Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [102]
Having decided that there was no point saving his punches until his closing speech, on the basis that Bryan would be the final speaker, Darrow rebutted the prosecution’s populist opening argument that the people paying teachers’ salaries should be allowed to dictate their curriculum. For years this had been Byran’s argument against the teaching of evolution in public schools: a simple defense of majority rule. “The right of the people speaking through the legislature, to control the schools which they create and support, is the real issue,” Bryan had written before the case opened.
Darrow countered that the people of Tennessee had adopted a constitution which granted every single one of them “religious freedom in its broadest terms.” Violating that freedom by limiting what people were able to teach or learn was thus a breach of their individual liberty. The state of Tennessee, Darrow argued, had no more right to insist in schools that the Bible is a holy book than it had to present as sacred the Koran, the Book of Confucius, or the essays of Emerson. In this way Darrow hoped to show that Bryan was not a defender of democracy but a threat to it. He concluded with a solemn warning: “We are marching backwards to the glorious age of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn men who dared bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”
As Joseph Krutch reported, Darrow’s eloquence and passion made even Dayton stop to think. Riveted, the town’s inhabitants forgot which side they were on, even bursting into applause for a particularly good strike by either side—but still placed their faith in Bryan as their champion to prove that, as Joseph Wood Krutch put it, “Learning is useless . . . Faith alone counts.”
The next day, while electrical storms thundered outside the courthouse, Darrow formally objected to the prayers that initiated each day’s proceedings. A Supreme Court decision permitted prayer in courtrooms, but it was not mandatory. “When it is claimed by the state that there is a conflict between science and religion there should be no . . . attempt by means of prayer . . . to influence the deliberations,” he argued. Prayer, he said, was a personal matter, to be conducted in private. The prosecution team protested but later a compromise was reached allowing modernist ministers to alternate with fundamentalists so that a broader spectrum of faith was represented.
Darrow had not expected Raulston to agree with his opening argument that Scopes’s constitutional rights had been violated by the Butler Act, and on Wednesday the judge confirmed this opinion. Furthermore he would not permit the defense’s scientific experts to take the stand and try to prove the facts of evolution. Once the parameters of the trial had been set, the proceedings could begin in earnest.
The prosecution called as witnesses some of Scopes’s students, hoping their testimony would demonstrate how Scopes’s use of the theory of evolution had undermined their faith in God. In response to Darrow’s cross-examination, they said that they did not think science had done them any harm. After the trial, Darrow was delighted to overhear one saying to another, “Don’t you think Mr. Bryan is a little narrow-minded?” He did not, perhaps, hear another Dayton teenager, also after the trial, comment, “I like him [Scopes], but I don’t believe I came from a monkey.”
When drugstore owner Frank Robinson took the stand he testified that Scopes had said to him that any teacher using Hunter’s Biology was violating the Butler Act. Darrow, cross-examining, asked first if Robinson sold Hunter’s Biology in his shop—he did—and then, as the audience began to laugh, asked him if it were true that he was a member of the school board.
Dudley Malone rose for the defense after Bryan spoke. He questioned Bryan’s right to speak for all Christians and stated the defense’s conviction that no conflict existed between Christianity and evolution. The newspaper