Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [100]
In the days before the trial began, hot dog, sandwich and ice cream sellers catering to the unusual crowds mingled with trained chimps and revivalists, evangelists and holy rollers in Dayton’s town square. Signs everywhere exhorted the faithful to read their Bibles daily and have faith that Jesus is their savior. “The Sweetheart Love of Jesus Christ and Paradise Street is at Hand,” read one. “Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out,” warned another. A few bold book-sellers hawked biology texts. Badges reading “Your Old Man’s a Monkey” were sold. A string quartet of black musicians played.
Journalists absorbing the scene reported back to their editors via twenty-two newly installed Western Union telegraph operators. A movie camera platform had been placed in the courtroom and Rhea County’s first airstrip was marked off in a field so that film coverage of the trial could be flown out to be shown on national newsreels. Equipment was installed to transmit proceedings to the nation by live radio; it was the first trial to be broadcast nationally.
Reporters flooded into Dayton, filling the town’s one hotel and several boarding houses and crowding into Robinson’s soda fountain. Inhabitants reveled in the national attention and the chance to boost their hometown. The local policeman’s van bore a sign reading “Monkeyville Police”; a delivery man called himself the “Monkeyville Express”; the regional press declared its delight that the world was “taking note of the South.” As Clarence Darrow said, “Most of the newspapers treated the whole case as a farce instead of a tragedy, but they did give it no end of publicity.”
Perhaps the man most enjoying Dayton was Henry Mencken, covering the trial for the Baltimore Evening Sun, which had stood for John Scopes to the tune of $500. Mencken could be seen everywhere, his relish for the unfolding events apparent on his broadly smiling face. As Scopes put it, his trial was really “Mencken’s show.” Joseph Krutch, a Tennessean journalist working in the North, was in Dayton reporting for The Nation. He said the scene “seemed arranged for [Mencken’s] delight . . . Had he invented the Monkey Trial no one would have believed in it, but he had been spared the necessity of invention.” Krutch admired Mencken, but, sensitive to his scorn for small-town Southern life, disliked how he charmed everyone on both sides and then wrote “brutally contemptuous” accounts of them.
“There was a friar wearing a sandwich sign announcing that he was the Bible champion of the world. There was a Seventh Day Adventist arguing that Clarence Darrow was the beast with seven heads and ten horns described in Revelation XIII, and that the end of the world was at hand,” Mencken recounted. “There was an ancient who maintained that no Catholic could be a Christian. There was the eloquent Dr. T.T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss., come to town with a truck-load of torches and hymn-books to put Darwin in his place. There was a singing brother bellowing apocalyptic hymns. There was William Jennings Bryan, followed everywhere by a gaping crowd. Dayton was having a roaring time. It was better than the circus.”
But Mencken, nostrils twitching for any whiff of hypocrisy, found that even in Dayton “there was a strong smell of antinomianism.” The sweating evangelists preaching Armageddon outside the courthouse were mostly itinerant, hoping to take advantage of the crowds gathered to see evolution dispatched by Bryan once and for all; the townspeople, according to Mencken, did not permit their faith to impede their debaucheries. As a friendly female journalist explained to him, Dayton was, after all,