Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (17 page)
Authors: Edward J. Larson
BOOK: Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
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Trial promoters welcomed Neal as the first noted outsider to join the proceedings but cried foul when he suggested transferring the case to Knoxville or Chattanooga, which could provide more dignified facilities for the event and adequate accommodations for visitors. The
Chattanooga News
even tried to instigate a new case in its city in the event that the transfer fell through. Daytonians responded by threatening to boycott Chattanooga merchants and preparing their town for the trial.
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The leading civic association, the Progressive Dayton Club, formed a Scopes Trial Entertainment Committee to arrange suitable trial facilities and visitor accommodations. “A strong following has been mustered for erecting a gigantic tent,” the
Nashville Tennessean
reported. “Others favor placing a roof over the baseball park and there are those who stand solidly behind a plan to fill every inch of the courtroom with seats, place benches on the huge lawn and use loud speakers.” Proponents of the third option stressed that Dayton already had an unusually large courtroom—the second largest in the state—and they ultimately prevailed. Housing the thousands of expected visitors posed a trickier problem because Dayton had only three hotels, with a combined total of two hundred rooms. The committee provided for further accommodations though a card index of rooms in private homes and requisitioning army tents and cots through East Tennessee’s powerful representative in Congress, future Secretary of State Cordell Hull. To clinch the case for Dayton, the district judge, acting with the consent of both prosecution and defense, called a special session of the grand jury for May 25 to indict Scopes before any other town could steal the show.
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Chattanooga News
even tried to instigate a new case in its city in the event that the transfer fell through. Daytonians responded by threatening to boycott Chattanooga merchants and preparing their town for the trial.
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The leading civic association, the Progressive Dayton Club, formed a Scopes Trial Entertainment Committee to arrange suitable trial facilities and visitor accommodations. “A strong following has been mustered for erecting a gigantic tent,” the
Nashville Tennessean
reported. “Others favor placing a roof over the baseball park and there are those who stand solidly behind a plan to fill every inch of the courtroom with seats, place benches on the huge lawn and use loud speakers.” Proponents of the third option stressed that Dayton already had an unusually large courtroom—the second largest in the state—and they ultimately prevailed. Housing the thousands of expected visitors posed a trickier problem because Dayton had only three hotels, with a combined total of two hundred rooms. The committee provided for further accommodations though a card index of rooms in private homes and requisitioning army tents and cots through East Tennessee’s powerful representative in Congress, future Secretary of State Cordell Hull. To clinch the case for Dayton, the district judge, acting with the consent of both prosecution and defense, called a special session of the grand jury for May 25 to indict Scopes before any other town could steal the show.
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Carried away with these developments, trial promoters invited the British evolutionist and writer H. G. Wells to present the case for evolution. “I am sure that in the interest of science Mr. Wells will consent,” Rappleyea told reporters. Of course, Wells, a popular writer and speaker—not a lawyer—summarily dismissed the idea, although he did take up the cause against Bryan and antievolutionism in articles and addresses. The invitation, however, suggested that Daytonians envisioned the upcoming trial more as a public debate around Scopes than as a criminal prosecution against him. Indeed, it had all the trappings of a summer Chautauqua lecture series, then a popular form of education and entertainment in communities throughout America. In mid May, their vision began crystallizing into reality when William Jennings Bryan—a top draw on the Chautauqua circuit—volunteered his services for the prosecution.
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Strictly speaking, it made no more sense for Bryan to appear as an attorney for this case than for Wells to do so. The Commoner had not practiced law for more than thirty years. Traditionally, a Washington or a Lincoln served as the model for American political leaders—a planter or an attorney elected by the people to political office, who then returned to private life after public service. Bryan followed a newer model—one that would become common later in the twentieth century. He adopted a series of political causes, from monetary reform in the 1890S to antievolution legislation in the 1920S, and championed them full time win or lose. Through lecture fees and book contracts, Bryan earned far more money speaking and writing about these causes out of office than he ever earned from his government salary as a member of Congress or the cabinet. He so loved the spotlight and passionately believed in his causes that returning to the practice of law held little attraction for him.
Of course, success as a lecturer and author required a steady stream of popular causes appealing to broad audiences, and Bryan generated them through his distinctive combination of left-wing politics and right-wing religion. Although the mainstream press often scoffed at this antiestablishment mix, he continued to make headlines after such fellow progressives as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Robert La Follette passed from the scene. Commenting on this, an editorial cartoon during the Scopes trial showed a defiant Bryan sitting on the front page for thirty years, with the notation: “You can’t laugh that off!” Others had noted the Commoner’s ability to retain popular influence despite ridicule, but Bryan called this cartoon “the best of its line” and asked the cartoonist for the original.
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Fully cognizant of his role, Bryan did not enter the Rhea County Courthouse as a lawyer prosecuting a case before a small-town jury but as an orator promoting a cause to the entire nation. Daytonians wanted it that way.
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Fully cognizant of his role, Bryan did not enter the Rhea County Courthouse as a lawyer prosecuting a case before a small-town jury but as an orator promoting a cause to the entire nation. Daytonians wanted it that way.
Sensing a prime opportunity to gain publicity for his cause, Bryan jumped at the chance to join the prosecution. By coincidence, the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association was meeting in Tennessee at the time of Scopes’s initial arrest, with Bryan as its featured speaker. As a means to maximize its influence, the WCFA regularly met in conjunction with major church conferences and that year picked the Southern Baptist’s annual assembly in Memphis. Even though the time and place of its meeting had nothing to do with the state’s new antievolution law, the WCFA wasted no time in adopting a resolution commending Tennessee for “prohibiting the teaching of the unscientific, anti-Christian, atheistic, anarchistic, pagan, rationalist evolutionary theory.”
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The Tennessee connection assured that antievolution lawmaking and the pending lawsuit would be major topics of conversation at the meeting—and helped to attract Bryan, a Presbyterian lay leader, to the Baptist-dominated event. He stressed both topics in his address.
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The Tennessee connection assured that antievolution lawmaking and the pending lawsuit would be major topics of conversation at the meeting—and helped to attract Bryan, a Presbyterian lay leader, to the Baptist-dominated event. He stressed both topics in his address.
Editorial cartoon commenting on Bryan’s ability to make headlines and create issues. (Reprinted with permission from the
Columbus Dispatch)
Columbus Dispatch)
Bryan’s address repeated the three main points of his standard argument for antievolution laws: evolution theory lacked scientific proof; teaching it to school students undermined their religious faith and social values; and most important, that the “Bible-believing” majority should control the content of public school instruction. To this he added two new warnings. First, widely publicized ridicule of the Tennessee law was eroding public support of such statutes elsewhere. “People who hold the Bible dear should make themselves heard. Recently a lot of [University of Tennessee] students ridiculed the Legislature of your state for passing a bill to prohibit teaching evolution,” Bryan observed. “I saw large [newspaper] space given the ridicule but small space given to the noble act of Governor Peay in signing the bill.” Second, court challenges posed a further threat. “I notice that a case is on the docket for trial involving the evolution statute of your state. I certainly hope it will be upheld. It ought to be,” he concluded.
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Bryan quickly perceived the pending trial as a vehicle for making himself heard—a “battle royal” in defense of the faith, as he would call it.
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Bryan quickly perceived the pending trial as a vehicle for making himself heard—a “battle royal” in defense of the faith, as he would call it.
After Bryan left the WCFA meeting, leaders of the association who stayed on in Memphis for the Baptist conclave grew increasingly concerned about the upcoming trial. It became readily apparent—at least to those reading Tennessee newspapers—that the ACLU and local civic leaders were staging the event and that no one in Dayton cared much about upholding the law. Indeed, to counter this impression, Sue Hicks issued a press release affirming his commitment to defend the law’s validity, and Rappleyea turned the formal role of prosecutor over to Walter White, who held more conservative religious views. Still, the cards appeared stacked against the law. Furthermore, in response to pleas for tolerance, delegates at the Baptist conclave in Memphis overwhelmingly defeated a motion by fundamentalists to add an antievolution plank to the denomination’s statement on faith. During his address to the WCFA meeting in Memphis, Bryan described “the south as the bulwark of Fundamentalism, where it would take its last stand if brought to bay.” Now even the Southern Baptist Convention rejected a call for laws against teaching evolution. Thrown on the defensive, William Bell Riley and other WCFA leaders sent Bryan a telegram on May 13 asking him to appear on the association’s behalf at the Scopes trial. Local attorneys could not be trusted to defend the statute, and antievolutionists desperately needed some sort of victory.
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Getting wind of the WCFA request a day later, the
Memphis Press
wired the Rhea County prosecutors, “Will you be willing for William Jennings Bryan to aid the state in prosecution of J. T. Scopes.”
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Sensing an opportunity to secure a top star for Dayton’s show, Sue Hicks wired back an affirmative reply and dashed off a letter to Bryan: “We will consider it a great honor to have you with us in the prosecution.”
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Bryan already had publicly accepted the WCFA offer by the time Hicks’s letter reached him nearly a week later at the Presbyterian General Assembly’s annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio, where modernists and moderates within the denomination joined forces to rout the Commoner’s fundamentalist faction. Not only did the assembly reject the fundamentalist candidate for moderator and a resolution against teaching evolution, but Bryan lost his post as vice-moderator. Eager to regain the offensive, Bryan scribbled a note to Hicks on hotel stationery, “I appreciate your invitation [and] shall be pleased to be associated with your forces in the case.” In the margin, he added, “I shall, of course, serve without compensation.”
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In a stroke, the ACLU lost control of what it initially conceived as a narrow constitutional test of the statute. With Bryan on hand, evolution would be on trial at Dayton, and pleas for individual liberty would run headlong into calls for majority rule.
Memphis Press
wired the Rhea County prosecutors, “Will you be willing for William Jennings Bryan to aid the state in prosecution of J. T. Scopes.”
33
Sensing an opportunity to secure a top star for Dayton’s show, Sue Hicks wired back an affirmative reply and dashed off a letter to Bryan: “We will consider it a great honor to have you with us in the prosecution.”
34
Bryan already had publicly accepted the WCFA offer by the time Hicks’s letter reached him nearly a week later at the Presbyterian General Assembly’s annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio, where modernists and moderates within the denomination joined forces to rout the Commoner’s fundamentalist faction. Not only did the assembly reject the fundamentalist candidate for moderator and a resolution against teaching evolution, but Bryan lost his post as vice-moderator. Eager to regain the offensive, Bryan scribbled a note to Hicks on hotel stationery, “I appreciate your invitation [and] shall be pleased to be associated with your forces in the case.” In the margin, he added, “I shall, of course, serve without compensation.”
35
In a stroke, the ACLU lost control of what it initially conceived as a narrow constitutional test of the statute. With Bryan on hand, evolution would be on trial at Dayton, and pleas for individual liberty would run headlong into calls for majority rule.
The ACLU’s plan for a narrow test case promptly suffered a second setback when Clarence Darrow stepped forward to duel Bryan. Darrow first learned of the pending trial while in Richmond, Virginia, to address the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association on his ideas about the lack of individual criminal responsibility. The address followed Darrow’s sensational triumphs in the Leopold-Loeb trial and in the case of a suburban Chicago riding master who murdered his wife. The defendants confessed to the acts in both cases, but Darrow saved them from the death penalty by invoking psychological determinism—quoting from Omar Khayyam in the later case, “We are but the puppets in the games we play.”
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These two trials became the talk of the nation and, at age 68, restored Darrow to prominence as America’s leading defense lawyer. H. L. Mencken covered the Richmond address, and the two discussed whether Darrow should defend Scopes; but the aging attorney had just announced his retirement and let the matter pass. The ACLU would not want his help anyway, Darrow surmised, because his zealous agnosticism might transform the trial from a narrow appeal for academic freedom to a broad assault on religion. Furthermore, ever since the Leopold-Loeb trial, Bryan had used Darrow’s arguments about the psychological impact of the defendants’ study of Nietzsche as a prime example of the need to stop teaching evolution. As the ACLU later assured its many liberal religious supporters, it did not want Darrow anywhere near Dayton.
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These two trials became the talk of the nation and, at age 68, restored Darrow to prominence as America’s leading defense lawyer. H. L. Mencken covered the Richmond address, and the two discussed whether Darrow should defend Scopes; but the aging attorney had just announced his retirement and let the matter pass. The ACLU would not want his help anyway, Darrow surmised, because his zealous agnosticism might transform the trial from a narrow appeal for academic freedom to a broad assault on religion. Furthermore, ever since the Leopold-Loeb trial, Bryan had used Darrow’s arguments about the psychological impact of the defendants’ study of Nietzsche as a prime example of the need to stop teaching evolution. As the ACLU later assured its many liberal religious supporters, it did not want Darrow anywhere near Dayton.
When Bryan jumped in, however, Darrow could no longer restrain himself. “At once I wanted to go,” he later acknowledged. “To me it was perfectly clear that the proceedings bore little semblance to a court case, but I realized that there was no limit to the mischief that might be accomplished unless the country was aroused to the evil at hand.”
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Darrow at that time was in New York consulting with Dudley Field Malone, a swank international divorce lawyer with a passion for radical causes. Malone once served as Bryan’s assistant at the State Department and still harbored resentment against his former boss from those days. Darrow and Malone wired Neal and simultaneously released the contents of their telegram to the press. “We have read the report that Mr. William Jennings Bryan has volunteered to aid the prosecution,” the telegram noted in language clearly intended for public broadcast. “In view of the fact that scientists are so much interested in the pursuit of knowledge that they can not make the money that lecturers and Florida real estate agents command, in case you should need us, we are willing, without fees or expenses, to help the defense of Professor Scopes.”
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Darrow at that time was in New York consulting with Dudley Field Malone, a swank international divorce lawyer with a passion for radical causes. Malone once served as Bryan’s assistant at the State Department and still harbored resentment against his former boss from those days. Darrow and Malone wired Neal and simultaneously released the contents of their telegram to the press. “We have read the report that Mr. William Jennings Bryan has volunteered to aid the prosecution,” the telegram noted in language clearly intended for public broadcast. “In view of the fact that scientists are so much interested in the pursuit of knowledge that they can not make the money that lecturers and Florida real estate agents command, in case you should need us, we are willing, without fees or expenses, to help the defense of Professor Scopes.”
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Adding a sharp edge to the basic argument for individual freedom, Darrow and Malone thus characterized the case as innocent, truth-seeking scientists versus an oppressive, fundamentalist huckster. Darrow was not about to let Bryan set the tone for this debate and the press knew it. Noting that the Commoner’s presence “brings the trial of J. T. Scopes into the limelight of a national event,” Joseph Pulitzer’s St.
Louis Post-Dispatch
commented at the time, “Now for a fitting foeman for Mr. Bryan to speak for evolution—Clarence Darrow, for instance—and we may have a debate that would drag the country out of its doldrums of steadily improving business prospects and corresponding mental lethargy.”
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Louis Post-Dispatch
commented at the time, “Now for a fitting foeman for Mr. Bryan to speak for evolution—Clarence Darrow, for instance—and we may have a debate that would drag the country out of its doldrums of steadily improving business prospects and corresponding mental lethargy.”
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