Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  But, most of all, Mencken thought the fireworks were finished. “Darrow has lost,” he told his readers.

  “There may be some legal jousting on Monday … but the main battle is over, with Genesis completely triumphant.”34

  AT THE MONKEY HOUSE on Saturday, stenographers took down statements from the defense experts to build a record for the appeal. Bryan and his wife went to visit Lookout Mountain. Scopes went dancing. And Darrow made a strange phone call—or so it seemed—to the Jewish scholar Rabbi Louis Ginzberg, whose Sabbath he interrupted. His friend Darrow wanted to know: “Where did Cain get his wife?”

  Sunday evening Darrow sat down with Hays and Harvard University geologist Kirtley Mather, who knew his Bible as well as his rocks. The two lawyers asked Mather to play the role of William Jennings Bryan, and together they conducted a mock interrogation, quizzing the professor about Adam’s rib, Jonah and the whale, and other biblical tales.

  It was the trap that Darrow had tried to set with his public letter to Bryan in 1923. If Bryan insisted that the Bible must be taken literally, he would have to defend some mighty strange things. But if the Commoner strayed from a literal interpretation, he opened himself up to the defense team’s contention—that Creation may have included evolution.

  “I’m going to put a Bible expert on the stand,” Darrow told Charles Francis Potter, a Unitarian minister who had journeyed to Dayton to help the defense. “A greater expert than you—greatest in the world—he thinks.” Darrow asked Potter to page through a Bible, looking for “all the unscientific parts.” He gave him a sheaf of telegrams that the defense had received with advice from supporters around the country. “See if there are any good ideas we can use,” Darrow said.35

  Putting an opposing champion on the stand was an unusual tactic, but Bryan should have seen it coming. Darrow had done it several times in his career. And the notion was in the air: Darrow’s hometown Tribune openly speculated, on the weekend before the showdown, about what he might do if given the chance to cross-examine Bryan. Darrow had dared Bryan, in the press, to submit to questioning “in open court under oath.” And the defense, in fact, had already shown its hand in court—on Thursday, when Darrow quizzed Ben McKenzie about his beliefs.

  It happened when McKenzie was ridiculing the defense contention that evolution and Genesis were reconcilable. “They want to put words in God’s mouth,” McKenzie said, “and have Him say that He issued some sort of protoplasm, or soft dish rag, and put it in the ocean, and said ‘Old boy, if you wait around for 6,000 years, I will make something out of you.’ ”

  The audience laughed. But Darrow rose to challenge him. “Let me ask a question,” Darrow said. “When it said, ‘in His own image’ did you think that meant the physical man? … You think men must believe that, to believe the Bible—that the physical man as we see him looks like God?”

  “The reason I believe that firmly is because the Bible teaches it,” said McKenzie.

  “Let me ask another question,” said Darrow. “You said there was the first day, the second day, the third day … do you think they were literal days?”

  “We didn’t have any sun until the fourth day,” McKenzie acknowledged. But he sensed where this was headed and swiftly extricated himself.36

  AND SO IT happened that on Monday, after Raulston had cited Darrow for contempt of court and Darrow had, with elaborate and suspicious humility, apologized, and the judge had just as elaborately—reciting poetry and prayer—forgiven him, and after Hays had spent long hours of the morning reading excerpts from the experts’ affidavits into the record, the proceedings were moved for a few final chores to the speaker’s platform of rough-hewn wood that had been erected on the north side of the courthouse for preachers and performers.

  It was just too hot, and the crowd too large, for the courtroom, Raulston said; he had been warned that the floor was showing signs of collapse. So tables and chairs were carried to the outdoor stage; thousands of spectators sat in rows of makeshift benches or stood in the shade of the maple trees on the two-acre lawn, and reporters leaned from the courthouse windows.

  “The change from the hot stuffy courtroom was a very agreeable one,” Mary Bryan wrote, though she was disappointed that Darrow had not been found in contempt. “I would not have wept if he had spent the night in jail. He has been so abusive, so bitter and so venomous all the way through.”

  After the usual verbal tilt, Darrow persuaded the judge to have the “Read Your Bible” sign removed from the courthouse wall. Then Malone whispered to Scopes, “Hell is going to pop now!” and Hays was calmly telling the judge, “The defense desires to call Mr. Bryan as a witness …”

  There was a split-second pause as Hays talked on and three thousand souls tried to grasp what he had asked. Then, Scopes recalled, “all of the lawyers leaped to their feet … the judge blanched and was at a loss for words. Everyone seemed to be talking at once.” After a bit of argument—for nothing was accomplished in Dayton without argument—Raulston allowed Bryan to take the stand.

  Indeed, Bryan demanded to testify. He was still hurting from the whipping he’d gotten from Malone on Thursday. And he was angry at the charge, made by the defense and widely circulated, that he was hiding behind the judge’s rulings, afraid to fight for his beliefs. It was a terrible decision. Darrow’s legal talents were well known and freshly honed; Bryan had not been in a courtroom for twenty-eight years. Darrow frequently joined in debates; Bryan’s public appearances were always monologues. Darrow had rehearsed that weekend; Bryan was seemingly caught by surprise.

  But “it was his one opportunity to recoup the glory,” Scopes wrote. “He underestimated Clarence Darrow.”37

  For the next two hours, penned on that small stage, Darrow and Bryan would be but three or four feet—often, just inches—apart. Darrow would stand with arms folded, or slouch in a chair, or lean, half-sitting, on the court reporters’ pinewood table. Bryan glared from an office swivel chair that had been carried out for use as the witness stand; he clutched a palm-leaf fan in his fist. By the end they would be standing, shouting insults, pointing fingers, or shaking fists in each other’s faces.

  “You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven’t you, Mr. Bryan?” Darrow began. “Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?”

  “I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there,” Bryan replied. “Some of the Bible is given illustratively. For instance: ‘Ye are the salt of the earth.’ I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt …”

  “But when you read that Jonah swallowed the whale—or that the whale swallowed Jonah, excuse me please—how do you literally interpret that?”

  “When I read that a big fish swallowed Jonah … I believe it. And I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make both do what he pleases.”

  For Bryan, so far so good. The fundamentalists in the audience heartily approved his defense of Jonah. The men were smoking. Children played on seesaws made from the rough wood benches. Bryan was calm and contemptuous as Darrow probed, looking for a weakness, Scopes said, like “a hawk after prey.”

  “You don’t know whether it was the ordinary run of fish, or made for that purpose?” Darrow asked.

  “You may guess. You evolutionists guess,” Bryan responded.

  “But when we do guess, we have a sense to guess right,” said Darrow.

  “But do not do it often,” said Bryan.

  The Commoner thought things were going well. The crowd was with him. He was enjoying himself. He leaned to one side and a little bit forward, resting an elbow on the arm of his chair. “One miracle is just as easy to believe as another,” he said.

  Small boys walked through the crowd selling soda pop. An airplane sailed overhead. The judge relaxed and picked up an afternoon newspaper, with its account of Darrow’s apology.

  “Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still?” Darrow asked.
/>   “I accept the Bible absolutely,” said Bryan.

  Stewart objected. He could see where Darrow was going. If Joshua was said to have made the sun stand still, then the authors of the Old Testament must have believed that the sun was in motion around the earth—an error corrected by Copernicus and Galileo. The questioning, Stewart said, “has gone beyond the pale of any issue that could possibly be injected into this lawsuit.” But Bryan and Raulston, pleased to be providing the crowd-pleasing showdown that folks had been clamoring for, brushed the objection aside.

  DARROW: “Have you an opinion as to whether whoever wrote the book, I believe it is … the Book of Joshua … thought the sun went around the earth?”

  BRYAN: “I believe that he was inspired.”

  DARROW: “Can you answer my question?”

  BRYAN: “When you let me finish the statement.”

  DARROW: “It is a simple question …”

  BRYAN: “You cannot measure the length of my answer by the length of your question.”

  (Laughter in the courtyard.)

  DARROW: “No, except that the answer be longer.”

  (Laughter in the courtyard.)

  DARROW: “Do you think whoever inspired it believed that the sun went around the earth?”

  BRYAN: “I believe it was inspired by the Almighty, and He may have used language that could be understood at the time … instead of using language that could not be understood until Darrow was born.”

  (Laughter and applause in the courtyard.)

  Still no blood. Darrow prowled on. He brought up the story of the Great Flood and of Noah, who was said to have gathered all the animals, two by two, in an ark that rode out the storm. Seventeenth-century scholars had fixed the date of man’s creation at around 4000 B.C.

  “You believe the story of the flood to be a literal interpretation?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” said Bryan.

  “When was that flood … about 4004 B.C.?”

  “That has been the estimate,” Bryan said. The calculations, made by a Protestant bishop in 1650, were included as annotations in the well-known King James Version of the Bible. At first, Bryan hesitated to defend them.

  “I never made a calculation,” Bryan said.38

  But Darrow fired his questions rapidly.

  DARROW: “A calculation from what?”

  BRYAN: “I could not say.”

  DARROW: “From the generations of man?”

  BRYAN: “I would not want to say that.”

  DAR ROW: “What do you think?”

  BRYAN: “I do not think about things I don’t think about.”

  DARROW: “Do you think about things you do think about?”

  BRYAN: “Well, sometimes.”

  (Laughter in the courtyard.)

  POLICEMAN: “Let us have order.”

  I do not think about things I don’t think about. The exchange made Bryan look silly, pathetic, ignorant. Do you think about things you do think about? Well, sometimes. It has echoed through history for almost a century. Laughter in the courtyard.

  Now Stewart tried, again, to stop the fight.

  “I am objecting to his cross-examining his own witness,” the prosecutor said. But the judge left it up to Bryan.

  “I want him to have all the latitude he wants,” Bryan said. No one would say he ran away. “For I am going to have latitude when he gets through.”

  “You can have latitude and longitude,” said Darrow. It was a silly pun, but it drew a laugh from the spectators. The people of Dayton “forgot for a moment that Bryan’s faith was their own,” wrote a newsman. “The crowd saw only the battle.”

  Again, Stewart objected. McKenzie was on his feet too. And again, Bryan insisted on continuing. Darrow and his colleagues “did not come here to try this case. They came here to try revealed religion,” Bryan said, rising from the swivel chair to address the crowd out on the lawn. “I am here to defend it, and they can ask me any questions they please.”

  Bryan’s loyalists applauded, but it was a poison gift. Their approval only spurred their hero on.

  DARROW: “Great applause from the bleachers.”

  BRYAN: “From those whom you call yokels.”

  DARROW: “I have never called them yokels.”

  BRYAN: “That is the ignorance of Tennessee, the bigotry.”

  DARROW: “You mean who are applauding you?”

  (Applause.)

  BRYAN: “Those are the people you insult.”

  DARROW: “You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion.”

  But Bryan had lost his way. He was now defending not the wisdom of the Good Book, but a three-hundred-year-old pseudo-history created by a long-dead Irish bishop. And each of Darrow’s goading questions revealed more of Bryan’s closed-mindedness, and his ignorance of science and history. It made Bryan look stupid. The farmers in their overalls may have loved him for it, but no thinking person could escape the conclusion.

  “Don’t you know there are any number of civilizations that are traced back to more than 5,000 years?” Darrow asked.

  “I have no evidence of it that is satisfactory,” said Bryan. His face was red. He glowered at Darrow. “No evidence that I have found … would justify me in accepting the opinions of these men against what I believe to be the inspired word of God.”

  So, asked Darrow, “whatever human beings, including all the tribes that inhabited the world … and all the animals, have come onto the earth since the flood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know a scientific man on the face of the earth that believes any such thing?”

  “I don’t think I have ever asked one the direct question.”

  “Quite important, isn’t it?” Darrow’s arms were crossed, and he tapped his gold-rimmed spectacles against his biceps.

  “Well, I don’t know that it is,” said Bryan. “I have been more interested in Christians going on right now.”

  “You have never investigated to find out how long man has been on the earth?” Darrow asked.

  “I have never found it necessary.”

  “Don’t you know that the ancient civilizations of China are 6,000 or 7,000 years old, at the very least?”

  “No, but they would not run back beyond the creation, according to the Bible.”

  “Have you any idea of how old the Egyptian civilization is?”

  “No.”

  Bryan was getting tired. And more so after, at Bryan’s insistence, Darrow let him make a rambling speech about comparative religions. Now Darrow drew him back to specifics.

  “Do you think the Earth was made in six days?” he asked Bryan.

  “Not six days of 24 hours,” Bryan replied.

  Again, the wary Stewart saw where they were headed. Bryan was abandoning a literal interpretation of the “days” of Genesis. To those who were familiar with Bryan’s personal views of evolution, this was not surprising—but Stewart knew that the audience, and the crowd of reporters, would see it as a faith-shaking concession.

  “What is the purpose of this examination?” Stewart demanded of the judge.

  Bryan, finally, sensed danger. He lashed out at Darrow. “The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible,” Bryan said.

  “We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, and that is all,” said Darrow.

  “I am trying to protect the word of God against the greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States,” said Bryan, up on his feet and waving a finger at Darrow. “I want the papers to know I am not afraid.”

  Darrow promised Raulston to wrap things up. He had only a few more questions, he told the judge.

  DARROW: “Do you believe that the first woman was Eve?”

  BRYAN: “Yes.”

  DARROW: “Do you believe she was literally made out of Adam’s rib?”

  BRYAN: “I do.”

  D
ARROW: Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?”

  BRYAN: “No sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.”

  DARROW: “There were no others recorded, but Cain got a wife.”

  BRYAN: “That is what the Bible says.”

  And now, as they approached the two-hour mark of the debate, Darrow returned to Bryan’s admission that the “days” of Genesis may have lasted more than twenty-four hours.

  Goaded by his adversary, Bryan struggled to explain. “I do not see that there is any necessity for construing the words ‘the evening and the morning’ as meaning necessarily a 24-hour day,” Bryan said.

  “You think those were not literal days,” said Darrow.

  “I do not think they were 24-hour days,” said Bryan. “I think it would be just as easy for the kind of God we believe in to make the earth in six days as in six years or in six million years or in six hundred million years. I do not think it important whether we believe one or the other.”

  “The creation might have been going on for a very long time?” Darrow asked.

  “It might have continued for millions of years,” said Bryan. There was a collective gasp—some claimed they heard shouts of disapproval—from the crowd.