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

by Edward Larson

  Dayton quickly returned to normal following the trial, with few visitors other than the Bryans and the Darrows remaining by the week’s end. “Dayton has benefited, physically and mentally, by the ‘evolution trial,”’ trial promoter Fred Robinson boasted to a departing reporter, citing the refurbished courthouse and intellectual stimulation. Yet few perceived a lasting change. “Every indication is that Dayton is back where it was before the trial began, a sleepy little town among the hills,” the Nashville Banner observed at midweek. Even Scopes shook the dust of Dayton from his feet before the week ended.14

  Scopes no longer felt at home in Dayton. Following the verdict, the local school board offered to renew his teaching contract for another year provided that he comply with the antievolution law, but Scopes already had his sights fixed on graduate school. “Shortly before the trial was over, Kirtley Mather of Harvard and Watson Davis of the Science Service had notified me of the scholarship fund that expert witnesses were arranging for my graduate study in whatever field I chose,” Scopes later explained. “One of my most valuable windfalls at Dayton had been listening to and associating with the distinguished scientists who stayed at the Mansion. They had broadened my view of the world.” By the time Bryan died, Scopes already had left for the University of Kentucky to inquire about entering law school that fall. He ultimately settled on studying geology at the University of Chicago and became a petroleum engineer. In doing so, he passed up offers to capitalize on his fame through paid appearances on the lecture and vaudeville circuits and in movies. “I knew I would not live happily in a spotlight,” Scopes concluded. “The best thing to do, I was beginning to realize, was to change my life and seek anonymity.”15

  Robinson and Scopes were not alone in their efforts to determine whether the trial had any lasting potiential benefits. In the trial’s immediate aftermath, both sides found reason to celebrate. The prosecution claimed a legal victory; the defense a moral one. “Each side withdrew at the end of the struggle satisfied that it had unmasked the absurd pretensions of the other,” the veteran New York Times reporter Russell D. Owen concluded.16 On the day of the verdict, for example, Herbert Hicks boasted in a letter to his brother Ira, “We gave the atheist Jew Arthur Garfield Hays, the agnostic Clarence Darrow, and the ostracized Catholic Dudley Field Malone, a sound licking although the papers are prejudiced against us and may not say so.” His alleged victims thought nothing of the kind. From the stage of New York’s Ziegfeld Follies two days later, Malone declared the trial a “victorious defeat” that would help assure that “future generations will know the truth.” Hays reiterated this point in an essay for The Nation, claiming, “It is possible that laws of this kind will hereafter meet with the opposition of an aroused public opinion.”17

  Defense claims of victory clearly relied on popular reactions to the trial rather than solely on what transpired within the courtroom—and surely Malone and Hays hoped their confident claims would promote the desired response—but others closely associated with the trial tended to see momentum shifting in Bryan’s favor. Mencken’s final report from Dayton concluded by warning that “Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.... There are other States that had better look to their arsenals before the Hun is at their gates.” Talking to reporters in New York on his return from the trial, Charles Francis Potter forecast a national epidemic of antievolution lawmaking following the Scopes verdict. Asked about Potter’s comments, John Roach Straton readily agreed, boasting that southern states would be the first to enact such laws, followed by western ones, and that the movement then would sweep the North and West.18

  Tennessee newspapers generally offered a more equivocal initial assessment of the trial and its impact. Observing that the prosecution upheld the law in court even as the defense promoted its cause with the general public, a Nashville Banner correspondent concluded, “To call it a draw would be incorrect. The state and the defense each won a clear-cut and decisive victory.”19 The dueling commentators for the Chattanooga Times issued a split decision, the fundamentalist asserting that “Darrow, the agnostic, and his crowd ... met their match in the grand old Commoner,” while the modernist declared Bryan “shorn of strength” by Darrow’s interrogation.20 Even the proprosecution Memphis Commercial Appeal did not declare a single winner after Bryan’s tortured testimony. “We saw an attempted duel between science and religion at Dayton,” its editor observed, but he concluded that both sides lost ground.21

  Similarly, the nation’s press initially saw little of lasting significance in the trial beyond its having exposed Bryan’s empty head and Darrow’s mean spirit. After the verdict, a feature article in The New Republic denounced the trial as “a trivial thing full of humbuggery and hypocrisy.”22 Next-day editorials in both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune predicted that the fight for and against teaching evolution would continue unabated.23 The Literary Digest for the week summed up consensus among the press: “The trial at Dayton is no more than an opening skirmish, ‘a clash of picket hosts that can not be decisive,’ remarks the New York Evening Post; and other papers and commentators agree that it may mark the beginning of a great fight between the Fundamentalists and the Modernists.”24

  The same newspapers and magazines that dismissed the results as indecisive had given the trial unprecedented coverage only a week earlier ; journalists wired two million words from Dayton during the trial, including more from America to Europe than just about any prior news event. Yet the New York Times—which used as many as five telegraph wires at a time to carry reports from Dayton—observed afterward that the trial’s abrupt end saved “the public from having its ears bethumped with millions more of irrelevant words.”25 So long as the trial lasted, events at Dayton dominated the news, having received front-page coverage across the nation for a fortnight; as soon as Scopes lost, the story no longer was considered newsworthy and resurfaced only briefly when Bryan died. The Tennessee trial was simply the latest thrill during the kaleidoscopic Roaring Twenties. The great southern sociologist Howard W. Odum tracked press coverage at the time and counted that “some 2,310 daily newspapers in this country” covered the Scopes trial, and found “no periodical of any sort, agricultural or trade as well, which has ignored the subject.”26

  The timing of Bryan’s death caused some to reassess the trial’s potential significance. “Nothing could be more dramatic in time or in manner than the death of William Jennings Bryan, following so soon upon his appearance in the Dayton court room,” Walter Lippmann wrote in the New York World. “His death at this time will weight his words at Dayton with the solemnity of a parting message and strengthen their effect upon his fellow citizens.”27 Although Bryan reportedly died of apoplexy, people generally assumed that the stress of the trial precipitated the attack. Many blamed Darrow personally. “I could sense an opinion forming that Bryan was a martyr who had died defending the Grand Old Fundamental Religion,” Scopes commented, after a brief return visit to Dayton the following week. “Soon afterward there was a rumor about town that ‘that old devil Darrow’ had killed Bryan with his inquisition.” In early August, George Rappleyea reported to ACLU officials in New York, “The death of Bryan swept away any victory we might have gained before the people of Tennessee; I am the only modernist that now remains in Dayton.” Governor Peay made it official with a proclamation declaring that Bryan died “a martyr to the faith of our fathers” and announcing a state holiday to mark the funeral.28 After studiously ignoring the Scopes trial for weeks, Peay began taking a keen interest in winning the appeal—an apparent reaction to the defense’s treatment of Bryan and Tennessee.

  The Commoner’s funeral became a national event. Crowds lined the tracks as a special Pullman car carried the body to Washington for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Thousands filed by the open coffin, first in Dayton, then in several major cities along the train route, and finally in the nation’s capital. Flags flew at half-
mast. Shops closed. America’s political elite attended the burial, and senators and cabinet members served as pallbearers. Bryan’s former foes in the press now hailed his passion and integrity. “He tried to do the right thing as he saw it,” the New York Herald Tribune observed in a typical editorial. “His passing will be a profound shock to millions who, however often he misled them, looked upon him as their prophet and counselor,” a Philadelphia paper added.29 This popular reaction was captured in a country music ballad, “Death of William Jennings Bryan,” recorded only a week after the event; successive stanzas praised the Commoner for battling capitalists and helping workers, but one related directly to the Scopes trial: “He fought the evolutionists and infidel men, fools/ Who are trying to ruin the minds of children in our schools.” Bryan clearly retained a large following in spite of (and perhaps due to) his role in the trial. Indeed, in a memorial tribute, William Bell Riley described the Tennessee trial as “Bryan’s best and last battle.”30

  Many of those mourning their Peerless Leader’s passing vowed to carry on his final crusade. On his way to the funeral, Bryan’s brother Charles—a former governor of Nebraska and 1924 Democratic vice presidential nominee—talked of continuing his brother’s work and forecast that “Congress eventually will be called upon to take a hand in the evolution controversy.”31 As Bryan lay in state, the governor of Mississippi declared that his state “will probably follow the lead of Tennessee and bar the teaching of evolution in the schools”—a prediction that came true as soon as his state’s legislature next met. The public campaign for that legislation even featured speeches by Ben McKenzie telling the story of Bryan’s last stand at Dayton.32 During the fall of 1925, Texas Governor Miriam Ferguson—the South’s first woman governor—directed her state’s textbook commission to delete the theory of evolution from high school texts, a ban that for decades forced publishers to produce special edited versions of their biology textbooks for use in the Lone Star State. Throughout the country, dozens of fundamentalist leaders (including Riley, Straton, Norris, and Martin) rushed to don Bryan’s fallen mantle, loosing a frenzy of uncoordinated antievolution activity. During the next two years, measures to restrict teaching evolution surfaced in more state legislatures than ever before.

  A popular but short-lived legend began to develop (particularly in southern Appalachia) portraying Bryan as wholly triumphant at the Scopes trial. Even before the Commoner’s death, one correspondent wrote from Dayton at the conclusion of the trial, “For thousands in this section it would have come as no surprise if Mr. Bryan, having gloriously defeated the forces of unrighteousness, were to be visited by an angel of the Lord who would whisk the old gentleman off to Heaven in a chariot of fire.” Less than a month after the verdict, an antievolution resolution adopted by the Clear Creek Springs encampment (a regional fundamentalist gathering in Kentucky) referred to the fight “so nobly and courageously led by the late William Jennings Bryan.” Writing about Bryan’s “conquest” at Dayton for the WFCA’s journal, William Bell Riley asserted that the Great Commoner “not only won his cause in the judgment of the Judge; in the judgment of the jurors; in the judgment of the Tennessee populace attending; he won it in the judgment of an intelligent world.”33

  Country and western music captured this legend from the grass roots. The well-known Georgia balladeer Andrew Jenkins sang:There was a case not long ago in sunny Tennessee,

  The Bible then on trial there must vindicated be, ...

  Oh, who will go and end this fight, oh, who will be the man?

  To face the learned and mighty foe, and for the Bible stand?

  Bryan, the song continued, became the hero who “went to end the fight.” Also in 1925, Columbia record company released a country folk song that declared:When the good folks had their trouble down in Dayton far away,

  Mr. Bryan went to help them and he worked both night and day.

  There he fought for what was righteous and the battle it was won,

  Then the Lord called him to heaven for his work on earth was done.

  These and other compositions, collectively known as “Scopes songs,” revealed a popular perception of the trial already departing sharply from the historical record. In this version of the Scopes legend, a heroic Bryan inevitably saved the schoolchildren of Tennessee from the damnable teaching of evolution. By September 1925, a popular-music magazine reported that the Columbia release “is selling exceptionally well, especially in the South and throughout the regions where the late Commoner was most active.”34 Three months after the trial, Mencken could only sneer about the man he so despised, “His place in the Tennessee hagiocracy is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today.”35 The legend faded with time, but not before its inspiration led to the realization of Walter White’s dream of a fundamentalist college in Dayton named in Bryan’s honor. The Commoner and the Scopes experience had transformed Dayton from a religiously apathetic community into a center of faith.

  At the time, in sharp contrast with later legends about the Scopes trial, no one saw the episode as a decisive triumph for the defense. “In examining the coverage of the trial in five geographically scattered newspapers and over a dozen national magazines,” Ronald L. Numbers observed, “I discovered not a single declaration of victory by the opponents of antievolutionism, in the sense of their claiming that the crusade was at an end.” Indeed, following Bryan’s death, many of them feared precisely the opposite. A mid-August editorial in the Nation, a liberal journal of political opinion, referred to the antievolutionists’ “success at Dayton” and predicted a “flood” of fundamentalist lawmaking across the land. In October, Mencken darkly warned, “The evil that men do lives after them. Bryan, in his malice, started something that it will not be easy to stop.” Maynard Shipley’s Science League took on the role of a Jeremiah by issuing a steady stream of dire prophecies about a pestilence of antievolutionism sweeping the nation. “The forces of obscurantism in the United States are in open revolt!” Shipley wrote, a full two years after the Scopes trial. “Centering their attacks for the moment on evolution, the keystone in the arch of our modern educational edifice, the armies of ignorance are being organized, literally by the millions, for a combined political assault on modern science.”36

  From the moment that he objected to courtroom prayer, a noisy segment of those opposed to antievolutionism blamed Darrow for the failure of the Scopes defense to stem the tide of fundamentalism—crit—icism that only increased after Bryan’s death. Their reasoning reflected their own religious viewpoint. Some secular critics of the Tennessee law defended Darrow, but the Chicago agnostic was as much a pariah to religious modernists and mainline Christians as he was to fundamentalists. “Now that the chuckling and giggling over the heckling of Bryan by Darrow has subsided it is dawning upon the friends of evolution that science was rendered a wretched service by that exhibition,” Walter Lippmann wrote for the New York World. “The truth is that when Mr. Darrow in his anxiety to humiliate and ridicule Mr. Bryan resorted to sneering and scoffing at the Bible he convinced millions who act on superficial impressions that Bryan is right in his assertion that the contest at Dayton was for and against the Christian religion.” Speaking from the region most directly affected, the New Orleans Times-Picayune commented, “Mr. Darrow, with his sneering, ‘I object to prayer!’ and with his ill-natured and arrogant cross-examination of Bryan on the witness stand, has done more to stimulate ‘anti-evolution’ legislation in the United States than Mr. Bryan and his fellow literalists, left alone, could have hoped for.”37

  A varied array of Christians complained of Darrow’s role in the case. “Some of us regret that in the unique Scopes trial, on which so much popular education depends, we should not have, for the trial, lawyers who understand the point of view of the ordinary, thoroughly educated Christian,” a mainline church journal commented. A Congregational Church official offered his observations in a letter sent to the ACLU: “May I express the ear
nest opinion that not five percent of the ministers in this liberal denomination have any sympathy with Mr. Darrow’s conduct of the case?” From Nashville, the Vanderbilt University humanist Edwin Mims complained, “When Clarence Darrow is put forth as the champion of the forces of enlightenment to fight the battle for scientific knowledge, one feels almost persuaded to become a Fundamentalist.” The gravity of the issue was underscored for ACLU officials in September, when Raymond B. Fosdick—attorney for the Rockefellers and the brother of Harry Emerson Fosdick—curtly rejected an invitation to join their Scopes defense fund committee with the rebuke, “Largely through the choice of counsel a great opportunity was lost to place the case on a plane where the tremendous issue between tolerance and intolerance could be clearly seen.” Roger Baldwin wrote back to Fosdick, “I guess we here all feel as you do about the handling of it. What we are trying to do now is to get the issue clear on the appeal.”38

  As Baldwin’s letter to Fosdick suggests, ACLU officials in New York already had turned their attention to the appellate phase of the case. Once again they maneuvered to exclude Darrow from the defense team. The ACLU’s executive committee hatched its plan in early August: ease out Darrow by urging more “priority” for Tennessee counsel. Associate Director Forrest Bailey, who oversaw the Scopes case for the ACLU, wrote to John Neal, “All of us feel that when the case goes to the Supreme Court of the State, there ought to be more of Neal and less of Darrow. This is the stand we are taking in response to the many urgent suggestions that Darrow ought to disappear from this point on.” Hays dissented from this position, Bailey noted, “but I hope you see the other angle of the thing as we do.” Apparently he did. Rappleyea soon reported to the ACLU about a meeting with Neal in which the two agreed that Darrow should not appear before the state supreme court. Otherwise, Rappleyea explained, “It will not be our cause on trial, but it will be a case of the State of Tennessee vs. Clarence Darrow, the man who spiritually and literally crucified Bryan on the cross examination.”39