Scenes from the Trial and Its Aftermath
The Scopes Trial reached its climax on the seventh day of proceedings, with a dramatic exchange between Darrow and Bryan. Bryan, hoping to defend his faith publicly, agreed to be questioned by Darrow as a biblical expert. Darrow seized the chance to test Bryan on the stand. While some modern commentators view Bryan’s testimony as reasonable, it is largely remembered as a triumph for Darrow and a blow to Bryan’s reputation. On the stand, Bryan defended literalist interpretations but also conceded that the six “days” of creation might have lasted much longer. Judge Raulston ruled the following day to exclude Bryan’s testimony from the record.
Five days after the trial, Bryan passed away from “sudden apoplexy,” perhaps from complications due to diabetes. Public response to his passing was divided between his fervent supporters and those who viewed him as a zealot. The fundamentalist movement made the most of Bryan’s death, celebrating his stance on evolution and his battle against it. In accordance with Bryan’s wish for a Christian college to be founded near Dayton, Bryan College was opened in Dayton five years after the trial.
William Jennings Bryan. Bryan’s Last Speech: The Most Powerful Argument Against Evolution Ever Made. Oklahoma City: Sunlight Publishing, 1925.
Bryan’s “last” speech, which he began writing before arriving in Dayton, was originally intended as his closing argument at trial. Darrow and the defense precluded it, sacrificing their own right to a closing argument by asking the judge to instruct the jury that Scopes be found guilty. In the extensive speech, published posthumously, Bryan reiterated his view that education should be controlled by the states, that evolution was unproven, and that the theory was immoral and dangerous to humanity’s unique spiritual purpose.
Marcet Haldeman-Julius. Clarence Darrow's Two Great Trials. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1927.
The courtroom audience at trial overwhelmingly favored the prosecution, though some who were sympathetic to Scopes and Darrow also attended. Two were the socialists Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius and his wife, Marcet. A prolific publisher, Emmanuel produced pamphlets — including Darrow’s critiques of religion and society — for a mass audience. In this pamphlet, Marcet described the Scopes Trial and chronicled the Sweet trials, at which Darrow successfully represented Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African American medical doctor, against a murder charge. As Marcet wrote:
“Darrow put Bryan on the stand as a witness. In view of the trouncing he was to receive, there was something pathetically humorous in Bryan's easy, almost gleeful acquiescence to the request. Even so has many an unsuspecting child climbed into the dentist's chair to descend from it later sadder and wiser. Not that Bryan realized fully at the time, even as Darrow's questioning progressed, quite what was being done to him. The frequent and enthusiastic applause — not to mention fervent amens — from the Tennessee portion of the audience acted as an anesthetic.”
H. L. Mencken. Prejudices, Fifth Series. New York: Knopf, 1926.
H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) was an influential journalist, essayist, and social critic known for acerbic appraisals of American society in the early and mid-20th century. He was a longtime editor for The Baltimore Sun. Like his friend Darrow, he was critical of religion and a strong individualist. His writings were collected in Prejudices among other titles. This excerpt from his July 17 editorial characterizes Bryan’s main courtroom oration, though with derision:
“I don't think the old man did himself justice. He was in poor voice and his mind seemed to wander. There was far too much hatred in him for him to be persuasive. The crowd, of course, was with him. It has been fed upon just such balderdash for years. Its pastors assault it twice a week with precisely the same nonsense … Bryan has been roving around in the tall grass for years and he knows the bucolic mind. He knows how to reach and inflame its basic delusions … [t]oday he may well stand as the archetype of the American rustic.”