Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [104]
Both sides claimed victory, although in fact they were both diminished by the trial and the hard glare of national attention that they had endured. Moderate onlookers resented the stark choice they had been offered between atheism and fundamentalism. Most people thought the case had exposed Bryan as a fool and Darrow as a know-it-all, without resolving the issue it had sought to address. And as Joseph Krutch observed, future generations who saw the Scopes case as a witch hunt and compared it to post-war McCarthyism missed “the fact that it was also a circus”—“a jape elaborately staged for their own amusement by typical intellectual playboys of the exuberant Twenties, and the real villains were . . . the responsible citizens and officials of Tennessee who should never have allowed it to happen.”
Immediately after the trial ended, a still defiant William Jennings Bryan began making plans for a national anti-evolution lecture tour to capitalize on the publicity the Scopes case had created for his cause. Undeterred by Darrow’s devastating examination, he planned to argue four points: that the theory of evolution contradicted the biblical account of creation; that the theory of survival of the fittest destroyed man’s faith in God and love for one another; that studying evolution was spiritually and socially useless; and that a deterministic view of life as propounded by evolutionists undermined efforts to reform and improve society.
Bryan may have been undaunted by Darrow’s arguments, but others saw him as a spent force. Krutch felt almost sorry for him. “Driven from politics and journalism because of obvious intellectual incompetence, become ballyhoo for boom-town real estate in his search for lucrative employment, and forced into religion as the only quasi-intellectual field in which mental backwardness and complete insensibility to ideas could be used as an advantage, he already knew that he was compelled to seek in the most remote rural regions for the applause so necessary for his contentment,” he wrote. “Yet even in Dayton, as choice a strong-hold of ignorance and bigotry as one could hope to find, he went down in defeat in the only contest where he had met his antagonists face to face. Dayton itself was ashamed for him.”
But Bryan would never get the chance to resurrect his reputation by touring the nation. After a few days spent lecturing locally he returned to Dayton where he died in his sleep during an afternoon nap, five days after the end of the trial. A reporter told Darrow, vacationing in the Smoky Mountains, that people were saying Bryan had died of a broken heart because of his cross-examination. “Broken heart nothing,” said Darrow. “He died of a busted belly.” In Baltimore, Henry Mencken hooted, “God aimed at Darrow, missed, and hit Bryan instead.” In private he said to a friend, “We killed the son-of-a-bitch!”
Gloating such as Mencken’s helped turn Bryan into a martyr and Darrow into a villain. As the tributes to him after his death showed, Bryan was still a hugely popular national figure despite his limitations. Even the New York Herald Tribune congratulated him for trying “to do the right thing as he saw it.”
Although modernists claimed their nominal defeat as a triumph, calling the trial “the last significant attempt to discredit Darwin’s theory” as if no further attempts to challenge it would ever be made, two years later thirteen states, both Northern and Southern, were still considering instituting anti-evolution laws. In Mississippi and Arkansas they passed into statute. Even where no changes to the law were made, local school boards increasingly presented science as theory rather than dogma, restricting the teaching of evolution and biology throughout