bryan told reporters. “It is not the decision but the discussion which will follow that I consider important. It will bring the issue before the attention of the world.”107 No mere judicial decision could frustrate the awakened will of the people. “Who made the courts?” he asked in a rhetorical flourish before the Progressive Club. “The people. Who made the Constitution? The people. The people can change the Constitution and if necessary they can change the decisions of the court.”108

  Neal sat stone-faced throughout Bryan’s Progressive Club address as those around him cheered. He stayed up late that night penning a formal response. “We regard Mr. Bryan’s speech last night as the most remarkable utterance ever made by a lawyer just before his entrance into a trial of a criminal case. His speech comes as a challenge to the defense not to confine the test of the anti-evolution law,” Neal asserted, “but instead to put on trial the truth or lack of truth of the theory of evolution [and] the conflict or lack of conflict between science and religion.” 109 Such a trial could last up to a month, he predicted. That perfectly fit the defense strategy for the case, and Neal knew that the prosecution opposed it. Yet Bryan’s speech offered an opening. When prosecutors did move to exclude such issues from trial, the defense feigned surprise. “We men in New York, when we read the opinion of this distinguished lawyer to the effect that this was a duel to death,” Hays protested in court, “we relied then upon the opinion of that distinguished lawyer and we have spent thousands of dollars bringing witnesses here.”110 Of course, those witnesses and both New York lawyers—Hays and Malone—were already en route when Bryan issued his challenge.

  “You don’t know how glad I am to see you folks!” Rappleyea exclaimed when the two New York lawyers stepped off the train in Chattanooga a day before trial. “Things have been mighty lonesome down at Dayton since Bryan arrived. Mr. Neal, Scopes, and myself have been feeling like three lost kittens.” Malone laughed back, “Am I too late for the trial? I rather suspected that I was. You see, I have been reading Mr. Bryan’s speeches in the newspapers and I thought the trial had already begun.” It immediately became apparent that Bryan no longer had the stage to himself. “The issue is not between science and religion, as some would have us believe. The real issue is between science and Bryanism,” Malone added. “I believe that the scientists we have called to act as witnesses in the trial really know more about science than Mr. Bryan; and I also believe that the ministers we have called know more about religion than he does.” The prosecution wanted to keep those witnesses off the stand and let Bryan hold forth outside the courtroom. The defense would push its message in and out of court., “The fundamentalists cannot make the issue too broad for us,” one reporter eagerly replied to Malone. “The broader they make it, the better we will be satisfied.” Hays smiled. “This trial is going to be a good education for the people,” he promised, “and for the newspapers.”111

  These comments received wide circulation because a half dozen reporters from major northeastern newspapers rode on the train to Tennessee with Malone and Hays and reported th
eir remarks. Otherwise, in marked contrast to Bryan’s reception, the New York defense attorneys arrived without fanfare. “Unknown and unannounced,” one reporter noted, “the little group passed quietly through the station to Dr. Rappleyea’s car.” The only excitement occurred after their arrival in Dayton. Charles Francis Potter, who accompanied Malone and Hays on the trip, became alarmed when a young man grabbed their baggage out of the open trunk. “Hey, boy, what are you doing with those suitcases?” Potter shouted. “That’s all right, Doc,” Rappleyea replied. “That’s only Scopes.”112 The defenders, along with everyone else, had forgotten the defendant.

  Darrow arrived later that day, on the last train into Dayton. “There was no torchlight parade to greet me,” Darrow later recalled. “Still, there were some people at the depot to meet me; I was received most kindly and courteously at that.”113 Movie cameras captured the scene as Scopes embraced Darrow at the depot—providing the opening footage for newsreels shown throughout the country during the trial. “Scopes is not on trial. Civilization is on trial,” Darrow said upon leaving for Dayton. “Nothing will satisfy us but broad victory, a knockout which will have an everlasting precedent to prove that America is founded on liberty and not on narrow, mean, intolerable and brainless prejudice of soulless religio-maniacs.”114 Darrow would stand for individual liberty against mindless majoritarianism—and give no quarter to Bryan. Both sides had worked themselves to a fever pitch. Judge Raulston closed the final day before trial with a remarkable public benediction, as an open-air prayer service occurred on the courthouse lawn. “I am concerned that those connected with this investigation shall divest themselves of all ambition to establish any particular theory for personal gratification,” he noted in a public statement. “I am much interested that the unerring hand of Him who is the Author of all truth and justice should direct every official act of mine.”115 Jury selection began the next day.