Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [99]
At the start of 1925 Bryan and the evangelist preacher Billy Sunday arrived in Tennessee’s capital, Memphis, to put pressure on the state legislature to pass a bill proposed by John Washington Butler, a local farmer and Primitive Baptist lay leader. Butler had been worried by news “that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense,” and proposed to make it illegal “to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Masked Klansmen marched in support of the bill, despite Bryan’s private disapproval of their order. The Butler Act was passed that March. In New York, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) pledged to support anyone who dared defy this ban on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
It was the manager of Dayton’s coal and iron mine, George Rappleyea, who first had the idea of using Dayton as a test case for the Butler Act. Rappleyea came from New York. He accepted the principles of evolution and, as a member of a modernist Methodist church, did not see it as incompatible with Christianity. Having read about the ACLU’s declaration, he suggested to a group of local men gathered in Frank Robinson’s drugstore and soda fountain (the hub of Dayton life) that they stage a test case of the Butler Act there. Robinson, who was also chairman of the Rhea County school board, liked the idea of generating some publicity for his sleepy town, as did the School Superintendent, Walter White.
Rappleyea persuaded his friend John Scopes, Rhea county’s amiable young math and science teacher and part-time football coach, to continue teaching biology classes from the state-approved textbook, Hunter’s Civic Biology, which contravened the Butler Act. Having secured the ACLU’s support, Rappleyea prosecuted Scopes for violating the law and Robinson notified the Chattanooga Times and the Nashville Banner of his action. Associated Press picked up the story and the next day it was carried by every major newspaper in the country.
The ACLU, which would eventually raise a fund of $11 million for Scopes’s defense appeal, engaged Clarence Darrow to act as his head lawyer. Darrow had spent his long and distinguished career fighting for the rights of the individual, for freedom of speech and the privilege of dissent. Initial fears that he was too radical, and would allow the opposition to present the case as a clash between religion and godlessness, were finally discounted in view of Scopes’s expressed preference for the experienced criminal lawyer.
Darrow himself had hesitated before committing himself to the case until he heard that his adversary would be William Jennings Bryan. Both men were Democrats, old allies in some causes and old sparring partners in others; in the past Darrow had even supported Bryan’s presidential ambitions. Their relationship was cordial but plainspoken. As an evangelizing agnostic and an impassioned advocate for scientific knowledge in general and evolution in particular, Darrow was the perfect focus for the prejudices and fears of the team prosecuting John Scopes. Secular and anticlerical to the core, he denied the primacy that biblical fundamentalists assigned to man above all other creatures and believed that the Christian doctrine of original sin was “silly, impossible and wicked.” He said afterwards that he took up Scopes’s cause because “there was no limit to the mischief that might be accomplished unless the country was roused to the evil at hand.”
William Jennings Bryan arrived in Dayton three days before Scopes’s trial began, declaring that it would be a “duel to the death.” Welcomed as the popular hero he was, Bryan spent his time giving lectures to the school board about teaching evolution, preaching,