Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (29 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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The issue of prayer resurfaced when court resumed in the afternoon. The defense again drew attention to the religious issue underlying the case by submitting a petition to the court, signed by Potter and other visiting modernist clerics, asking that “clergymen from other than fundamentalist churches” alternately deliver the opening prayer. Hays then moved that “we have an opportunity to hear prayers by men who think that God has shown His divinity in the wonders of nature, in the book of nature, quite as much as in the book of the revealed word.” Perhaps no single sentence during the entire trial better captured the difference between modernism and fundamentalism.
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Judge Raulston deftly referred the petition to the local pastors’ association and asked that group to choose who should deliver future courtroom prayers. Visiting journalists began to laugh. Local spectators cheered. Hays objected. Everyone thought that this would preclude modernists from the task, but the association picked Potter for the very next day and alternated between fundamentalists and modernists thereafter.
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Judge Raulston deftly referred the petition to the local pastors’ association and asked that group to choose who should deliver future courtroom prayers. Visiting journalists began to laugh. Local spectators cheered. Hays objected. Everyone thought that this would preclude modernists from the task, but the association picked Potter for the very next day and alternated between fundamentalists and modernists thereafter.
Tensions reached a high point that afternoon. Spectators filled every available seat, and several hundred people stood in the aisles and along the walls. County officials worried aloud that the floor might collapse under the weight. Power and water remained out, stopping the electric fans and drinking water. Nothing happened. “For a hour and a half,” the
Commercial Appeal
reported, “the hot, bustling crowd puffed, fanned, smoked and drank red soda pop waiting for the judge.”
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Scopes lit one cigarette after another. A rumor spread that an INS reporter had scooped the judge’s ruling. Raulston finally entered the courtroom at 3:45 and after dealing with the clerics’ petition, addressed the press. “I am now informed that the newspapers in the large cities are now being sold which undertake to state what my opinion is,” he sternly lectured. “Now any person that sent out any such information as that, sent it out without the authority of this court and if I find that they have corruptly secured such information I shall deal with them as the law directs.” The judge adjourned court for the day without issuing his ruling and appointed a committee of five leading journalists to investigate the source of the leak. “Judge Raulston was very angry,” one of the reporters noted, “and ready to take severe measures with any culprit; the newspaper men were split in rival camps and at dagger’s points with one another.”
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Commercial Appeal
reported, “the hot, bustling crowd puffed, fanned, smoked and drank red soda pop waiting for the judge.”
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Scopes lit one cigarette after another. A rumor spread that an INS reporter had scooped the judge’s ruling. Raulston finally entered the courtroom at 3:45 and after dealing with the clerics’ petition, addressed the press. “I am now informed that the newspapers in the large cities are now being sold which undertake to state what my opinion is,” he sternly lectured. “Now any person that sent out any such information as that, sent it out without the authority of this court and if I find that they have corruptly secured such information I shall deal with them as the law directs.” The judge adjourned court for the day without issuing his ruling and appointed a committee of five leading journalists to investigate the source of the leak. “Judge Raulston was very angry,” one of the reporters noted, “and ready to take severe measures with any culprit; the newspaper men were split in rival camps and at dagger’s points with one another.”
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Tempers cooled slowly. Stewart stomped out of the courtroom still angry over the clerics’ petition. “What does he think this is, a political convention?” the chief prosecutor asked reporters. “It’s going to be mighty rough from now on,” Malone warned. In a press interview, Bryan grimly concluded that “this case uncovered a concerted attack upon revealed religion that is being made by a minority made up of atheists, agnostics, and unbelievers.”
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Some of the assembled journalists could not help joking about the scooped story. Fortified with boot-leg liquor, the press committee that evening conducted a mock trial of the young INS correspondent who had written the offending article. Amid howls of laughter, the young reporter identified his source as the judge. Apparently Raulston inadvertently tipped his hand on his way to lunch when, in response to the correspondent’s questions, he agreed that the trial would resume after the ruling, thereby implying that the indictment would stand.
62
Some of the assembled journalists could not help joking about the scooped story. Fortified with boot-leg liquor, the press committee that evening conducted a mock trial of the young INS correspondent who had written the offending article. Amid howls of laughter, the young reporter identified his source as the judge. Apparently Raulston inadvertently tipped his hand on his way to lunch when, in response to the correspondent’s questions, he agreed that the trial would resume after the ruling, thereby implying that the indictment would stand.
The lighter mood carried over into the courtroom on Wednesday and the trial got back on track. After hearing the report from the press committee, Raulston let off the INS correspondent with a stern lecture then read the long-awaited ruling on the motion to quash the indictment. One by one, the judge rejected defense objections to the statute. On the constitutional issue of religious freedom, he opined, “I cannot conceive how the teachers’ rights under this provision of the constitution would be violated by the act in issue.... The relations between the teacher and his employer are purely contractual and if his conscience constrains him to teach the evolution theory, he can find opportunities elsewhere.”
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The court had adopted the prosecution’s position, which accorded with the prevailing currents of constitutional interpretation. “I don’t think anyone was surprised,” Scopes later wrote. “No one of the defense had expected Judge Raulston to rule the Butler Act unconstitutional or otherwise to view favorably the motion to quash.”
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The trial proper would begin after lunch.
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The court had adopted the prosecution’s position, which accorded with the prevailing currents of constitutional interpretation. “I don’t think anyone was surprised,” Scopes later wrote. “No one of the defense had expected Judge Raulston to rule the Butler Act unconstitutional or otherwise to view favorably the motion to quash.”
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The trial proper would begin after lunch.
—CHAPTER SEVEN—
THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY
W
EDNESDAY WAS the hottest day of the trial, or so it seemed to many inside the courthouse. One observer called it “the worst day of all,” and complained of “the crowd filling the court rooms so that a breath of air through the windows was almost impossible.”
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Only the renewed cordiality among participants made it tolerable. When prosecutor Ben McKenzie appeared on the verge of collapsing from the heat again, Malone rushed over to fan him. During the noon recess, two young prosecutors, Wallace Haggard and William Bryan, Jr., went swimming with the defendant in a mountain pond. “The water was cool and clear,” Scopes later recalled. “We temporarily forgot the trial and everything; as a result we were late returning to the courtroom.” When they finally showed up, Scopes could barely squeeze through the packed aisles to the defense table. “Where the hell have you been?” thundered Hays, but no one else appeared to notice the defendant’s absence.
2
EDNESDAY WAS the hottest day of the trial, or so it seemed to many inside the courthouse. One observer called it “the worst day of all,” and complained of “the crowd filling the court rooms so that a breath of air through the windows was almost impossible.”
1
Only the renewed cordiality among participants made it tolerable. When prosecutor Ben McKenzie appeared on the verge of collapsing from the heat again, Malone rushed over to fan him. During the noon recess, two young prosecutors, Wallace Haggard and William Bryan, Jr., went swimming with the defendant in a mountain pond. “The water was cool and clear,” Scopes later recalled. “We temporarily forgot the trial and everything; as a result we were late returning to the courtroom.” When they finally showed up, Scopes could barely squeeze through the packed aisles to the defense table. “Where the hell have you been?” thundered Hays, but no one else appeared to notice the defendant’s absence.
2
Prosecutors had too much trouble locating their own witnesses—schoolboys lost in a sea of adults—to worry about Scopes, and by the time they found them they had lost their chairs to spectators. Ben McKenzie called on the unknown culprits to return the chairs: “We are a necessary evil in the courtroom,” he protested.
When the prosecutors and their witnesses were finally in place, the court recalled the jurors and directed each side to make its opening statement. Stewart earlier predicted that his case would take “about an hour,” and kept to that pace by delivering a two-sentence opening statement.
3
Scopes violated the antievolution law by teaching that “mankind is descended from a lower order of animals,” the prosecutor simply declared. “Therefore, he has taught a theory which denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the Bible.”
4
3
Scopes violated the antievolution law by teaching that “mankind is descended from a lower order of animals,” the prosecutor simply declared. “Therefore, he has taught a theory which denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the Bible.”
4
Defense counsel estimated that their experts, if permitted to testify, would talk for weeks, and accordingly countered with an extended, carefully crafted opening statement. “We will prove that whether this statute be constitutional or unconstitutional the Defendant Scopes did not and could not violate it,” Malone read from a typed script. “We will show by the testimony of men learned in science and theology that there are millions of people who believe in evolution and in the story of creation as set forth in the Bible and who find no conflict between the two. The defense maintains that this is a matter of faith and interpretation, which each individual must determine for himself.” “[S]o that there shall be no mistake,” he noted, “the defense believes that there is a direct conflict between the theory of evolution and the theories of creation as set forth in the Book of Genesis,” but this simply represented the
opinion
of counsel. “While the defense thinks there is a conflict between evolution and the Old Testament, we believe there is no conflict between evolution and Christianity.” Among the defense lawyers, only Malone could have read this line with conviction; it did reflect the beliefs of their modernist Christian expert witnesses, however. Malone suggested succinctly three different views on the relationship between the Bible and evolution: complete accord, direct conflict, and progressive compatibility. Accepting any one viewpoint constituted a matter of personal religious opinion, he asserted. The prosecution simply could not assume, nor could it prove, that teaching the theory of human evolution denied the biblical account of creation.
5
opinion
of counsel. “While the defense thinks there is a conflict between evolution and the Old Testament, we believe there is no conflict between evolution and Christianity.” Among the defense lawyers, only Malone could have read this line with conviction; it did reflect the beliefs of their modernist Christian expert witnesses, however. Malone suggested succinctly three different views on the relationship between the Bible and evolution: complete accord, direct conflict, and progressive compatibility. Accepting any one viewpoint constituted a matter of personal religious opinion, he asserted. The prosecution simply could not assume, nor could it prove, that teaching the theory of human evolution denied the biblical account of creation.
5
Malone directly assailed Bryan. “There might be a conflict between evolution and the peculiar ideas of Christianity which are held by Mr. Bryan as the evangelical leader of the prosecution, but we deny that the evangelical leader of the prosecution is an authorized spokesman for the Christians of the United States,” Malone explained. To emphasize the transitory nature of religious opinion, he quoted from a twenty-year-old article in which Bryan endorsed Thomas Jefferson’s Statute of Religious Freedom in language that seemingly repudiated laws—such as the antievolution statute—that coerced or promoted religious belief. “The defense appeals from the fundamentalist Bryan of today to the modernist Bryan of yesterday,” Malone declared. The repeated references to Bryan finally drew an objection from Stewart, but the Commoner waved him off. “I ask no protection from the court,” Bryan asserted, “and when the proper time comes I shall be able to show the gentlemen that I stand today just as I did, but that this has nothing to do with the case at bar.”
6
After waiting days for their Peerless Leader to speak in court, the local spectators erupted. “They stamped. They whistled, they cheered with their lungs. They applauded with their hands,” one reporter observed. “Bryan had won. His simple eloquence had confounded the sophistry of his enemies.”
7
Watching this demonstration, Mencken observed, “Bryan is no longer thought of as a politician and jobseeker in these Godly regions, but has become converted into a great sacerdotal figure, half man and half archangel—in brief, a sort of fundamentalist pope.”
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6
After waiting days for their Peerless Leader to speak in court, the local spectators erupted. “They stamped. They whistled, they cheered with their lungs. They applauded with their hands,” one reporter observed. “Bryan had won. His simple eloquence had confounded the sophistry of his enemies.”
7
Watching this demonstration, Mencken observed, “Bryan is no longer thought of as a politician and jobseeker in these Godly regions, but has become converted into a great sacerdotal figure, half man and half archangel—in brief, a sort of fundamentalist pope.”
8
After order was restored and Malone finished reading his opening statement, the prosecution expeditiously presented its case. Stewart called four witnesses. Superintendent White led off by testifying that Scopes had admitted teaching about the theory of human evolution from Hunter’s
Civic Biology
when conducting a review session for a high school biology class. Stewart identified offending paragraphs from the textbook, which sounded harmless enough when Darrow read them into the record during cross-examination. Darrow also had White confirm that the state textbook commission had officially adopted the text for use in Tennessee public schools. The only clash occurred when Stewart asked White to identify the King James version of the Bible, and offered it as evidence “of what the act relates to when it says ‘Bible.’ ” Seizing an opportunity to emphasize differences in biblical interpretation, Hays immediately objected on the grounds that dozens of differing versions of the Bible existed. “This is a criminal statute and should be strictly construed. There is nothing in the statute that shows [teachers] should be controlled in their teaching by the King James version,” he declared. In Protestant East Tennessee, however, this version was the Bible—or so Judge Raulston stated in overruling the objection.
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Civic Biology
when conducting a review session for a high school biology class. Stewart identified offending paragraphs from the textbook, which sounded harmless enough when Darrow read them into the record during cross-examination. Darrow also had White confirm that the state textbook commission had officially adopted the text for use in Tennessee public schools. The only clash occurred when Stewart asked White to identify the King James version of the Bible, and offered it as evidence “of what the act relates to when it says ‘Bible.’ ” Seizing an opportunity to emphasize differences in biblical interpretation, Hays immediately objected on the grounds that dozens of differing versions of the Bible existed. “This is a criminal statute and should be strictly construed. There is nothing in the statute that shows [teachers] should be controlled in their teaching by the King James version,” he declared. In Protestant East Tennessee, however, this version was the Bible—or so Judge Raulston stated in overruling the objection.
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Two high school students followed White to the witness stand. The first, Howard Morgan, a wide-eyed freshman from Scopes’s general science course, testified that the defendant once discussed human evolution in class. “Well, did he tell you anything else that was wicked?” Darrow asked on cross-examination. Even Bryan cracked a smile as Morgan answered, “No, not that I remember.”
10
Everyone laughed when the boy, who had twisted his tie under his ear and popped the top button of his shirt, assured Darrow he was not hurt by what he learned from Scopes. A sullen senior named Harry Shelton next confirmed that Scopes conducted a biology review session using Hunter’s textbook. In his cross-examination, Darrow drew out that Shelton had remained a church member despite attending the class. Instruction in human evolution hardly seemed harmful to these students.
10
Everyone laughed when the boy, who had twisted his tie under his ear and popped the top button of his shirt, assured Darrow he was not hurt by what he learned from Scopes. A sullen senior named Harry Shelton next confirmed that Scopes conducted a biology review session using Hunter’s textbook. In his cross-examination, Darrow drew out that Shelton had remained a church member despite attending the class. Instruction in human evolution hardly seemed harmful to these students.
Finally, Frank Robinson took the stand. He testified that Scopes himself admitted that “any teacher in the state who was teaching Hunter’s Biology was violating the law.” On cross-examination, Darrow asked him about this textbook. “You were selling them, were you not?” and “You were a member of the school board?” Spectators began to laugh as they caught Darrow’s drift, and broke out again when he cautioned the witness, as if advising a bootlegger, “You are not bound to answer these questions.” Stewart could only joke back, “The law says teach, not sell.”
11
Darrow was having too much fun at the prosecution’s expense. Stewart decided against calling further witnesses. He simply stated that others were prepared to offer similar testimony and rested the state’s case less than an hour after it began.
11
Darrow was having too much fun at the prosecution’s expense. Stewart decided against calling further witnesses. He simply stated that others were prepared to offer similar testimony and rested the state’s case less than an hour after it began.
With the afternoon drawing to a close, Darrow called the defense’s first witness, the zoologist Maynard M. Metcalf. Stewart interrupted to remind Darrow, “We have a rule in this state that precludes the defendant from taking the stand if he does not take the stand first.” Darrow turned to the judge, “Your honor, every single word that was said against this defendant, everything was true.” Scopes would not testify, Darrow declared.
12
Rather than deny what Scopes had done, the defense would seek to show that his actions did not violate the law—and this required expert testimony about the theory of evolution and the Bible. “So I sat speechless, a ringside observer at my own trial, until the end of the circus,” Scopes later commented. “Darrow realized that I was not a [biology] teacher and he was afraid that if I were put on the stand I would be asked if I actually taught biology,” he added. “Although I knew something of science in general, it would be quite another matter to deal exhaustively with scientific questions on the witness stand.”
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Rather than deny what Scopes had done, the defense would seek to show that his actions did not violate the law—and this required expert testimony about the theory of evolution and the Bible. “So I sat speechless, a ringside observer at my own trial, until the end of the circus,” Scopes later commented. “Darrow realized that I was not a [biology] teacher and he was afraid that if I were put on the stand I would be asked if I actually taught biology,” he added. “Although I knew something of science in general, it would be quite another matter to deal exhaustively with scientific questions on the witness stand.”
13
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