Education: The Great Trial

Scene. In the fastnesses of Tennessee, the quiet of dawn is split asunder by wailing screams from a steam siren. It is the Dayton sawmill, waking up villagers and farmers for miles around. From 5 until 6:30 the blasts continue. The hamlet and the fantastic cross between a circus and a holy war that is in progress there come slowly to life.

Along the main street of the village, where everyone in town sees everyone else within five minutes, peddlers, hucksters, hot-sausage men (they call their wares “hot monkeys” now), pamphleteers, itinerant evangelists, prepare themselves and their goods for another day’s trafficking.

The holder of the barbecue concession on the courthouse lawn builds up his fire and heaves half an ox on the coals. The field secretary of an anti-Evolution society picks his teeth and adds a note or two of his stock harangue, delivered thrice daily: “Shall we be taxed to damn our children?” An evangelist-bookseller looks proudly up at his billboards: HELL AND THE HIGH SCHOOLS, GOD OR GORILLA, BRYAN’S BOOKS FOR SALE HERE.

A preacher from Georgia in a bungalow on wheels drowsily draws on his outlandish costume—alpaca coat, shabby policeman’s trousers and an opera hat— and hopes that the new day may bring him an audience for his weird sermon proving that Negroes are not human beings. The barker for a tent show called The She-Devil clears his throat.

In a forest clearing outside the town, exhausted Holy Rollers snore under the shrubbery after a night’s orgy of insane gesticulation and acrobatics incited by a mouthing, syncopating professional ecstatic. Sid Strunk, the village policeman, ruminates over his breakfast coffee that it is a good thing they have brought reserves from Chattanooga. About 8 o’clock, dusty wagons, gigs, buggies and small automobiles come jogging in along the country roads. In them are gaunt farmers, their wives in gingham and children in overalls, who crowd toward the court house to get seats for the day’s proceedings in the trial of Teacher John Thomas Scopes, alleged violator of the state’s antievolution law, bewildered instrument of Science and Faith which have accidentally chosen Dayton as their battleground and in whose wake has come the usual camp-following of freaks, fakes, mountebanks and parasites of publicity.

Smirking, gabbling, cynical minions of the press throng with the farmers—and that is all of the crowd. For all the publicity she has stirred up, or rather because of it, Dayton has not attracted the visitors she expected—eminent scientists, statesmen, politicians, financiers, society figures.

Events. Such was the scene. Two days before the trial, Lawyer William Jennings Bryan, chief of the prosecution, lumbered off a train from Florida. The populace, Bryan’s to a moron, yowled a welcome. Going to the house he had rented, Bryan took off his coat, wandered the streets in his shirt sleeves, a panoramic smile of blessing upon his perspiring countenance, an impressive pith helmet covering the bald, pink dome of his head.

He wandered to Robinson’s drug store for a strawberry sundae. There sat freckle-faced young Teacher Scopes, in his blue shirt and hand-painted bow tie, grinning with bashful curiosity at passers-by (“like the Prince of Wales,” said one fanciful reporter) and listening to his proud father, Thomas Scopes of Paducah, Ky., exclaim: “John was always an extraordinary boy.” Father Scopes was proceeding to uncomplimentary remarks about Lawyer Bryan when the son interrupted :

“Mr. Bryan, meet my father.”

The two shook hands; Bryan consumed his sundae and departed, exuding benevolence.

A Florida realtor followed Bryan’s motor in another bungalow on wheels, placarded : “Ask us about Tampa ! Ask us ! Ask us!” Countered Mr. Bryan, himself a Miami, Fla., realtor: “You don’t need to ask us about Miami.”

Lawyer Bryan addressed the Dayton Progressive Club at dinner, shrewdly comparing Dayton to Nazareth and Bethlehem, calling the trial a “duel to death,” exhorting men to campaign with him to “put the Bible into the U. S. Constitution.”

Slouching Lawyer Darrow, defense counsel, arrived. Finding shy young Scopes in the crowd, asked Darrow: “Is Bryan here? Is he all right? It would be very painful to me to hear that he had fallen a victim to synthetic sin.” The Courtroom. Lawyers Colby of Manhattan and Godsey of Dayton having withdrawn from the case (the latter cowering before public opinion), there sat with Lawyer Darrow and Teacher Scopes in the courtroom only plump, foppish Lawyer Malone of Manhattan and Judge Neal of Knoxville, Tenn. Fumbling his soiled lavender galluses, slowly masticating a quid of tobacco, Darrow squinted across at Lawyer Bryan, rather voluptuous in a black mohair suit, surrounded by assistant counsel.

By the judge’s bench, a cotton-topped, curly-headed boy of four played about, waiting to draw the names of venire-men for the jury from a box, a duty assigned to a young child by state law. The Judge himself, John T. Raulston of Winchester, Tenn., after opening the court and calling a special sitting of the grand jury to reindict Scopes so that there might be no mistake, sat back in his chair chewing gum, waving to friends among the spectators, occasionally calling for order when growls of prejudice greeted the cross-questioning to which Darrow and Malone were putting the venire-men.

Jury. A jury was sworn — ten farmers, a shipping clerk and a farmer-teacher, none of whom had ever read a book on Evolution or admitted a prejudice for or against it; all of whom, with the exception of one illiterate, had read the Bible.

Trial. Lawyer Bryan, palm leaf fan in hand, collarless, led the prosecution forces into Court shortly before 9 o’clock. A few of the more courageous clung to their coats, but the heat soon overcame their vanity, with the exception of foppish, double-breasted-coated Dudley Field Malone.

“General” Ben McKenzie, local wit and humorist, dressed in a blue seersucker suit, peered down his nose and through his glasses perched thereon and in a high, rasping, querulous voice began the fight. The Court seemed in considerable doubt as to what he was driving at. But when he sneered at the laws in the “great metropolitan City of New York” and in “the great white city of the Northwest,” Lawyer Malone said: “We object. … I do not consider further allusion to the geographical parts of the country as particularly necessary. . . . We are here rightfully as American citizens.”

Judge Raulston interposed: “I want you gentleman from New York, or any other foreign State, to always remember that you are our guests. …” “Your Honor,” objected Mr. Malone, “we (Continued on Page 28)

(Continued from Page 17) want it understood that while we are in this courtroom we are here as lawyers, not as guests.” A long fight then began concerning the differences between the caption of the act under which Scopes was indicted and the act itself. Attorney General Stewart led off for the State. He claimed that the Constitution in no way discriminated against religious beliefs. Lawyer Clarence Darrow dominated the proceedings and aggravated in doing so a small rent in left shirt sleeve into a gigantic tear.

Lawyer Darrow then began his long argument for the defense, basing it on the diversion of the caption of the act from the act itself and on the ambiguity of the indictment. “I am going to argue it [the case] as if it was serious. . . . The Book of Genesis, written when everybody thought the world was flat . . . religious ignorance and bigotry as any that justified the Spanish Inquisition or the hanging of witches in New England. . . . The State of Tennessee has no more right to teach the Bible as the Divine Book than it has the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Confucius, the Buddha or the Essays of Emerson. . . . Who is the Chief Mogul that can tell us what the Bible means ? . . . Nothing was ever heard of all that [Christian divisions] until the Fundamentalists got into Tennessee. . . . Here is one thing I cannot account for, that is the hatred and the venom and feeling of people with very strong religious convictions. . . . Joshua made the sun stand still. The Fundamentalists will make the ages roll back. . . . This is as brazen and bold an attempt to destroy liberty as was ever seen in the Middle Ages. …”

The trial was continued.

Ramifications of the Scopes trial ran all the way from a proposal by residents of Dayton that a Fundamentalist college be founded there with William Jennings Bryan as president, to expressions of astonishment in the Muslam newspapers of Constantinople at “such antiquated ideas.”

In Los Angeles, Calif., U. S. Secretary of the Navy Cuntis D. Wilbur advertised an address before the Bible class which he once taught. He tried to reconcile Evolution and the Bible by dissenting from literal interpretation of the latter and rejecting “God in a vacuum.”

English newspapers made much of the reports from Dayton, generally referring to Mr. Bryan as having “taken personal charge of God” Even the staid Paris Temps ran a few editorials : ‘”It is the hot season and vacation time, and the interest of the newspapers languishes. It is necessary to find something to talk about.”