Nineteenth-century America made its last stand in a boiling courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. Farmers and their families, in overalls and gingham, flocked into the small mountain town in cavalcades of mule-drawn wagons and Model T flivvers, agog to hear the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, defend their Bible against this newfangled notion that everyone's great-grandpappy was a monkey. Ostensibly on trial was John Thomas Scopes, a 24-year-old teacher of science and football at Dayton High School, who had agreed to be the defendant in a test case of Tennessee's new law proscribing the teaching of evolution. The boosters of Dayton hoped a show trial would put the town on the map. It did.
Scopes was simply an innocent pawn. It was his defender, the great criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow, who personified the menace of Modernity. He was Beelzebub to rural America-an agnostic, a big-city intellectual, defender of labor radicals. Moreover, he was notoriously fresh from saving the rich city kids Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold from the electric chair, on the grounds that they could not help what they did when they carried out the "perfect murder" of a 14-year-old boy.
It had been 66 years since Charles Darwin's Origin of Species had challenged the biblical story of creation. The liberal East and the Episcopalians had long since adapted their faith to its findings, but this only deepened suspicions among the Baptists and Presbyterians in the so-called Bible Belt centered in the Southern states. They saw scientific materialism, like immigration, Catholics, Jews and booze, as a plot against their way of life and they took refuge in fundamentalism as well as the Klan and Prohibition. The term originated in 1910 with the publication of millions of copies of The Fundamentals: A Testimony to Their Truth, paid for by two wealthy laymen. The book argued the literal truth of the Protestant Bible, the Virgin birth, and the physical resurrection of Christ.
Bryan was but one of many in the fundamentalist movement campaigning against the teaching of evolution in public schools, but by 1925 his eloquence had won him its leadership. That eloquence had been considerably squandered in recent years, mostly in the cause of dubious Florida real estate deals. Seated like a pasha on a barge in the middle of a manmade lake, he would use his fine voice to sell the gullible on the benefits of buying into the Sunshine State. Yet he was still a devoutly religious man, and he was eager to help the state of Tennessee save Christianity. A lifelong opponent of Darwin's illegitimate offspring, Social Darwinism, he saw in the teaching of the "survival of the fittest" the very sort of moral neutralism that could have produced a Leopold and Loeb. Darrow was as eager to repulse the tyranny of the majority and expose Bible Belt justice.
The two men, both Democrats, nursed an ancient rivalry and it was their personal duel that reverberated throughout America. The case itself was a foregone conclusion when Judge John T. Raulston of Fiery Gizzard, Tennessee, ruled that the issue was not the truth of evolution or the wisdom of the statute, but simply whether Scopes had broken Tennessee's law, which he admittedly had. (He was fined $100). But the real climax was on July 20, the day before the verdict, when the court moved into the open air for Darrow's cross-examination of Bryan, who volunteered himself as an expert on the Bible.
How could Bryan affirm that Jonah was swallowed by a whale? Was he aware of the size of a whale's gullet?
He had been swallowed, hedged Bryan, by a "giant fish."
Did he really believe that the serpent crawled on its belly because the Lord punished it for tempting Eve in the garden of Eden?
"I believe that," said Bryan.
Had he any idea, mocked Darrow, how the snake got about before it was cursed? Did it perhaps walk on its tail?
The huge crowd laughed. The give and take of cross-examination by a master of the art required Bryan to dance like an angel on the head of a pin. He won applause, but so did Darrow, and when Bryan wobbled he lost the support of the zealots. Did he think the Earth was made in six days? "Not six days of twenty-four hours," he answered. Once he had granted the need for interpretation, he had eliminated the fundamentalists' authority. At the end of the trial, while Darrow was surrounded in congratulations, Bryan stood alone with a solitary friend. In the press he was berated as a simpleton.
Five days later in Dayton, Bryan ate one of his enormous meals, despite the midday heat, took a nap and died in his sleep at the age of 65. The anti-evolutionists marked his death with a renewed campaign of witch-hunts and "monkey bills." But the bigotry and ignorance associated with the cause rallied liberal Christians, who believed there was no necessary conflict between the teachings of Christianity and the findings of science. There were no more prosecutions. The tide slowly ebbed.
BEAK OF THE FINCH
by Jonathan Weiner
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize