Bryan had conceded one of the defense team’s most important arguments. For if a Christian was not bound to a literal translation of Genesis, and could construe that God took hundreds of millions of years to make the world, why couldn’t he construe that God’s creation of man took ages as well? And if so, then the Bible and evolution, faith and science, were indeed reconcilable.
Bryan had “agreed that no intelligent person would accept the Bible literally,” Hays recalled. “It seemed to many that Darrow demolished the fundamentalist case, for if anything is conceded to interpretation, the fundamentalist authoritarian position is destroyed.”39
Darrow’s job was almost finished, as he took one last shot at the wounded prey. There was an unanswered riddle from his old list of Bible questions. To ask it now was cruel and gratuitous—an obvious play for cheap laughs. But he went ahead and read aloud from Genesis, the story of Eve and the apple.
“Do you think that is why the serpent is compelled to crawl upon its belly?”
“I believe that,” said Bryan.
“Have you any idea how the snake went before that time?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you know whether he walked on his tail?”
The laughter of the crowd brought Bryan to his feet. “Your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible,” he shouted. “I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in a God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee to slur at it.”
“I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes,” Darrow yelled back. They were both on their feet, shaking their fists. And with that Raulston adjourned the most memorable session of any American legal case, ever.
“The followers of Darrow rose up and swarmed to his side, anxious to seize the hand of their champion,” said Hays. “Bryan stood apart, almost alone, a strained tired expression on his face as he looked into the twilight that was closing about him.”40
FOR THOSE WHO witnessed the great duel under the maples, there was no escaping the conclusion that Bryan had blundered terribly.
BRYAN IS WORSTED, read a headline in the Chattanooga News. His concession on the length of days was “a real victory for the defense,” the paper reported. Bryan’s answers, the News editorial said, had been “grossly inadequate. His personal knowledge of science was not of a nature particularly responsive to a hostile examination.” It was a charitable conclusion.
Mary Bryan felt that “Papa stood by his guns very manfully” under Darrow’s abusive questioning. But things had gone badly, she wrote her children. The Infidel had fired so many questions so fast that Papa’s “answers made him appear more ignorant than he is.” And “of course, it went out over the country.”
Indeed it did. A narrative of Bryan’s fall in a man-to-man duel with Darrow was irresistible to the skeptics of the press, with their innate contempt for jay towns and fun-killing preachers. “I made up my mind to show the country what an ignoramus he was and I succeeded,” Darrow wrote the absent Mencken. Darrow went back to the Monkey House, leaned back in a chair on the porch, and let the newspapermen do their work. They had found a third act for their modernist script: teacher persecuted. Titans grapple. Freedom triumphs. And out across the country—or at least in the bigger towns and cities—an American population that venerated science and progress saw in Bryan not a great moral leader. They saw instead a crank.
“There was no pity for the helplessness of the believer come so suddenly and so unexpectedly upon a moment when he could not reconcile statements of the Bible with generally accepted facts,” the Times reported. “There was no pity for his admissions of ignorance of things boys and girls learn in high school, his floundering confessions that he knew practically nothing of geology, biology, philology, little of comparative religion and little even of ancient history.” The newspaper was describing the reaction of the crowd in Dayton, but the words applied to the millions who had followed the trial from home. “And finally, when Mr. Bryan, pressed harder and harder by Mr. Darrow, confessed he did not believe everything in the Bible should be taken literally, the crowd howled.”
Across America, the crowd howled. And Bryan had further gall to drink. Stewart called on him that night and told him the trial would end the next morning, without giving Bryan an opportunity to put Darrow on the stand. Stewart had skillfully managed the case, to the considerable frustration of the defense attorneys, until Bryan’s performance wrecked things. Stewart could not stop it as it happened, but he was determined to halt it now. He absolutely refused to let Bryan match wits with Darrow again.41
It rained on Tuesday, and the trial moved back into the courtroom, where further disappointment awaited Bryan. The jury was brought in and both sides asked it to return a guilty verdict, so that the case could move on to higher courts. Bryan had labored for weeks on a monumental address—it was to be a capstone of his career—but there would be no more long speeches, and he was left to implore the remaining reporters to include a text of his remarks in their coverage. Raulston fined Scopes $100.
“The papers are prejudiced against us and may not say so,” Herbert Hicks wrote his brother Ira. But “we gave the atheist Jew Arthur Garfield Hays, the agnostic Clarence Darrow, and the ostracized Catholic Dudley Field Malone a sound licking.”
But at trial’s end, the crowd surged to congratulate Darrow. He “was delighted as a boy and seemed as shy,” one account noted. Bryan was “a weary, heartbroken man,” wrote another correspondent. And so ended what Bryan called the “little case of little consequence.”42
MOST OF THE participants and reporters left Dayton that evening, but not the two titans. They each had speaking engagements to honor in Tennessee and wanted to rest and enjoy the scenery. Darrow was the featured guest at a dance thrown by Dayton’s young people, where he danced a waltz with Malone’s handsome wife. Bryan kept to his fervent schedule with no apparent signs of discouragement. Five days after the trial, Darrow was sightseeing in the Smoky Mountains near Knoxville when a reporter tracked him down with the news that Bryan, while napping in his borrowed bed in Dayton, had died in his sleep.
Darrow managed to compose a suitable public tribute to his old foe. But when it was suggested that Bryan died of a broken heart he murmured, “Busted heart nothing; he died of an overstuffed belly.”
“The lapse of time leaves heroes stranded,” the Nation reported, in its farewell tribute. It was Bryan’s great flaw “that his heart was much stronger than his head … He was lost when pinned down to detail.
“Always the heart swept him on, with no check from a reasoning hand,” the magazine said. “And when Clarence Darrow got him on the witness stand he revealed himself as a pathetically sincere and pitifully ignorant old man.”43
Bryan’s funeral was a national event. He was still, Will Rogers wrote, the tribune of the little folk. His death gave a hyperdramatic coda to the Scopes trial, further cinching its claim on history. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, his coffin draped in an American flag. And the poet Vachel Lindsay wrote:
Where is that boy, that Heaven-born Bryan
That Homer Bryan, who sang from the West?
Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,
Where the kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest.
Chapter 19
SWEET
That is all there is to this case …
Take the hatred away and you have nothing.
When he arrived in Tennessee in the summer of 1925, Darrow was a famous man; by the time he left, he was an American folk hero. He had been known for much of his professional life as a radical, a rebel, and a champion of underdogs. Now, after winning Chief Healey and Fred Lundin their freedom, saving the lives of Leopold and Loeb, and besting Bryan in the Bible Belt, he emerged as an American archetype: the legal sorcerer who won hopeless cases.
The Monkey Trial had captured the American imagination. Ernest Hemingway slipped a m
ention of Bryan’s demise into The Sun Also Rises. Inspired by the events in Dayton, Sinclair Lewis began work on Elmer Gantry, a tale of a corrupt preacher. There was a slice of Darrow in the lawyer Billy Flynn in the 1926 play Chicago. And “Get Clarence Darrow!” cried editor Walter Burns when The Front Page debuted on Broadway in 1928. There was no need to explain the joke to Manhattan theatergoers: it signified the depth of the editor’s predicament. Darrow had become, Lincoln Steffens would write in the Saturday Review, the “Attorney for the Damned.” Or, as Vanity Fair christened him, “The Great Defender.”
The Scopes trial “was inconceivably dramatic: two ancient warlocks brought jaw to jaw at last,” wrote Mencken. “It was superb to see Darrow throw out his webs, lay his foundations, prepare his baits. His virtuosity never failed. In the end Bryan staggered to the block and took that last appalling clout. It was delivered calmly, deliberately, beautifully. Bryan was killed as plainly as if he had been felled with an axe. He rolled into the sawdust a comic obscenity.”1
Darrow’s friends rejoiced. “Nothing is dangerous which the whole world is laughing at, and the world is laughing at Tennessee and Mr. Bryan,” Erskine Wood wrote in his diary. In Europe, Brand Whitlock shared a similar sentiment in his journal: “This chance, Darrow made the most of, rendering Bryan ridiculous.”2
When Darrow arrived back in Chicago, he could have demanded staggering fees for whatever fat and easy cases struck his fancy. Instead, he worked almost a year for meager wages saving Negroes charged with murdering a white man.
THE KILLING OCCURRED on September 9, 1925, but the tension that caused the event began to build the day before, in a modest middle-class neighborhood on the east side of Detroit. At mid-morning a truck filled with furniture moved up to the curb at the corner of Garland and Charlevoix Avenues, where young black men carried furniture into a two-story brick bungalow. The house belonged to Dr. Ossian Sweet, twenty-nine, and his twenty-three-year-old wife, Gladys. With their baby daughter, they were the first African American family to settle in this white neighborhood and had no illusions about how they would be welcomed. Among the furnishings were a sack of firearms and a satchel heavy with some four hundred rounds of ammunition.
Earlier that summer, Dr. Alexander Turner, another black physician, had been confronted by a mob as he tried to move into his purchased house in a white neighborhood in Detroit. Rocks and bricks shattered the windows of his car and home and, at gunpoint, he was compelled to sign a deed and relinquish ownership of the property. Turner was but one of a number of black homebuyers who met violence when they tried to move outside the city’s cramped “Black Bottom” ghetto. In several cases, the blacks or police had to ward off racist mobs with gunfire.
Sure enough, a crowd of several hundred white people gathered at the corner of Garland and Charlevoix that evening; some rocks were thrown, and those in the house heard shouted vows to get the “niggers.” A contingent of Detroit policemen kept the whites in order, and the night passed without violence. The Sweets went shopping for furniture for their new home on Wednesday, and Ossian spent the afternoon seeing patients at his medical practice in the black quarter of the city. But alarmed by reports that the mob would return, he asked his brothers—Henry and Otis—and a group of friends, and some friends of friends, to help defend his home.3
At nightfall on Wednesday, the crowd was back, lining the sidewalks and lots across the streets. Inside, the black men tried to calm themselves with a game of whist and waited for a dinner of fresh ham, greens, and sweet potatoes. Gladys was baking a cake for dessert. Then, as Otis and a friend arrived in a taxi, the first rock hit the house. Ossian opened the door to let his brother in and saw the crowd surge toward the house. Stones rained on the roof and porch. Someone shouted, “The people! The people are coming!” A bedroom window was broken. The men armed themselves and took firing positions throughout the house. Another pane shattered. And, down in the dining room, Ossian heard volleys of gunfire.
Some twenty shots were fired. On the lawns and sidewalks across the avenues, men ducked and women screamed and ran to collect their children. Two of the Sweets’ white neighbors went down, hit by gunshots. One of them, a foreman at an auto plant named Leon Breiner, was smoking his pipe when a bullet hit him in the back. He bled to death before doctors could save him. A dozen Detroit policemen who had been stationed about the corner were stirred into action by the fusillades, and an officer fired at the armed black men on the second floor. Inspector Norton Schuknecht, the burly, double-chinned officer in charge, chuffed up the steps of the Sweet house and, incongruously, rang the doorbell.
“Jesus Christ!” he exploded, when Ossian let him in. “What in hell are you fellows shooting for?”
“Why, they’re ruining my house,” Sweet stammered.4
News of Breiner’s death spread quickly. The crowd swelled into the thousands, black motorists on nearby streets were assaulted, and the police had to deploy an armored car and hundreds of club-wielding officers to keep the house protected. The Sweets and their friends were stripped of their weapons—a shotgun, two rifles, and seven handguns—and pushed from the house, out the back door and across the yard, into a paddy wagon parked in the alley. Only the drawn guns of the police kept the whites at bay.
Ossian and Gladys and nine of their friends and family members were taken to police headquarters and questioned that night. Most tried to obfuscate, but Henry Sweet, twenty-one, the doctor’s brother, told his interrogators how he crouched at the front window with a rifle and, with the stones “pouring down like rain,” fired two shots “to protect myself.” If he had not acted in self-defense, Henry told the authorities, “probably, I would have been dead by now.”
The white prosecutors saw things differently. The blacks had provoked things by moving into a neighborhood where they were not wanted. The crowd on the corner was tiny and tame. The threat “was not sufficiently serious to justify taking a life,” the prosecuting attorney would claim later. “If a man threatens to slap my face, I have no right to kill him.” All eleven black men were charged with assault with intent to commit murder, and with first-degree murder for the death of Leon Breiner. In the parlance of the law, they had maliciously conspired “to shoot to kill without legal justification or excuse.”
THE SWEET BROTHERS, grandsons of slaves, had been raised in the South. Ossian was born in central Florida in 1895, the oldest surviving boy of ten children in a family of hardworking farmers. At the age of thirteen Ossian was sent north, to a Negro college in Ohio. To help pay his tuition, he got summer jobs in Detroit. In 1917, he entered medical school at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and after graduation moved back to Michigan, where he opened his practice, met and married Gladys, and joined Detroit’s professional black elite. He tended the sick and injured at the Negro hospital, opened a pharmacy, and took Gladys to Europe, where he studied advanced medicine in Vienna and Paris.
Otis, a dentist, joined Ossian in Detroit, as did Henry, a college student. They were part of the great migration of African Americans who made their way north in the years around World War I, fleeing the Jim Crow era in the South, manning the factories, and packing the cramped black ghettoes of New York, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities. Almost a million blacks made the journey, one-tenth of the nation’s Negro population.
“The great majority of people came here absolutely broke … you saw families coming here with their old clothes, and a basket and a bundle … just getting here, you know,” the black lawyer Charles Mahoney recalled. “They lived where they could and they worked for what they could get … They had no experience, they had no money, they had no contacts. They were just here … They came because it was better, you know. They came looking for hope.”
Three or four families shared a single apartment. Homes took in so many lodgers that they might as well have been hotels. Stables, garages, and cellars were converted into rented rooms. A growing number of the new arrivals, like the Sweet brothers, were college educated and middle c
lass. They vowed to secure their rights.5
The NAACP was a symbol of this militancy. Since the days of its founding, the organization had grown more professional and aggressive. In 1920 James Weldon Johnson—lawyer, poet, journalist, songwriter, diplomat, and educator—took over as the NAACP’s executive secretary, as its chief operating officer was known. He was the first black man to hold that office. Johnson hired Walter White, a young blond-haired blue-eyed Negro novelist as assistant secretary and sent him and others around the country to catalog incidents of injustice. The results of their investigations were printed in the Crisis, edited by the brilliant Du Bois.
Almost a century after they were written, the NAACP’s accounts of racial barbarity retain the power to sadden and revolt. As awful as is the image of a mob hanging a Negro from a light post, the reality is worse. The victims rarely met their deaths with a quick snap of their necks: they were tortured, mutilated, and burned alive. Often, the blacks lost their ears, fingers, or teeth, which were kept by their killers, or their killers’ children, or sold as souvenirs. Five dollars a tooth. Two bits for a link from the chain.
White was twenty-four when he joined the NAACP. Within months he was in southern Georgia, where a black man named Sidney Johnson killed a white man who had beaten him. A mob seized two random blacks and shot them seven hundred times, then, over a period of time, killed seven more innocent African Americans. Mary Turner, the widow of one of the dead men, threatened to swear out warrants for his killers. She was eight months pregnant, but her affront was not forgiven. The mob hung her upside down from a small oak tree, splashed her with gasoline, and set her on fire. She declined to die and was hauled back up, and her unborn child cut from her womb with “a knife, evidently one such as is used in splitting hogs,” White wrote. “The infant, prematurely born, gave two feeble cries and then its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel. Hundreds of bullets were fired into the body of the woman, now mercifully dead.” Johnson was finally trapped in a cabin and died in a shootout. His corpse was castrated, dragged through town behind a car, tied to a tree, and burned.6
Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned Page 49
