Darrow spoke in dead earnest, expressing a liberal skeptic’s view of religion. Hundreds of creeds existed within Christianity alone, he noted, not to mention all the other religions of the world. “The state of Tennessee under an honest and fair interpretation of the constitution has no more right to teach the Bible as the divine book than that the Koran is one, or the book of Mormon, or the book of Confucius, or the Buddha, or the Essays of Emerson,” he snarled. “There is nothing else, your Honor, that has caused the difference of opinion, of bitterness, or hatred, of war, of cruelty, that religion has caused.” Darrow quoted the maxim, “To strangle puppies is good when they grow up into mad dogs,” and suggested that it applied to fundamentalism, which threatened “to kindle religious bigotry and hate” in America. The Bible itself contained differing accounts of creation, Darrow added. “It is not a book on biology, [its writers] knew nothing about it.... They thought the earth was created 4,004 years before the Christian Era. We know better. I doubt if there is a person in Tennessee who does not know better.” Most intelligent Christians accepted the theory of evolution too, he asserted, “and that the God in which they believe did not finish creation on the first day, but that he is still working to make something better and higher still out of human beings.” Bigotry, ignorance, and hatred marked the antievolution crusade according to Darrow, “But your life and my life and the life of every American citizen depends after all upon the tolerance and forbearance of his fellowman.”45
“While he was talking there was absolute silence in the room except for the clicking of telegraph keys,” the New York Times reported. “His words fell with crushing force, his satire dropped with sledgehammer effect upon those who heard him.”46 H. L. Mencken added, “You have but a dim notion of it who have only read it. It was not designed for reading but for hearing. The clangorousness of it was as important as the logic. It rose like a wind and ended like a flourish of bugles.” 47 Darrow paced as he spoke, tugging on his lavender suspenders. “He would stop and brood a minute, hunching his shoulders almost up to his ears, and then they would drop, his head would shoot forward and his lower lip protrude as he hurled some bitter word at his opponents,” the New York Times noted.48 The Chicago Tribune, Darrow’s hometown paper, classed it as “one of the greatest speeches of his career.”49 It continued for two hours until the judge interrupted at the prescribed time for adjournment. Even then Darrow persisted for another ten minutes. “There was unquestioned greatness both in the passion with which it was uttered and in the calculation of the moment for utterance,” Joseph Wood Krutch wrote in The Nation, “and when [Darrow] concluded with the solemn warning that ‘we are marching backwards to the glorious age of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind,’ even Dayton stopped to think.”50
Telegraphs transmitted 200,000 words from Dayton that day, a record for a single event. Newspapers across the country reprinted Darrow’s speech at length, and many editors echoed his plea for tolerance. Defense attorneys rushed forward to congratulate Darrow. “We looked upon the day’s work and found it good,” Hays later commented, “a ray of light had been flashed in Tennessee.”51 Ben McKenzie extended effusive compliments, hailing Darrow’s effort as “the greatest speech that I have ever heard on any subject in my life.” Ruby Darrow proudly fussed over her husband’s sleeve, which had split open during one gesture.
Not everyone in the courtroom had the same reaction. Some spectators hissed at the end (Mencken called them “morons”), and one remarked, “They ought to put him out!”52 Bryan—coatless, collarless, and wet with perspiration—sat silently throughout, trying to cool himself and shoo flies with his palmleaf fan. “Somehow,” Darrow later recalled, “he did not look like a hero. Or even a Commoner. He looked like a commonplace fly-catcher.”53 The Memphis Commercial Appeal captured much of the local sentiment in a front-page editorial cartoon picturing a cold, aloof Darrow huddled atop a black mountain in hell, surrounded by skulls of “annihilation,” the dragon of “agnosticism,” and a bowed prisoner of Satan labeled “spiritual despair.” The caption read, “Darrow’s Paradise!”54 A day later Mencken reported, “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. That is, locally, upon the process against the infidel Scopes, upon the so-called minds of these fundamentalists of upland Tennessee.”55 Hays agreed: “Personally, I doubt whether at any time the attorneys for the prosecution caught our point on the religion question. Every word, to say nothing of emotions, in court made it clear that there was really no other question.”56
The court reconvened on time the next morning, but promptly adjourned until afternoon. A powerful storm, which some visiting reporters jokingly attributed to divine displeasure with Darrow’s speech, had disrupted the town’s power and water on Monday night. As a result, Raulston had not finished preparing his ruling on the motion to quash the indictment. He needed a few more hours. In the meantime, the only official business before the court consisted of the opening prayer. To highlight its contention that the case raised a religious question, and thereby to underscore its establishment clause argument, the defense now formally objected to public prayer in the courtroom. “When it is claimed by the state that there is a conflict between science and religion,” Darrow stated, “there should be no... attempt by means of prayer... to influence the deliberations.” Ben McKenzie defended the practice by citing a state supreme court decision that permitted voluntary prayer by jurors. Darrow responded by drawing a modern-day distinction between public and private religion: “I do not object to the jury or anyone else praying in secret or private, but I do object to the turning of this courtroom into a meeting house.”57
Editorial cartoon during the Scopes trial presenting popular view of Darrow’s militant agnosticism. (Copyright © 1925 the Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tennessee. Used with permission)
Stewart had heard enough. He did not want to lose control of the proceedings. Sensing Darrow’s strategic objective in raising the objection, Stewart promptly denied that any religious question existed in the case. “It is a case involving the fact as to whether or not a schoolteacher has taught a doctrine prohibited by statute,” he asserted, again avoiding any mention of evolution. Stewart also rejected Darrow’s views on the inappropriateness of public prayer, stating that “such an idea extended by the agnostic counsel for the defense is foreign to the thoughts and ideas of the people who do not know anything about infidelity and care less.” Darrow fixed his deep-set eyes directly on the fiery young prosecutor who, according to one reporter, “was trembling with suppressed emotion as he forced out his last words.” The judge tried to defuse the situation, pleading at one point, “Gentlemen, do not turn this into an argument,” but overruled the objection. The prayer was heard.58
The issue of prayer resurfaced when court resumed in the afternoon. The defense again drew attention to the religious issue underlying the case by submitting a petition to the court, signed by Potter and other visiting modernist clerics, asking that “clergymen from other than fundamentalist churches” alternately deliver the opening prayer. Hays then moved that “we have an opportunity to hear prayers by men who think that God has shown His divinity in the wonders of nature, in the book of nature, quite as much as in the book of the revealed word.” Perhaps no single sentence during the entire trial better captured the difference between modernism and fundamentalism.59 Judge Raulston deftly referred the petition to the local pastors’ association and asked that group to choose who should deliver future courtroom prayers. Visiting journalists began to laugh. Local spectators cheered. Hays objected. Everyone thought that this would preclude modernists from the task, but the association picked Potter for the very next day and alternated between fundamentalists and modernists thereafter.
Tensions reached a high point that afternoon. Spectators filled every available
seat, and several hundred people stood in the aisles and along the walls. County officials worried aloud that the floor might collapse under the weight. Power and water remained out, stopping the electric fans and drinking water. Nothing happened. “For a hour and a half,” the Commercial Appeal reported, “the hot, bustling crowd puffed, fanned, smoked and drank red soda pop waiting for the judge.”60 Scopes lit one cigarette after another. A rumor spread that an INS reporter had scooped the judge’s ruling. Raulston finally entered the courtroom at 3:45 and after dealing with the clerics’ petition, addressed the press. “I am now informed that the newspapers in the large cities are now being sold which undertake to state what my opinion is,” he sternly lectured. “Now any person that sent out any such information as that, sent it out without the authority of this court and if I find that they have corruptly secured such information I shall deal with them as the law directs.” The judge adjourned court for the day without issuing his ruling and appointed a committee of five leading journalists to investigate the source of the leak. “Judge Raulston was very angry,” one of the reporters noted, “and ready to take severe measures with any culprit; the newspaper men were split in rival camps and at dagger’s points with one another.”61
Tempers cooled slowly. Stewart stomped out of the courtroom still angry over the clerics’ petition. “What does he think this is, a political convention?” the chief prosecutor asked reporters. “It’s going to be mighty rough from now on,” Malone warned. In a press interview, Bryan grimly concluded that “this case uncovered a concerted attack upon revealed religion that is being made by a minority made up of atheists, agnostics, and unbelievers.”62 Some of the assembled journalists could not help joking about the scooped story. Fortified with boot-leg liquor, the press committee that evening conducted a mock trial of the young INS correspondent who had written the offending article. Amid howls of laughter, the young reporter identified his source as the judge. Apparently Raulston inadvertently tipped his hand on his way to lunch when, in response to the correspondent’s questions, he agreed that the trial would resume after the ruling, thereby implying that the indictment would stand.
The lighter mood carried over into the courtroom on Wednesday and the trial got back on track. After hearing the report from the press committee, Raulston let off the INS correspondent with a stern lecture then read the long-awaited ruling on the motion to quash the indictment. One by one, the judge rejected defense objections to the statute. On the constitutional issue of religious freedom, he opined, “I cannot conceive how the teachers’ rights under this provision of the constitution would be violated by the act in issue.... The relations between the teacher and his employer are purely contractual and if his conscience constrains him to teach the evolution theory, he can find opportunities elsewhere.”63 The court had adopted the prosecution’s position, which accorded with the prevailing currents of constitutional interpretation. “I don’t think anyone was surprised,” Scopes later wrote. “No one of the defense had expected Judge Raulston to rule the Butler Act unconstitutional or otherwise to view favorably the motion to quash.”64 The trial proper would begin after lunch.
—CHAPTER SEVEN—
THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY
WEDNESDAY WAS the hottest day of the trial, or so it seemed to many inside the courthouse. One observer called it “the worst day of all,” and complained of “the crowd filling the court rooms so that a breath of air through the windows was almost impossible.”1 Only the renewed cordiality among participants made it tolerable. When prosecutor Ben McKenzie appeared on the verge of collapsing from the heat again, Malone rushed over to fan him. During the noon recess, two young prosecutors, Wallace Haggard and William Bryan, Jr., went swimming with the defendant in a mountain pond. “The water was cool and clear,” Scopes later recalled. “We temporarily forgot the trial and everything; as a result we were late returning to the courtroom.” When they finally showed up, Scopes could barely squeeze through the packed aisles to the defense table. “Where the hell have you been?” thundered Hays, but no one else appeared to notice the defendant’s absence.2
Prosecutors had too much trouble locating their own witnesses—schoolboys lost in a sea of adults—to worry about Scopes, and by the time they found them they had lost their chairs to spectators. Ben McKenzie called on the unknown culprits to return the chairs: “We are a necessary evil in the courtroom,” he protested.
When the prosecutors and their witnesses were finally in place, the court recalled the jurors and directed each side to make its opening statement. Stewart earlier predicted that his case would take “about an hour,” and kept to that pace by delivering a two-sentence opening statement.3 Scopes violated the antievolution law by teaching that “mankind is descended from a lower order of animals,” the prosecutor simply declared. “Therefore, he has taught a theory which denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the Bible.”4
Defense counsel estimated that their experts, if permitted to testify, would talk for weeks, and accordingly countered with an extended, carefully crafted opening statement. “We will prove that whether this statute be constitutional or unconstitutional the Defendant Scopes did not and could not violate it,” Malone read from a typed script. “We will show by the testimony of men learned in science and theology that there are millions of people who believe in evolution and in the story of creation as set forth in the Bible and who find no conflict between the two. The defense maintains that this is a matter of faith and interpretation, which each individual must determine for himself.” “[S]o that there shall be no mistake,” he noted, “the defense believes that there is a direct conflict between the theory of evolution and the theories of creation as set forth in the Book of Genesis,” but this simply represented the opinion of counsel. “While the defense thinks there is a conflict between evolution and the Old Testament, we believe there is no conflict between evolution and Christianity.” Among the defense lawyers, only Malone could have read this line with conviction; it did reflect the beliefs of their modernist Christian expert witnesses, however. Malone suggested succinctly three different views on the relationship between the Bible and evolution: complete accord, direct conflict, and progressive compatibility. Accepting any one viewpoint constituted a matter of personal religious opinion, he asserted. The prosecution simply could not assume, nor could it prove, that teaching the theory of human evolution denied the biblical account of creation.5
Malone directly assailed Bryan. “There might be a conflict between evolution and the peculiar ideas of Christianity which are held by Mr. Bryan as the evangelical leader of the prosecution, but we deny that the evangelical leader of the prosecution is an authorized spokesman for the Christians of the United States,” Malone explained. To emphasize the transitory nature of religious opinion, he quoted from a twenty-year-old article in which Bryan endorsed Thomas Jefferson’s Statute of Religious Freedom in language that seemingly repudiated laws—such as the antievolution statute—that coerced or promoted religious belief. “The defense appeals from the fundamentalist Bryan of today to the modernist Bryan of yesterday,” Malone declared. The repeated references to Bryan finally drew an objection from Stewart, but the Commoner waved him off. “I ask no protection from the court,” Bryan asserted, “and when the proper time comes I shall be able to show the gentlemen that I stand today just as I did, but that this has nothing to do with the case at bar.”6 After waiting days for their Peerless Leader to speak in court, the local spectators erupted. “They stamped. They whistled, they cheered with their lungs. They applauded with their hands,” one reporter observed. “Bryan had won. His simple eloquence had confounded the sophistry of his enemies.”7 Watching this demonstration, Mencken observed, “Bryan is no longer thought of as a politician and jobseeker in these Godly regions, but has become converted into a great sacerdotal figure, half man and half archangel—in brief, a sort of fundamentalist pope.”8
After order was restored and Malone finished reading his opening sta
tement, the prosecution expeditiously presented its case. Stewart called four witnesses. Superintendent White led off by testifying that Scopes had admitted teaching about the theory of human evolution from Hunter’s Civic Biology when conducting a review session for a high school biology class. Stewart identified offending paragraphs from the textbook, which sounded harmless enough when Darrow read them into the record during cross-examination. Darrow also had White confirm that the state textbook commission had officially adopted the text for use in Tennessee public schools. The only clash occurred when Stewart asked White to identify the King James version of the Bible, and offered it as evidence “of what the act relates to when it says ‘Bible.’ ” Seizing an opportunity to emphasize differences in biblical interpretation, Hays immediately objected on the grounds that dozens of differing versions of the Bible existed. “This is a criminal statute and should be strictly construed. There is nothing in the statute that shows [teachers] should be controlled in their teaching by the King James version,” he declared. In Protestant East Tennessee, however, this version was the Bible—or so Judge Raulston stated in overruling the objection.9
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion Page 21
