CHAPTER FIVE

JOCKEYING FOR POSITION

THE INDICTMENT of John Scopes inflamed the righteous ire of Columbia University’s influential president, Nicholas Murray Butler. “The Legislature and the Governor of Tennessee have with every appearance of equanimity just now joined in violently affronting the popular intelligence and have made it impossible for a scholar to be a teacher in that State without becoming at the same time a law-breaker,” he told June graduates at Columbia’s commencement. “The notion that a majority must have its way, whether in matters of opinion or in matters of personal conduct, is as pestilent and anti-democratic a notion as can possibly be conceived.” Denouncing fundamentalists and antievolutionists as the “new barbarians” storming the citadels of learning, Butler proclaimed, “Courage is the only weapon left by which the true liberal can wage war upon all these reactionary and leveling movements. Unless he can stand his ground and make his voice heard and his opinions felt, it will certainly be some time before civilization can resume its interrupted progress.”¹

Butler’s widely reported address served as a clarion call for educators and helped set the tone for liberal reaction to the upcoming trial. Fundamentalists represented a clear and present danger to progress that should be exposed and opposed in Dayton. Princeton president John Greer Hibben denounced the antievolution law as “outrageous” and the Scopes trial as “absurd.” Yale president James Rowland Angell expressed a similar viewpoint to the graduating class of his university, admonishing them that “the educated man must recognize and knit into his view of life the undeniable physical basis of the world.”² The ACLU invited twenty prominent progressive educators to serve on a Tennessee Evolution Case Fund advisory committee to help raise money for the defense. All twenty accepted the invitation, including the two senior statesmen of American higher education, president emeritus Charles W. Eliot of Harvard and president emeritus David Starr Jordan of Stanford. From England, George Bernard Shaw condemned the “monstrous nonsense of Fundamentalism” and Arthur Keith confessed that he would like to see the Scopes “prosecution hanged on the spot.” When asked for his opinion of the Tennessee law, Albert Einstein replied, “Any restriction of academic freedom heaps coals of shame upon the community.”³

When Scopes visited New York in early June to confer with ACLU officials, the fashionable Civic Club hosted a formal dinner in his honor. The event attracted an overflow crowd, which the New York Times characterized as “comprising almost every shade of liberal and radical opinion.”⁴ Commenting on Scopes’s visit, a reporter for the New York World observed, “Under the banner of liberalism, to the blaze of page headlines, with the aid of special interviews, posed photographs and human interest incidents, the conglomerate host of liberals is falling in about the lanky, grave-eyed Tennessee high-school teacher.” According to this reporter, the “army” surrounding Scopes included “feminists, birth-control advocates, agnostics, atheists, free thinkers, free lovers, socialists, communists, syndicalists, biologists, psychoanalysts, educators, preachers, lawyers, professional liberals, and many others, including just talkers.”⁵

The ACLU endeavored to project an all-American image for Scopes during this visit. Except for the Civic Club dinner, which the ACLU needed to raise funds for the defense, Scopes remained mostly in his hotel room or private meetings. At public appearances and press interviews, he simply repeated his account of the trial’s humble origins: “Just a drug store discussion that got past control,” as he put it. Hounded by the New York press for a juicier news item and influenced by the people around him, Scopes occasionally revealed a more radical side. “I don’t know what the term ‘parlor Socialist’ means exactly, but I think that is what I am,” he confided to one reporter. When asked by another if he was a Christian, Scopes let slip, “I don’t know, who does?”⁶ Nevertheless, carefully staged press photographs near the Statue of Liberty in New York and on Capitol Hill during a return-trip stopover in Washington communicated the desired image to millions. “John Thomas Scopes,” the Washington Post reported, “yesterday stood before the original copy of the Constitution of the United States at the Congressional library and gazed long and wonderingly at the script upon which he hopes to vindicate his right to instruct the young of the land in accepted scientific principles.” Here he returned to the script. “I want to correct the impression that I hold nonreligious views and am in fact an agnostic,” he told the Post reporter. “While I am not a member of any church I have always had a deep religious feeling.”⁷

To demonstrate scientific support for the cause, Scopes made public appearances in New York with three of America’s best-known evolutionary scientists: the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, the psychologist J. McKeen Cattell, and the eugenicist Charles B. Davenport. All three men helped shape the public response to the upcoming trial.

Osborn had been wrangling with Bryan over the teaching of evolution for years and redoubled his efforts to promote the theory of human evolution and his views about its compatibility with Christian concepts of morality. “The facts in this great case are that William Jennings Bryan is the man on trial,” Osborn argued in a hastily compiled book dedicated to Scopes and published on the eve of trial. Science gave irrefutable evidence of human evolution, according to Osborn, and “evolution by no means takes God out the Universe, as Mr. Bryan supposes.” In this book, Osborn characterized the Commoner as blinded by “religious fanaticism” and “stone-deaf” to scientific argument—“he alone by his own resounding voice drowns the eternal speech of Nature.” This became a common image of Bryan in the popular press: a typical political cartoon pictures Bryan’s gaping mouth overshadowing a quiet researcher above the caption, science and showmanship. “Bryan’s gospel is not truth,” Osborn maintained, “it is an ill-starred state of opinion, disastrous to true religion, disastrous to morals, disastrous to education.”⁸ Clinging to an outmoded view of purposeful evolution that Darrow repudiated, Osborn publicly warned Scopes against “radicalism” at the trial and declined to appear as an expert witness for the Chicago agnostic.⁹ Nevertheless, he posed for pictures with the Tennessee teacher among prehistoric fossils at his American Museum of Natural History and kept up a steady drumbeat against Bryan in magazine and newspaper articles during June and early July.

In his role as leader of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and owner-editor of its journal, Science, the efforts of Cattell on Scopes’s behalf were less visible than those of Osborn but no less important. He met Scopes in New York to reaffirm the AAAS’s commitment to the defense. “The American Civil Liberties Union can count on the association providing scientific expert advisors in defense of Professor Scopes,” the AAAS promised in accord with a formal resolution drafted by Osborn, Davenport, and the Princeton biologist Edwin G. Conklin. The resolution declared that “the evidences in favor of the evolution of man are sufficient to convince every scientist of note in the world” and hailed Darwin’s theory as “one of the most potent of the great influences for good that have thus far entered into human experience.”¹⁰ The resolution served as a launching pad for Cattell’s efforts. As a scientist and AAAS officer, he worked closely with Maynard Shipley’s Science League of America in orchestrating scientific support for the Scopes defense; as a science editor and publisher, he promoted the cause through editorials in Science and work with Watson Davis’s Science Service, an agency that distributed popular articles about science to magazines and newspapers.

Editorial cartoon during the Scopes trial ridiculing Bryan’s attacks on science. (Copyright © 1925 New York World. Used with permission of The E. W. Scripps Company)

Davenport’s involvement in the Scopes case began with a Science Service article entitled “Evidences for Evolution” that appeared in scores of newspapers across the country as the first in a series of pretrial columns in which prominent scientists capitalized on popular interest aroused by the case to educate the public about evolution. Davenport represented a logical choice for writing the initial article because, as America’s lead eugenicist, he had a vital stake in defending the teaching of evolution. The textbook used by Scopes, Hunter’s Civic Biology, featured Davenport’s research into the evolutionary improvement of humans “by applying to them the laws of selection,” and stressed the importance of proper “mate selection” in this process.¹¹ Eugenic mate selection required education, however, and Bryan had targeted eugenic thinking as one of the evil consequences of teaching evolution. Davenport struck back first in his Science Service article and later by giving his public blessing to Scopes in New York. “Fundamentalists accept what they have been told about the accuracy of description of the origin of the universe given in Scripture,” Davenport noted in the Science Service article. “The biologist has his own idea of what is the word of God. He believes it to be the testimony of nature.” He offered the laboratory breeding of new “forms of banana fly” as his evidence for evolution.¹² Later articles in the series featured other elementary evidences for evolution, such as the human tailbone and cultural development. With the Scopes trial only weeks away, such shopworn scientific evidence became newsworthy.

Throughout the country, scientists and educators reported widespread curiosity about the theory of evolution. Books on the topic sold briskly even in Tennessee, where Vanderbilt University chancellor James H. Kirkland predicted that the trial would stimulate “far more inquiry” into Darwinism. At the time, most Americans simply understood the theory of human evolution to mean that people came from apes. Bryan played on this common understanding in his public addresses, often repeating the popular applause line, “How can teachers tell students that they came from monkeys and not expect them to act like monkeys?” Osborn took this opportunity to explain otherwise. “The entire monkey-ape theory of human descent, which Bryan and his followers are attacking, is pure fiction, set up as a scarecrow,” he commented in the New York Times. “Man has a long and independent line of family ascent of his own.” Following Osborn’s lead, Scopes made similar comments to the press. Referring to the massive outpouring of information about evolution, the world-famous horticulturist Luther Burbank described the trial as “a great joke, but one which will educate the public and thus reduce the number of bigots.”¹³

Liberal ministers joined in the public outcry over the indictment and trial of John Scopes. These events unfolded at the height of the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, when intradenominational battles between liberal and conservative Christians made front-page headlines in newspapers across the country. The antievolution movement split those factions along the crucial fault line of an evolutionary versus a literal interpretation of the Bible. Neither side could afford to back down on the issue. Bryan stood as the recognized leader of fundamentalist forces within the northern Presbyterian church. His entry into the Scopes case brought a predictable response. “Practically every preacher in New York touched on the subject last Sunday,” one newspaper reported the following week. “Many defended the law, but many others ridiculed it and scored William Jennings Bryan for his dramatic entrance into the case.”¹⁴

Charles Francis Potter, a prominent Unitarian minister, led the assault on Bryan in Gotham that Sunday and hounded the Commoner all the way to Dayton. “Mr. Bryan beclouds the issue, saying that the choice is between fundamentalism and atheism,” Potter declared. “If the voice which demands absolute acceptance of every word of the Bible is the only one to be heard, the less educated will begin to believe that voice.” Potter and other modernists sought to provide other voices at this seemingly critical juncture. Indeed, warning that “we are just beginning to hear the Fundamentalist advance—the Tennessee trial is the opening barrage,” he called on modernists to “take ten of the hundred reasons for doubting the Bible’s literal truth and drop them from airplanes if necessary in cities of the South.” As public interest in the Scopes trial mounted, Potter grew increasingly optimistic about its educational value.¹⁵ “If the Anti-Evolutionists in Tennessee were aware of the existence of any other religions than their own, they might realize that it is the very genius of religion itself to evolve from primary forms to higher forms,” he commented in a later sermon. “The author of the anti-evolution bill is obviously nearer in mental development to the nomads of early biblical times than he is to the intelligence of the young man who is under trial.”¹⁶

Seizing the opportunity to educate and enlighten, Potter carried his message to the people of Dayton, originally with the expectation of serving as an expert witness on religion for the defense but ultimately as a freelance writer and speaker after he refused to endorse the defense’s public position that the theory of evolution was compatible with scripture. Mencken captured the scene in a report from Dayton: “There is a Unitarian clergyman here from New York trying desperately to horn into the trial,” Mencken observed. “He will fail. If Darrow ventured to put him on the stand the whole audience, led by the jury, would leap out of the courthouse windows, and take to the hills.”¹⁷ For Potter, the Bible reflected an earlier religious consciousness from which only Christ’s moral teaching should be retained—and those should be integrated into an evolutionary world view. Rappleyea secured an invitation for Potter to preach this gospel in Dayton’s northern Methodist church one Sunday during the trial, but opposition within that relatively liberal congregation to the so-called New York infidel forced a cancellation. He settled for delivering a Sunday evening sermon on the courthouse lawn. Despite Mencken’s prediction, Potter also managed to give the opening prayer at trial one day—without any leapers—and took that occasion to petition for “the progress of mankind toward thy truth” from “Thou to Whom all pray and for Whom are many names.” All other courtroom prayers were directed exclusively to the Christian God.¹⁸

Potter’s place as a defense expert passed to the preeminent voice of modernism among American Christians, Shailer Mathews of the University of Chicago divinity school. Mathews could easily reconcile evolutionary science with the Bible through a modernist interpretation of scripture. “The writers of the Bible used the language, conceptions and science of the times in which they lived. We trust and follow their religious insight with no need of accepting their views on nature,” he explained in a widely reported address delivered in Chicago shortly before he was to leave for Dayton. “We have to live in the universe science gives us. A theology that is contrary to reality must be abandoned or improved.” This left Mathews between Potter and the fundamentalists: science informed scripture rather than the other way around, as the fundamentalists believed; but the Bible remained divine, which Potter denied. “He who understands the Bible in accordance with actual facts has no difficulty in realizing the truth of its testimony that God is in the processes which have produced and sustain mankind,” Mathews maintained. For him, evolution was divine creation, and human religious understanding developed over time. At trial, Mathews offered to explain how the Genesis account of creation symbolized an evolutionary process, “and how that process culminated in man possessed of both animal and divine elements.”¹⁹

Modernist ministers and theologians pressed the assault against fundamentalists in countless churches throughout the country. “William Jennings Bryan thinks that God ceased speaking to man after the first chapter of Genesis was written,” one New York Methodist pastor proclaimed. “To make belief in Genesis and belief in Christ stand or fall together is absurd. The two beliefs are on different levels,” a Michigan Baptist minister insisted. “Evolution is not on trial; Tennessee is,” a California Congregationalist preacher added. “And the judgment has already been given by the high court of public opinion. The people of Tennessee are the laughing stock of the world.”²⁰ Suddenly, for a few weeks, ministers could grab headlines anywhere in the country simply by asserting that the theory of human evolution did not conflict with the Bible.

Tennessee’s beleaguered modernists took up the cause with especial fervor. Several Tennessee clerics offered to serve as experts for the defense, two of whom were picked to testify. Still others preached sermons attacking Bryan and the prosecution. A large crowd turned out in Knoxville for a mid-June debate between two local fundamentalist and modernist ministers. “Today, theology is called upon to adjust itself to scientific facts,” the modernist minister maintained. “Christian theology adjusted itself to the Copernican theory, and to the facts of geology and for a majority of Christian scholars the adjustment to the facts of evolution has already been made.”²¹ In Tennessee, such scholarship centered in Vanderbilt University, a liberal Methodist school. When the threat of antievolution legislation first arose, the university hosted a major address by the famed New York modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick. After the law passed, its chancellor vowed to continue the teaching of evolution within his private institution. Now, with the Scopes trial looming, school officials turned the June commencement exercises into a defense of evolutionary science. “Christ did not come into the world to dictate to scientists what they should think,” declared the baccalaureate speaker, according to whom the theory of evolution harmonized perfectly with scripture. Indeed, he claimed that the Bible depicted an evolutionary development of religious consciousness, and urged the church to “canonize” Darwin and other scientists “under a special head: Servants of the truth of God.” The commencement speaker echoed these themes.²²

Middle ground did exist between modernism and fundamentalism but gained little attention in the public debate surrounding the Scopes trial. Each viewpoint was internally consistent, but many Americans opted for a pragmatic compromise that left room for both traditional religion and modern science by maintaining that orthodox belief in the Bible does not preclude an allegorical interpretation of the creation account. “A man can be a Christian without taking every word of the Bible literally,” one defense expert on theology offered to testify at the Scopes trial. “When St. Paul said: ‘I am crucified with Christ,’ and when David said, ‘The little hills skipped like rams,’ neither expected that what he wrote would be taken literally.” Similar textual interpretation allowed this witness to reconcile evolutionary science with the Genesis account by accepting evolution as God’s means of creation. “I am thoroughly convinced that God created the heavens and the earth,” he observed, “but I find nothing in the Scripture that tells me His method.”²³

Another Christian theology expert argued for the defense that science and religion could never conflict because they belonged to separate spheres of knowledge. “To science and not to the Bible must man look for the answers to the questions as to the process of man’s creation,” he offered to testify. “To the Bible and not science must men look for the answer to the causes of man’s intelligence, his moral and spiritual being.”²⁴ By presenting these two witnesses along with Mathews, the defense effectively demonstrated various ways that American Christians harmonized sincere religious faith with the findings of modern science.

The popular press seemed intent on pitting fundamentalists such as Bryan and Riley against modernists such as Mathews and Fosdick, or against agnostics such as Darrow, all of whom scorned the middle. Bryan, for example, publicly dismissed theistic evolution as “an anaesthetic that deadens the Christian’s pain while his religion is being removed,” while Mathews rejected attempts to retain Mosaic concepts of morality without Mosaic concepts of creation.²⁵ During the twenties, these two extremes gained adherents at the expense of the middle—and each claimed to represent the future of Christianity. Their clash spawned the antievolution movement and well deserved the attention it received during the Scopes trial. Christians caught in the middle sat on the sidelines.“The thing that we got from the trial of Scopes,” a Memphis Commercial Appeal editorial observed, was that most “sincere believers in religion” simply wanted to avoid the origins dispute altogether. “Some have their religion, but they are afraid if they go out and mix in the fray they will lose it. Some are afraid they will be put to confusion. Some are in the position of believing, but fear they can not prove their belief,” the editorialist noted, so they leave the field to extremists such as Darrow and Bryan.²⁶

Editorial cartoon suggesting that many Christians did not agree with Bryan’s attacks on the theory of evolution. (Copyright © 1925 New York World. Used with permission of The E. W. Scripps Company)

The middle did not remain entirely silent. President Hibbon of Princeton loudly complained about the trial, “I resent the attempt to force on me and you the choice between evolution and religion.” Some religious scientists used the opportunity to promote nonmaterialistic theories of evolution. Many were modernists, like Osborn, but others were orthodox, such as the Vanderbilt University science professor who wrote into the Nashville Banner, “As a scientist, I believe that the theory of Lamarck concerning the inheritance of acquired characteristics is probably in the process of being verified.”²⁷ That would resolve the controversy, the writer maintained. Such subtle arguments, however, attracted few headlines in newspapers bent on dramatizing the conflict between science and religion.

Even James Vance, the leading proponent of moderation within Tennessee’s religious circles, added little to the public debate over the Scopes trial. Vance served as pastor of the nation’s largest southern Presbyterian church and once held the denomination’s top post. In 1925, readers of a leading religious journal voted him one of America’s top twenty-five pulpit ministers, along with fundamentalist Billy Sunday and modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick. When the antievolution movement first began in 1923, Vance and forty other prominent Americans, including Conklin, Osborn, 1923 Nobel laureate Robert Millikan, and Herbert Hoover, tried to calm the waters with a joint statement that assigned science and religion to separate spheres of human understanding. This widely publicized document described the two activities as “distinct” rather than “antagonistic domains of thought,” the former dealing with “the facts, laws and processes of nature” while the latter addressed “the consciences, ideals and the aspirations of mankind.” It offered no reasoned reconciliation of the apparent conflicts between them, however.²⁸ In 1925, Vance joined thirteen moderate or liberal Nashville ministers in petitioning the Tennessee Senate to defeat the “unwise” antievolution bill. After reading the petition on the Senate floor, however, even an opponent of the legislation had to concede “that there was no reason assigned in the written request” for defeating the bill.²⁹

Vance had plenty of company straddling the fence over the Scopes case. Most national politicians followed the lead of President Calvin Coolidge in dismissing the case as a Tennessee matter. Tennessee politicians tended to mimic their governor, who defended the law and denounced the trial, but who clearly wished to avoid the entire issue and vowed to stay away from Dayton. Very few state legislators attended the trial, despite offers of reserved seating. Even the law’s author, J. W. Butler, only showed up after a newspaper syndicate offered to pay him for commentary on the proceedings. Labor unions hesitated to choose sides between two longtime friends—Bryan and Darrow. Only a handful of small unions did so, such as the prodefense Georgia Federation of Labor. Even the nation’s two leading teachers’ organizations split. Pushed by its vice president, ACLU executive committee member Henry Linville, the smaller American Federation of Teachers adopted a resolution in support of Scopes. The larger National Education Association rejected a similar resolution as “inadvisable.”³⁰ Relatively little comment about the trial survives from African Americans. A few black evangelists, such as Virginia’s John Jasper, endorsed Bryan’s position, while the NAACP, which worked regularly with the ACLU, participated in some of the ACLU’s New York meetings on the trial. In any event, the outcome would not affect African Americans, because Tennessee public schools enforced strict racial segregation and offered little to black students beyond elementary instruction.

White fundamentalists rushed in to fill the void, and willingly engaged modernists and evolutionists in setting the terms for public debate over the trial. In pulpits across America, conservative ministers argued against Darwinism. Many attacked Darrow and the menace of materialism as well, such as the Tennessee pastor who claimed that he “had been searching literature and the pages of history in an effort to find someone with whom he might class Darrow, but as yet had not been able to place him but in one class, and that of the Devil.”³¹ Leading antievolution crusaders such as Riley, Norris, Straton, Martin, and Sunday redoubled their efforts in the days before the trial, barnstorming the country for creationism. On a train to Seattle, Norris wrote to Bryan, “It is the greatest opportunity ever presented to educate the public, and will accomplish more than ten years campaigning.”³² From Oregon, Sunday added his endorsement of “any views expressed by William Jennings Bryan.”³³ Summer having come, the Bible conference and Chautauqua seasons were in full swing, providing ready audiences of antievolutionists.

During the twenties, the public became fascinated by formal debates between proponents and opponents of the theory and teaching of evolution. In 1924, for example, Straton and Potter clashed over the theory before a large audience at Carnegie Hall in a debate broadcast live on the radio and subsequently published by a commercial press. A panel of three judges from the New York State Supreme Court gave a unanimous decision to Straton on technical merit. “With the exception of the legal battles to outlaw evolution or to get ‘scientific creationism’ into the public schools,” the historian Ronald Numbers observed, “nothing brought more attention to creationists than their debates with prominent evolutionists.”³⁴ Public interest in the coming trial generated a variety of such debates across the country, including a series between Riley and the science popularizer Maynard Shipley on the West Coast. “Please report my compliments to Dr. Riley,” Bryan wrote to Straton in early June, just before Straton joined Riley for the final debate in Seattle. “He seemed to have the audience overwhelmingly with him in Los Angeles, Oakland and Portland. This is very encouraging; it shows that the ape-man hypothesis is not very strong outside the colleges and the pulpits.”³⁵ For the moment, at least, antievolutionists appeared to have the upper hand.

The presence of Riley or Straton insured a large audience, but a pair of mid-June debates in San Francisco between Shipley and two young editors of a Seventh Day Adventist journal may have attracted the greatest attention. According to the San Francisco Examiner, “That the Scopes trial is a living issue in San Francisco as elsewhere was indicated by the large crowd which on both evenings filled the auditorium long before the meeting hour, and afterwards filled the street and threatened to rush the doors.”³⁶ Prominent California jurists served on the panel of judges. Shipley spent the first debate sniping at Bryan, which allowed his Adventist opponent to win a split decision against the proposition, “Resolved, That the earth and all life upon it are the result of evolution,” by systematically raising a host of technical questions about that theory. The second debate focused on the timely issue of teaching evolution in public schools. Here Shipley gained the victory with a plea for freedom. In typical Adventist fashion, his opponent presented the teaching of evolution as “subversive of religious views” and argued for “neutrality on the questions of religion” in public schools. The remedy: “Keep evolution and Genesis both out.” Shipley countered with stories about the religious persecution of Galileo and Columbus for their scientific theories, and asserted the near universal support among scientists for the theory of evolution. “We hold that this theory, or any theory, advanced by those best qualified by education and experience to judge such matters, should be made known to the pupils of our publicly supported educational institutions, and that to suppress such knowledge is a social crime.”³⁷

The results of the San Francisco debates suggested that, in the spirit of liberty, people who doubted the theory of evolution might still tolerate the teaching of evolution. Perhaps Bryan sensed this all along and only campaigned to prohibit the teaching of evolution as true; but now he had to defend a broader law that barred all teaching about human evolution, while the defense followed Shipley’s approach by pleading for individual liberty to learn and teach about scientific theories.

Despite strenuous efforts to reach the public through debates and addresses, Scopes’s opponents regularly complained that the press garbled their message—reflecting in part their own perceptions. Following the San Francisco debates, for example, the Adventist science educator George McCready Price wrote to Bryan, “Our side whipped Mr. Shipley ‘to the frazzle.’” Yet newspaper reports were mixed, as were neutral judges’ and audience reactions; even an accurate news account of antievolution arguments might not sound as good as proponents remembered them. Accordingly, Price directed Bryan to “the full report of the debate” as published by an Adventist press.³⁸ In a private letter written shortly before the Scopes trial, Bryan explained his criticism of the press regarding the antievolution controversy. “I think the newspapers desire to be truthful about matters of science. Whether they are thoroughly sensible depends a good deal upon one’s point of view,” he commented. “I do not consider it thoroughly sensible for a paper to publish as if true every wild guess made by a man who calls himself a scientist; and yet the wilder the guess the more likely it is to be published.”³⁹

In fact, some bias against the prosecution did taint the news coverage. Most major American newspapers went on record favoring the defense. Even within Tennessee—although editorialists roundly criticized Dayton for staging the trial and several of them grudgingly conceded that the court should enforce the law—only one major daily newspaper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, consistently supported the prosecution. Surveying the initial press commentary, a Nashville Banner editorialist observed that “There are vigorous champions of the right of the state to regulate its institutions, but a great many editors commenting insist that the question is whether truth shall be limited by law. Inevitably Mr. Bryan has become something of the storm center.” During the trial, an article in a trade publication for journalists commented, “Some of the reporters are writing controversial matter, arguing the case, asserting that civilization is on trial. The average news writer is trying to stick to the facts as revealed in court, but it is a slippery, tricky job at best.”⁴⁰ Based on a later study of editorial and news articles from the period, the journalism professor Edward Caudill agreed: “The press was biased in favor of Darrow,” but mostly due to its insensitivity to faith-based arguments rather than to intentional advocacy.⁴¹

Whatever the source for bias, the results could be quite blatant. For example, when T. T. Martin passed through Chattanooga on his way to the trial he defended antievolution laws with the standard claim that they protected the individual liberty of religious students. Apparently unable to see any connection between the restrictive statute and individual liberty, the Chattanooga Times article on Martin’s speech dismissed his claim as “quite novel.”⁴² Stung by critical letters to the editor from fundamentalists, the newspaper’s managing editor sought a balance by commissioning Chattanooga’s leading fundamentalist minister to join the paper’s regular staff reporters in covering the trial “with no restrictions,” as the minister was told, “save the truth and nothing but the truth be written.” This policy, which Bryan hailed as “highly commendable,” produced a diverse array of articles, with the minister’s daily features typically published alongside those written by modernist clerics or Watson Davis’s Science Service.⁴³ No other newspapers followed this approach, however. In mid June, when Riley, Martin, and other prominent antievolutionists offered a series of newspaper columns to balance the proevolution Science Service series, there were few takers among major papers.

Antievolutionists despaired of receiving fair treatment in the secular press. A letter to Sue Hicks from his brother Ira, a fundamentalist pastor in New Jersey, captured this feeling of frustration. “I have no doubt about the outcome of the case,” Ira wrote in mid June. “What I fear is the news papers will color everything to look like a victory for evolution as their sympathy is there. To get the real facts of this case before the people, especially in the north, is going to be a difficult task.”⁴⁴ Alternate outlets for information existed in church newspapers and journals. Some supported the prosecution, such as The Baptist and Reflector, which sent its editor from Kentucky to Dayton to cover the trial. Another Baptist journal offered its support from afar: “Scopes is just a fool boy who has lent himself to be the tool of faddists and opportunists.”⁴⁵ A pretrial article in a Washington, D.C.-based fundamentalist journal, The Present Truth, added, “Scopes as a teacher is an employee of the State, paid out of state funds, and surely the State has a right to say what he may do and may not do in his official capacity.”⁴⁶

Most traditional church publications appeared under denominational auspices, however, and many established denominations were split by the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, which left their newspapers and journals in the middle on the Scopes case. Some criticized both Bryan’s fanaticism and Darrow’s naturalism; others called for tolerance or simply avoided the issue. In discussing the trial, Roman Catholic newspapers warned parishioners against both the theory of evolution as materialistic dogma and antievolution laws as part of an effort by Protestant fundamentalists to control public education. The Catholic Press Association sent a top officer, Benedict Elder, to cover the trial for diocesan newspapers across the country. Upon his arrival in Dayton, Elder complained about the “religious complex [of] some writers for the metropolitan papers,” and offered his qualified support for the prosecution: “Although as Catholics we do not go quite as far as Mr. Bryan on the Bible, we do want it preserved.”⁴⁷ Elder went to Dayton with a top Knights of Columbus official. “There is a vast amount of sympathy for Mr. Bryan and the state of Tennessee among the Catholics of America,” the official noted. “However one may differ from him, the efforts of the Great Commoner serve the Christian faith of the young of Tennessee, and he is entitled to respect.”⁴⁸

Antievolutionists increasingly turned to interdenominational journals and publishers to communicate their side of the story. The WCFA’s quarterly journal presented its view of the Scopes trial to the faithful, and America’s two leading conservative Christian magazines, Moody Monthly and Sunday School Times, also took up the cause. Fundamentalist publishing houses, particularly the nondenominational Fleming H. Revell Company, contributed to the barrage of words. Antievolution books by Bryan sold so well that he discussed retiring from the lecture circuit after the Scopes trial to concentrate solely on writing. T. T. Martin’s Hell and the High School and Price’s The Phantom of Organic Evolution chalked up record sales; indeed, Martin hawked his book near the courthouse in Dayton under a large banner bearing the book’s title, which created a popular backdrop for photographers who wanted to emphasize the trial’s carnival atmosphere. The role of interdenominational and parachurch organizations in American religion had been increasing for years as traditional churches divided into liberal and conservative factions that crossed denominational lines; events leading up to the Scopes trial, however, accelerated this trend—especially for fundamentalists. Just before the trial, for example, when Riley announced the formation of a half dozen local societies to push for antievolution laws in various states, he stressed, “The societies are sponsored by fundamentalists of all denominations.”⁴⁹

Bryan moved at the center of the fundamentalists’ pretrial publicity campaign. He kept in close contact with leading antievolutionists as they spoke around the country. He traveled extensively himself, criss-crossing the eastern United States half a dozen times during May and June, speaking freely about the case in a style reminiscent of his whistle-stop campaigns for the presidency. The trial “is not a joke,” Bryan assured a Chicago audience, “but the beginning of the end of attacks upon the Bible by those teachers in the public schools who have been substituting the guesses of scientists for the word of God.”⁵⁰ Before a crowd of over 20,000 people in a small midwestern town, he added, “The most important elements that stir the human heart are bound up in [this case:] the education of the child and the religion of the child.”⁵¹ In full campaign mode, the Commoner proclaimed in Brooklyn, “We must win if the world is to be saved.”⁵² Back home in early July, he reported to the Miami Rotary Club: “The wide publicity given evolution and religion is focusing the attention of the world on a subject the people did not fully understand.”⁵³ Upon meeting Scopes in Dayton several days later, Bryan leaned toward the teacher and quietly said, “You have no idea what a black and brutal thing this evolution is.”⁵⁴

Bryan’s busy schedule made it difficult for the prosecutors to arrange a joint strategy session. Knowing that Bryan was passing through Tennessee in early June, Sue Hicks proposed that the Commoner stop over in Chattanooga for a conference, but Bryan had a speech in Tallahassee the following day. “You might meet me in Nashville at 8 a.m., [and] ride to Decatur,” Bryan scribbled his reply on hotel stationery. “This would give us about four hours together on the train, which would I think be sufficient for plans necessary now.”⁵⁵ Thus forewarned of Bryan’s itinerary, a band playing “Onward Christian Soldiers” and a blue-ribbon delegation of city and state leaders greeted the Commoner’s train when it pulled into Nashville. The three Dayton prosecutors, Hicks, Hicks, and Haggard, met with Bryan that morning; Stewart was in court at the time. The prosecution met together only once more prior to assembling in Dayton, late in June when Bryan had a brief stopover in Atlanta. Otherwise, they communicated by mail. Nevertheless, a bond immediately formed among the prosecutors. Four days after the first meeting, Sue Hicks wrote to his brother Ira, “We had a splendid conference with Bryan… in Nashville and rode with him in [his] state room to Chattanooga. He is greatly enthused about the case and will talk about nothing else. Of course we think Bryan is a wonderful man.”⁵⁶ In similar letter to another brother, Sue Hicks added that Bryan “is making great plans for this case. He says it is [a] turning point for Christianity.”⁵⁷

Bryan never varied in his public pronouncements regarding the prosecution’s strategy. “I have been explaining this case to audiences. It is the easiest case to explain I have ever found,” he wrote to Sue Hicks at the outset. “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.” Bryan went on to add, “By the way I don’t think we should insist on more than the minimum fine and I will let the defendant have the money.”⁵⁸ He reasserted this position after consulting with co-counsel on the train in Nashville. “The New York papers have entirely mistaken the issue,” he told reporters. “Mr. Scopes demands pay for teaching what the state does not want taught and demands that the state furnish him with an audience of children to which he can talk and say things contrary to law. No court has ever upheld any such proposition.” As to raising “the question of evolution” at trial, Bryan commented, “I am not so sure that it is involved.”⁵⁹

Privately, however, Bryan hoped to discredit the theory of evolution through expert testimony. Sue Hicks explained the plan to his brothers shortly after the prosecution’s first strategy session. “We can confine the case to the right of the legislature to control the schools and easily win. However we want both legal and moral victory if possible,” he wrote in strict confidence. “After we have put on sufficient proof to show the facts of the teaching, the state will rest its case and wait for the defense to move. They will likely want to win a moral victory for their scientific beliefs and will introduce various scientists, to substantiate the theory of evolution.” Here, Bryan hoped to ambush the defense. “We are planning to meet them on every issue raised and we think, without trouble, we have them beat in both the legal and scientific phases,” Hicks boasted. “It is part of our plan to keep the defense thinking that we are going to restrict the case to the right of the legislature to control, but when the trial comes on we can gain a moral victory by opening out the field to our evidence.”⁶⁰ Bryan confided his hopes in a letter to Johns Hopkins medical school professor Howard A. Kelly, one of the scientific experts solicited to testify. “The American people do not know what a menace evolution is—I am expecting a tremendous reaction as a result of the information which will go out from Dayton, and I am counting on you as one of the most powerful factors,” he wrote.⁶¹

Early on, the prosecution divided up responsibility for preparing and presenting the case. Recognizing his lack of trial experience and unfamiliarity with Tennessee law, Bryan left the legal issues strictly to the local attorneys. He assumed responsibility for securing scientists and theologians to testify against the theory of evolution. It was here that Bryan’s ambitious plans for attacking the theory at trial began to break down. None of the Tennessee prosecutors knew anything about science. Sue Hick’s confidence about winning the scientific phase of the trial rested solely on Bryan’s assertions about the matter. “Mr. Bryan is getting up the witnesses for us,” he wrote to his brother Ira, “and expects to have many of the leading scientists and doctors of divinity.”⁶² This great expectation met with bitter disappointment.

During the first strategy session, Bryan referred to the work of George McCready Price in refuting the theory of evolution. Sue Hicks also heard about Price from his brother Ira, who called Price “one of the best geologists.”⁶³ But Price carried no authority as a scientist outside fundamentalist circles. He lacked formal scientific training and devised his idiosyncratic geological theories about a recent six-day creation and cataclysmic Noachian Flood based on a literal reading of scripture informed by writings of the Adventist prophet Ellen G. White. Adventism stood on the fringes of fundamentalism, however, and Price’s work gained only qualified support from Bryan and other prominent antievolution crusaders of the twenties—many of whom accepted a long geologic history of the earth based on a “day/age theory” or “gap theory” interpretation of the Genesis account. Prosecutors turned to Price as their principal scientific expert against the theory of evolution. “You are one of the outstanding scientists who reject evolution as a proven hypothesis,” Bryan wrote to Price in early June. “Please let us know at once whether you can come.”⁶⁴ But Price was lecturing in England and unable to return. “I do not think that I could do any good, even if I were present at the coming trial,” Price wrote in a letter to Bryan. “It seems to me that in this case, it is not a time to argue about the scientific or unscientific character of evolution theory, but to show its utterly divisive and ‘sectarian’ character, and its essentially anti-Christian implications and tendencies. This you are very capable of doing.”⁶⁵

No other potential scientific expert contacted by Bryan wanted to participate. Several turned him down flatly. Only Kelly gave a qualified yes, writing that “the Christian must stand very literally with the Word regarding the creation of man,” but he acknowledged “a possible continuous sequence in the life history of the lower creation.”⁶⁶ In other words, nonhuman species evolved. This troubled Bryan from a strategic standpoint. “I would not be concerned about the truth or falsity of evolution before man but for the fact that a concession as to the truth of evolution furnishes our opponents with an argument which they are quick to use,” Bryan wrote back. “If we concede evolution up to man, we have only the Bible to support us in the contention that evolution stops before it reaches man.” Of course, this was Kelly’s point when he offered to stand with the word of God rather than the evidence of science regarding human evolution. The prosecution had plenty of potential religious experts with better theological credentials than Kelly (Riley, Straton, and Norris offered to testify), so Bryan put Kelly on standby status. “I don’t want to put you to the trouble of going to Dayton unless it is necessary,” Bryan wrote, and it would not be necessary if the court foreclosed all scientific testimony; this became the prosecution’s single-minded objective by the time of trial.⁶⁷

As the trial date approached, Bryan began to worry about the composition of the prosecution team. He had joined the prosecution when questions still existed as to whether anyone in Dayton seriously wanted to enforce the law. Those doubts should have ended when circuit attorney general Tom Stewart took charge of the prosecution, even though the case only involved the type of misdemeanor typically left to city or county attorneys. Bryan dealt mainly with the original Dayton lawyers, all of whom lacked trial experience—as did the Commoner. The defense had assembled four of the finest trial attorneys in America, and Bryan was concerned. “While I think you and your brother, Mr. Haggard, and myself might be able to meet their attack without any outside help,” he wrote to Sue Hicks in mid June, “I feel that the case is so important that we should not take any chances.” Bryan went on to state that he had already informally asked “two prominent men from the outside to assist us so that our side will look as large as theirs.⁶⁸ The choice was revealing, and clearly would have achieved the stated objective by broadening the case beyond the issue of fundamentalism. One was Samuel Untermyer of New York, vice president of the American Jewish Congress; the other was Senator T. J. Walsh of Montana, a Roman Catholic.

In his letter to Hicks, Bryan described Untermyer as “the biggest lawyer I know,” and the Commoner knew many of America’s leading attorneys. Untermyer’s father, a Jewish immigrant to Virginia, had fought for the Confederacy. After the Civil War, the boy went with his widowed mother to New York, where he rose to become a fabulously wealthy corporate lawyer and civil rights activist. Untermyer served as a leader in both the ACLU and the American Jewish Congress, but Bryan knew him from their work together for the Democratic party. “Being a Jew,” Bryan wrote to Hicks, “he ought to be interested in defending Moses from the attacks of the Darrowites.”⁶⁹ And Untermyer would have done so, except for the fact that he had just sailed for Europe. Bryan’s letter caught up with Untermyer in London, from where he cabled detailed advice. Untermyer fully agreed that the legislature should control the school curriculum. “The most important question that will arise upon the trial, as I see it, is to restrain the defendants from reaching from outside the real issues of law that are involved in the controversy,” he wrote. “I would seek to exclude all discussion by experts or otherwise on the subject of evolution.… If the Court is prompt and intelligent in its ruling the trial will be a rather perfunctory affair. If you and your associates would like to have my participation on the appeal I shall be glad to act.”⁷⁰ This advice, coupled with the prosection’s problems in securing scientific experts, convinced Bryan to stick to a narrow legal strategy.

The local prosecutors disliked Bryan’s idea of asking out-of-state attorneys to join the team. Except for locally popular figures such as Bryan, they argued, such attorneys carried little weight in Tennessee courts. “We some what doubt the advisability of having a Jew in the case,” the Hicks brothers bluntly wrote to Bryan. Catholics posed a problem as well. Sue Hicks already had gloated to reporters over the prospect of besting the ACLU and Darrow. The former was “pro-communist,” he noted, and as to the latter, “All we have to do is to get the fact that Mr. Darrow is an atheist… across to the jury, and his case is lost.” Now the brothers pleaded with Bryan, “We feel that it will be a great victory for our cause to whip them without additional counsel.” They acknowledged their own inexperience, but stressed, “Attorney General Stewart is a good constitutional lawyer, a close observer, a good reasoner, a hard worker, and a good speaker. We feel that, under the conditions, he alone will be able to take care of [legal matters].” Bryan bowed to their objections, and left Stewart in charge.⁷¹ Walsh quietly let the matter pass, while Untermyer, who wanted to honor his final pledge to Bryan, had to be told that his assistance was not wanted for the appeal. Two additional lawyers joined the prosecution team, however. The circuit’s retired attorney general, Ben G. McKenzie, appeared alongside his son for the prosecution, and William Jennings Bryan, Jr., then in private practice in California following service as a U.S. attorney in Arizona, arrived to help his father.

Bryan’s penchant for oratory notwithstanding, the strategy and composition of the prosecution promised a quick trial. In a formal letter to the court submitting their witness list, the Hicks brothers wrote, “We have no list of witnesses to give out other than those we used before the grand jury. As we understand it, it is the duty of the Court to look within the four corners of the act and from that determine its constitutionality.” They added a barb typical of remarks at the trial: “We have no desire to violate a rule of evidence and allow the defense to turn loose a slush of scientific imagination and guess work upon our people, upon whom from reports, these great lawyers from the north and northwest look with pity and compassion, denominating them a set of ignoramuses.”⁷² Governor Peay communicated similar advice to the court. In a public letter released shortly before trial, he declared, “The case should be tried in an hour. It is about as simple a proposition as could be stated and the great hurrah about it is unnecessary and unfortunate.”⁷³ A prominent Nashville jurist felt the same way. “The question of whether or not the state has the right to prescribe a curriculum for its schools is the question upon which the Scopes trial should turn,” he declared, “and if it does the trial will be a short one and rather uninteresting.”⁷⁴

Bryan and Stewart knew that Darrow and company would not quietly accept such narrow limits for the trial. “If we can shut out the expert testimony,” Bryan predicted in a private letter shortly before trial, “we will be through in a short time. I have no doubt of our final victory, but I don’t know how much we will have to go through before we reach the end.”⁷⁵ Stewart anticipated a fierce fight. “The trial proper should be comparatively simple,” he observed. “This challenges the right of the legislature to regulate the public schools in the state.… The legal questions, however, are about to be lost sight of in the consideration of this unusual matter.”⁷⁶

The defense, of course, took an expansive view of the “legal questions” raised by a state law against teaching evolution, and adopted a strategy calculated to push them to the fore. Darrow and Malone told the press that their case would take a month to present. Hays explained the reasons why. The Tennessee statute expressly outlawed teaching that denied the biblical account of creation. As a legal matter, according to Hays, this was “unconstitutional because, in the light of present-day knowledge of evolution, to be adduced from scientists, it is unreasonable.” Further, he added, “the law was indefinite as well as unreasonable, because no two persons understand the Bible alike.” Hays elaborated on this second proposition. “If the fight of liberalism and honest thinking is to be won it must have the support of millions of intelligent Christians who accept the Bible as a book of morals and inspiration,” he explained. “Evidence which would tend to show that there is no conflict between religion and science, or even between the Bible, accepted as a book of morals, and science, would be more effective in answering their claims than a mere contention that the schools must be free to teach what these fundamentalists regard as irreligion.” With Darrow, Malone, and Hays in control of the defense, the fight for individual liberty against majority control expanded to include scientific evidence for evolution and religious theories of biblical interpretation. “That the people should derive light and education from court proceedings may be novel,” Hays wrote, “but it can hardly be objectionable.”⁷⁷

Defense attorneys began their efforts to enlighten and educate the public almost immediately through pretrial tactics that differed markedly from those of the prosecution. Although Bryan spoke widely about the menace of Darwinism, the prosecution kept as quiet as possible about their plans for the trial and said nothing in public about potential expert witnesses. The defense, in contrast, spoke openly about its plans and issued almost daily announcements about various scientists and theologians who would—or might (it was never quite clear)—testify on Scopes’s behalf in Dayton. In late June, for example, Malone announced a list of ten distinguished scientists who “have already signified their willingness to serve as witnesses.”⁷⁸ Only two of these ten actually went to Dayton, and the top names on the list—Osborn, Conklin, and AAAS president Michael I. Pupin—by this time clearly had said no. Defense attorneys suggested also that Luther Burbank would testify, even though the famed horticulturist had only agreed to serve on their advisory committee. The constant dribble of names insured a succession of newspaper articles linking the Scopes defense to America’s most respected scientists, which helped to enlighten the public about the widespread support for the theory of evolution throughout the scientific community. Such a tactic also kept the prosecutors off balance, especially as their own well of scientific experts came up dry.

Bryan tried to dismiss defense experts with populist oratory, often decrying that a “scientific soviet is attempting to dictate what shall be taught in our schools.” At trial, Bryan added, “It isn’t proper to bring experts in here to try to defeat the purpose of the people of this state by trying to show that this thing that they denounce and outlaw is a beautiful thing.”⁷⁹ He worried most about the public impact of Burbank’s activities in support of teaching evolution and sought to discredit them. “I remember seeing a letter from [Burbank] which was published in Ohio in which he denounces religion,” Bryan wrote to Riley three months before the trial. “Would it not be well for you to have some friends of yours in Minnesota write to him as if from the standpoint of an atheist and congratulate him on his activities and draw out from him a declaration of his atheistic views?” Bryan had good reason for concern. People everywhere know about Burbank’s knack for breeding new commercial plant varieties, which seemed like an example of evolution at work. “There is no such thing as evolution,” Bryan said in frustration shortly before trial, “Burbank? Ah, he merely produced varieties within a species.”⁸⁰ Typical Rhea County jurors, however—most of whom were farmers—surely would listen attentively to Burbank. Indeed, when Hays introduced a statement from Burbank in court, Judge Raulston jerked up in his chair, “Is he here?” and was visibly disappointed to learn that Hays only offered a written statement.⁸¹

In all likelihood, the eight scientists who finally showed up for the defense were completely unknown to the people of Dayton. From the scene of the trial, the Chicago Tribune reporter Philip Kinsley attributed what he described as the defense’s “trouble in getting prominent men to come here to testify on the side of evolution” to their fear of facing cross-examination by Bryan in a hostile setting. The best-known potential experts for the defense—Osborn, Davenport, Cattell, Burbank, Conklin, and David Starr Jordan—had clashed willingly with Bryan in public over evolution, however. They seemed more troubled about appearing at the trial with Darrow than against Bryan. Certainly none of them liked appearing in a supporting role opposite a showman such as Darrow. The Chicago attorney’s radical agnosticism made some of them uncomfortable as well. Furthermore, all six championed coercive eugenic measures to guide human evolution, measures that Darrow denounced as incompatible with human rights. Hints of each of these reasons appear in the scientists’ statements, but their absence from the trial spoke loudest of all.

This left the controversial Chicagoan as the only member of the defense team who could compete on the public stage with Bryan. Darrow did his best to promote Scopes’s side of the dispute in a series of widely reported speeches and press statements during the month before trial. His late June visit to Dayton and Knoxville attracted the most attention. “The night he arrived there was a violent storm,” Mencken joked from Dayton, “and horned cattle in the lowlands were afloat for hours.”⁸² Despite such efforts to sensationalize the contrast between Darrow and Daytonians, townspeople immediately took to the great agnostic. “He arrived wearing a straw katy, his coat open in a gesture of summer casualness,” Scopes later recalled. “It was easy to like him. He drawled comfortably and hadn’t any airs. He gave the impression he might have grown up in Dayton, just an unpolished, casual country lawyer, so ordinary did he act.”⁸³ Darrow sized up the town, conferred with Scopes, and met the press. The Progressive Dayton Club hosted a banquet in his honor, which gave him a formal opportunity to explain his views on evolution and religion. “People of Dayton like his personality and think he is a great man,” Sue Hicks reported to Bryan in a letter, “but they are all shaking their heads about his beliefs.”⁸⁴

Darrow was not speaking simply to Daytonians, however, but to all Americans. In speech after speech, he stressed the trial’s significance. “This case is a difference of opinion of people upon a matter which effects life,” he told the Progressive Club. “The country has fallen upon evil times. It seems that every organization has some law it is endorsing to force upon the people,” he warned a large public audience at Neal’s law school in Knoxville. “If the human race is going to be improved,” Darrow asked in a New York address, “who will do it? The Bryans?… It is best to leave everyone free to work out things for himself. Nature is doing it in a big, broad way and doing it pretty successfully.” From his naturalistic, materialistic perspective, Darrow cried out for tolerance and liberty: “What we are depends on heredity and environment, and we can control neither. As a result, I never condemn, never judge.”⁸⁵

His usual approach to a trial was quite different. “Ordinarily, Darrow’s strategy was to dissipate the prejudice aroused by any crime of which the defendant might be accused… by good humor and light quips,” Hays wrote, noting as an example Darrow’s crack at a trial of a spouse killer, “Well, it was his own wife, wasn’t it?”⁸⁶ Here Darrow sought the opposite effect so as to emphasize the threat to freedom and to counter Bryan’s claim that an evolutionary world view offered no basis for morality. It worked. Hicks privately described Darrow’s Progressive Club address as “wonderful.” “Those who want to hear a great burst of oratory did not hear that,” a deeply moved journalist wrote of Darrow’s hour-long Knoxville lecture. “They simply saw a stooped man in baggy dark clothes who talked to them in ordinary conversational manner. They saw a tired but kindly face, shrewd eyes which often evoke laughter, but seldom laugh. And they liked it.”⁸⁷ This contrasted starkly with Bryan and his bombastic majoritarian crusade for legal restrictions on academic freedom.

In what was scheduled as the highlight of his June visit to Tennessee, Darrow almost had the opportunity to present his side of the case at the annual meeting of the state bar association, but its president revoked the invitation when delegates became embroiled in controversy over the pending trial. Supporters of a floor resolution condemning Dayton for using a criminal trial as an “advertising medium” clashed with proponents of one demanding repeal of the antievolution statute, which delegate Robert S. Keebler of Memphis denounced as “half pitiful, half ludicrous” in an hour-long oration that systematically detailed constitutional objections to the law. As the meeting reeled toward chaos, the president ruled the whole topic out of order, struck Keebler’s remarks from the record, and withdrew Darrow’s invitation.⁸⁸ The ACLU subsequently printed two thousand copies of Keebler’s “banned” oration, which it distributed in a bulk-mail solicitation for contributions to a special defense fund for the Scopes case. “The public’s interest in the Scopes trial has been greater perhaps than any since the famous Dred Scott decision,” the ACLU announced in launching this fund drive. “We believe that citizens all over the United States will want to have a part in this issue that will shape the future course of education in the country.”⁸⁹

Two of Darrow’s co-counsels also spoke freely with the press and public during the weeks before trial, reinforcing Darrow’s efforts to communicate the significance of the case. “No more serious invasion of the sacred principle of liberty than the recent act against the teaching of evolution in Tennessee has ever been attempted,” Dudley Field Malone told a Knoxville women’s group during his pretrial visit to the state.⁹⁰ About the same time, John Neal warned a Chicago audience, “If the state’s charges against Scopes are sustained you will see other evolution trials and perhaps a movement in congress to control the thought as well as the actions of people.”⁹¹ Following a pretrial visit to Dayton, Darrow’s best-known co-counsel, Bainbridge Colby, issued a statement decrying the “holiday atmosphere surrounding the approaching trial,” adding “the issue is grave in character, embodying principles at the base of our security of happiness and American citizenship.”⁹² The press resisted this characterization of events, and persisted in treating the entire episode as a joke. Editorial cartoons inevitably depicted the Great Commoner embroiled with monkeys—and the monkeys usually winning. Syndicated political humorist Will Rogers brushed aside an invitation to Dayton with the comment, “Bryan is due back here in the New York zoo in July.”⁹³

Malone assumed responsibility for pressing the defense contention that the theory of evolution did not conflict with the biblical account of creation. Taking this message to Baptist Tennessee during his pretrial visit presented a challenging role for a twice-married Roman Catholic divorce lawyer with Socialist ties, but Malone was a highly effective public speaker and the only professing Christian among the defense lawyers at Dayton. “I daresay that I am just as strong a believer in Christianity… as Mr. Bryan,” Malone told a Chattanooga luncheon audience. “I find no difficulty in holding with devotion to Christianity and also to evolution. Theology is concerned with the aspiration of men and their faith in a future life. Science is concerned with the process of nature.” These separate spheres need never cross, he added in an evening address to the local Civitan Club: “There should be no more conflict between religion and science than between the love a man gives to his mother and to his wife.”⁹⁴ Prosecutors countered this message by attacking the messenger. “I read in today’s Banner Mr. Sue Hicks’ interview wherein he scored Darrow, Malone and other atheists,” a Nashville legal advisor for the prosecution wrote to the Hicks brothers. “This is the line to attack, and you will find it most vulnerable and will strike the responsive chord with the people.”⁹⁵

Neal, for his part, kept the focus on academic freedom. He claimed to “represent the protest of the intellectuals of the south against the antievolution legislation,” which he blamed on the “arrested [intellectual] development” of the region. “It is not a case of religion against irreligion, not a case of Fundamentalism against Modernism, but a case for the freedom of speech and thought,” Neal told a New York audience.⁹⁶ Neal gained widespread attention in early June when he tried to delay the selection of new biology textbooks for Tennessee public schools until after the Scopes trial. His legal threats were ignored by the state textbook commission, which replaced Hunter’s Civic Biology with texts that barely mentioned evolution.

Except for an occasional press release, the usually talkative Colby said little in public about the upcoming trial. He appeared ill at ease in Dayton during his pretrial visit and positively appalled when observing a criminal prosecution in Kingston, Tennessee, on the drive back to Knoxville. An accompanying reporter from the Chattanooga Times described it as a murder trial; Scopes recalled it as a rape case. By either account, a young defendant (of whom Scopes said, “At best he was a moron; more likely he was an imbecile”) was being railroaded without proper representation in a courtroom filled with gun-toting spectators. Darrow had to be physically restrained from intervening, while Colby hung back moaning, “Those poor, poor unfortunate people.” Upon his return to New York, he convinced the ACLU to seek an injunction to remove the Scopes case to a “sedate” federal court on the flimsy grounds that the antievolution statute applied to an institution receiving federal funds, namely, the University of Tennessee. After a federal judge abruptly denied this last-minute petition, a ruling even the other defense lawyers viewed as correct, Colby quietly resigned from the case. The Chattanooga Times reporter had predicted this development: “When he took one look at the hardy Tennessee mountaineers assembled in the Kingston courtroom, [Colby] departed in haste for the effete east, with the mental reservation that ‘this is no place for me.’ Colby saw at Kingston what he thought he would see at Dayton.”⁹⁷ Darrow felt right at home, however, while Malone and the ACLU representative Arthur Garfield Hays approached the pending trial with a spirit of adventure.

Having survived a second attempt “to rob Dayton of the big show,” as one reporter described it, townspeople eagerly completed preparations for the expected throng.⁹⁸ Officials roped off six blocks of the town’s main street as a pedestrian mall, which quickly filled with hucksters and proselytizers. The state sent a mobile chlorination unit to provide an adequate supply of safe drinking water and a sanitary engineer to oversee waste disposal. Chattanooga contributed a fire brigade and six constables. A temporary tourist camp opened on vacant land owned by the coal company. Dayton’s finest hotel, the Aqua, placed cots in its hallways, while the Ladies’ Aid Society prepared to offer one-dollar lunches at a downtown church. Rappleyea fixed up an abandoned eighteen-room house known as the Mansion to accommodate visiting defense experts, leading some townspeople to joke that they used to think that the house was haunted, but now they knew it was. Mencken described it as “an ancient and empty house outside the town limits, now crudely furnished with iron cots, spittoons, playing cards and the other camp equipment of scientists.”⁹⁹ The Morgan Springs Hotel, a nearby mountain resort, engaged a jazz orchestra to perform nightly during the trial. The local cinema screened The She Devil.

Dayton bustled with activity. Workers erected a speaker’s platform on the courthouse lawn and marked off the county’s first airstrip on a nearby pasture. Robinson’s drugstore stocked up on books by both Bryan and Osborn, and hung out a banner declaring, “Where It Started.” No need to define It. Other signs appeared along the main street, including several large banners proclaiming, READ YOUR BIBLE, one of which adorned the courthouse itself. A cavernous storage loft above a downtown hardware store became a makeshift press room for visiting reporters. Western Union stationed twenty-two key operators in town to transmit news reports and strung extra telegraph wires to nearby cities. The telephone company and post office hired additional staff. The Southern Railway added extra passenger service to Dayton and advertised free stopovers in town on all tourist tickets. The Progressive Dayton Club struck a souvenir coin bearing the likeness of a monkey wearing a straw hat.

The courtroom received a face-lift for the trial. A fresh coat of cream-colored paint brightened the walls. Five hundred additional spectator seats and a movie camera platform crowded the chamber. Telegraph wires ran into the courtroom for minute-by-minute transmissions of the proceedings, much like those used to broadcast big-league baseball games. The telephone company installed a bank of phones in an adjoining room, and new public toilets went in downstairs. In a move symbolic of the trial itself, the jury box was removed from the center of the chamber to make room for three central microphones, which fed loudspeakers on the courthouse lawn and in four public auditoriums around town. WGN, the radio voice of the Chicago Tribune, arranged to transmit the message from the microphones through special telephone lines to Chicago, from where the station broadcast the proceedings live over the airways. “The event will be the first of its kind in the history of radio,” the Tribune boasted, “undertaken as a demonstration of the public service of radio in communicating to the masses great news events.” It dismissed concerns about the propriety of such a broadcast. “This is not a criminal trial, as that term is ordinarily understood,” the announcement added. “It is more like the opening of a summer university.… The defendant, Scopes, is already a negligible factor. Nothing serious can happen to him. The contest is entirely over ideas.”¹⁰⁰

John Scopes, left, and his initial defenders, John Neal, middle, and George Rappleyea, right, beneath a trial-related poster on the way to a court hearing. (Courtesy of Bryan College Archives)

The composition of the town’s population also changed. Many residents left Dayton during the trial, leasing their homes to visitors. The Bryan family, for example, occupied the modern home of a druggist, F. R. Rogers, who took his family to their cottage in the mountains. Darrow initially stayed in the Mansion but after his wife arrived from Chicago moved with her into the vacated home of a local banker. Malone checked into the Aqua Hotel with a striking woman who registered as Doris Stevens, which created quite a stir until townspeople realized that the woman (who registered under her own last name) was his wife. Hays and Neal spent most of their time at the Mansion, which served as headquarters for the defense team throughout the trial.

A diverse array of journalists, evolutionists, and antievolutionists trailed in behind the attorneys. Approximately two hundred reporters covered the trial for newspapers across America and as far away as London. Press photographers and newsreel camera crews also appeared in abundance. T. T. Martin preached in the streets, as did a Brooklyn rationalist who shouted about the evils of Christianity, and a Detroit man who billed himself as the Champion Bible Demonstrator. A small contingent of black Pentecostalists camped near town, attracting the attention of reporters who apparently thought that speaking in tongues was an indigenous Tennessee religious phenomenon, when in reality the great black church leader Charles Harrison Mason had brought Pentecostalism to the Tennessee African-American community from Los Angeles a decade earlier. “It sounds to the infidel like a series of college yells,” Mencken wrote.¹⁰¹ For a fee, anyone in Dayton could pose with a live chimpanzee or view fossilized remains of “the missing link.” Most visitors, however, had nothing in particular to say or sell but, as one African-American tourist from Atlanta told a New York Times reporter, simply “wanted to see the show.” After surveying the crowd, the reporter concluded, “Whatever the deep significance of the trial, if it has any, there is no doubt that it has attracted some of the world’s champion freaks.”¹⁰²

Bryan, the star attraction, arrived three days before the trial began. A summer heat wave pushed temperatures into the nineties that day and throughout the trial—twenty degrees above normal. While waiting for Bryan’s noon train, a reporter asked a nearby bootblack, “Why all the crowd at the depot?” The reporter recorded the following response: “Des wait’n fur Willum Jennums Bryan, sir.… He’s a hard-shell preacher,… a stand-patter,… a non-skidder, and de’s no movin’ uu’m when de thinks um right.”¹⁰³ The Royal Palm limited from Miami finally arrived at 1:30 p.m. and made its first stop ever in the small town that it usually passed through at full throttle. “As Mr. Bryan stepped from the rear platform,” one reporter observed, “he was greeted with applause and flutters of handkerchiefs. He was met by at least half the normal population of the town, and the temporary increase composed of newspaper people and photographers.” Bryan wore a tropical pith helmet to protect his balding head from the sun and heat, and doffed it frequently to the crowd. “Just say that I am here,” he declared with a broad smile. “I am going right to work, and I am ready for anything that is to be done.”¹⁰⁴ This work consisted of a series of antievolution speeches around town.

Once the prosecution decided to oppose the admission of expert testimony at trial and narrowly limit the legal issue to majoritarian control over public education, out-of-court speeches and statements became the only sure way for Bryan to proclaim his message in Dayton. By arriving early, he now had the stage (and scores of news-hungry reporters) to himself. Bryan made the most of this opportunity. He strolled around town in his shirtsleeves greeting well-wishers and talking with reporters. He posed for pictures at Robinson’s drugstore and lectured the school board on the dangers of teaching evolution. Bryan gave two public addresses before the trial began, one at a Progressive Dayton Club banquet in his honor and another in a dramatic mountaintop setting near the Morgan Springs Hotel. “The contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death,” Bryan said in explaining his view of the trial’s significance to the Progressive Club. “The atheists, agnostics and all other opponents of Christianity understand the character of the struggle, hence their interest in this case. From this time forth Christians will understand the character of the struggle also.”¹⁰⁵ On the mountaintop, he added, “Evolutionists, though admittedly in a minority, are intolerant enough to demand that the school teach their views, and their views really constitute their religion.”¹⁰⁶

The Commoner professed his faith in the judgment of the people, once the public was informed of the significance of the issue. “I have been quoted as saying that I think the decision of this case will be of importance,” Bryan told reporters. “It is not the decision but the discussion which will follow that I consider important. It will bring the issue before the attention of the world.”¹⁰⁷ No mere judicial decision could frustrate the awakened will of the people. “Who made the courts?” he asked in a rhetorical flourish before the Progressive Club. “The people. Who made the Constitution? The people. The people can change the Constitution and if necessary they can change the decisions of the court.”¹⁰⁸

Neal sat stone-faced throughout Bryan’s Progressive Club address as those around him cheered. He stayed up late that night penning a formal response. “We regard Mr. Bryan’s speech last night as the most remarkable utterance ever made by a lawyer just before his entrance into a trial of a criminal case. His speech comes as a challenge to the defense not to confine the test of the anti-evolution law,” Neal asserted, “but instead to put on trial the truth or lack of truth of the theory of evolution [and] the conflict or lack of conflict between science and religion.”¹⁰⁹ Such a trial could last up to a month, he predicted. That perfectly fit the defense strategy for the case, and Neal knew that the prosecution opposed it. Yet Bryan’s speech offered an opening. When prosecutors did move to exclude such issues from trial, the defense feigned surprise. “We men in New York, when we read the opinion of this distinguished lawyer to the effect that this was a duel to death,” Hays protested in court, “we relied then upon the opinion of that distinguished lawyer and we have spent thousands of dollars bringing witnesses here.”¹¹⁰ Of course, those witnesses and both New York lawyers—Hays and Malone—were already en route when Bryan issued his challenge.

“You don’t know how glad I am to see you folks!” Rappleyea exclaimed when the two New York lawyers stepped off the train in Chattanooga a day before trial. “Things have been mighty lonesome down at Dayton since Bryan arrived. Mr. Neal, Scopes, and myself have been feeling like three lost kittens.” Malone laughed back, “Am I too late for the trial? I rather suspected that I was. You see, I have been reading Mr. Bryan’s speeches in the newspapers and I thought the trial had already begun.” It immediately became apparent that Bryan no longer had the stage to himself. “The issue is not between science and religion, as some would have us believe. The real issue is between science and Bryanism,” Malone added. “I believe that the scientists we have called to act as witnesses in the trial really know more about science than Mr. Bryan; and I also believe that the ministers we have called know more about religion than he does.” The prosecution wanted to keep those witnesses off the stand and let Bryan hold forth outside the courtroom. The defense would push its message in and out of court. “The fundamentalists cannot make the issue too broad for us,” one reporter eagerly replied to Malone. “The broader they make it, the better we will be satisfied.” Hays smiled. “This trial is going to be a good education for the people,” he promised, “and for the newspapers.”¹¹¹

These comments received wide circulation because a half dozen reporters from major northeastern newspapers rode on the train to Tennessee with Malone and Hays and reported their remarks. Otherwise, in marked contrast to Bryan’s reception, the New York defense attorneys arrived without fanfare. “Unknown and unannounced,” one reporter noted, “the little group passed quietly through the station to Dr. Rappleyea’s car.” The only excitement occurred after their arrival in Dayton. Charles Francis Potter, who accompanied Malone and Hays on the trip, became alarmed when a young man grabbed their baggage out of the open trunk. “Hey, boy, what are you doing with those suitcases?” Potter shouted. “That’s all right, Doc,” Rappleyea replied. “That’s only Scopes.”¹¹² The defenders, along with everyone else, had forgotten the defendant.

Darrow arrived later that day, on the last train into Dayton. “There was no torchlight parade to greet me,” Darrow later recalled. “Still, there were some people at the depot to meet me; I was received most kindly and courteously at that.”¹¹³ Movie cameras captured the scene as Scopes embraced Darrow at the depot—providing the opening footage for newsreels shown throughout the country during the trial. “Scopes is not on trial. Civilization is on trial,” Darrow said upon leaving for Dayton. “Nothing will satisfy us but broad victory, a knockout which will have an everlasting precedent to prove that America is founded on liberty and not on narrow, mean, intolerable and brainless prejudice of soulless religio-maniacs.”¹¹⁴ Darrow would stand for individual liberty against mindless majoritarianism—and give no quarter to Bryan. Both sides had worked themselves to a fever pitch. Judge Raulston closed the final day before trial with a remarkable public benediction, as an open-air prayer service occurred on the courthouse lawn. “I am concerned that those connected with this investigation shall divest themselves of all ambition to establish any particular theory for personal gratification,” he noted in a public statement. “I am much interested that the unerring hand of Him who is the Author or all truth and justice should direct every official act of mine.”¹¹⁵ Jury selection began the next day.