Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (68 page)

D
ARROW:
“Do you think whoever inspired it believed that the sun went around the earth?”

B
RYAN:
“I believe it was inspired by the Almighty, and He may have used language that could be understood at the time … instead of using language that could not be understood until Darrow was born.”
(Laughter and applause in the courtyard.)

Still no blood. Darrow prowled on. He brought up the story of the Great Flood and of Noah, who was said to have gathered all the animals, two by two, in an ark that rode out the storm. Seventeenth-century scholars had fixed the date of man’s creation at around 4000 B.C.

“You believe the story of the flood to be a literal interpretation?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” said Bryan.

“When was that flood … about 4004 B.C.?”

“That has been the estimate,” Bryan said. The calculations, made by a Protestant bishop in 1650, were included as annotations in the well-known King James Version of the Bible. At first, Bryan hesitated to defend them.

“I never made a calculation,” Bryan said.
³⁸

But Darrow fired his questions rapidly.

D
ARROW:
“A calculation from what?”

B
RYAN:
“I could not say.”

D
ARROW:
“From the generations of man?”

B
RYAN:
“I would not want to say that.”

D
AR ROW:
“What do you think?”

B
RYAN:
“I do not think about things I don’t think about.”

D
ARROW:
“Do you think about things you do think about?”

B
RYAN:
“Well, sometimes.”
(Laughter in the courtyard.)

P
OLICEMAN:
“Let us have order.”

I do not think about things I don’t think about
. The exchange made Bryan look silly, pathetic, ignorant.
Do you think about things you do think
about? Well, sometimes
. It has echoed through history for almost a century.
Laughter in the courtyard
.

Now Stewart tried, again, to stop the fight.

“I am objecting to his cross-examining his own witness,” the prosecutor said. But the judge left it up to Bryan.

“I want him to have all the latitude he wants,” Bryan said. No one would say he ran away. “For I am going to have latitude when he gets through.”

“You can have latitude and longitude,” said Darrow. It was a silly pun, but it drew a laugh from the spectators. The people of Dayton “forgot for a moment that Bryan’s faith was their own,” wrote a newsman. “The crowd saw only the battle.”

Again, Stewart objected. McKenzie was on his feet too. And again, Bryan insisted on continuing. Darrow and his colleagues “did not come here to try this case. They came here to try revealed religion,” Bryan said, rising from the swivel chair to address the crowd out on the lawn. “I am here to defend it, and they can ask me any questions they please.”

Bryan’s loyalists applauded, but it was a poison gift. Their approval only spurred their hero on.

D
ARROW:
“Great applause from the bleachers.”

B
RYAN:
“From those whom you call yokels.”

D
ARROW:
“I have never called them yokels.”

B
RYAN:
“That is the ignorance of Tennessee, the bigotry.”

D
ARROW:
“You mean who are applauding you?”
(Applause.)

B
RYAN:
“Those are the people you insult.”

D
ARROW:
“You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion.”

But Bryan had lost his way. He was now defending not the wisdom of the Good Book, but a three-hundred-year-old pseudo-history created by a long-dead Irish bishop. And each of Darrow’s goading questions revealed more of Bryan’s closed-mindedness, and his ignorance of science and history. It made Bryan look stupid. The farmers in their overalls may have loved him for it, but no thinking person could escape the conclusion.

“Don’t you know there are any number of civilizations that are traced back to more than 5,000 years?” Darrow asked.

“I have no evidence of it that is satisfactory,” said Bryan. His face was red. He glowered at Darrow. “No evidence that I have found … would justify me in accepting the opinions of these men against what I believe to be the inspired word of God.”

So, asked Darrow, “whatever human beings, including all the tribes that inhabited the world … and all the animals, have come onto the earth since the flood?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know a scientific man on the face of the earth that believes any such thing?”

“I don’t think I have ever asked one the direct question.”

“Quite important, isn’t it?” Darrow’s arms were crossed, and he tapped his gold-rimmed spectacles against his biceps.

“Well, I don’t know that it is,” said Bryan. “I have been more interested in Christians going on right now.”

“You have never investigated to find out how long man has been on the earth?” Darrow asked.

“I have never found it necessary.”

“Don’t you know that the ancient civilizations of China are 6,000 or 7,000 years old, at the very least?”

“No, but they would not run back beyond the creation, according to the Bible.”

“Have you any idea of how old the Egyptian civilization is?”

“No.”

Bryan was getting tired. And more so after, at Bryan’s insistence, Darrow let him make a rambling speech about comparative religions. Now Darrow drew him back to specifics.

“Do you think the Earth was made in six days?” he asked Bryan.

“Not six days of 24 hours,” Bryan replied.

Again, the wary Stewart saw where they were headed. Bryan was abandoning a literal interpretation of the “days” of Genesis. To those who were familiar with Bryan’s personal views of evolution, this was not surprising—but Stewart knew that the audience, and the crowd of reporters, would see it as a faith-shaking concession.

“What is the purpose of this examination?” Stewart demanded of the judge.

Bryan, finally, sensed danger. He lashed out at Darrow. “The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible,” Bryan said.

“We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, and that is all,” said Darrow.

“I am trying to protect the word of God against the greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States,” said Bryan, up on his feet and waving a finger at Darrow. “I want the papers to know I am not afraid.”

Darrow promised Raulston to wrap things up. He had only a few more questions, he told the judge.

D
ARROW:
“Do you believe that the first woman was Eve?”

B
RYAN:
“Yes.”

D
ARROW:
“Do you believe she was literally made out of Adam’s rib?”

B
RYAN:
“I do.”

D
ARROW:
Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?”

B
RYAN:
“No sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.”

D
ARROW:
“There were no others recorded, but Cain got a wife.”

B
RYAN:
“That is what the Bible says.”

And now, as they approached the two-hour mark of the debate, Darrow returned to Bryan’s admission that the “days” of Genesis may have lasted more than twenty-four hours.

Goaded by his adversary, Bryan struggled to explain. “I do not see that there is any necessity for construing the words ‘the evening and the morning’ as meaning necessarily a 24-hour day,” Bryan said.

“You think those were not literal days,” said Darrow.

“I do not think they were 24-hour days,” said Bryan. “I think it would be just as easy for the kind of God we believe in to make the earth in six days as in six years or in six million years or in six hundred million years. I do not think it important whether we believe one or the other.”

“The creation might have been going on for a very long time?” Darrow asked.

“It might have continued for millions of years,” said Bryan. There was
a collective gasp—some claimed they heard shouts of disapproval—from the crowd.

Bryan had conceded one of the defense team’s most important arguments. For if a Christian was not bound to a literal translation of Genesis, and could construe that God took hundreds of millions of years to make the world, why couldn’t he construe that God’s creation of man took ages as well? And if so, then the Bible and evolution, faith and science, were indeed reconcilable.

Bryan had “agreed that no intelligent person would accept the Bible literally,” Hays recalled. “It seemed to many that Darrow demolished the fundamentalist case, for if anything is conceded to interpretation, the fundamentalist authoritarian position is destroyed.”
³⁹

Darrow’s job was almost finished, as he took one last shot at the wounded prey. There was an unanswered riddle from his old list of Bible questions. To ask it now was cruel and gratuitous—an obvious play for cheap laughs. But he went ahead and read aloud from Genesis, the story of Eve and the apple.

“Do you think that is why the serpent is compelled to crawl upon its belly?”

“I believe that,” said Bryan.

“Have you any idea how the snake went before that time?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you know whether he walked on his tail?”

The laughter of the crowd brought Bryan to his feet. “Your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible,” he shouted. “I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in a God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee to slur at it.”

“I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes,” Darrow yelled back. They were both on their feet, shaking their fists. And with that Raulston adjourned the most memorable session of any American legal case, ever.

“The followers of Darrow rose up and swarmed to his side, anxious to seize the hand of their champion,” said Hays. “Bryan stood apart, almost alone, a strained tired expression on his face as he looked into the twilight that was closing about him.”
⁴⁰

F
OR THOSE WHO
witnessed the great duel under the maples, there was no escaping the conclusion that Bryan had blundered terribly.

BRYAN IS WORSTED
, read a headline in the
Chattanooga News
. His concession on the length of days was “a real victory for the defense,” the paper reported. Bryan’s answers, the
News
editorial said, had been “grossly inadequate. His personal knowledge of science was not of a nature particularly responsive to a hostile examination.” It was a charitable conclusion.

Mary Bryan felt that “Papa stood by his guns very manfully” under Darrow’s abusive questioning. But things had gone badly, she wrote her children. The Infidel had fired so many questions so fast that Papa’s “answers made him appear more ignorant than he is.” And “of course, it went out over the country.”

Indeed it did. A narrative of Bryan’s fall in a man-to-man duel with Darrow was irresistible to the skeptics of the press, with their innate contempt for jay towns and fun-killing preachers. “I made up my mind to show the country what an ignoramus he was and I succeeded,” Darrow wrote the absent Mencken. Darrow went back to the Monkey House, leaned back in a chair on the porch, and let the newspapermen do their work. They had found a third act for their modernist script: teacher persecuted. Titans grapple. Freedom triumphs. And out across the country—or at least in the bigger towns and cities—an American population that venerated science and progress saw in Bryan not a great moral leader. They saw instead a crank.

“There was no pity for the helplessness of the believer come so suddenly and so unexpectedly upon a moment when he could not reconcile statements of the Bible with generally accepted facts,” the
Times
reported. “There was no pity for his admissions of ignorance of things boys and girls learn in high school, his floundering confessions that he knew practically nothing of geology, biology, philology, little of comparative religion and little even of ancient history.” The newspaper was describing the reaction of the crowd in Dayton, but the words applied to the millions who had followed the trial from home. “And finally, when Mr. Bryan, pressed harder and harder by Mr. Darrow, confessed he did not believe everything in the Bible should be taken literally, the crowd howled.”

Across America, the crowd howled. And Bryan had further gall to drink. Stewart called on him that night and told him the trial would end the next morning, without giving Bryan an opportunity to put Darrow
on the stand. Stewart had skillfully managed the case, to the considerable frustration of the defense attorneys, until Bryan’s performance wrecked things. Stewart could not stop it as it happened, but he was determined to halt it now. He absolutely refused to let Bryan match wits with Darrow again.
⁴¹

It rained on Tuesday, and the trial moved back into the courtroom, where further disappointment awaited Bryan. The jury was brought in and both sides asked it to return a
guilty verdict, so that the case could move on to higher courts. Bryan had labored for weeks on a monumental address—it was to be a capstone of his career—but there would be no more long speeches, and he was left to implore the remaining reporters to include a text of his remarks in their coverage. Raulston fined Scopes $100.