Part 11

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

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

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 After Rappelyea had been replaced by Walter White, the Rhea County superintendent of schools, as the complaining witness, the thirteen jurors took less than an hour to indict Scopes whose trial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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DARROW: All right, all right.

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

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

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