Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (24 page)

The Scopes trial is surrounded by misconceptions, and their exposure provides as good a way as any for recounting the basic story. In the heroic version, John Scopes was persecuted, Darrow rose to Scopes’s defense and smote the antediluvian Bryan, and the antievolution movement then dwindled or ground to at least a temporary halt. All three parts of this story are false.

For the first, we have already noted that Austin Peay and the legislators of Tennessee did not intend to enforce their law. In fact, Bryan himself had lobbied the legislature (unsuccessfully) with advice that the act prescribe no penalty for noncompliance. It was, after all, only a symbolic statement; any teeth in the act might lead to its upset on constitutional grounds. The ACLU advertised in Tennessee papers for a test case. George Rappelyea read their offer in the Chattanooga
Times
and moseyed on down to Robinson’s with his plan. Later, John Scopes remembered: “It was just a drugstore discussion that got past control.” For once, the tale of outside (even Yankee) agitators tells at least a half-truth.

Bryan was vanquished and embarrassed during the trial, but not primarily by Darrow. The trial itself, with its foregone conclusion, was something of a bore. (Scopes
had
violated the law and the defense wanted a quick conviction for an advantageous move to a higher court.) It dragged on in interminable legal wrangling and had only two moments of high drama. The first occurred during a legal argument about the admissibility of expert testimony. The defense had brought to Dayton an impressive array of men prominent both in evolutionary biology and Christian conviction. The prosecution urged that their testimony be excluded. The law plainly forbade the teaching of human evolution, and Scopes just as plainly had violated the law. The potential truth of evolution was not at issue. Judge Raulston agreed with the prosecution, and the assembled experts took to their typewriters instead. With benefit of a weekend recess to hone their statements, the experts produced some formidable documents. They were printed in newspapers throughout the country, and Judge Raulston finally did admit them into the printed record of the trial.

Bryan, who had sat in uncharacteristic silence for several days, used this procedural argument as a springboard for his prepared excoriation of evolution. In a grandiloquent speech clearly directed to his constituents (witnesses remarked that he stood with his back to the judge), Bryan virtually denied that humans were mammals and argued that the case of Messrs. Leopold and Loeb amply demonstrated that too much learning is a dangerous thing. The defense’s rebuttal provided Bryan’s first humiliation; for in this rural land, before the advent of television, no art commanded more respect than speechifying. And Bryan was just plain outspoken, outgestured, and outshouted—not by Darrow, but by another defense attorney, Dudley Field Malone, a prominent New York divorce lawyer and former subordinate to Bryan in the State Department (where Bryan had been secretary under Woodrow Wilson). H. L. Mencken wrote:

Nonetheless, Judge Raulston ruled against the defense and excluded expert testimony the next morning. It was Friday and all seemed over, including the shouting. Scopes would be convicted summarily on Monday morning; he had violated the law and Raulston’s narrow construction of the case had excluded all other issues. Virtually all the journalists, including H. L. Mencken, left town to avoid both the lull of a weekend recess and the expected anticlimax to follow. Thus, when Darrow induced Bryan to take the stand as an expert witness on the Bible, he spoke to a depleted local crowd and a skeleton crew of journalists. The reconstructions of
Inherit the Wind
and other accounts dramatize what was only an afterthought.

It is not even clear why Raulston allowed Bryan to appear (since he had excluded experts of opposite persuasion). The other prosecuting attorneys tried to dissuade Bryan, and Raulston finally expunged the entire exchange from the record. Bryan viewed the occasion as a desperate attempt to recover from Malone’s drubbing, but Darrow exposed him as a pompous fool. Still, the most famous moment of the exchange—when Bryan deserted strict fundamentalist tenets by admitting that the days of Genesis might have lasted far longer than twenty-four hours—was not, as legend has it, a reluctant admission drawn forth by Darrow’s ruthless logic. Bryan offered this statement freely, as an initial response to a series of questions. He did not seem to appreciate that local fundamentalists would regard it as a betrayal, and the surrounding world as a fatal inconsistency.

Scope’s conviction was eventually quashed on a technicality. Judge Raulston had set the fine of $100 himself, but Tennessee law required that all fines greater than $50 be recommended by the jury. With Bryan humiliated and the conviction quashed, the legend of victory for the defense arose, thus completing the heroic version. But the Scopes trial was a defeat (or a victory so Pyrrhic that it scarcely deserves the name) for several reasons. First, Bryan recouped by involuntarily taking the only option left for an immediate restoration of prestige: he died in Dayton a week after the trial ended. Ted Mercer’s Bryan College, a thriving fundamentalist institution in Dayton, is his local legacy. Second, the quashing of Scopes’s conviction was a bitter pill for the defense. Suddenly, there was no case left to appeal. All that effort down the tubes of a judge’s $50 error.

The Butler Act remained on the books until its repeal in 1967. It was not enforced, but who can tell how many teachers muted or suppressed their views and how many children never learned one of the most exciting and expansive ideas ever developed by scientists. In 1973, a “Genesis Bill” passed the senate of Tennessee, 69 to 16. It legislated equal time for evolution and creation and required a disclaimer in all texts that any stated idea about “the origin and creation of man and his world…is not represented to be scientific fact.” The Bible, however, was declared a reference work, not a text, and therefore exempt from the requirement for a printed disclaimer. This bill was declared unconstitutional a few years later.

Third, and sadly, any hope that the issues of Scopes’s trial had been banished to the realm of nostalgic Americana have been swept aside by our current creationist resurgence—the climate that inspired my own detour across the Tennessee River.

Late in his life, I came to know Kirtley Mather, emeritus professor of geology at Harvard, pillar of the Baptist church, lonely defender of academic freedom during the worst days of McCarthyism, and perhaps the finest man I have ever known. Kirtley was also a defense witness in Dayton. Each year, from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s, Kirtley gave a lecture to my class recalling his experiences at Dayton. It seemed a wonderful echo of times gone by, for Kirtley, in his late eighties, could still weave circles around the finest orators at Harvard. The lecture didn’t change much from year to year. I viewed it first as a charming evocation, later as mildly related to current affairs, finally as a vital statement of pressing realities. This year, I will dust off the videotape and show it to my class as a disquisition on immediate dangers.

In 1965, John Scopes permitted himself this hope in retrospect:

(Scopes, by the way, later went to the University of Chicago and became a geologist. He lived quietly in Shreveport, Louisiana, for most of his life, working, as do so many geologists, for the petroleum industry. This splendid man of quiet integrity refused to capitalize on his transient and accidental fame in any way. His silence betokened no crisis of confidence or any departure from the principles that led to his momentary renown. He simply chose to make his own way on his own merits.)

Today, Jerry Falwell has donned Bryan’s mantle, and Scopes’s hopes for a “new era” have been thwarted. Of course, we will not replay Scopes’s drama in exactly the same way; we have advanced somewhere in fifty-six years. Evolution is now too strong to exclude entirely, and current proposals for legislation mandate “equal time” for evolution and for old-time religion masquerading under the self-contradictory title of “scientific creationism.” But the similarities between 1925 and 1981 are more disconcerting than the differences are comforting.

As in 1925, creationists are not battling for religion. They have been disowned by leading churchmen of all persuasions, for they debase religion even more than they misconstrue science. They are a motley collection to be sure, but their core of practical support lies with the evangelical right, and creationism is a mere stalking horse or subsidiary issue in a political program that would ban abortion, erase the political and social gains of women by reducing the vital concept of the family to an outmoded paternalism, and reinstitute all the jingoism and distrust of learning that prepares a nation for demagoguery.

As in 1925, they use the same methods of willful misquotation to impart a “scientific” patina to creationism. I am now a major victim of these efforts because my views on rapid evolutionary bursts followed by long periods of stasis can be distorted to apparent support for creation by fiat and unchanging persistence of immutable types (see last essay). I was therefore amused (or soothed) to read that, in 1925, Bryan and company were using the same strategy to exploit the forthright address that William Bateson had delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1922. Bateson had expressed his confidence in the fact of evolution, but had honestly admitted that, despite reigning pomposity and textbook pap, we knew rather little about the mechanisms of evolutionary change. Scopes’s prosecutors had cited Bateson as “proof” that scientists had admitted the tenuousness of evolution itself. In his written affidavit to Judge Raulston, W. C. Curtis, a zoologist from the University of Missouri, submitted a letter from Bateson:

Curtis also submitted a letter from Bryan’s old boss Woodrow Wilson: “Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education, I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.” Ronald Reagan, however, raised them on the stump before a fundamentalist crowd in Dallas.

I learned something in Dayton, or rather, remembered something I should never have forgotten, while sipping that five-cent Coke around the original table in Robinson’s Drug Store. The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the “liberal” rhetoric of “equal time.” But mistake it not. Creationists are trying to impose a specific religious view by legislative fiat upon teachers who reject it both by conscience and training. For all their talk about weighing both sides (a mere question of political expediency), they would also substitute biblical authority for free scientific inquiry as a source of empirical knowledge.

All the commentators at Dayton, including the caustic H. L. Mencken himself, noted that the local people, although secure in their creationist beliefs, showed no intolerance or even discourtesy to the opposition. They feted Bryan when he arrived in town, and they provided a spread of equal size for Darrow. They applauded Malone on the merits of his speech. Mencken wrote:

Dayton has persevered in its geniality. I encountered warm disagreement with my evolutionary views, but I sensed no disrespect for my opinions and no inclination to demote me as a person because I disagreed with a favored belief. Geniality of this sort is widespread but, alas, so fragile. A few seeds of ugliness and intolerance can generate the cover for an entire field. We have nothing to fear from the vast majority of fundamentalists who, like many citizens of Dayton, live by a doctrine that is legitimately indigenous to their area. Rather, we must combat the few yahoos who exploit the fruits of poor education for ready cash and larger political ends.

Bryan was easy prey for ridicule, since he was such a fool in his political dotage. Mencken wrote in his sharpest prose: