Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [101]
To Clarence Darrow’s surprise, the trial opened on the sweltering morning of Friday 10 July with a long prayer entreating the jury, the accused and the attorneys to be “loyal to God.” Dayton’s courtroom had been freshly painted yellow. It was packed solid by a mixture of journalists and fascinated locals, and loudspeakers conveyed the proceedings to the crowds that had overflowed on to the lawn.
As a concession to the unusual heat, Judge Raulston announced that the trial’s participants would be permitted to remove their coats and ties. Only the defense’s Dudley Malone managed to keep his jacket on for the entire two weeks, admitting the temperature just so far as to dab his damp forehead with a linen handkerchief and earning Dayton’s grudging respect for his stamina. Unusually, smoking was banned from the courtroom, but nicotine addicts (everyone but Bryan) were placated with well-placed spittoons and chewed their tobacco instead of smoking it.
While his defense team were relaxed and eagerly anticipating the upcoming debate, John Scopes, looking like a college student in his slacks and open-necked shirt, was nervous. He had been happy enough to allow Rappleyea to bring him to court—he did not come from Dayton, and had no intention of remaining there; he was unattached and easy-going, with liberal views but no very strong opinions—but once there he found that all the hullabaloo made him uncomfortable. He spent as much of the next two weeks as he could hiding out down at the local swimming hole, escaping public attention. His presence wasn’t really necessary, anyway: on leaving for Dayton, Clarence Darrow had declared, “Scopes is not on trial. Civilization is on trial.” The defense had decided that their client need not testify. As Scopes put it later, he was nothing more than a “ringside observer at my own trial.”
Bryan sat confidently in court with his stiff collar removed and his sleeves rolled up, fanning himself against the heat and flies with a huge palm leaf. He hadn’t prosecuted a case for nearly forty years, but, as the mouthpiece of God, he was unintimidated. Bryan knew “he represented religion,” said Darrow, adding in a damning phrase worthy of Mencken, “and in this he was the idol of all Morondom.” Behind him, in a wheelchair, sat his invalid wife Mary, who suffered from severe arthritis with quiet dignity.
The judge, John Raulston, an acknowledged supporter of the law Scopes had violated, gave off an air that said, “Rest assured, we shall assassinate you gently.” For, as Joseph Krutch observed, Raulston “had probably never in his life heard anyone question in other than timidly apologetic terms the combination of ignorance, superstition, and (sometimes) hypocrisy for which he stood; and he was confident that, so far at least as his world was concerned, the debate as well as the legal verdict would be in his and his community’s favor.”
That afternoon twelve jurors were selected. They were representative of Dayton’s population—mostly regular churchgoers, simple, middle-aged farmers with little formal education. According to custom, no women were included among their number. An informal poll conducted during the trial showed that 85 percent of churchgoing Daytonians professed to believe the Bible literally, though they were more usually moderate Methodists than fervently fundamentalist Baptists.
Clarence Darrow’s two-hour opening speech the following Monday was one of the most electrifying of his career, an impassioned defense of tolerance and secularism against fundamentalism. “Coatless and conspicuously suspendered as if to assure Dayton that he was as plain a man as any of its own citizens,” according to Krutch, Darrow burst into