The real (Scopes) Monkey Trial is eternal, winding its way anew through American life, decade after decade. The carefully staged publicity stunt in Tennessee was merely one occasion in a longer struggle over the nature of man and the limits of his knowled
In a merely procedural sense, the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tenn., ended on July 21, 1925, with the conviction of biology teacher John T. Scopes on the charge of instructing students that “man has descended from a lower order of animals.” But of course the real Monkey Trial is eternal, winding its way anew through American life, decade after decade. The carefully staged publicity stunt in Tennessee was merely one occasion in a longer struggle over the nature of man and the limits of his knowledge. I know this is an old- fashioned romantic ACLU-liberal view of the matter, but I hold to it.
As I write this column, county officials in Dayton are unveiling a statute of Clarence Darrow, the garrulous, crooked lawyer who represented Team Enlightenment in the original 1925 contest between Darwinian evolution and the Scriptures. In 2005, the citizens of Dayton, where Monkey Trial tourism is now a crucial industry, erected a statue of William Jennings Bryan on the grounds of the immortal Rhea County courthouse. Bryan had been the chosen hero of evangelical Christianity in the trial, dying less than a week after its conclusion, and is the namesake of a local bible college, which paid for the statue.
Bryan was also a three- time Democratic candidate for president and a former secretary of State, so what good American could possibly object? The answer, as usual in the U. S., was “quarrelsome unbelievers,” who pointed out that their man Darrow deserved equal representation on public property. The Freedom From Religion Foundation raised US$ 150,000 for a Darrow statue, outraging some of the godly successors of Bryan who still live in the town and revere the man.
The counter-erection of Darrow does not seem to have required litigation or even much agitation. Even Christians in Dayton seem to have sensed that there was something incomplete about having an effigy of Bryan but none of his great adversary. Darrow may have been a filthy atheist, but ... well, he will be good for the economy. It was so in 1925, when the trial and the 200 reporters who came to watch turned the town into a giant open- air fair-ground- marketplace-spectacle. And it is so now: commerce is a powerful agent of Hegelian synthesis.
I became a serious student of the Scopes Trial as an undergraduate. Like anybody else, I had seen the 1960 Hollywood rendering of the play about the trial, Inherit The Wind, which represents Bryan as an ignorant windbag, Darrow as a tired, patient figure of ostentatious nobility, and a thinly disguised H. L. Mencken as a cruel nihilist newspaperman. Today I suppose I would regard Mencken as the real hero of the show. He was privy to the ACLU’s engineering of the trial as a publicity stunt, but he also always said that Tennessee was within its constitutional rights to forbid the teaching of evolution — to be, in his view, just as backward as its people wished.
Inherit The Wind makes its pseudo- Mencken a heartless guttersnipe mostly as a device for elevating a sympathetic Darrow even further. This is part of the movie’s major liberty with the events of the trial: it has Bryan drop dead in mid- rant at the moment of its culmination, instead of waiting a few days. What I discovered as a student was that, aside from this excusable concession to theatrical unity, the film probably deserves some kind of prize for general fidelity to historical events.
The most ludicrous scenes from its version of the trial are all taken from the actual record, most nearly verbatim. The hucksters and ranters outside the courtroom, with performing apes in tow, were real. The devastating heat in the courthouse, which turned the portly Bryan and the shabby Darrow into perspiring gladiators, is real. The early, intrusive use of the radio to broadcast the trial — exercising the same sort of nefarious influence that cable television did on the O. J. Simpson proceeding — is quite real. Even Bryan’s fatal disappointment at not being able to conclude the trial by giving a stem- winding revival speech to the nation is probably more or less legitimate: the speech itself exists, and must have taken an awful lot of work.
There is a scene in the movie in which the judge refers to Bryan as “Colonel” and a mystified Darrow objects. The judge explains that Bryan has been made an honorary colonel in the Tennessee state militia in honour of his visit, and when Darrow rejoins that this seems likely to prejudice the jury, he is made a colonel too. Even this bit of fiction has an anchoring in reality: the trial transcript shows that the judge, John T. Raulston, consistently addressed both Bryan and Darrow as “Colonel.”
Among historians, no one seems 100- per- cent certain why this happened. It was unusual enough that Darrow commented on it in mid- trial, saying how much he relished his new military dignity. Judge Raulston may simply have been acting out of an instinctive sense of deference to the highfalutin visiting lawyers. Darrow was no colonel, but Bryan had in fact held the rank (as a noncombatant) during the Spanish-American War. A former attorney general on the prosecution side was being addressed in court as “General.”
I suspect that Judge Raulston, a son of Tennessee suddenly plunged into a new kind of multidimensional media circus, was going to slightly absurd lengths to keep the trial fair in calling Darrow “Colonel.” Nobody will ever make a Scopes Monkey Trial movie in which Raulston is the hero. But, in a way, that new statue of Clarence Darrow is a tribute to him, and to the spirit of even- handedness he was trying to preserve.
TODAY I SUPPOSE I WOULD REGARD MENCKEN AS THE REAL HERO.