Download Transcript: Text

We've got to the end of the Scopes Trial now. Scopes has been found guilty of violating the Butler Act by teaching evolution. Clarence Darrow's questioning of William Jennings Bryan made for a remarkable spectacle, but was ultimately a strange tangent that was never going to make any impact on the outcome of the case.

The way the Trial’s been talked about in the subsequent decades, it seems like Darrow has been declared the unambiguous winner of the debate. But if Bryan felt like he’d experienced a career-defining humiliation, he wasn't showing it. After all, he'd been in politics for nearly 40 years. He'd lost three Presidential Elections. He had plenty of experience losing and bouncing back.

No, he was straight back on the public speaking circuit, making the best of it - after all, technically he actually had won the case. He'd secured the first ever conviction under the law that he'd spent the last couple of years campaigning for. And he was hardly going to let a smartarse big city Agnostic get in the way of that.

In the trial, the defence had successfully thrown in the towel early enough to prevent Bryan from giving a lengthy closing address to the court. However, he had, of course, prepared one, and he was hardly going to let it go to waste, so he trialled it on the people of Dayton.

He laid out how the people of the state had a right to decide what their children were taught in public schools paid for with their money, and if they wanted to protect their children from evolutionist propaganda, that was their right. He defended his movement from accusations of being against science, too.

“Christianity welcomes truth from whatever source it comes, and is not afraid that any real truth from any source can interfere with the divine truth that comes by inspiration from God Himself.”

But this “real truth” definitely did not include Evolution.

“Evolution is not truth; it is merely an hypothesis - it is millions of guesses strung together.”

And he described again, like he had earlier in his fundamentalist career, the problems of the theory of evolution - how there was no adequate evidence for evolution, and nobody could explain how it happened - but this was relatively brief and vague. The bulk of the speech dealt with the religious and moral hazards of the theory of evolution. He talked about how it risks undermining religious faith - citing, as in earlier speeches, Charles Darwin himself as an example, and giving astonishingly high figures for the numbers of Scientists who don’t believe in God.

He expounded on the corrupting influence of Atheist philosophy, in particular the role of Nietzsche’s philosophy in inspiring Leopold and Loeb, the notorious child murderers who Clarence Darrow had defended. He quoted Darrow’s closing statements, like he had during the trial.

“I do not know what remote ancestor may have sent down the seed that corrupted him, and I do not know through how many ancestors it may have passed until it reached Dickey Loeb. All I know is, it is true, and there is not a biologist in the world who will not say I am right.”

The point being that the sort of biological determinism advocated by Darrow undermined the very basis of morality. If your actions are determined in advance by inheritance, then how can you be morally responsible for your actions.

“Evolutionists say that back in the twilight of life a beast, name and nature unknown, planted a murderous seed, and that the impulse that originated in that seed throbs forever in the blood of the brute's descendants, inspiring killings innumerable, for which the murderers are not responsible because coerced by a fate fixed by the laws of heredity!”

And he talked about how all this investigation of scientific minutiae by evolutionists is distracting us from what’s really important:

“Christians desire that their children shall be taught all the sciences, but they do not want them to lose sight of the Rock of Ages while they study the age of rocks; neither do they desire them to become so absorbed in measuring the distance between the stars that they will forget Him who holds the stars in His Hand.”

Meanwhile, Scopes had been receiving countless letters with congratulations in all sorts of languages, attempts to save his soul by persuading him to convert to every Christian denomination you can think of, and even apparently, from some of his more enthusiastic admirers, marriage proposals.

He got offers, too, from promoters looking to capitalise on the Scopes brand, including an offer of $50,000 to do lectures on evolution (despite the fact that he wasn’t actually particularly knowledgeable about it). But he turned them all down. He wanted to move on to a proper career now. He didn’t want to be Monkey Trial Guy for the rest of his life. Bryan and Darrow were both attention-seekers, but Scopes wasn’t. He wanted to become anonymous again.

But anonymity was always going to be difficult now, and the letters kept coming. They filled an entire room and he had to start piling them up on the porch as the postman kept bringing washtubs full of them. At one point Scopes and two friends made a bonfire with them, and occasionally they’d rake one out, open it, read it out loud, and then return it to the fan mail inferno.

All this time, Bryan was touring Tennessee with his undelivered courtroom speech, speaking from the rear platform of a train car to cheering crowds wherever he stopped, laying out his plan for continuing his campaign against the Godless Clarence Darrows of the world and their dangerous Evolutionist heresies that sought to undermine the foundations of decent, civilised society.

”Never had Christian and crusading zeal of the old warrior of the ancient faith burned more fiercely”, is how the New York Times described his tour of Tennessee.

Towards the end of his speech, he returned to his warnings against the dangers of applying science without the moral guidance of religion.

“Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.”

“In war, science has proven itself an evil genius: it has made war more terrible than it ever was before.”

”Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide;”

“If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene.”

And his conclusion, intended to have been directly addressed to the jury, brought home the importance, as he saw it, of upholding the Butler Act:

“If the law is nullified, there will be rejoice wherever God is repudiated, the saviour scoffed at and the Bible ridiculed. Every unbeliever of every kind and degree will be happy. If, on the other hand, the law is upheld and the religion of the school children protected, millions of Christians will call you blessed and, with hearts full of gratitude to God, will sing again that grand old song of triumphs:

“Faith of our fathers, living still, in spite of dungeon, fire and sword;
O how our hearts beat high with joy, When’er we hear that glorious word.
Faith of our fathers, Holy Faith, we will be true to thee till death!””

He was back in Dayton on Sunday, to lead a prayer in the service at the Methodist Church. According to the New York Times,

“His, prayer, it was said, was the most beautiful and most affecting ever delivered in the church.”

He ate lunch, and went to his room. He called Sue Hicks, one of the Scopes Trial prosecutors, and they talked about an upcoming print run of his undelivered speech from the trial. At 2PM, he told his wife’s housekeeper. “I think I’m going to get a good sleep.”

At 4PM, on Sunday, July 26, 1925, 5 days after Scopes had been convicted of violating the Butler Act, William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner, was found dead.

The people of the Appalachian foothills of Eastern Tennessee poured into Dayton once more. Farmers from the hills and labourers and shopkeepers from the towns in the valleys, in their best black funeral suits, come to witness their hero as he lay in the house where he had departed for the bosom of Abraham. Two local pastors, a Baptist and a Methodist, led the crowd in prayer on the lawn outside, in honour of a man who they said “went to an untimely death a martyr to the cause of the living God.”

And then it was finally time for him to leave the town where he’d spent his last weeks. Just as they’d turned out to see him questioned by Darrow in the shade on the courthouse lawn, a great Daytonian throng gathered to watch as the Great Commoner’s coffin, draped in the Stars and Stripes, was carried to a special train car laid on by the Southern Railway Company, and departed eastwards for Washington, stopping at every town it passed through on the way for locals to pay their respects.

Bryan’s body lay in state for 24 hours at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, with a guard of veterans of the Spanish-American War, in which this man, amidst a convoluted career defined in a great part by opposition to war, had served as a Colonel. Crowds of admirers filed past this hero of whichever cause of his it was that they cared about - free silver, neutrality in the First World War, prohibition, women’s suffrage, or Biblical Literalism.

Yet more stood out in the rain, as his coffin was carried through the streets of Washington and across the Potomac River to Arlington National Cemetery. Flags across the country flew at half-mast that day, when, for all his remarkable career as a politician and an activist, the Great Commoner was buried as a Colonel of the US Army.

Bryan’s death overall seems to have been, paradoxically, excellent news for the Fundamentalists. Had Bryan lived to continue his anti-Evolution crusade, his Scopes Trial performance would have continued to be thoroughly mocked in the press, but now all that would be in very poor taste. Everyone had to show respect to someone who was, after all, a major figure of the last 40 years of American history.

As far as the Fundamentalists themselves were concerned, a sort of semi-mythical retelling of the Scopes Trial developed within a few weeks, where it had morphed into a resounding Anti-Evolutionist success. Take as an example, Vernon Dalhart’s country ballad The Old Religion’s Better After All.

“Then to Dayton Came a man, with his new ideas so grand
And he said we came from monkeys long ago.
But in teaching his belief, Mr. Scopes found only grief,
For they would not let their old religion go.”

There were plenty of ballads like this, and it was common for them to present Bryan personally as the hero of this great victory for the Bible, as seen in Evolution - Bryan’s last fight by Andrew Jenkins (unfortunately I couldn’t find the tune for this one, so I’m afraid you’re not going to hear me singing).:

“I see a man though old in years, a mighty man is he,
Amid the nation's sighs and tears, he starts for Tennessee.
And when he reached old Dayton-town, he faced the foe for, said he,
"I'll never turn the Bible down, 'tis good enough for me."
Yes, Bryan went to end the fight, there was no greater man
To face the learned and mighty foe, and for the Bible stand.”

I guess what we can see here is that Bryan’s arguments were never supposed to appeal to people who were looking for intellectually-robust reasoning. The anti-evolutionist movement was to a large extent proudly anti-intellectual. Bryan’s rhetoric in Dayton presented Evolution as a product of a hostile, foreign intellectual culture in Northern universities. This was a tribal clash between opposing sides in the culture war.

Bryan’s death meant he could even be transformed into a full-on Fundamentalist martyr, who gave his life in the struggle against the Satanic forces of Darwinism.

Charles Nabell’s Scopes Trial is a good example:

“Bill Bryan was a hero, by the nation he was loved,
He kept the faith within his soul till called by Him above.
Now the death of Jennings Bryan caused sadness in our land,
He gave his life for sacred faith, he nobly made his stand;
He's sleeping now in Arlington where other heroes lie,
Though God has called him, in our hearts he'll never, never die.”

The mythologising of Bryan as the hero of the Scopes Trial was complemented with a representation of Clarence Darrow as its villain - the Northern Agnostic representing the forces of darkness against which Bryan and the people of Tennessee had fought and won. Darrow even came to be represented as actually responsible for Bryan’s death.

Darrow was obviously very diplomatic about his rival’s death to the papers, saying

“He was a man of strong convictions, and always espoused his cause with ability and courage.”

Mencken, though, supposedly leant into it and remarked that

“God aimed at Darrow, missed, and hit Bryan instead.”

For the most part reporters for Northern papers, that were generally hostile to fundamentalism, were basically respectful, avoiding saying what they actually thought about Bryan’s views, focusing on summarising his whole career (of which the Scopes Trial was only a small part), and recording how Bryan’s supporters reacted to his death.

H.L. Mencken, though, was of course an exception, and showed absolutely no reverence whatsoever. To quote some examples from his obituary for Bryan:

“He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity.”

“His place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gallstones down there to-day.”

“He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

“When he began denouncing the notion that man is a mammal even some of the hinds at Dayton were agape. And when, brought upon Darrow’s cruel hook, he writhed and tossed in a very fury of malignancy, bawling against the baldest elements of sense and decency like a man frantic - when he came to that tragic climax of his striving there were snickers among the hinds as well as hosannas.”

He was as scathing as usual of William Jennings Bryan’s supporters among the people of Tennessee, calling them “rustic ignoramuses”, “anthropoid rabble”, and “gaping primates”.

The way people like Mencken had treated the people of Dayton had certainly made him very unpopular, and many people had expected Scopes to become something of a pariah locally - I think the coverage in pro-evolution media probably created an exaggerated impression of just how intolerant the local people were.

Understandably expecting the affair to negatively impact Scopes’s teaching career, some of the expert witnesses were setting up a scholarship fund for Scopes to go back to university. Before he ended up in Dayton, he’d majored in Law at the University of Kentucky, and his plan had been to go back there. Unfortunately, when he went to Lexington to visit the University, he met the law school dean, who kept telling him he could be “another Clarence Darrow”. This was the last thing Scopes wanted.

“Soon everyone would expect me to be another Darrow. There would be no escape from being compared to the man who had defended me. I might become, instead, another William Jennings Bryan, Jr., walking in the shadow of another man’s fame.”

Instead, he chose to pursue his passion for geology, travelling North to the University of Chicago.

The attitude of local people towards Scopes seems to have been mixed. You get the impression from Scopes’s autobiography that he remained on reasonably friendly terms with the people of Dayton itself, and Robinson, the school board president, had told him he could keep his job, and was disappointed when he told him he’d been offered a scholarship and was leaving for Chicago.

On the other hand, consider the following anecdote he recounts. On the way back to Dayton from Lexington, Kentucky, Scopes met a journalist, Paul Anderson of the Post-Dispatch, at Knoxville Station. This was where Scopes found out William Jennings Bryan had just died, and Anderson was racing to get to Dayton for this extraordinary scoop. The route he’d been planning to take went southwest to Chattanooga and then back up the other side of the Tennessee River to Dayton, but Scopes had a better idea, that would mean Anderson wouldn’t have to wait overnight in Chattanooga, and could get to Dayton ahead of all the other journalists.

Unfortunately, this would require taking a taxi from Athens (about thirty miles from Dayton, and the closest point on the railway between Knoxville and Chattanooga). They reached the ferry across the Tennessee River without incident (appropriately enough, their route would presumably have taken them along a road now called the “William Jennings Bryan Highway”). But then on the ferry, who should they meet but Judge Raulston himself, the very judge who had recently convicted Scopes of violating the Butler Act.

Scopes and Raulston exchanged polite nods, but the taxi driver recognised him as well.

“Do you know who that was? That was the monkey trial judge! Judge Raulston. I wish I’d been judge over there. I’d had that bunch of damned Atheists tarred and feathered and run out on a rail.”

Anderson started asking what he thought of each of the people involved.

“Darrow! Why, that man’s got horns, I tell you! He’s got the horns of the devil.”

And then his passenger himself:

“John T. Scopes is a renegade of the first water, if ever I saw one! Yessir! You ever heard of a man turning like that on his own people? A full-fledged renegade!”

Scopes didn’t reveal his identity until the driver was dropping him off in Dayton.

And with that, he left for Chicago, to follow his geological dreams.

According to Scopes, this whole business had all started when he stayed behind in Dayton rather than going back to Kentucky for the summer holidays because he had a date lined up with someone he calls a “beautiful blonde”. The ideal Romantic Finale would no doubt have had the hero marrying his mysterious golden-haired beloved, but this is real life. The date never happened, and I see no reason to believe he ever saw her again. He rounds off the chapter, though, by acknowledging her unintended role.

“The merchants of the town, who had profited most from the circus, should have given her a vote of thanks. She deserves as much credit as anyone for the trial’s being held in Dayton that summer.”

Although Scopes was out of the picture now, and pretty much refused to have anything to do with the case from here, this wasn’t even over yet. The defence were going to Nashville to make their case to the Supreme Court of the State of Tennessee. But here they had a problem, in the form of Clarence Darrow.

I doubt any significant number of fundamentalists were persuaded of anything by Darrow’s questioning of Bryan in the trial. If anything, it confirmed what they already thought of Evolutionists. Darrow was just there to slander the Bible, and as much as the evolutionists might make a show of wanting to reconcile evolution with Christianity, this was what they were really about. The Modernists were secretly Darrowesque Atheist blasphemers, or at the very least useful idiots for them.

Darrow has, nowadays, kind of gone down in history as the hero of the Scopes Trial, but at the time his role was more controversial. Obviously fundamentalists hated him, that was a given - after all, some of them seemed to think their hero had died a martyr at his hands. And Fundamentalists hated all of the Scopes trial defence team and would have hated them whoever they were. The problem, though, was the Modernists.

The ACLU had wanted to make the point that you can be a Christian and still be fine with evolution being taught in schools. They were insistent that their quarrel was not with Christianity in general, but with this one particular version of Christianity inspiring states to ban schools and even universities from teaching established scientific fact.

Clarence Darrow, though, was well-known for being opposed to religion in general. And he hadn’t done a particularly good job of hiding that during the trial. It had been obvious to many Modernists that his debate with Bryan was more to do with making fun of the Bible and getting one up on his personal rival than with ensuring the right of teachers to teach correct science.

Walter Lippmann wrote in the New York World that

“The truth is that when Mr. Darrow in his anxiety to humiliate and ridicule Mr. Bryan resorted to sneering and scoffing at the Bible he convinced millions who act on superficial impressions that Bryan is right in his assertion that the contest at Dayton was for and against the Christian religion”.

Bryan had argued that it was impossible to be a proper Christian who took the Bible seriously and believe in evolution. In a sense Darrow came across to many people as if he agreed.

If you cast your mind back to Part 2, this had been a concern of the ACLU from the beginning. As soon as Darrow offered his services, many of the ACLU leadership were reluctant to accept, thinking it wouldn’t be a good look to have such a notorious controversialist on the defence team.

Now that he’d already shown himself to be a liability, and his reputation was putting off potential donors, they wanted to have another go at ditching him.

This exposed a divide between Forrest Bailey, the director of the ACLU, and Arthur Garfield Hays, manager of the defense team. Bailey wanted Darrow gone, Hays wanted to keep him. But Bailey persuaded John Randolph Neal, the eccentric local counsel to come on side, and Neal was officially the one with the authority to drop Darrow.

But Darrow found out they were trying to get rid of him. Bailey was forced to apologise for the misunderstanding and keep him on. Now Darrow wanted Neal gone and presented some alternative prominent Tennessee lawyers who opposed the Butler Act.

Walter Nelles, another ACLU lawyer, suggested a committee of lawyers could take over the case from the ACLU. But Hays wasn’t having this, he didn’t want just anyone winning the appeal and taking the credit that was really due to Darrow.

While this was going on, the maverick legal genius of John Randolph Neal hadn’t been communicating at all with the rest of the team, and missed the deadline to file the Bill of Exceptions with the Supreme Court. This meant the defense would no longer be able to appeal the court’s decision to exclude the expert witnesses, which had been part of the point of the appeal.

Still, they had the constitutional arguments to argue.

In the end, after all this chaos they ended up with mostly the same people arguing the appeal that had argued the original case. Minus Malone, and plus the Memphis attorney Robert Keebler, increasing the Tennessee representation to two.

It wasn't for almost a year after the trial, in May 1926, that the Tennessee Supreme Court heard the appeal. Dayton had been left behind now, and the throng of journalists now descended on Nashville, the state capital, somewhere far more used to attention. The arguments made were mostly the same as the constitutional arguments brought up at the start of the trial, in the motion to quash the indictment. There were a couple of technical points about the wording of the Bill, and the process of passing it, and all that. They also pointed to a clause in the State Constitution that says “It shall be the duty of the general assembly to cherish literature and science” - and the Butler act certainly seems like a pretty flagrant violation of this.

Most significantly, though, was the argument that the act violates the Constitution of Tennessee by preferring Christianity to other religions.

In the trial, the prosecution had tried to play down the connection of religion to the case. The people of Tennessee, represented by their state legislature, had passed a law, and Scopes had broken it, and it wasn’t for lawyers and scientists from out of state to come in and tell the people of Tennessee not to enforce their own laws.

This time round, though, now that the constitutional arguments were actually in play, and the religious question was relevant, they countered them with the argument that the purpose of the law is actually to ensure religious neutrality in education. If schools aren’t allowed to teach Christianity, they shouldn’t be allowed to teach atheism either.

And the prosecution also brought up a point that hadn’t actually arisen in the trial, but would become more critical to the fundamentalist movement in subsequent decades, especially now that William Jennings Bryan was dead:

“If you permit the teaching that the law of life is the law of the jungle, you have laid the foundation by which man can be brought to accept the doctrine of Communism and to the point where he believes it right to advocate murder.”

This was clearly a dig at Clarence Darrow, and his career defending left-wing radicals, including terrorists, and also just regular murderers like Leopold and Loeb.

Edward Larson also points out how much more authoritarian the prosecution were sounding compared to how they’d talked in the trial. William Jennings Bryan had been very clear the whole time that the state’s power to ban the teaching of evolution only extended to the schools that they paid for, and if evolutionists wanted to teach evolution they were free to set up their own schools. But now, with Bryan the Populist Democrat safely deceased, they were free to go full red scare mode, and talk instead in terms of “what is required for the public welfare”, comparing banning the teaching of evolution to compulsory vaccination (a comparison that might sound odd in terms of modern culture war polarisation).

The problem with this, that Clarence Darrow raised, is that the legislature passing the law were all very obviously motivated by hostility towards evolution more than by any desire to ensure neutrality. And public schools in science lessons are supposed to teach science, regardless of what religious beliefs that contradicts.

In the end, after waiting another 8 months, until January 1927, the Supreme Court ruled, by three votes to one, that the law was constitutional.

The court held, like the prosecution had, that, as far as the common use of the terms involved was concerned, the meaning of the act was clear enough. Although they did acknowledge that “the Act was not drafted with as much care as it could have been drafted”.

On the “cherish science and literature” point, the court ruled that that clause in the constitution was just too vague to actually require the legislature to do anything in particular.

As far as the religious neutrality side of things was concerned, the court ruled that the legislature’s motives in passing the law were irrelevant, and the law didn't violate the religious neutrality clause in the constitution, for two reasons that in my opinion sound a bit half-baked. Banning the teaching of Evolution doesn't privilege Christianity because (as the defense's expert witnesses themselves argued) rejecting evolution isn’t the position of all Christians. Besides, the law doesn't require schools to teach anything at all. A school wouldn't necessarily have to teach the Biblical account of creation in science lessons. They could also stay within the law by simply not teaching anything at all about the origins of humans.

Now the defence just had to take it up another level, right? Appeal to the Federal Supreme Court, and argue the case there. Which had really been their plan from the beginning.

However, the Tennessee Supreme Court had other plans.

If you were really - and I mean really - paying attention in the last episode, you’ll remember that, when the judge passed sentence, he set the fine to $100, the minimum legal amount.

Apparently though, the jury was supposed to determine the fine, rather than the judge, and so, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction. In a disastrous outcome for the defence, they had won the case.

This was very convenient for the Tennessee Supreme Court, because it thwarted the defence’s plans to take the case all the way to the Federal Supreme Court and test its constitutionality there. You can’t appeal an acquittal, after all.

“We see nothing to be gained from prolonging the life of this bizarre case”

was how the Supreme Court put it in their ruling. Tennessee was left with a law that they couldn’t enforce, because any attempt to enforce it would run the risk of the Supreme Court overturning it.

But this was hardly the end for anti-evolutionism, and the battle over whether or not evolution can be taught in schools.

Thank you for listening to Science: A Peculiar History. You can donate to help support the podcast at buymeacoffee.com/joebath.

You can find the podcast almost anywhere you get podcasts. You can find transcripts, images and sources for past episodes on the website, scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk. If you have any questions, comments, corrections or suggestions, you can message any of the podcast’s social media channels, email admin@scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk, or use the contact form on the website.