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| Scopes trial, July 20, 1925 (Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution) |
Chicago's most notorious attorney, Clarence Darrow, was riding high in 1924. He basked in the national spotlight while defending Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two Hyde Park teens who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks for the thrill of it.
Darrow admitted their guilt — which was undeniable — placing all his chips on saving the smug idiots from the death penalty. It worked.
In the spring of 1925, Darrow was looking for his next mountain to climb. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union was trying to fight the Butler Act, a new Tennessee statute banning public school teachers from discussing "any theory which denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man is descended from a lower order of animals.”
That law was advocated by another American titan, William Jennings Bryan. Like Darrow, he'd made his name in the 1890s, the "boy orator" who mesmerized the 1896 Democratic National Convention with his "cross of gold" speech advocating free silver. He ran for president three times and lost each time. By the 1920s, he had shifted into religious conservatism, plumping for Prohibition and battling Satan in the form of Darwin's theory of evolution being taught in public school.
To have a case, the ACLU needed a defendant, and took out newspaper ads looking for one. The hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, bit. Hoping to draw attention to itself and maybe make a few bucks, it enlisted a 24-year-old football coach and substitute teacher, John Scopes.
He never taught evolution.
"I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair" Scopes said.
With Jennings on board, Darrow leaped into the fray.
"At once I wanted to go," Darrow wrote. The trial began July 10, 1925.
Limelight can scorch the uninitiated. Dayton, which surprised newsman H.L. Mencken by being "a country town of charm and even beauty," bit off more than it could chew.
"Here was an ... almost a miraculous chance to get Dayton upon the front pages, to make it talked about, to put it upon the map. But how now?" Mencken wrote. "Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke."
Despite Darrow's famous eloquence, the trial's outcome was never in doubt.
"The Scopes trial, from the start, has been carried on in a manner exactly fitted to the anti-evolution law and the simian imbecility under it," Mencken wrote. "The rustic judge, a candidate for re-election, has postured the yokels like a clown in a ten-cent side show, and almost every word he has uttered has been an undisguised appeal to their prejudices and superstitions."
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In the movie version of the trial, "Inherit The Wind", Gene Kelly plays a Baltimore newspaper columnist , named Hornbeck, obviously based on HL Mencken & when he's in Dayton Tennessee, someone says to him that he has a nice place to stay, he replies "I had a nice place to stay, but I left it to come here", which is a perfect description of that bizarre town & that idiotic law.
ReplyDeleteOne of the original prosecutors is the origin of the Johnny Cash song, "A Boy Named Sue", as Sue Hicks was a man with that name. he was given his mother's name because she died right after giving birth to him.
The various religious loons, known as Young Earth Creationists, who insist the Earth is only 6000 or so years old, based on the absurd calculations of the Irish bishop James Ussher in 1654, really need their heads examined, as they are as nuts as the flat earthers. Even the Catholic Church agrees that the Earth is billions of years old!
Exactly, Clark! It's the born again, fundament., evangs., that are the most backward.
DeleteAnd, of course, the Trump Supreme Court has ruled that churches can have political speech and endorsements from the pulpit - heretofore forbidden by the wisdom of the Founders. The religious right has been trying for 250 years to impose their beliefs on the nation as a whole. They've finally accomplished that goal through the efforts of the most irreligious, adulterous, criminal, amoral freak the country has ever produced. He couldn't perform the sign of the cross without poking his eye out.
ReplyDeletePerfect timing and good historical references, in this column.
ReplyDeleteMy God, Mencken was a turn of the century prophet.
ReplyDelete100 years ago it was a rutic judge; today its POTUS
ReplyDeleteA hundred years ago, in the summer of '25, was the Scopes Trial. In August, tens of thousands of robed and hooded Klan members marched through the streets of Washington D.C.. The Orange Order is doing its best to turn the clock back a century, back to those idyllically happy and peaceful days:
DeleteLet's see if I can redeem myself for yesterday.
ReplyDelete"That's part of your problem: you haven't seen enough movies. All of life's riddles are answered in the movies."
Steve Martin to Kevin Kline in the outstanding film, "The Grand Canyon" (1991).
It seems that everyone's connection to the Scopes Trial is the film (Inherit the Wind, 1960). Did you enjoy the movie, and, as a reporter, what did you think of Gene Kelly's portrayal of H. L. Mencken?