Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (64 page)

“This year it is a misdemeanor for a country school teacher to flout the archaic nonsense of Genesis. Next year it will be a felony. The year after the net will be spread wider,” Mencken warned. “The clowns turn out to be armed, and have begun to shoot.”
¹¹

Mencken met up with Darrow in Richmond, where Darrow was speaking to the American Psychiatric Association, and urged him to head for Dayton. And why not? The drugstore conspirators were displaying their own love of hoopla, choreographing fistfights at town meetings and staging gunplay on Main Street for the benefit of visiting reporters.
John Randolph Neal, a defrocked University of Tennessee law professor, had gone to Dayton, nudged Godsey aside, and declared himself the lead defense counsel. Rappleyea was trying to get former secretary of state
Bainbridge Colby or English novelist
H. G. Wells to serve on the defense.

Darrow saw his chance to outflank the ACLU. He and Malone sent a telegram to Neal (with a press-pleasing dig at Bryan’s Florida land deals) offering their services: “We have read the report that William Jennings Bryan has volunteered to aid the prosecution, and in view of the fact that scientists are so much interested in the pursuit of knowledge that they cannot make the money that lecturers and Florida real estate agents command, in case you should need us, we are willing, without fees or expenses, to help the defense of Professor Scopes in any way.” Neal quickly accepted the offer.
¹²

B
RYAN WAS SURE
he could defeat the man he liked to call the nation’s foremost atheist. Darrow “is an outspoken believer in evolution and has the courage to carry the logic of evolution to its legitimate course,” Bryan wrote a Tennessee associate. “He will furnish us with abundant material.” The faint hearts at the ACLU tended to agree. Scopes had accepted Neal, Darrow, and Malone “before we got our grip on the case and without any consultation,” griped the ACLU’s
Forrest Bailey, in a letter marked “Confidential” to journalist
Walter Lippmann. “We did the very best we could to undo it.” In the holy chuch of liberalism, Darrow and Malone were
irreverent “fakes,” Mencken explained to a friend. “Darrow is hated by all Liberals as a renegade. Malone is simply an Irishman who likes a fight.”

Reporters were pulled aside and reminded of Darrow’s faults. “The report that Mr. Darrow is an atheist … has led to grave shaking of heads,” wrote
Philip Kinsley in the
Tribune
. “The spectacle of Mr. Darrow being questioned by Mr. Bryan before a jury of Tennessee hill men, almost certain to be old fashioned religionists, is not pleasant.” That seemed a silly thought—when did lawyers put each other on the stand? But Darrow felt the need to tell the press: “I am not an atheist. When it comes to the question of knowing whether there is a God, I am ignorant.”

The decision was left to Scopes. The “yokel”—as Mencken called him—showed his mettle at an ACLU parley in New York. “The arguments against Darrow were various: that he was too radical, that he was a headline hunter,” Scopes recalled. Nevertheless, “I wanted Clarence Darrow.” The thing was a circus already. Bryan’s entry had guaranteed that. “We should expect a gouging, roughhouse battle … a real gutter fight,” said Scopes. “Darrow had been in many such situations.” And so Hughes and Wells remained on the sidelines and Colby—aghast at the signs of hellzapoppin’—withdrew on the eve of the trial.

“There shortly will descend upon Dayton, Tenn., the greatest aggregation of assorted cranks, including agnostics, atheists, communists, syndicalists and new-dawners, ever known in a single procession,” the
New York Post
reported. “Greenwich Village is on its way … Men of science are being smothered in the rush of long-haired men and short-haired women, feminists, neurotics, free thinkers and free lovers … The vital issues on trial in Tennessee are being lost in the stampede of professional martyrs and a swarm of practicing egoists.”

The best that the ACLU could do was add Hays, its counsel, to the defense team. It proved to be a fortuitous choice. Hays was bright and combative. He and Darrow had complementary talents, became lasting friends, and would join in the defense of civil rights and liberties in several notable cases to come. Before he left New York, Scopes was feted at a City Club dinner, where Manhattan’s liberals gathered to raise money. Mary went as Darrow’s escort and sent Sara a description of Darrow’s speech. “His position is that only those men, and women, who bring light to man’s darkness are important: the great men of science—Darwin, Pasteur, Pavlov—men of knowledge who dispel superstition, fanaticism, disease,
cruelty, who make the human race more intelligent,” she wrote. The cause of labor, which he had upheld so long, left men as it found them, “jungle creatures fighting for a bone more, a breathing spell more—but not the least bit more intelligent about their bondage, as addicted to their religions and fetishes, their political and social myths, as ever.” At the end of the night Darrow gave her “a little silver—not enough—for taxi fare,” she noted caustically. But she was back for breakfast the next day, and a ride along the Hudson. And Darrow promised to “skin the pants off old Bryan.”
¹³

T
HE
M
ONKEY
T
RIAL
now became the talk of the English-speaking world. Dayton was swept and dusted, and hung with billboards and bunting. (“Read Your Bible” said a sign on the courthouse—no good omen for the defense.) The streets were jammed with flivvers; the sidewalks with gawkers and grifters. Traveling tent shows came to town. Chimpanzees did tricks, and hucksters sold lemonade, an infinite variety of monkey souvenirs—and redemption.

“The sweetheart love of Jesus Christ and Paradise Street is at hand,” one proselytizer promised. “Do you want to be a sweet angel?” He listed the terms of a heavenly contract (“Forty days of prayer,” “Itemize your sins and iniquities”) and guaranteed results (“If you come clean, God will talk back to you in voice”). Even the public privies were decked with religious banners. And from the rich bottomland and the precarious farms of the Cumberland ridges came the Bible-toting folk of the soil in buggies and high-wheeled cars, women in their bonnets and gingham, men in slouched felt hats and overalls—there to swear to the power of the Book, the faith of their fathers, and the unchallengeable, literal authority of Genesis.

There came, as well, the legions of Mammon. Robinson hung a sign (“Where It Started”) outside the drugstore and supervised the distribution of a promotional pamphlet—
Why Dayton of All Places?
—that had been printed to drum up business.
¹⁴
Mencken, who had christened himself a “consulting Man of Vision” for the defense, was unimpressed. “I am leaving for the Hill of the Skull,” he told a friend. “I shall put up at Chattanooga to avoid the hookworm,” he promised. “I hear that 100 bootleggers and 250 head of Chicago whores will be in attendance.”
¹⁵

Summoned by “the sportive gods of news,” as one of them put it,
scores of reporters arrived, with their cheap suits, smart-aleck ways, and illicit whiskey, from the big-city papers of the East, Midwest, and South. Many of them slept on cots (and shared the single outhouse) at Bailey’s hardware store, which they christened the “Press Hall” and filled with the clacks and dings of typewriters. Telegraph wires were strung from the upper floors of the redbrick Rhea County courthouse, and two dozen telegraph operators at the local Western Union office prepared to move 400,000 words a day. Microphones were set about the cavernous, freshly painted courtroom—the second largest in Tennessee, folks noted proudly, and newly scrubbed of tobacco juice—so that the trial could be broadcast by radio: an American first.
¹⁶

There was more at stake, obviously, than Scopes and his eighth-grade biology class. Modernity was on trial. The headline in
Time
magazine promised, “Light vs. Darkness.” And the Dayton prosecutors, thrust into the spotlight, focused on their duties. A regional attorney general,
Thomas Stewart, led the Tennessee team, with Dayton’s own
Wallace Haggard, the Hicks brothers—Sue and Herbert—and the lovable rascal
Ben McKenzie and his son Gordon. Bryan brought his son, William Jr., to the trial as well.

“I congratulate you on getting into it … The advertising this case will bring you will be worth untold money,” the Reverend
Ira Hicks, a minister, wrote his brothers. “You will have no trouble in making the evolutionists who take the stand look like a joke.” Accomplished Red hunters sent the prosecutors dossiers on Darrow, Malone, and the ACLU. “From a friendly suit,” wrote Kinsley, “this case has suddenly changed to a cold, stern fight.”
¹⁷

T
HE KEY TO
that midsummer’s showdown was, from the first, the issue of scientific testimony. The prosecutors always knew what their strongest argument was: the public’s right to run its own schools. A teacher had broken a law. End of story. There was no need, really, to debate Darwinism at all.

“It is the
easiest
case to explain I have ever found,” Bryan wrote to
Sue Hicks. “While I am perfectly willing to go into the question of evolution, I am not sure that it is involved. The
right
of the
people
speaking through the legislature to control the schools which they
create
and
support
is the real issue as I see it.”

Darrow, of course, had grand matters to place before the country—issues of academic liberty, free thought, and scientific inquiry. He hoped, by calling scientists to the stand, to educate the public and alert them to the threat posed by rural zealots with their silly lockstep creed. And the defense was aided by public expectations. The country was looking forward to a spectacular debate on Monkeys and Man, led by the titans Darrow and Bryan. A cut-and-dried case that addressed only the question “Did John Scopes teach the theory of evolution?” would make it look like Bryan and his team had fled the field. So Bryan set out to collect an array of experts of his own. “We can confine the case to the right of the legislature to control the schools and easily win,”
Sue Hicks wrote his brother Reese. “However, we want both legal and moral victory if possible.”

The prosecutors felt cocky because Judge
John Raulston, who would preside at the trial, had been “somewhat indiscreet,” as Hicks put it, when plotting the case with them. But the churchmen whom Bryan solicited were not so confident. They worried about how the Yankee press would describe their faith in virgin births and talking snakes. One by one, Bryan’s experts declined his invitation. And so, as the trial approached, the prosecutors returned to their initial strategy. They spoke no more about moral victories, and went to work on the judge, intent on keeping experts off the stand.

Raulston was a deeply religious man, born in a mountain vale called Fiery Gizzard, down near the Alabama border. He was a lay preacher in the Methodist Church and had taken a few turns speaking at revivals. And he was an ambitious man who knew his constituents and shared their pride and insecurities. “Scientific testimony for either side would be impertinent and incompetent,” Hicks told him. “We have no desire to … allow the defense to turn loose a slush of scientific imagination and guesswork on our people, upon whom … these great lawyers from the north and northwest look with pity and compassion, denominating them a set of ignoramuses.”

“If we can shut out the expert testimony, we will be through in a short time,” Bryan wrote a friend on the eve of the trial. “I have no doubt of our final victory.”
¹⁸

D
ARROW HAD VISITED
Dayton at the end of June to take his turn before the Dayton Progressive Club. “He was somewhat disarmed to find the people, not dogmatic and intolerant, but open minded and of sound judgment,” Haggard told Bryan. Indeed it was so. Aside from the heat, Darrow thought Dayton a lovely little market town and he went to work wooing its residents. “He drawled comfortably and hadn’t any airs,” Scopes remembered. “He gave the impression he might have grown up in Dayton, just an unpolished, casual country lawyer.”

Dayton charmed reporters as well. “The streets are asphalt, the electric lights work indoors and out … the girls are peaches and wear flapper clothes, the young fellows are stylish and collegiate,” wrote
Jack Lait for the Hearst news service. “An airplane … roars over the town and no horses shy and no yokels stare.”

Colby and Malone were in Dayton as well, and it was this trip that “convinced Colby he would be happier elsewhere,” said Scopes. The defendant and his lawyers had visited a courthouse in the mountains so Darrow and Colby could get a feel for local justice. “It was a rape case, and the defendant appeared to be a half-witted young fellow who wasn’t sure what was going on,” Scopes recalled. “His accuser was a young woman who seemed to know too well what was going on … She said she was pregnant and … as a means of escaping an embarrassing situation … had conveniently accused the poor devil of raping her.”

A court-appointed counsel was botching the defense before an audience of gun-toting hillbillies. Colby was “overcome at the poverty, the ignorance and the uncleanliness of the inhabitants.” But Darrow, outraged, muttered, “I am going to defend that boy” and headed toward the bench. Neal and Scopes blocked him, told him that an outsider would only alienate the jury, and muscled him into the car.
¹⁹

Some wondered if Darrow was up to the task. Edgar Lee Masters wrote to Mencken, previewing the showdown. “I fear that you will find that Darrow is not the man to fight Bryan,” Masters wrote. “I have seen Darrow perform over and over again. He must have the stage set, a complaisant judge or a fixed jury to be bold and even there his forte is a speech, such as it is. He fails in cross examination due to his lack of concentration, patience, sequences of plan, pugnacity and will. I have seen Darrow quit cold more than once where he could see that it meant labor to fight, and where the publicity was doubtful, or adverse. In a word he lacks character.”