THE NEWS MEDIA ARRIVE
On July 8, famed trial lawyer *Clarence Darrow arrived, followed by *H.L. Mencken, the well-known journalist for the Baltimore Sun, who quickly established a reputation as the most caustic anti-creation, anti-religion writer at the trial. *Westbrook Pegler and *Joseph Wood Krutch, two other famous news correspondents, also arrived. Along with them came over 200 other newspaper men, some of them “unofficially acting in behalf of the defense.” During the trial, they sent off over 2 million words, much of it highly biased.
Chicago radio station WGN brought down equipment to Dayton and produced the first national broadcast of a trial in U.S. history. No stone was left unturned to make this a mammoth news media blitz in favor of evolutionary beliefs.
Many reporters brought with them office directives, instructing them in advance how to play up the proceedings of the trial. One reporter, when asked why he never bothered to go to the courthouse, replied, “Oh, I don’t have to know what’s going on; I know what my paper wants me to write.” Most of the stories sent out were anti-creationist in sentiment, and some were scathing attacks on Bryan, Christianity, and Biblical beliefs.
*H.L. Mencken, in his articles, called Bryan “the old buzzard,” “a tin-pot pope in the coca-cola belt,” and “the old mountebank [one who is deceitful or unscrupulous].” Mencken spent part of his time touring around town, noting the strange characters brought in for the sidewalk extravaganzas of apes and shouters, and writing sarcastic comments about the residents (“hillbillies,” “Babbits,” “yokels,” and “morons and peasants.”)
There were those who believed that the ACLU sent down the odd characters who walked about the streets of Dayton, babbling in the guise of religious fanatics. No one recognized or knew where most of them came from, and after the trial they quickly disappeared. What private citizen would think of hauling in an expensive chimpanzee and walking it about the streets of Dayton? One weekly magazine, the pro-socialist New Republic, reported: “As we go to press, he [Bryan] is still engaged in battling earnestly for organized ignorance, superstition, and tyranny. . He has illuminated vividly for the rest of us the essentially bigoted position of himself and his followers, and the degree of religious intolerance which they will undoubtedly enforce upon the country if they ever get the chance.” New Republic, July 22, 1925, p. 219.
The ridicule of Darrow against the Bible, Christians, and their beliefs was faithfully reported in the press and sent around the world. The confusing definitions and atheistic sentiments were broadcast everywhere. The liberal ministers that wrote and came to town in defense of evolution had their words placed in print for all to read. The carefully-contrived circus antics that were shipped into Dayton to play on the streets were declared to be none other than the inevitable result of Christianity carried to its conclusion.
The laws of the land prohibited slaying the Christians on the streets, but it did not prohibit destroying them in the public press.
Bryan had already been instrumental in getting Congress to enact legislation on prohibition and woman suffrage, and there were those who feared he might try to use Dayton as a springboard to the presidency. It was known that, across the nation, there was a groundswell of interest in national legislation forbidding evolutionary teaching in the schools. In the early 1920s, 20 state legislatures were introducing 36 measures restricting evolutionary teaching in the schools. Obviously, Dayton was recognized as crucial.
THE GREAT AMERICAN SHOW
On Friday, July 10, 1925, the Scopes Trial was slated to begin. As the press and spectators thronged the courthouse, they encountered Joe Mendi, the trained chimpanzee; Deck Carter, “Bible Champion of the World;” and Lewis Levi Johnson Marshall, “Absolute Ruler of the Entire World, Without Military, Naval or Other Physical Force.”
All part of the Dayton sideshow; sidewalk characters thought to have been brought into town as part of the large-scale misrepresentation of creationism. The evolutionists had no scientific evidence to support their theory, but they had other methods which they considered more effective in winning their battles.
Do not consider the sidewalk circus to be a little matter. All that occurred in the courtroom or on the streets of Dayton during the two weeks the reporters were In town was reported in minute detail in a thousand newspapers across the continent and beyond the oceans.
“Thousands of cartoons were printed, imported and sold locally and in nearby towns depicting Bryant as a monkey, with the caption, ‘ He denies his lineage.’ “ “The Scopes Trial,” in Symposium on Creation III (1971), p. 112; also see The Nation, July 8, 1925, p. 81.
“EXPERT WITNESSES”
Scientific experts were brought hundreds of miles to testify, but their statements were not accepted as evidence for the jury’s hearing. The cavilers, the curious, and men of learning throughout the world followed the proceedings with intense interest. Critical responses came by mail from a wide range of people, including *George Bernard Shaw, Edgar Lee Masters, and *Albert Einstein.
Several evolutionist ministers wrote or came to town and offered their services as expert testimony that evolution should be acceptable by Christianity. After the trial started, *Dr. Charles F. Potter, the liberal evolutionist pastor of the West Side Unitarian Church in New York City, came to Dayton and presented a petition, with a collection of names on it, to the court. The petition requested that, since the judge refused to discontinue the prayer customary at the opening of court, liberal and non-christian churches should offer them. The judge accepted this, and throughout the trial it was so done. That Potter gave the first prayer was a subject of laughter back in New York, since he was the one who earlier had erected a sensational statue in his church entitled, The Chrysalis. It portrayed an adult human being emerging from the skin of an ape.
“Two years before his final, fatal trip to his beloved East African wilderness, Carl Akeley (18641926) created an evolutionary sculpture for a church that caused a public sensation. The bronze depicted a handsome ‘modern’ man emerging from a cracked-open gorilla skin; he titled it The Chrysalis.
“The piece was commissioned for New York’s West Side Unitarian Church, where it was on display for many years (the church no longer exists). Creationists were outraged and publicly criticized the Unitarians for placing it in their house of worship. The Chrysalis became the focus of a spirited public controversy.
“The Unitarian pastor, Charles Francis Potter, was unperturbed by the fundamentalist tempest . . [and said] ‘I know of no concrete symbol which so well expresses the religious message which I am trying to preach every Sunday.’ ” *R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 82.
Certain items of “scientific evidence of evolution” were mentioned at the trial, whether or not formally presented. This included Piltdown Man (announced to the world in December 1912, and repudiated in the 1950s (as a fossil forgery) when the British Museum’s Kenneth Oakley devised a new method for determining whether ancient bones were of the same age), but especially Nebraska Man was proclaimed. The great Nebraska Man, discovered only three years before in Bryan’s home state, was exalted at the trial as the outstanding evidence that man had evolved from an apelike creature.
“One of the most singular and embarrassing incidents in the history of evolutionary science began in 1922, when a solitary molar tooth was found in Nebraska. First-rank paleontologists, anthropologists and anatomists examined the cusp pattern, and all agreed with its discoverer that the tooth belonged to an ancient ape-man: a ‘missing link’ of tremendous importance, to which they gave the name Hesperopithecus a ‘Western ape.’
“The tooth was certainly ancient; it was embedded in million-year-old Pliocene deposits. But what else could be said about it? For starters, English anatomist Sir Grafton Elliot Smith and a museum artist collaborated to produce a painting of both male and female Hesperopithecus for the Illustrated London News. Their ‘reconstruction’ featured full figures of a well-muscled, ski browed pair in a prehistoric landscape complete with early horses and camels.
“Professor H.F. Osborn, head of the American Museum of Natural History, welcomed the news. Anti-evolutionist politician William Jennings Bryan was a Nebraskan, and Osborn rubbed it in: ‘The Earth spoke to Bryan from his own State,’ he crowed, ‘the little tooth speaks volumes. . evidence of man’s descent from the ape.’
“In 1925, when John Scopes was tried for breaking Tennessee’s state law against teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in the public schools, the Hesperopithecus tooth was introduced as evolutionary evidence, along with other fossils, of early man [as] then accepted by science (including Piltdown, which was later revealed as a fossil forgery).
“Two years after the ‘Monkey Trial,’ a team of paleontologists returned to the Nebraska site where Hesperopithecus had been discovered five years earlier, determined to find more of this mysterious creature. To their joy, weathering had exposed parts of a jaw and skeleton on the precise spot. Eagerly, they brushed away dust and sand until the ancient fossil emerged to tell its truth, the infamous molar had once belonged to an extinct pig!” *A. Milner. Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990). P. 322. (….maybe we evolved from pigs!)
Several individuals offered to help Bryan at the trial. One of these was the leading anti-evolution writer of the 1920s and 1930s: George McCready Price. He contacted Bryan and offered to come immediately to his aid. However, circumstances prevented him from arriving in time.
JOHN SCOPES
The trial was about a science teacher at the local high school, but Scopes was not a science teacher. John Thomas Scopes was only 24 years old at the time of the trial. He was the football coach over at Dayton’s Central High. He also taught a math class or two, and on one occasion in the spring of 1925 had substituted for two weeks while the regular science teacher was sick. During the time that Scopes was in charge of the science class, the evolution lesson was supposed to have been covered. But young Scopes never had taught that lesson! He obviously told this fact to Darrow, for Darrow made sure that Scopes never took the witness stand, yet the entire world-publicized trial hung on the allegation that he had taught that lesson! No statement was ever made by him in the court trial as whether or not he had committed the violation. His arrest was clearly based on a trumped-up charge. The basis of the trial was as false as the evolutionary theories being defended.
Following the drugstore conversation, Scopes did not go back to the high school and teach an evolution class, as is nearly always stated when the trial story is told. (He was served the warrant on May 5, and in the courtroom it was declared by his attorney that he taught evolution to the biology class on April 24.) He merely agreed to admit in court that he had taught evolution at the school earlier in the school year, but after the date when the Butler bill was passed and became law. There are records of five separate occasions in which Scopes later stated that he never had taught evolution at the high school.
After the verdict had been handed down, Scopes confessed the arrangement to William K. Hutchinson of International News Service, who promised to keep quiet. Years later, L. Sprague de Camp wrote it up in a book:
“[Scopes to Hutchinson:] ‘There is something I must tell you. It’s worried me. I didn’t violate the law.‘
.. .A jury has said you had,’ replied Hutchinson. “‘Yes, but I never taught that evolution lesson. I skipped it. I was doing something else the day I should have taught it, and I missed the whole lesson about Darwin and never did teach it. Those kids they put on the stand couldn’t remember what I taught them three months ago. They were coached by the lawyers. And that April twenty-fourth date was just a guess…Honest, I’ve been scared all through the trial that the kids might remember I missed the lesson. l was afraid they’d get on the stand and say I hadn’t taught it and then the whole trial would go blooey. If that happened they would run me out of town on a rail.’
” ‘Well you are safe now,’ said Hutchinson.
“‘Yes, I’m convicted of a crime I never committed.’ said Scopes.” L. Sprague de Camp, The Great Monkey Trial (1968), p. 432.
In his book, de Camp says it was Clarence Darrow who did the coaching, and encouraged young Scopes to commit perjury if he should be called to the witness stand (which did not happen). That incident was also related in the New York Times Magazine, for July 4, 1965. In the book, Preacher and I, Charles Potter mentioned an incident after the trial when Scopes told him and his wife that his work at the high school was mainly that of athletic coach, and then Scopes explained that the biology class substitutions he did were mainly used as an opportunity to discuss football plays. Quoting Scopes:
“I was pretty busy. Sometimes we had to use the biology period for planning our plays, and I reckon likely we never did get around to that old evolution lesson. But the kids were good sports and wouldn’t squeal on me in court.”
Later, in his memoirs, Scopes again disclaimed having taught evolution.
“To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure I had taught evolution. Robinson [the drugstore owner] and the others apparently weren’t concerned about this technicality. I had expressed willingness to stand trial. That was enough.” *John Scopes, Center of the Storm (1987), p. 80.
MORE MAIL FOR SCOPES
The letters kept pouring in. From all over the United States and elsewhere they came. A New York promotor wrote and offered Scopes $2,000 a week to appear as Tarzan in movies; another offered him $50,000 if he would sign a contract to give lectures defending evolution. A Christian woman from Kentucky expressed her concerns for the people: “If you convert everybody to your way of thinking, what will you accomplish? The churches will be torn down, men will have to go armed to protect themselves from murder and lust, and sin will be rampant in the world, for men will not fear God and they will do as they please.”
Sounds like life in our own time, now that evolutionary theory is almost universally accepted. She concluded with this:
“The only thing you will accomplish will be the making of infidels and the sending of innumerable souls to hell.” *Jack Scopes, “The Man Who Put the Monkey on Dayton’s Back, ” Chattanooga Life and Leisure, July 1989, p. 19.
In marked contrast, an evolutionist wrote different concerns for the people:
“As long as the legislature of Tennessee prefers sandals to shoes, unsanitary beards to clean shaves, and jackasses to automobiles, intelligence shall expect some persecution. The fight is on with these arrogant Fundamentalists and I wish to see them get enough of it before it is over, even if we must carry it on for 10 or 20 years.”*Jack Scopes, “The Man Who Put the Monkey on Dayton’s Back” Chattanooga Life and Leisure, July 1989, pp. 19, 24.
3 – FRIDAY, JULY 10, 1925
THE MONKEY TRIAL
Yes, it was a “monkey trial, ” just as the press proclaimed throughout the world. The purpose was to make a monkey out of the creationists. (with false evidence, claims, and illusions)
On Friday, July 10,1925, the Scopes trial began. The newspapers predicted a heat wave, and it was hot as crowds of reporters, Christians, atheists, and the curious thronged the courthouse.
As Scopes entered the courtroom and sat down, Darrow sat down next to him, threw a reassuring arm around him, and whispered, “Don’t worry, son; we’ll show them a few tricks.” (Recollection by Scopes, in Reader’s Digest, March 1961, p. 137.) Judge J.T. Raulston ascended the bench, and the trial was underway. Everyone was quiet as young Scopes was reindicted and a jury was selected.
At the trial, the chief counsel for the defense (Darrow) was cited because of his actions for contempt of court, and the leader for the prosecution (Bryan) took the witness stand. The accused (Scopes) never was called to testify. The defense spent its time upholding evolution and ridiculing the Bible. The prosecution defended the State and Biblical positions.
It has frequently been commented upon that the evolutionists were not permitted to bring in expert testimony by evolutionary scientists. But little mention is made of the fact that the creationists were not permitted to do so either. For example, on July 16, 1925, Bryan wrote to the well-known Johns Hopkins University surgeon, Howard Kelly:
“The court has excluded expert testimony, so we will not need to have you come. We have won every point so far and expect to win the suit.” W.J. Bryan correspondence, Ac. No. 557, Tennessee State Library and Archives.
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