Creationism on trial
"Defending God's word"
Early in 1925, a handful of men began to talk about the
possibility of doing something that would create some interest in
bringing people to Dayton. It seemed that we were just kind of
drying up and we weren't getting any tourist trade, any travel
coming through. And a group of men met at Robinson's Drug Store around a Coke and they decided they would try the new Scopes law. At that time, it wasn't known as Scopes, of course. So they went to look around and get a teacher that was willing to try the case. John T. Scopes, our coach at the high school, said, "Well, I wouldn't mind doing that. I will be the teacher, and I will let them say I taught evolution against the law." And then they began to look around and see if they could find some lawyers that would be interested in coming. And one of them said, "Well, I'll write William Jennings Bryan, and see if he'll be interested in coming and testing the constitutionality of this law." So he got in touch with Bryan, he got in touch with Clarence Darrow, and both of them agreed to come and try the case."
As that shows, much of the impetus behind bringing the Scopes trial here was economics. But I also think hat nearly every individual citizen in the Dayton area believed in the Bible's story of how man was created by God and not raised up from a lower form of animal. God, of course it disturbed them to hear there was a teacher that was going to teach children that the Bible story was not true. I was about seventeen years old and my father was a deputy sheriff. And because we expected huge crowds for the trial, and the weather then was almost a hundred degrees, we knew that our courtroom would be just a baking oven. So the judge agreed that one or two boys could bring Cokes in to the press people, to the jury, and to the lawyers, and I was on of those boys. They had three times the capacity of people in the courtroom for that trial, and they were all rooting for Bryan because Bryan was defending God's word. At about the middle of the trial, the judge decided, " We can't stand this baking oven of a courtroom with this size crowd. I'm going to permit the trial to go outside and we'll continue it under the shade trees out in the yard." And he took the jury, put the seats out there for them, and moved his platform out there so he could preside. When he did this, it happened to be a period when Bryan was witnessing and Darrow was digging in on him and being very rude in the kind of questions he was asking him. And the people were getting more and more irritated with Darrow. And of course, the disturbed judge. And he finally said, "I have no control over this crowd out under the shade trees. We've got go back in the courtroom." And in less than a couple hours they went back into the courtroom where he could announce, "I'll empty the courtroom if this fuss keeps going."
-Gilles Ryan, born in 1907, was seventeen years old during the trial and attending Ray Central High School, where John Scopes was a teacher.
Most of the people in Dayton were fundamentalist Christians, but there were quite a few of us who felt otherwise, of course. My father was the county druggist during the time of Scopes. He went in business in 1898, and by 1925, he was chairman of the school board. He sided with Darrow and the evolutionists because he didn't believe that the state or federal government had a right to tell a local school board what they could or could not teach. Like most druggists, my dad was also a purveyor of textbooks, so he was as guilty as Scopes, I guess, in the sense that he had hired Scope to teach school and was selling the textbook which was in question. Still, he really enjoyed the trial and all the hullabaloo and saw it as an opportunity to promote the drugstore. From 1940 on, I don't think he ever filled a prescription. He just talked to people about the trial, people coming in and wanting to see the pictures and all that. We lived less than a hundred yards from the courthouse and they had speakers out on the front lawn, bellowing the trial out to the crowds. The unit manager of the Underwood and Underwood photographic group and I would sit on the front porch in the swing and I would walk across with him when it looked like some excitement was brewing and we'd talk to his photographers. The trial really was a hullabaloo. Everywhere we had hucksters selling watch fobs and handmade dolls. When I die, I'll hopefully go to heaven, and I want to ask to ask the Lord, what was it all about?
-Wallace "sonny" Robinson, born in 1920, inherited his father's drugstore and managed it until his retirement in the mid-1980's.
A lot of the newspaper people who came here for the trial looked upon the locals as rubes or hillbillies. The chief antagonist was H.L. Mencken, who really seemed to be making fun of our way of life. But we were proud of where we lived. My father's drugstore-where all the discussions about Scopes began- w as the town gathering spot. In the morning, men would come to the store to chat. They'd each get a cigar at the counter and then chat. I remember one man would come in and take out a nickel and tap it on the counter and that meant that he wanted his cigar. The women did whatever their work was in the morning, and then after lunch, they'd get cleaned up and come to town to shop. And they'd come to the stored for a Coca-Cola or a dish of ice cream. After school, children came in and they'd take the funny books off the rack, read them and then put them back. The papers were the same ting. People could come in and pick a paper up, look through it, put it back together, and put it back on the stand. Nobody minded having a secondhand paper. Bryan like it here so much he stayed on after the trial for a few days. But he was a very different man from when he arrived. When Bryan came, he was smiling and seemed to be rested, and then, in the middle of the trial, it was just as in he had wilted. It just seemed that the starch had gone out for him, and Darrow did put his through a strenuous series of questions about how he believed the Bible. Barrow asked his something about" how is it that all this happened in one day?" And then Bryan made the mistake of saying that he felt the days then had more than twenty-four hours. And Darrow pounced on that, and made a big thing of it and you could just see that Bryan was more or less defeated.
William Jennings Bryan, in a speech he repeated around the world, said that "while I do not accept that Darwinian theory I shoall not quarrel with you about it." Yet the last great crusade of his life was as special prosecutor in the Scopes tral, in which he opposed the traching of Darwin's theory of ebvolution in public schools.
Stephen Jay Gould, who teaches biology, geology, and the history of science at Harvard, had tried to explain why Bryan decided to quarrel with the theory of evolution. According to Gould, scientistis in the early 1900s believed that competition among animas for survival justified ruthless competition and war among humans. Because Bryan was a lifelong champion of the poor and the working classes and of peace, he rejected such an interpretation of evolution.
Gould points out two mistakes in the view of Darwin's ideas held by the scientists of Bryan's time. First, Gould says that in nature, survival of the fittest often leads to cooperation rather that ruthless competition. Two competing species evolve so that they both survive, despite apparent weaknesses. The lesson of nature is not always that the strong survive- sometimes the wise survived. Second, Gould criticizes any effort to draw lessons about human morality from Darwin's theories. In the following excerpt, Gould explains this point and Bryan's reaction against evolution.
Whatever Darwinism represents, on the playing fields of nature ( and by representing both murder and cooperation at different times, it upholds neither as nature's principal way), Darwinism implies nothing about moral conduct. We do not find our moral values in the actions of nature.
But Bryan made this common error and continually characterized evolution as a doctrine of battle and destruction of the weak.
… In his "Last Evolution Arguments," Bryan charged that evolutionists had misused science to present moral opinions about the social order as though they represented facts of nature.
… One of the saddest chapters in all the history of science involves the extensive misuse of data to support biological determinism, the claim that social inequalities based on race, sex, or class cannot be altered because they reflect the innate and inferior genetic endowments of the disadvantaged.
- Who is Stephen Jay Gould? Why is he qualified to discuss Bryan's view of evolution?
- Why does Gould blame scientists for Bryan's understanding of Darwin?
- How does Gould think Bryan characterized evolution?
- According to Gould, what do Darwin's ideas imply about human moral conduct?
- What did Bryan expect to happen to the poor and working classes if Darwinism became widely accepted?
- What does Gould imply about Bryan's attitude toward poor people?
- Argue for or against the premise that human ethics can successfully be guided by the natural patterns found in the behavior of animals.