Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (24 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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His usual approach to a trial was quite different. “Ordinarily, Darrow’s strategy was to dissipate the prejudice aroused by any crime of which the defendant might be accused ... by good humor and light quips,” Hays wrote, noting as an example Darrow’s crack at a trial of a spouse killer, “Well, it was his own wife, wasn’t it?”
86
Here Darrow sought the opposite effect so as to emphasize the threat to freedom and to counter Bryan’s claim that an evolutionary world view offered no basis for morality. It worked. Hicks privately described Darrow’s Progressive Club address as “wonderful.” “Those who want to hear a great burst of oratory did not hear that,” a deeply moved journalist wrote of Darrow’s hour-long Knoxville lecture. “They simply saw a stooped man in baggy dark clothes who talked to them in ordinary conversational manner. They saw a tired but kindly face, shrewd eyes which often evoke laughter, but seldom laugh. And they liked it.”
87
This contrasted starkly with Bryan and his bombastic majoritarian crusade for legal restrictions on academic freedom.
86
Here Darrow sought the opposite effect so as to emphasize the threat to freedom and to counter Bryan’s claim that an evolutionary world view offered no basis for morality. It worked. Hicks privately described Darrow’s Progressive Club address as “wonderful.” “Those who want to hear a great burst of oratory did not hear that,” a deeply moved journalist wrote of Darrow’s hour-long Knoxville lecture. “They simply saw a stooped man in baggy dark clothes who talked to them in ordinary conversational manner. They saw a tired but kindly face, shrewd eyes which often evoke laughter, but seldom laugh. And they liked it.”
87
This contrasted starkly with Bryan and his bombastic majoritarian crusade for legal restrictions on academic freedom.
In what was scheduled as the highlight of his June visit to Tennessee, Darrow almost had the opportunity to present his side of the case at the annual meeting of the state bar association, but its president revoked the invitation when delegates became embroiled in controversy over the pending trial. Supporters of a floor resolution condemning Dayton for using a criminal trial as an “advertising medium” clashed with proponents of one demanding repeal of the antievolution statute, which delegate Robert S. Keebler of Memphis denounced as “half pitiful, half ludicrous” in an hour-long oration that systematically detailed constitutional objections to the law. As the meeting reeled toward chaos, the president ruled the whole topic out of order, struck Keebler’s remarks from the record, and withdrew Darrow’s invitation.
88
The ACLU subsequently printed two thousand copies of Keebler’s “banned” oration, which it distributed in a bulk-mail solicitation for contributions to a special defense fund for the Scopes case. “The public’s interest in the Scopes trial has been greater perhaps than any since the famous Dred Scott decision,” the ACLU announced in launching this fund drive. “We believe that citizens all over the United States will want to have a part in this issue that will shape the future course of education in the country.”
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The ACLU subsequently printed two thousand copies of Keebler’s “banned” oration, which it distributed in a bulk-mail solicitation for contributions to a special defense fund for the Scopes case. “The public’s interest in the Scopes trial has been greater perhaps than any since the famous Dred Scott decision,” the ACLU announced in launching this fund drive. “We believe that citizens all over the United States will want to have a part in this issue that will shape the future course of education in the country.”
89
Two of Darrow’s co-counsels also spoke freely with the press and public during the weeks before trial, reinforcing Darrow’s efforts to communicate the significance of the case. “No more serious invasion of the sacred principle of liberty than the recent act against the teaching of evolution in Tennessee has ever been attempted,” Dudley Field Malone told a Knoxville women’s group during his pretrial visit to the state.
90
About the same time, John Neal warned a Chicago audience, “If the state’s charges against Scopes are sustained you will see other evolution trials and perhaps a movement in congress to control the thought as well as the actions of people.”
91
Following a pretrial visit to Dayton, Darrow’s best-known co-counsel, Bainbridge Colby, issued a statement decrying the “holiday atmosphere surrounding the approaching trial,” adding “the issue is grave in character, embodying principles at the base of our security of happiness and American citizenship.”
92
The press resisted this characterization of events, and persisted in treating the entire episode as a joke. Editorial cartoons inevitably depicted the Great Commoner embroiled with monkeys—and the monkeys usually winning. Syndicated political humorist Will Rogers brushed aside an invitation to Dayton with the comment, “Bryan is due back here in the New York zoo in July.”
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About the same time, John Neal warned a Chicago audience, “If the state’s charges against Scopes are sustained you will see other evolution trials and perhaps a movement in congress to control the thought as well as the actions of people.”
91
Following a pretrial visit to Dayton, Darrow’s best-known co-counsel, Bainbridge Colby, issued a statement decrying the “holiday atmosphere surrounding the approaching trial,” adding “the issue is grave in character, embodying principles at the base of our security of happiness and American citizenship.”
92
The press resisted this characterization of events, and persisted in treating the entire episode as a joke. Editorial cartoons inevitably depicted the Great Commoner embroiled with monkeys—and the monkeys usually winning. Syndicated political humorist Will Rogers brushed aside an invitation to Dayton with the comment, “Bryan is due back here in the New York zoo in July.”
93
Malone assumed responsibility for pressing the defense contention that the theory of evolution did not conflict with the biblical account of creation. Taking this message to Baptist Tennessee during his pretrial visit presented a challenging role for a twice-married Roman Catholic divorce lawyer with Socialist ties, but Malone was a highly effective public speaker and the only professing Christian among the defense lawyers at Dayton. “I daresay that I am just as strong a believer in Christianity ... as Mr. Bryan,” Malone told a Chattanooga luncheon audience. “I find no difficulty in holding with devotion to Christianity and also to evolution. Theology is concerned with the aspiration of men and their faith in a future life. Science is concerned with the process of nature.” These separate spheres need never cross, he added in an evening address to the local Civitan Club: “There should be no more conflict between religion and science than between the love a man gives to his mother and to his wife.”
94
Prosecutors countered this message by attacking the messenger. “I read in today’s Banner Mr. Sue Hicks’ interview wherein he scored Darrow, Malone and other atheists,” a Nashville legal advisor for the prosecution wrote to the Hicks brothers. “This is the line to attack, and you will find it most vulnerable and will strike the responsive chord with the people.”
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Prosecutors countered this message by attacking the messenger. “I read in today’s Banner Mr. Sue Hicks’ interview wherein he scored Darrow, Malone and other atheists,” a Nashville legal advisor for the prosecution wrote to the Hicks brothers. “This is the line to attack, and you will find it most vulnerable and will strike the responsive chord with the people.”
95
Neal, for his part, kept the focus on academic freedom. He claimed to “represent the protest of the intellectuals of the south against the antievolution legislation,” which he blamed on the “arrested [intellectual] development” of the region. “It is not a case of religion against irreligion, not a case of Fundamentalism against Modernism, but a case for the freedom of speech and thought,” Neal told a New York audience.
96
Neal gained widespread attention in early June when he tried to delay the selection of new biology textbooks for Tennessee public schools until after the Scopes trial. His legal threats were ignored by the state textbook commission, which replaced Hunter’s
Civic Biology
with texts that barely mentioned evolution.
96
Neal gained widespread attention in early June when he tried to delay the selection of new biology textbooks for Tennessee public schools until after the Scopes trial. His legal threats were ignored by the state textbook commission, which replaced Hunter’s
Civic Biology
with texts that barely mentioned evolution.
Except for an occasional press release, the usually talkative Colby said little in public about the upcoming trial. He appeared ill at ease in Dayton during his pretrial visit and positively appalled when observing a criminal prosecution in Kingston, Tennessee, on the drive back to Knoxville. An accompanying reporter from the
Chattanooga Times
described it as a murder trial; Scopes recalled it as a rape case. By either account, a young defendant (of whom Scopes said, “At best he was a moron; more likely he was an imbecile”) was being railroaded without proper representation in a courtroom filled with gun-toting spectators. Darrow had to be physically restrained from intervening, while Colby hung back moaning, “Those poor, poor unfortunate people.” Upon his return to New York, he convinced the ACLU to seek an injunction to remove the Scopes case to a “sedate” federal court on the flimsy grounds that the antievolution statute applied to an institution receiving federal funds, namely, the University of Tennessee. After a federal judge abruptly denied this last-minute petition, a ruling even the other defense lawyers viewed as correct, Colby quietly resigned from the case. The
Chattanooga Times
reporter had predicted this development: “When he took one look at the hardy Tennessee mountaineers assembled in the Kingston courtroom, [Colby] departed in haste for the effete east, with the mental reservation that ‘this is no place for me.’ Colby saw at Kingston what he thought he would see at Dayton.”
97
Darrow felt right at home, however, while Malone and the ACLU representative Arthur Garfield Hays approached the pending trial with a spirit of adventure.
Chattanooga Times
described it as a murder trial; Scopes recalled it as a rape case. By either account, a young defendant (of whom Scopes said, “At best he was a moron; more likely he was an imbecile”) was being railroaded without proper representation in a courtroom filled with gun-toting spectators. Darrow had to be physically restrained from intervening, while Colby hung back moaning, “Those poor, poor unfortunate people.” Upon his return to New York, he convinced the ACLU to seek an injunction to remove the Scopes case to a “sedate” federal court on the flimsy grounds that the antievolution statute applied to an institution receiving federal funds, namely, the University of Tennessee. After a federal judge abruptly denied this last-minute petition, a ruling even the other defense lawyers viewed as correct, Colby quietly resigned from the case. The
Chattanooga Times
reporter had predicted this development: “When he took one look at the hardy Tennessee mountaineers assembled in the Kingston courtroom, [Colby] departed in haste for the effete east, with the mental reservation that ‘this is no place for me.’ Colby saw at Kingston what he thought he would see at Dayton.”
97
Darrow felt right at home, however, while Malone and the ACLU representative Arthur Garfield Hays approached the pending trial with a spirit of adventure.
Having survived a second attempt “to rob Dayton of the big show,” as one reporter described it, townspeople eagerly completed preparations for the expected throng.
98
Officials roped off six blocks of the town’s main street as a pedestrian mall, which quickly filled with hucksters and proselytizers. The state sent a mobile chlorination unit to provide an adequate supply of safe drinking water and a sanitary engineer to oversee waste disposal. Chattanooga contributed a fire brigade and six constables. A temporary tourist camp opened on vacant land owned by the coal company. Dayton’s finest hotel, the Aqua, placed cots in its hallways, while the Ladies’ Aid Society prepared to offer one-dollar lunches at a downtown church. Rappleyea fixed up an abandoned eighteen-room house known as the Mansion to accommodate visiting defense experts, leading some townspeople to joke that they used to think that the house was haunted, but now they knew it was. Mencken described it as “an ancient and empty house outside the town limits, now crudely furnished with iron cots, spittoons, playing cards and the other camp equipment of scientists.”
99
The Morgan Springs Hotel, a nearby mountain resort, engaged a jazz orchestra to perform nightly during the trial. The local cinema screened
The She Devil.
98
Officials roped off six blocks of the town’s main street as a pedestrian mall, which quickly filled with hucksters and proselytizers. The state sent a mobile chlorination unit to provide an adequate supply of safe drinking water and a sanitary engineer to oversee waste disposal. Chattanooga contributed a fire brigade and six constables. A temporary tourist camp opened on vacant land owned by the coal company. Dayton’s finest hotel, the Aqua, placed cots in its hallways, while the Ladies’ Aid Society prepared to offer one-dollar lunches at a downtown church. Rappleyea fixed up an abandoned eighteen-room house known as the Mansion to accommodate visiting defense experts, leading some townspeople to joke that they used to think that the house was haunted, but now they knew it was. Mencken described it as “an ancient and empty house outside the town limits, now crudely furnished with iron cots, spittoons, playing cards and the other camp equipment of scientists.”
99
The Morgan Springs Hotel, a nearby mountain resort, engaged a jazz orchestra to perform nightly during the trial. The local cinema screened
The She Devil.
Dayton bustled with activity. Workers erected a speaker’s platform on the courthouse lawn and marked off the county’s first airstrip on a nearby pasture. Robinson’s drugstore stocked up on books by both Bryan and Osborn, and hung out a banner declaring, “Where It Started.” No need to define
It.
Other signs appeared along the main street, including several large banners proclaiming, READ YOUR BIBLE, one of which adorned the courthouse itself. A cavernous storage loft above a downtown hardware store became a makeshift press room for visiting reporters. Western Union stationed twenty-two key operators in town to transmit news reports and strung extra telegraph wires to nearby cities. The telephone company and post office hired additional staff. The Southern Railway added extra passenger service to Dayton and advertised free stopovers in town on all tourist tickets. The Progressive Dayton Club struck a souvenir coin bearing the likeness of a monkey wearing a straw hat.
It.
Other signs appeared along the main street, including several large banners proclaiming, READ YOUR BIBLE, one of which adorned the courthouse itself. A cavernous storage loft above a downtown hardware store became a makeshift press room for visiting reporters. Western Union stationed twenty-two key operators in town to transmit news reports and strung extra telegraph wires to nearby cities. The telephone company and post office hired additional staff. The Southern Railway added extra passenger service to Dayton and advertised free stopovers in town on all tourist tickets. The Progressive Dayton Club struck a souvenir coin bearing the likeness of a monkey wearing a straw hat.
The courtroom received a face-lift for the trial. A fresh coat of cream-colored paint brightened the walls. Five hundred additional spectator seats and a movie camera platform crowded the chamber. Telegraph wires ran into the courtroom for minute-by-minute transmissions of the proceedings, much like those used to broadcast big-league baseball games. The telephone company installed a bank of phones in an adjoining room, and new public toilets went in downstairs. In a move symbolic of the trial itself, the jury box was removed from the center of the chamber to make room for three central microphones, which fed loudspeakers on the courthouse lawn and in four public auditoriums around town. WGN, the radio voice of the
Chicago Tribune,
arranged to transmit the message from the microphones through special telephone lines to Chicago, from where the station broadcast the proceedings live over the airways. “The event will be the first of its kind in the history of radio,” the
Tribune
boasted, “undertaken as a demonstration of the public service of radio in communicating to the masses great news events.” It dismissed concerns about the propriety of such a broadcast. “This is not a criminal trial, as that term is ordinarily understood,” the announcement added. “It is more like the opening of a summer university.... The defendant, Scopes, is already a negligible factor. Nothing serious can happen to him. The contest is entirely over ideas.”
100
Chicago Tribune,
arranged to transmit the message from the microphones through special telephone lines to Chicago, from where the station broadcast the proceedings live over the airways. “The event will be the first of its kind in the history of radio,” the
Tribune
boasted, “undertaken as a demonstration of the public service of radio in communicating to the masses great news events.” It dismissed concerns about the propriety of such a broadcast. “This is not a criminal trial, as that term is ordinarily understood,” the announcement added. “It is more like the opening of a summer university.... The defendant, Scopes, is already a negligible factor. Nothing serious can happen to him. The contest is entirely over ideas.”
100
John Scopes, left, and his initial defenders, John Neal, middle, and George Rappleyea, right, beneath a trial-related poster on the way to a court hearing. (Courtesy of Bryan College Archives)
The composition of the town’s population also changed. Many residents left Dayton during the trial, leasing their homes to visitors. The Bryan family, for example, occupied the modern home of a druggist, F. R. Rogers, who took his family to their cottage in the mountains. Darrow initially stayed in the Mansion but after his wife arrived from Chicago moved with her into the vacated home of a local banker. Malone checked into the Aqua Hotel with a striking woman who registered as Doris Stevens, which created quite a stir until townspeople realized that the woman (who registered under her own last name) was his wife. Hays and Neal spent most of their time at the Mansion, which served as headquarters for the defense team throughout the trial.
A diverse array of journalists, evolutionists, and antievolutionists trailed in behind the attorneys. Approximately two hundred reporters covered the trial for newspapers across America and as far away as London. Press photographers and newsreel camera crews also appeared in abundance. T. T. Martin preached in the streets, as did a Brooklyn rationalist who shouted about the evils of Christianity, and a Detroit man who billed himself as the Champion Bible Demonstrator. A small contingent of black Pentecostalists camped near town, attracting the attention of reporters who apparently thought that speaking in tongues was an indigenous Tennessee religious phenomenon, when in reality the great black church leader Charles Harrison Mason had brought Pentecostalism to the Tennessee African-American community from Los Angeles a decade earlier. “It sounds to the infidel like a series of college yells,” Mencken wrote.
101
For a fee, anyone in Dayton could pose with a live chimpanzee or view fossilized remains of “the missing link.” Most visitors, however, had nothing in particular to say or sell but, as one African-American tourist from Atlanta told a
New York Times
reporter, simply “wanted to see the show.” After surveying the crowd, the reporter concluded, “Whatever the deep significance of the trial, if it has any, there is no doubt that it has attracted some of the world’s champion freaks.”
102
101
For a fee, anyone in Dayton could pose with a live chimpanzee or view fossilized remains of “the missing link.” Most visitors, however, had nothing in particular to say or sell but, as one African-American tourist from Atlanta told a
New York Times
reporter, simply “wanted to see the show.” After surveying the crowd, the reporter concluded, “Whatever the deep significance of the trial, if it has any, there is no doubt that it has attracted some of the world’s champion freaks.”
102
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