Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (28 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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Chief prosecutor Tom Stewart during a break in the Scopes trial. (Courtesy of Bryan College Archives)
Stewart kept returning to his main point regarding the statute: “It is an effort on the part of the legislature to control the expenditure of state funds, which it has the right to do.” Individual freedom was not at stake.
“Mr. Scopes might have taken his stand on the street corners and expounded until he became hoarse,” Stewart asserted, “but he cannot go into the public schools... and teach his theory.” Legislators, “who are responsible to their constituents, to the citizens of Tennessee,” should control public education. Like Bryan, Stewart stressed majority rule; unlike Bryan, he never bashed evolution. Lawmakers could exclude any subject from the public school curriculum according to Stewart, and he cited ample legal precedents to support this general assertion.
39
“Many leaving the courtroom were heard to say that the 33-year-old attorney-general, in his clashes with the veterans of the opposing counsel, ‘took pretty good care of himself,”’ one reporter observed .
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“Many leaving the courtroom were heard to say that the 33-year-old attorney-general, in his clashes with the veterans of the opposing counsel, ‘took pretty good care of himself,”’ one reporter observed .
40
By that time, however, most spectators were discussing Darrow’s brilliant rebuttal. “I made a complete and aggressive opening of the case,” Darrow later explained. “I did this for the reason that we never at any stage intended to make any [closing] arguments in the case.” In that upcoming case to the jury, which would follow debate on the pending motion, the prosecution would offer its evidence that Scopes taught about human evolution and the defense would try to introduce expert testimony on science and religion. At that point, the defense planned to waive closing arguments and submit the matter to the jury. Bryan spent weeks preparing his closing arguments for the trial. It would have come at the end of the case, with no chance for a courtroom response. Defense attorneys feared its impact on the jury and the public. “By not making a closing argument on our side we could cut him out,” Darrow explained.
41
Such a trial-ending tactic placed tremendous importance on his beginning plea to quash the indictment. Darrow might not get another chance to state his case in court. Furthermore, by saving his argument on the motion to quash for the rebuttal, and thereby becoming the last speaker on that opening issue, the prosecution could not respond to it. Darrow rose to the occasion.
41
Such a trial-ending tactic placed tremendous importance on his beginning plea to quash the indictment. Darrow might not get another chance to state his case in court. Furthermore, by saving his argument on the motion to quash for the rebuttal, and thereby becoming the last speaker on that opening issue, the prosecution could not respond to it. Darrow rose to the occasion.
“Clarence Darrow,” the
New York Times
proclaimed in its lead story, “bearded the lion of Fundamentalism today, faced William Jennings Bryan and a court room filled with believers of the literal word of the Bible and with a hunch of shoulders and a thumb in his suspenders defied every belief they hold sacred.”
42
As with many powerful speeches, the argument was simple yet delivered with great impact. “We have been informed that the legislature has the right to prescribe the course of study in the public schools. Within reason, they no doubt have, no doubt,” Darrow began. But “the people of Tennessee adopted a constitution, and they made it broad and plain, and said that the people of Tennessee should always enjoy religious freedom in its broadest terms, so I assume that no legislature could fix a course of study which violated that.”
43
He had answered Stewart.
New York Times
proclaimed in its lead story, “bearded the lion of Fundamentalism today, faced William Jennings Bryan and a court room filled with believers of the literal word of the Bible and with a hunch of shoulders and a thumb in his suspenders defied every belief they hold sacred.”
42
As with many powerful speeches, the argument was simple yet delivered with great impact. “We have been informed that the legislature has the right to prescribe the course of study in the public schools. Within reason, they no doubt have, no doubt,” Darrow began. But “the people of Tennessee adopted a constitution, and they made it broad and plain, and said that the people of Tennessee should always enjoy religious freedom in its broadest terms, so I assume that no legislature could fix a course of study which violated that.”
43
He had answered Stewart.
Darrow’s opening introduced his main point. The antievolution statute was illegal because it established a particular religious viewpoint in the public schools. Darrow presented this defense in state constitutional terms because the U.S. Supreme Court had not yet interpreted the Constitution’s establishment clause to limit state laws—but otherwise both state and federal constitutions offered similar protections. He began reading from and commenting on the Tennessee constitution: “‘All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience.’ That takes care even of the despised modernist, who dares to be intelligent.” He resumed reading, “and that ‘no preference shall be given by law to any religious establishment or mode of worship.’ Does it? Could you get any more preference, your honor, by law?” Darrow explained, “Here is the state of Tennessee going along its own business, teaching evolution for years.” He turned toward Bryan. “And along comes somebody who says we have to believe it as I believe it. It is a crime to know more than I know. And they publish a law inhibiting learning.” That law established a religious standard, Darrow charged: “It makes the Bible the yard stick to measure every man’s intellect, to measure every man’s intelligence and to measure every man’s learning.” Bryan “is responsible for this foolish, mischievous and wicked act,” Darrow thundered. “Nothing was heard of all that until the fundamentalists got into Tennessee.”
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Darrow spoke in dead earnest, expressing a liberal skeptic’s view of religion. Hundreds of creeds existed within Christianity alone, he noted, not to mention all the other religions of the world. “The state of Tennessee under an honest and fair interpretation of the constitution has no more right to teach the Bible as the divine book than that the Koran is one, or the book of Mormon, or the book of Confucius, or the Buddha, or the Essays of Emerson,” he snarled. “There is nothing else, your Honor, that has caused the difference of opinion, of bitterness, or hatred, of war, of cruelty, that religion has caused.” Darrow quoted the maxim, “To strangle puppies is good when they grow up into mad dogs,” and suggested that it applied to fundamentalism, which threatened “to kindle religious bigotry and hate” in America. The Bible itself contained differing accounts of creation, Darrow added. “It is not a book on biology, [its writers] knew nothing about it.... They thought the earth was created 4,004 years before the Christian Era. We know better. I doubt if there is a person in Tennessee who does not know better.” Most intelligent Christians accepted the theory of evolution too, he asserted, “and that the God in which they believe did not finish creation on the first day, but that he is still working to make something better and higher still out of human beings.” Bigotry, ignorance, and hatred marked the antievolution crusade according to Darrow, “But your life and my life and the life of every American citizen depends after all upon the tolerance and forbearance of his fellowman.”
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“While he was talking there was absolute silence in the room except for the clicking of telegraph keys,” the
New York Times
reported. “His words fell with crushing force, his satire dropped with sledgehammer effect upon those who heard him.”
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H. L. Mencken added, “You have but a dim notion of it who have only read it. It was not designed for reading but for hearing. The clangorousness of it was as important as the logic. It rose like a wind and ended like a flourish of bugles.”
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Darrow paced as he spoke, tugging on his lavender suspenders. “He would stop and brood a minute, hunching his shoulders almost up to his ears, and then they would drop, his head would shoot forward and his lower lip protrude as he hurled some bitter word at his opponents,” the
New York Times
noted.
48
The
Chicago Tribune,
Darrow’s hometown paper, classed it as “one of the greatest speeches of his career.”
49
It continued for two hours until the judge interrupted at the prescribed time for adjournment. Even then Darrow persisted for another ten minutes. “There was unquestioned greatness both in the passion with which it was uttered and in the calculation of the moment for utterance,” Joseph Wood Krutch wrote in
The Nation,
“and when [Darrow] concluded with the solemn warning that ‘we are marching backwards to the glorious age of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind,’ even Dayton stopped to think.”
50
New York Times
reported. “His words fell with crushing force, his satire dropped with sledgehammer effect upon those who heard him.”
46
H. L. Mencken added, “You have but a dim notion of it who have only read it. It was not designed for reading but for hearing. The clangorousness of it was as important as the logic. It rose like a wind and ended like a flourish of bugles.”
47
Darrow paced as he spoke, tugging on his lavender suspenders. “He would stop and brood a minute, hunching his shoulders almost up to his ears, and then they would drop, his head would shoot forward and his lower lip protrude as he hurled some bitter word at his opponents,” the
New York Times
noted.
48
The
Chicago Tribune,
Darrow’s hometown paper, classed it as “one of the greatest speeches of his career.”
49
It continued for two hours until the judge interrupted at the prescribed time for adjournment. Even then Darrow persisted for another ten minutes. “There was unquestioned greatness both in the passion with which it was uttered and in the calculation of the moment for utterance,” Joseph Wood Krutch wrote in
The Nation,
“and when [Darrow] concluded with the solemn warning that ‘we are marching backwards to the glorious age of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind,’ even Dayton stopped to think.”
50
Telegraphs transmitted 200,000 words from Dayton that day, a record for a single event. Newspapers across the country reprinted Darrow’s speech at length, and many editors echoed his plea for tolerance. Defense attorneys rushed forward to congratulate Darrow. “We looked upon the day’s work and found it good,” Hays later commented, “a ray of light had been flashed in Tennessee.”
51
Ben McKenzie extended effusive compliments, hailing Darrow’s effort as “the greatest speech that I have ever heard on any subject in my life.” Ruby Darrow proudly fussed over her husband’s sleeve, which had split open during one gesture.
51
Ben McKenzie extended effusive compliments, hailing Darrow’s effort as “the greatest speech that I have ever heard on any subject in my life.” Ruby Darrow proudly fussed over her husband’s sleeve, which had split open during one gesture.
Not everyone in the courtroom had the same reaction. Some spectators hissed at the end (Mencken called them “morons”), and one remarked, “They ought to put him out!”
52
Bryan—coatless, collarless, and wet with perspiration—sat silently throughout, trying to cool himself and shoo flies with his palmleaf fan. “Somehow,” Darrow later recalled, “he did not look like a hero. Or even a Commoner. He looked like a commonplace fly-catcher.”
53
The Memphis
Commercial Appeal
captured much of the local sentiment in a front-page editorial cartoon picturing a cold, aloof Darrow huddled atop a black mountain in hell, surrounded by skulls of “annihilation,” the dragon of “agnosticism,” and a bowed prisoner of Satan labeled “spiritual despair.” The caption read, “Darrow’s Paradise!”
54
A day later Mencken reported, “The net effect of Clarence Darrow’s great speech yesterday seems to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan. That is, locally, upon the process against the infidel Scopes, upon the so-called minds of these fundamentalists of upland Tennessee.”
55
Hays agreed: “Personally, I doubt whether at any time the attorneys for the prosecution caught our point on the religion question. Every word, to say nothing of emotions, in court made it clear that there was really no other question.”
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52
Bryan—coatless, collarless, and wet with perspiration—sat silently throughout, trying to cool himself and shoo flies with his palmleaf fan. “Somehow,” Darrow later recalled, “he did not look like a hero. Or even a Commoner. He looked like a commonplace fly-catcher.”
53
The Memphis
Commercial Appeal
captured much of the local sentiment in a front-page editorial cartoon picturing a cold, aloof Darrow huddled atop a black mountain in hell, surrounded by skulls of “annihilation,” the dragon of “agnosticism,” and a bowed prisoner of Satan labeled “spiritual despair.” The caption read, “Darrow’s Paradise!”
54
A day later Mencken reported, “The net effect of Clarence Darrow’s great speech yesterday seems to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan. That is, locally, upon the process against the infidel Scopes, upon the so-called minds of these fundamentalists of upland Tennessee.”
55
Hays agreed: “Personally, I doubt whether at any time the attorneys for the prosecution caught our point on the religion question. Every word, to say nothing of emotions, in court made it clear that there was really no other question.”
56
The court reconvened on time the next morning, but promptly adjourned until afternoon. A powerful storm, which some visiting reporters jokingly attributed to divine displeasure with Darrow’s speech, had disrupted the town’s power and water on Monday night. As a result, Raulston had not finished preparing his ruling on the motion to quash the indictment. He needed a few more hours. In the meantime, the only official business before the court consisted of the opening prayer. To highlight its contention that the case raised a religious question, and thereby to underscore its establishment clause argument, the defense now formally objected to public prayer in the courtroom. “When it is claimed by the state that there is a conflict between science and religion,” Darrow stated, “there should be no... attempt by means of prayer... to influence the deliberations.” Ben McKenzie defended the practice by citing a state supreme court decision that permitted voluntary prayer by jurors. Darrow responded by drawing a modern-day distinction between public and private religion: “I do not object to the jury or anyone else praying in secret or private, but I do object to the turning of this courtroom into a meeting house.”
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Editorial cartoon during the Scopes trial presenting popular view of Darrow’s militant agnosticism. (Copyright © 1925 the
Commercial Appeal,
Memphis, Tennessee. Used with permission)
Commercial Appeal,
Memphis, Tennessee. Used with permission)
Stewart had heard enough. He did not want to lose control of the proceedings. Sensing Darrow’s strategic objective in raising the objection, Stewart promptly denied that any religious question existed in the case. “It is a case involving the fact as to whether or not a schoolteacher has taught a doctrine prohibited by statute,” he asserted, again avoiding any mention of evolution. Stewart also rejected Darrow’s views on the inappropriateness of public prayer, stating that “such an idea extended by the agnostic counsel for the defense is foreign to the thoughts and ideas of the people who do not know anything about infidelity and care less.” Darrow fixed his deep-set eyes directly on the fiery young prosecutor who, according to one reporter, “was trembling with suppressed emotion as he forced out his last words.” The judge tried to defuse the situation, pleading at one point, “Gentlemen, do not turn this into an argument,” but overruled the objection. The prayer was heard.
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