A Religious Orgy in Tennessee (2 page)

To read Mencken is to understand why columnist Walter Lippmann would remark, in the
Saturday Review of Literature
, that “He calls you a swine, and an imbecile, and he increases your will to live,” and yet, “What Mr. Mencken has created is a personal force in American life which has an extraordinarily cleansing and vitalizing effect.” The humorist S.J. Perelman called Mencken “the ultimate firework” and credited him with loosening up journalism from its gray moorings. When Mencken's diary was published in 1989 and raised the ire of many, he was defended in a group letter to the
New York Review of Books
signed by Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut and others, who hailed him as “a tremendous liberating force in American culture.”

In his essays and reporting, Mencken comes off as an unusual fusion of anti-authoritarian and demotic impulses, disdainful of the crowd and group-think. In a piece titled “The Foundations of Quackery,” which appeared in the
Baltimore Evening Sun
two years before the Scopes trial, he remarks “I have often pointed out how politics, under democracy, invariably translates itself from the domain of logical ideas to the domain of mere feelings, usually simple fear.” That conviction—that it was simple fear being played upon, in this instance by the anti-Darwin movement—drove much of his coverage of the Scopes trial, just as it inflected his writing lifelong.

The Scopes trial lasted eight days in courtroom time, eleven days by the calendar, July 10 - 21 in stifling heat. Mencken's reportage covers many of the oddities of the setting and proceedings: the carnival atmosphere that surrounded the courthouse, the tussle over prayers at the opening of each court day, Judge Raulston's decision to disallow expert testimony before the jury (he allowed some to be read into the record). That may have been the stroke that caused Mencken to abandon Dayton on July 18, before the trial ended. In his memoirs, Mencken reported leaving to avoid dereliction of his duties to the
American Mercury
, but his departure meant that he missed Darrow's examination of Bryan on the stand, called there by the defense to serve as an expert witness on the Bible. The parrying between Darrow and Bryan in the two-hour exchange appears in the appendix of this book, the trial transcript perhaps most remarkable for what Bryan tries mightily to avoid saying.

In the end, despite the publicity it generated, what the 3,000 curious outsiders who flocked to Dayton saw was a trial whose cultural repercussions far exceeded its legal import. Rather than managing to hook the large constitutional issues it could have—concerning the validity of the restriction on teaching evolution—it was limited to a finding of whether or not John Scopes had violated the Butler Act. He had, even though the textbook he used, George Hunter's
Civic Biology
, had been approved by the state; it took the jury only nine minutes to decide on a guilty verdict. Scopes was fined $100. On appeal, in 1927 the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned it on a technicality: the judge had determined the penalty rather than the jury, which had the right under the state constitution. Since Scopes was no longer employed by the State of Tennessee, the court remarked, “We see nothing to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case” and recommended to Attorney General Stewart that he drop the matter, which he did, ending Darrow's hopes that the case could be brought to the Supreme Court.

William Jennings Bryan died five days after the end of the trial. The full fury of what Mencken felt is represented in the original obituary essay he wrote, which appeared in the
Baltimore Evening Sun
on July 27 and is reprinted here. The critic Alfred Kazin, in his
On Native Grounds
, said that while Mencken's essay on Bryan was “one of the cruelest things he ever wrote,” it “was probably the most brilliant” as well. For one of the few times in his life, though, Mencken censored himself due to an immediate outcry, and produced a softer, second version for the paper. His rethinking appeared in the
American Mercury
in October, and can be found in the ending of these pages. Even in giving his own prose a purgative scrub, Mencken retains his punch: “If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum,” he wrote of Bryan.

The unresolved issues at the heart of the Scopes trial remained vexing questions for decades. Mississippi and Arkansas went on to pass statutes inspired by the Butler Act, and other states imposed less onerous restrictions on the teaching of evolution.

In
Epperson v Arkansas
in 1968, however, the Supreme Court overruled the Arkansas Supreme court, finding that the language so closely modeled on Butler's (making it unlawful in a state-supported school “to teach the theory or doctrine that mankind ascended or descended from a lower order of animals,” or to adopt or use a textbook that did) “must be stricken because of its conflict with the constitutional prohibition of state laws respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” (Susan Epperson was a high school teacher from Little Rock, contesting the law.) Justice Abe Fortas, who wrote the majority opinion, stated “there can be no doubt that Arkansas has sought to prevent its teachers from discussing the theory of evolution because it is contrary to the belief of some that the Book of Genesis must be the exclusive source of doctrine as to the origin of man.… Plainly, the law is contrary to the mandate of the First, and in violation of the Fourteenth, Amendment to the Constitution.”

Almost two decades later, in 1987, the Supreme Court invalidated a Creationism Act that had been passed in the state of Louisiana. In
Edwards v Aguillard
, the parents of public school children challenged the statute, the state represented by Governor Edwin Edwards. The state law required that if evolution was taught, it must be accompanied by instruction in “creation science.” The act was found in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority, affirmed an appellate court conclusion that “the Act does not serve to protect academic freedom, but has the distinctly different purpose of discrediting evolution by counterbalancing its teaching at every turn with the teaching of creationism.” Further, he noted, “the preeminent purpose of the Louisiana Legislature was clearly to advance the religious viewpoint that a supernatural being created humankind.”

Such legal remedies have interrupted but hardly stopped the flow of news stories that snap us back to visions of the Scopes trial. In August of 1999, the Kansas Board of Education, ignoring the advice of a twenty-seven member advisory board of scientists, voted to adopt new science standards and leave it to local school boards whether or not to teach general Darwinian views, and further to strike knowledge of macroevolution from state assessment tests. Teaching the “Big Bang” theory and reference to the age of the earth were also left to local discretion. Most of the anti-evolution members of the state board were voted out in 2000, and in 2001 the new board reinstated the evolution requirement in the state's science curriculum.

In Pennsylvania, a local school board voted in 2004 to institute a requirement for teachers to read a statement about “intelligent design” prior to teaching evolution in high school biology, which led several parents to file suit. That suit,
Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District
, was decided in December 2005, with U.S. District Judge John Jones finding the board's actions unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and further determining that “intelligent design” is creationism and not science. (School board members who were involved in the decision were also voted out of office, subsequently.)

In 2005, Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, went so far as to post a warning about “increasing challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools,” and the inclusion of non-scientifically based “alternatives” in science courses. He noted that educators, according to news reports, were “quietly being urged to avoid teaching about evolution,” even where controversy was not overt. Alberts issued an appeal to those outside the life sciences, fearing that the trend will spread to the earth and physical sciences as well. Mencken, it should be noted, wrote after Bryan's death that “the fire is still burning on many a far-flung hill, and it may begin to roar again at any moment.”

“Democracy, in the last analysis, is only a sort of dream,” Mencken wrote in his notebooks (collected in the book
Minority Report)
. “It should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus and Heaven. It is always a mistake to think of it as a reality. It never really exists; it is simply a forlorn hope.” Lucky for us, he kept hoping.

From
The Baltimore Evening Sun
, June 15, 1925

It is an old and bitter observation that, in armed conflicts, the peacemaker frequently gets the worst of it. The truth of the fact is being demonstrated anew in the case of the Tennessee pedagogue accused of teaching Evolution. No matter what the issue of that great moral cause, it seems to me very unlikely that either of the principal parties will be greatly shaken. The Evolutionists will go on demonstrating, believing in and teaching the mutability of living forms, and the Ku Klux theologians will continue to whoop for Genesis undefiled. But I look for many casualties and much suffering among the optimistic neutrals who strive to compose the controversy—that is, among the gentlemen who believe fondly that modern science and the ancient Hebrew demonology can be reconciled.

This reconciliation will take place, perhaps, on that bright day when Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler and the Hon. Wayne B. Wheeler meet in a saloon under a Baptist church, and drink
Brüderschaft
in a mixture of Clos Vougeot and Coca-Cola. But not before. For the two parties, it must be manifest, are at the farthermost poles of difference, and leaning out into space. If one of them is right at all, then the other is wrong altogether. There can be no honest compromise between them. Either Genesis embodies a mathematically accurate statement of what took place during the week of June 3, 4004 BC or Genesis is not actually the Word of God. If the former alternative be accepted, then all of modern science is nonsense; if the latter, then evangelical Christianity is nonsense.

This fact must be apparent, I believe, to everyone who has given sober and prayerful thought to the controversy. It should be especially apparent to those who now try to talk it away. I have, I confess, a great suspicion of such persons. When they pretend to be scientists it always turns out on inspection that they are only half-scientists—that no fact, however massive, is yet massive enough to keep them off the mourners' bench. And when they pretend to be Christians they are always full of mental reservations, which is to say, they are full of secret doubts, heresies and hypocrisies.

When I say Christians, of course, I mean Christians of the sort who accept the Bible as their sole guide to the divine mysteries, and are forced, in consequence, to take it exactly as it stands. There are also, of course, persons of the name who subscribed to arier and more sophisticated cults, each with its scheme for ameliorating the disconcerting improbability of certain parts of Holy Writ. Some of these cults get around the difficulty by denying that any sort of belief whatever, save perhaps in a few obvious fundamentals, is necessary to the Christian way of life—that a Christian is properly judged not by what he believes, but by what he does. And others dispose of the matter by setting up an authority competent to “interpret” the Scriptures,
i.e.
, to determine, officially and finally, what they mean or ought to mean when what they say is obscure or incredible.

Of the latter cults the most familiar is the Roman Catholic. It does not reject or neglect the Bible, as the Ku Klux Protestants allege; it simply accepts frankly the obvious fact that the Bible is full of difficulties—or, as the non-believer would say, contradictions and absurdities. To resolve these difficulties it maintains a corps of experts specially gifted and trained, and to their decision, when
reached in due form of canon law, it gives a high authority. The first of such experts, in normal times, is the Pope; when he settles a point of doctrine,
i.e.
, of Biblical interpretation, the faithful are bound to give it full credit. If he is in doubt, then he may summon a Council of the Church,
i.e.
, a parliament of all the chief living professors of the divine intent and meaning, and submit the matter to it. Technically, I believe, this council can only advise him; in practice, he usually follows the view of its majority.

The Anglican, Orthodox Greek and various other churches, including the Presbyterian, follow much the same plan, though with important differences in detail. Its defects are not hard to see. It tends to exalt ecclesiastical authority and to discourage the study of Holy Writ by laymen. But its advantages are just as apparent. For one thing, it puts down amateur theologians, and stills their idiotic controversies. For another thing, it quietly shelves the highly embarrassing questions of the complete and literal accuracy of the Bible. What has not been singled out for necessary belief, and interpreted by authority, is tacitly regarded as not important.

Out of this plan flows the fact that the Catholics and their allies, in the present storm, are making much better
weather of it than the evangelical sects. Their advantage lies in the simple fact that they do not have to decide either for Evolution or against it. Authority has not spoken upon the subject; hence it puts no burden upon conscience, and may be discussed realistically and without prejudice. A certain wariness, of course, is necessary. I say that authority has not spoken; it may, however, speak to-morrow, and so the prudent man remembers his step. But in the meanwhile there is nothing to prevent him examining all the available facts, and even offering arguments in support of them or against them—so long as those arguments are not presented as dogma.