5

He Defied the Bible

The State of Tennessee

versus

John Thomas Scopes

Macon County was, in 1925, one of Tennessee’s most rural areas. Without a single mile of railroad track, its almost unbroken stretches of farmland were tilled by a God-fearing, Bible-reading population whose sole contact with the outside world consisted of weekly visits to LaFayette, the tiny county seat. Its representative in the lower house of the state legislature was one John Washington Butler, a combination farmer-school teacher, who worked 120 acres just outside of LaFayette.

Butler had first run for election in 1922 on a platform that stressed the need for a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the public schools of Tennessee. During his first term, he was evidently much too engrossed with finding his way around Nashville to do any legislating, but he assured his constituents that, if they sent him back for a second stint, he would find the time to push an anti-evolution bill. The good people of Macon County believed him and, in November of 1924, he was resoundingly reëlected to the House of Representatives.

When he returned to the capital the following January, he lost no time in living up to his campaign promise. He drafted a statute that would make it unlawful for any public school teacher “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The penalty was a fine ranging between one hundred and five hundred dollars. Butler threw his bill into the legislative hopper, saw that it reached the floor of the House, and then promptly washed his hands of it.

By all odds, the proposed legislation should have died aborning. But with surprisingly strong Baptist support, it carried the lower house on January 28, 1925 by a vote of 71 to 5. The next day, Williams Jennings Bryan, who had been fighting Darwinism up and down rural America, roared into Nashville with his rhetorical “Is the Bible True?” harangue. Every word of it was, he assured his enthusiastic audience, some of whom were so carried away by his oratory that they printed his speech and sent it to each member of the legislature. Six weeks later, the Butler Act skipped handily through the Senate by a vote of 24 to 6. On March 21st, a skeptical Governor Austin Peay signed it into law because he was convinced that it would never be “an active statute.” He couldn’t have been more mistaken.

Up in New York, Roger Baldwin, the director of the struggling American Civil Liberties Union, read a report of the new statute in a Tennessee newspaper. He sent a press release to the Memphis, Chattanooga and Knoxville papers, announcing that the ACLU would gladly finance a test case against the Butler Act if only it could find a Tennessee teacher with enough gumption to violate the law. A month later, a mining engineer named George W. Rappelyea, who managed the Dayton mines of the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company, informed Baldwin that he was in a position to arrange a test case. His offer was promptly accepted.

Rappelyea, who had been raised on New York’s Third Avenue, was, in the words of one observer, “an untidy little person with rather ill-tended teeth.” But, from behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, he looked out at the word with alert, questioning eyes and the ACLU’s challenge was more than he could resist. On May 5th, with Baldwin’s offer of financial support in his pocket, he headed downtown to F. E. Robinson’s drugstore where he promptly became involved with three members of the Dayton bar in an argument over the constitutionality of the Butler Act.

At this fortuitous moment, John Thomas Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of the University of Kentucky, who had been doubling as science teacher and football coach at Dayton’s Central High School, came into Robinson’s for his usual afternoon soda. Here, in this bespectacled, towheaded biologist, whose father was, according to Clarence Darrow, a man who “brought up his family to have their own opinions and to stand by them,” Rappelyea saw his chance to make good on his rash promise to the ACLU. It took the rest of the afternoon to persuade Scopes to go along with the idea but, before the drugstore conclave broke up that evening, Rappelyea was able to telegraph the ACLU that he had found his prospective defendant. The next morning, he received a wire from New York: “We will cooperate Scopes case with financial help, legal advice and publicity.” The State of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes was under way.

Rappelyea didn’t waste any time. As soon as Scopes had consented to be his guinea pig, he headed for the sheriff’s office where he swore out a warrant for the young teacher’s arrest. A deputy was sent to Robinson’s drugstore where, after waiting patiently for Scopes to finish his third soda for the day, he arrested him. On May 10th, three Dayton magistrates decided that there was enough evidence that Scopes had been teaching his students the theory of evolution to hold him for the action of the Rhea County Grand Jury which was scheduled to convene early in August. Bail was set at $1000 and it was promptly posted by the ACLU.

To the merchants of Dayton, the impending trial was a bonanza of no mean proportions. It was sure to fill Main Street with thousands of curiosity seekers who could be counted on to leave many a sawbuck behind them. But more than that, if Dayton was ever to get on the map, this was its main chance. For years it had been going downhill as Chattanooga, its neighbor to the southwest, had grown by leaps and bounds. With a monkey matched against the Bible in the newly painted brick courthouse that sat on a two-acre plot off Market Street, there was no telling what might be in store for the town.

But there was one disturbing cloud on the horizon. The possibilities of a wide-open anti-evolution trial had not been lost on Chattanoogans who began to press the city’s official family to get the jump on Dayton. Judge John T. Raulston, of the Eighteenth Circuit Court, who was slated to preside at the Scopes trial, spiked that one by calling a special session of the grand jury on May 25th. After Rappelyea had been replaced by Walter White, the Rhea County superintendent of schools, as the complaining witness, the thirteen jurors took less than an hour to indict Scopes whose trial was then set for Friday, July 10th. Raulston had saved the day for the Main Street merchants who promptly organized eager committees to scrub and paint the town into a brightness it hadn’t known since Peter Donaldson’s blast furnace had failed in 1913. As one reporter put it, “Dayton was determined to be ready for its fame.”

In Darrow’s opinion, “the little town of Dayton, Tenn., had never been heard of very far away from home.” The seat of Rhea County, it was a prosperous village of some two thousand residents, most of whom were gainfully employed by the four or five factories and mills that punctuated its outskirts. Every Saturday afternoon, the Cumberland Mountain farmers flocked into town to spend the money their wheat, tobacco and strawberry crops had earned for them. They would park their open Model-T Fords on the unpaved side streets and, after a snack at the Hotel Aqua, wander in and out of the shops that filled the brick and wooden buildings on Main and Market Streets. On Sunday morning, almost the entire community could be found in the nine churches whose spires gave Dayton the nearest thing to a skyline it would ever have.

However, the town was far from a hotbed of religious fanatics. Although theology was always a lively subject on its shady street corners, the average Daytonian was not one to lose his head over sacerdotal differences of opinion. But its ministers didn’t share their parishioners’ equanimity on matters spiritual. Convinced, publicly at least, that “the Holy Bible contains and is itself the fountain of true wisdom,” they set about raising funds which they hoped to donate to the prosecution staff to offset the thousand-dollar fees which, rumor had it, the ACLU was dangling before the eager noses of local lawyers. Scopes and any other evolutionist had to be shown that anyone who taught “our children any theory which has as its purpose or tendency the discrediting of our religion” would be promptly punished. If the Reverend L. M. Cartwright and his cohorts couldn’t disprove Darwin’s hypothesis, they could certainly discourage its converts.

When Scopes was first arrested, he had retained John Randolph Neal, a former law professor at the University of Tennessee, who had just opened a law school in Knoxville. Neal, despite his reputation for eccentricity, was astute enough to recognize that he lacked the trial experience that Scopes’ defense demanded. Originally, he was convinced that John W. Davis was the right man to represent the young teacher but, when Clarence Darrow volunteered his services, Neal realized that the man and the case had met. “For the first, the last, and the only time in my life,” Darrow later told a friend, “I volunteered my services in a case. I did this because I really wanted to take part in it.”

What undoubtedly motivated Darrow to take this unprecedented—and, as it turned out, extremely expensive step—was the fact that, on May 13th, William Jennings Bryan, the thrice-defeated Democratic candidate for the Presidency, had announced in Pittsburgh that he would, Tennessee officialdom willing, represent the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association in the case. Bryan, who was at the time a vociferous hawker for Florida real estate, was, in Darrow’s opinion, “the logical man to prosecute the case.” He had sparked the passage of anti-evolution statutes in several Bible Belt states and was the leader of the American fundamentalist movement. Two years earlier, he and Darrow had clashed in the pages of the Chicago Tribune over what the Chicagoan considered the former’s attempts “to shut out the teaching of science from the public schools.” A Dayton booster could hardly have asked for a better cast.

On the evening of July 9th, Darrow arrived in a Dayton that looked as if it were expecting a revival meeting rather than a criminal prosecution. As he drove from the railroad station, he passed under signs that admonished him to “Come to Jesus” and “Prepare to Meet Thy Maker.” The town was bedecked with flags and bunting while sidewalk refreshment stands, with monkey posters pasted on their sides, lined both sides of Main Street. Two tame chimpanzees in a store window were entertaining the curious crowds which had been flocking into town for more than a week. Newspapermen, radio operators, photographers, farmers, telegraphers, preachers, beggars, tourists and unemployed coal miners—they all thronged into Dayton in such hordes that every available bed had been spoken for weeks before the trial was scheduled to get underway. If nothing else, the big show, which H. L. Mencken had already dubbed the Monkey Trial, was sure to have an audience which would be as huge as it was diverse.

Darrow’s first night in Dayton was spent in The Mansion, an abandoned plantation on the outskirts of town that Rappelyea, in a burst of sudden inspiration, had reopened for the occasion. But a man used to the conveniences of Chicago was not one to camp more than twelve hours in a house that lacked running water and the lawyer spent the rest of the trial in the home of one of the local bankers. Bryan, who had arrived two days before, was quartered at a private home from which he sallied forth to address, in quick succession, the Dayton Progressive Club, the Rhea County Board of Education, and the Methodist Episcopal Church South. In between, when he could tear himself away from the prodigious meals his hosts insisted on serving him, he posed for pictures with John Washington Butler, Judge Raulston, and every minister in town.

Friday, the tenth, dawned hot and humid. When Darrow arrived at the courthouse, he passed under a sign that proclaimed in large letters, “Read Your Bible.” He walked up the rather steep stairs that led to the second-floor courtroom where Raulston, who liked to refer to himself as “jist a reg’lar mountin’eer jedge,” was already ensconced behind his newly painted bench. Darrow pushed his way slowly through the perspiring crowd that blocked every aisle in the courtroom. As he sank into the one vacant chair at the defense table, he nodded to Arthur Garfield Hays, Dudley Field Malone and John Randolph Neal, who were there to assist him. Across the way, at the prosecution table, sat Bryan, his son, William, Junior, and five Tennessee lawyers of varying shapes and sizes. After the Reverend Mr. Cartwright had reminded everyone to look to God for “that wisdom to so transact the business of this court in such a way and manner as that Thy name may be honored and glorified among men,” things were off and running.

But first a little repair work was necessary. The special grand jury that had originally indicted Scopes had been assembled so hurriedly that there was some doubt as to its legality. Raulston promptly swore in a new panel and began to read the Butler Act to it. Then he picked up his well-thumbed copy of the Bible and, in a voice that would have delighted Billy Graham, intoned the first twenty-seven sections of Genesis, pausing significantly at those portions which insisted that “God created man in His own image.” Three of Scopes’ students then told the thirteen bumpkins in the jury box that he had taught his classes all about evolution from George William Hunter’s Civic Biology. In less than an hour, the defendant was properly charged and the prosecution was back on the rails.

The first order of business was the selection of the jury. There wasn’t much to choose from since only nineteen talesmen had shown up that morning. Darrow, who prided himself on his painstaking care in picking a panel, didn’t waste much time with the bemused farmers who shuffled into the jury box and waited patiently for the agnostic from Chicago to question them as to their qualifications. By 1:30 p.m. the jury was complete. Of its eleven members who attended church regularly, six were Baptists, four Methodists and one an adherent of the Disciples of Christ. The single backslider said that he perused the Bible from time to time, but not “like I ought to.” At least one—a former miner named Jim Riley—admitted he could not read but, since both sides apparently considered illiteracy an asset, he was promptly waved into the jury box. As the twelfth man—S. S. Wright—took his seat, Raulston, who was obviously in no hurry to rush the trial along, announced that court would adjourn for the weekend.

On Monday, things began in earnest. After A. T. Stewart, the Attorney General for the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit, had read the indictment to the jury, Neal immediately moved to dismiss it on the ground that it violated both the state and federal constitutions. Raulston thought that the legal arguments on these points might be too heady for his back country jury—which had not yet been sworn in—and he excused its members who promptly repaired to the courthouse lawn where they eagerly listened to the proceedings over the loudspeakers. After the lesser lights on both sides of the fence had used up the morning in forensic fireworks, a now coatless Darrow, who had just been dubbed a Tennessee colonel by Raulston, began his attack on the constitutionality of the Butler Act.

After assuring the judge that he would “always remember that this Court is the first one that ever gave me the great title of ‘Colonel,’” he got down to the business at hand. First of all, he turned to face Bryan, who was busy cooling himself with a palm fan, and declared that the Great Commoner was the one “who is responsible for this foolish, mischievous and wicked act.” Then he spent the rest of the afternoon ripping into the anti-evolution law which he classified as “as bold an attempt to destroy learning as was ever made in the Middle Ages.” He had just gotten up a full head of steam when Raulston interrupted him to announce that it was “adjourning time.” This pronouncement didn’t seem to carry much weight with Darrow who swept on to his climax:

Today it is the public-school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your Honor it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until, with flying banners, and beating drums, we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

As he sat down, he noticed for the first time that, in his excitement, he had ripped one of his shirt sleeves.

The next morning—Tuesday, July 14th—he stormed back into the courtroom and shook Raulston to his back teeth by demanding that the practice of opening court with a prayer be abandoned. “I don’t object to the jury or anyone else praying in secret or in private,” he argued, “but I do object to the turning of this courtroom into a meetinghouse in the trial of this case. This case is a conflict between science and religion and no attempt should be made by means of prayer to influence the deliberation and consideration by the jury of the facts in this case.” After Raulston had recovered his equilibrium, he informed Darrow that it had “been my custom since I have been a judge to have prayers in the courtroom when it was convenient, and I know of no reason why I should not follow up this custom, so I will overrule the objection.” As a compromise, he asked New York’s Reverend Charles Francis Potter, who had come to Dayton as a witness for the defense, to lead the next day’s prayer.

Raulston spent the rest of the day working on the opinion which would accompany his decision on the motion to dismiss the indictment. However, at the very moment he was dictating it to his stenographer, the International News Service had informed its subscribers that the defense motion would be denied. The judge, furious at being upstaged, appointed a committee of newspapermen, headed by Richard Beamish of the Philadelphia Inquirer, to investigate the leak. The committee’s report was as simple as it was conclusive. It seemed that William K. Hutchison, an INS reporter, had asked Raulston whether court would be adjourned to the next day after the opinion was read. When the judge replied that it would, Hutchison guessed that the motion had been denied and released a story to that effect. Raulston decided to let the matter drop with a warning to the newsmen not to “ask me any questions without putting me on notice what it is about.”

On Wednesday morning, he confirmed Hutchison’s accurate guesswork and announced that he would not quash the indictment. His reasons were simple—no one was forced to teach in the public schools and, if any teacher’s conscience was troubled by having to hew to the letter of the Butler Act, he could resign and teach in a private institution. Why, if this law wasn’t constitutional, the Holy Writ itself was suspect! He raced through his 6000-word opinion in a little more than an hour, pausing only to wipe the perspiration from his face with a large scarlet handkerchief. When he had finished, the courthouse clock read 11:13 and he promptly adjourned for lunch.

That afternoon, Foreman Jack R. Thompson, a former United States Marshal, led his fellow jurors back into the box and, at long last, they were sworn in. Their first official act was to request, through their foreman, that the judge “take up the matter of some electric fans here.” Unfortunately, the depleted state of the county treasury would not permit such an extravagance, but Raulston graciously consented to “divide my fan,” and it was placed on an oblique with the jury box. He also suggested that a foraging squad be sent out to see what could be done about “borrowing” a fan or two in town.

The first witness for Bryan & Company was Walter White, the county superintendent of schools, who had signed the second complaint against Scopes. He said that the defendant had admitted to him back in May that he had used Hunter’s Civic Biology in class and that it was absolutely impossible to teach from it without presenting Darwin’s theory. As for the Butler Act, Scopes had told White that “the law was unconstitutional anyway.” Yet, despite the threat the text posed to the impressionable minds of Tennessee’s small fry, it had been used in the state’s school system since 1909 and had been officially adopted by the School Book Commission as late as 1924. In fact, it could be purchased in Dayton from the now celebrated drug store of F. E. Robinson who, in addition to his pharmaceutical pursuits, was the president of the county board of education. When Darrow asked the witness if he had ever warned any teacher about the book’s evil contents, or if anyone had ever complained to him about them, the answer to the question was a drawled “No, Sir.”

When White stepped down from glory, he was followed by fourteen-year-old Howard Morgan, the son of Luke Morgan of the Dayton Bank & Trust Company, to whose house Darrow and his wife, Ruby, had fled after one night’s experience with The Mansion’s inactive plumbing. Young Howard was one of Scopes’ students. According to him, the defendant had insisted that “the earth was once a hot molten mass, too hot for plant or animal life to exist upon it; in the sea the earth cooled off; there was a little germ of one-cell organism formed and this organism kept on evolving until it got to be a pretty good-sized animal and then came on to be a land animal, and it kept on evolving, and from this was man, and that man was just another mammal.”

Morgan looked disappointed when Stewart looked over at Darrow and purred, “Your witness, Colonel.” Under the Chicagoan’s gentle questioning, the boy admitted that Scopes had never said that “a cat was the same as a man.” On the contrary, “he said that man had reasoning power; that these animals did not.” After observing that he wasn’t as sure as Scopes about that, Darrow asked the witness whether he could remember anything else of a salacious nature that the defendant had taught him. He could not.

Seventeen-year-old Harry Shelton backed up his classmate’s story. Yes, Scopes had indeed said that man was descended from a lower order of animals. But what he had learned hadn’t had any adverse effect on him. He still went to church regularly, just as he had before he was told that “all life comes from a single cell.” Darrow, who looked quite satisfied with the way things were going, asked Harry, “Did Mr. Scopes teach you that man came from the monkey?” As the boy opened his mouth to answer the question, there was a horrendous shriek from the direction of the courthouse lawn. A chimpanzee, which had been brought from New York as a publicity stunt; had just been struck by a rock propelled by the elastic band in the slingshot of a small boy who quite obviously had little respect for his ancestors. Harry Shelton’s answer to Darrow’s question was never to be recorded by the thoroughly distracted court stenographer.

It had been in F. E. Robinson’s emporium that what Scopes called “just a drugstore discussion that got past control” had started all the hullabaloo. Robinson, who presided over the county school board, had been present while Rappelyea was trying to convince Scopes to throw himself in the path of the anti-evolution law. Yes, he had heard the defendant state that he had been teaching Darwin’s theory to his biology class. In fact, John Thomas had gone even further and said that it was impossible to teach the subject from any of the available books without violating the Butler Act.

But Robinson, whose drugstore sold everything from sassafras to hickory chips, also purveyed Hunter’s Civic Biology. Darrow reminded him that he might be talking himself into a criminal prosecution but, as Stewart informed Raulston, “the law says ‘teach’, not sell.” They were still laughing at that one in the back rows when Robinson proudly admitted that he had a monopoly on the book in Dayton and that copies were supplied to him by the county library in Chattanooga. No, he hadn’t noticed “any signs of moral deterioration in the community” since he’d been selling them.

This was Tennessee’s case against John Thomas Scopes. After some pro forma motions to dismiss the indictment had been denied by the judge, Darrow called his first witness, a bespectacled gentleman who turned to be Dr. Maynard M. Metcalf, a zoologist from John Hopkins University, who described himself as an “evolutionist.” He was the first of a band of scientific witnesses whom Darrow had brought to Dayton with him to show “what evolution is ... and the interpretation of the Bible that prevails with men of intelligence who have studied it.” But none of them were ever to get to say their pieces, because Bryan, in his one speech of the trial, convinced Raulston, who was ready to meet him more than halfway, that “the Bible, the record of the Son of God, the Savior of the World, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified and risen again—that Bible is not going to be driven out of this court by experts who come hundreds of miles to testify that they can reconcile evolution with its ancestor in the jungle, with man made by God in His image and put here for His purpose as part of a divine plan.” Not very legal, perhaps, but quite persuasive.

However, Raulston did consent to the submission of affidavits by Darrow’s experts for the “information of the judge.” When Darrow asked for the rest of the day to prepare these statements, Raulston indicated that he wasn’t inclined to grant the request. “I do not understand,” Darrow barked at him, “why every request of the State and every suggestion of the prosecution should meet with an endless loss of time; and a bare suggestion of anything that is perfectly competent on our part should be immediately overruled.” Raulston, with a bland smile, expressed the hope that “you do not mean to reflect upon the court?”

DARROW: Well, your Honor has the right to hope.

RAULSTON: I have the right to do something else perhaps.

DARROW: All right, all right.

The next morning, Saturday, the 18th, the Chattanooga News prophesized that Raulston would probably cite Darrow for contempt when court reconvened after the weekend.

But the weather was much too hot for further fireworks and on Monday, Darrow, after being cited, mollified the ruffled feelings of his Honor by admitting that “I went further than I should have gone and I want to apologize to the court for it.” Raulston was more than magnanimous. “I accept Colonel Darrow’s apology,” he murmured. “I am sure his remarks were not premeditated. I am sure that if he had time to have thought and deliberated, he would not have spoken those words ... we forgive him and we forget it and we command him to go back home and learn in his heart the words of the Man who said: ‘If you thirst come unto Me and I will give thee life.’” Pyrrhus would have understood.

That afternoon, as the usual crowd of slightly more than one thousand people pushed into the courtroom after the noon recess, a worried bailiff informed Raulston that there was some danger that the building would collapse. The latter decided to transfer the trial to the courthouse lawn where an impromptu platform had been built to accomodate Bryan and the ministers who had been using their free time to put in a word for the Bible and its copyright owner. But, from the defense’s point of view, the courtroom en plein air had one drawback—there was a large sign on the courthouse wall facing the jurors which importuned them to “Read Your Bible Daily.” When Darrow suggested that a companion placard stating “Read Your Evolution” be erected alongside the offending sign, Raulston promptly decided to remove all signs. Sic transit gloria mundi.

After the furor had died down, Arthur Garfield Hays finished reading the statements which had been prepared by the scientists and clergymen Darrow had brought to Dayton, and whose testimony had been excluded by Raulston’s ruling. Seven geologists, anthropologists and zoologists as well as three Protestant ministers and a Jewish rabbi were represented as Hays, in a tired voice, tried his best to educate an increasingly exasperated Raulston. When the defense attorney had finished his readings, he offered into evidence two Bibles and sat down. Darrow whispered something in his ear, and Hays was back on his feet again. “The defense desires to call Mr. Bryan as a witness,” he announced. “We should want to take Mr. Bryan’s testimony for the purposes of our record, even if your Honor thinks it is not admissable in general, so we wish to call him now.”

Despite Bryan’s obvious discomfiture at having to take the stand, there was no escape. He was being called as an expert on the Bible, a status he had assumed before Chautauquas up and down the land, and he simply could not refuse to accept Darrow’s challenge. After gaining a few minutes to collect his thoughts by insisting that the lawyers for the defense be ordered to take the stand when he was finished, Bryan perched himself in the spindle-legged chair that passed for a witness chair. What the New York Times later described as the most amazing court scene in Anglo-Saxon history was about to be launched.

With the observation that he was sure that the witness would tell the truth, Darrow waived having him sworn. Then he got down to cases. He asked Bryan whether he had given considerable study to the Bible, and the old Democrat assured him that he had, “for about fifty years.” With slight exceptions, he was convinced that everything in the Scriptures should be taken literally. “When I read that a big fish swallowed Jonah,” he bellowed, “I believe it, and I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make them both do what he pleases. One miracle is just as easy to believe as another.”

As Darrow led his perspiring adversary through the Bible from Creation to the Battle of Jericho, many of the reporters sprawled on the benches that had been placed under the square’s maple trees remembered that he had asked many of the same questions in the pages of the Chicago Tribune two years earlier. Bryan had refused to answer them then, but he was forced to do so now. When the long day drew to a close, Bryan was a defeated and humiliated man who had left whatever reputation he had brought into Dayton among the empty pop bottles and cracker jack boxes that littered the courthouse lawn. As Will Rogers put it, “He might make Tennessee the side show of America, but he can’t make a street carnival of the whole United States.”

With Bryan committed to defending the literalness of every incredible occurrence in the Bible, Darrow’s task was a comparatively simple one. A man who believed that Joshua made the sun stand still, or that Eve was created out of Adam’s rib, or that a giant flood destroyed all life on earth, was a sitting duck for an experienced and shrewd cross-examiner. As the day wore on, it was quite apparent that Bryan’s answers were destroying him in the eyes of even his friends, and that Darrow had succeeded in turning a rout into what had all the earmarks of a shattering victory.

Bryan’s observation that he was “more interested in the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks” set the tone of the entire interrogation. For example, when Darrow took up the subject of Eve’s temptation, the witness was certain that labor pains had originated with God’s wrath at apple larceny.

Q. And for that reason, every woman born of woman who has to carry on the race, has childbirth pains because Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden?

A. I will believe just what the Bible says. I ask you to put that in the language of the Bible, for I prefer that to your language. Read the Bible and I will answer.

Q. All right, I will do that: “‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman’”—that is referring to the serpent?

A. The serpent.

Q. “‘... and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’ Unto the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.’” That is right, is it?

A. I accept it as it is.

Q. And you believe that came about because Eve tempted Adam to eat the fruit?

A. Just as it says.

As for the serpent, he had to “crawl upon his belly” for his nefarious part in the episode.

Q. Do you think that is why the serpent is compelled to crawl on his belly?

A. I believe that.

Q. Have you any idea how the snake went before that time?

A. No, sir.

Q. Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not?

A. No, sir. I have no way to know.

The laughter that accompanied Darrow’s last question about the earthbound snake marked the beginning of the end. A few minutes earlier Bryan had admitted that the six days of Creation did not amount to “six days of twenty-four hours.” His impression was that “they were periods” but he had no idea as to their length. The defender of the Word, who had refused to question Joshua’s sun-stopping maneuver or Jonah’s sojourn in the alimentary canal of a whale, knew that it took more than a week to build a makeshift barn, and somehow couldn’t swallow a six-day Creation. But as far as the fundamentalists on the courthouse lawn were concerned, he had betrayed them all. When he walked home later that afternoon, only one man accompanied him. The rest of the crowd followed Darrow all the way to the Morgan house.

The next morning dawned cool and rainy, and Raulston ordered the circus back into the courthouse, cracks or not. After expunging Bryan’s testimony, because he felt it could “shed no light upon any issues that will be pending before the higher courts,” he ordered the jury, which had been cooling its collective heels for more than a week just inside loudspeaker range, to get back to work. Darrow said that he thought it would save a great deal of time if the judge would instruct it to bring back a verdict of guilty so that the case could “get to a higher court.” At 11:14 on the morning of Wednesday, July 22nd, Captain Thompson led his colleagues down the stairs to the courthouse lawn where, after some eight minutes of palavar and one ballot, they found Scopes guilty of violating the Butler Act. As to the fine, they were willing to leave that to Raulston, who had told them in advance that he intended to fix it at one hundred dollars, the minimum under the statute.

The judge was as good as his word. He asked Scopes to stand up and informed him that he was indebted to the State of Tennessee in the sum of one hundred singles. When Neal reminded Raulston that he had forgotten to ask the defendant whether he had anything to say before being sentenced, the judge was all apologies. The thin, balding teacher, who had been silent for twelve sweltering days, didn’t take very long to say what he had to say. “Your Honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose the law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom—that is, to teach the truth—as guaranteed in our constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.”

Not to be outdone, his Honor, after imposing the fine again, told Scopes that “it sometimes takes courage to search diligently for a truth that may destroy our preconceived notions and ideas. It sometimes takes courage to declare a truth or stand for an act that is in contravention to the public sentiment. A man who is big enough to search for the truth and find it and declare it in the face of all opposition is a big man.” While Darrow, Hays and Malone were digesting that one, the Baltimore Sun posted the five-hundred-dollar bond required as a condition of appeal and everyone began to congratulate everyone else. After Hays had promised to send the judge a copy of the Origin of Species, Raulston said, “We will adjourn and Brother Jones will pronounce the benediction.” The first stage of the State of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes was over.

For weeks before the trial, Bryan had been busy writing an anti-evolution speech which he looked forward to delivering in the courtroom. But Darrow’s carefully planned capitulation on the trial’s last day had deprived him of his national forum. Such a speech, however, could not remain locked up in the frustrated soul of a veteran Chautauquian who was not in the habit of keeping his thoughts to himself. After trying excerpts out on roadside audiences in Jasper and Winchester, Tennessee, he persuaded the Chattanooga News to publish it. But he was never to see it in print. On Sunday, July 26th, he died of what Darrow, with more candor than good taste, termed “indigestion caused by over-eating.” As for the great oration, Mrs. Bryan released it for general publication two days after her husband’s death. It went largely unnoticed.

Everything else was anti-climatic. A year and a half later, the Tennessee Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of the Butler Act. But its four members reversed Scopes’ conviction because Raulston had violated the state constitution when he, and not the jury, had fixed the fine. Unless the prosecution insisted on bringing Scopes to trial again, the case was cold turkey, and Chief Justice Green did his best to keep it that way. “We see nothing to be gained,” he urged, “by prolonging the life of this bizarre case.” The Attorney General took the rather broad hint Green had dropped, and immediately nolle prossed the indictment.

Although the school board offered to reinstate Scopes, he decided to take advantage of his notoriety and accepted a graduate scholarship. As for the Butler Act, it was never to be enforced again—in Tennessee or anywhere else for that matter. In 1951, a bill proposing its repeal was introduced by, of all people, Rhea County’s representative in the Tennessee Legislature, but it was soundly defeated. Another attempt, ten years later, was voted down, 69 to 17, in the House of Representatives. Today, it still lurks in the statute books, a remembrance of things past. But as far as the “victorious defeat” that clipped its wings was concerned, Darrow never grew tired of saying that “I believed that the cause was worth while, and was always glad that I helped.”