Think I'm talking about O.J.? Hardly. It was the first court case to be broadcast on the radio. It happened in a small town in Tennessee. Both prosecution and defense sported lawyers famous in their own circles and infamous in the other's.
It was a showdown between competing worldviews.
Before a double homicide, a dubious innocent verdict, and a grandiose display of the logical conclusion of attempting to exact temporal justice in that civil trial, there was a trial that held actual importance. Theology, science, and religion would all be irreperably harmed by ripples that were sent out when the ACLU's agnostic bulldog Clarence Darrow convinced his bosses to let him face down the evangelical heavyweight William Jennings Bryan.
It was called the Scopes Monkey Trial. Excerpts of the transcript can be read on the UMKC page about the Scopes trial. I've also purchased an eBook that contains the full transcript of the trial.
One of the things that strikes me is the relative ignorance of Clarence Darrow about what the Bible does or does not say about science. When the court characterizes him as an "agnostic," Darrow responds that he is pleased to be known as such. Agnostics don't make good Bible students. His questioning of Bryan about the stopping of the sun in Joshua, Jonah and the Whale, and his continued assertion that Genesis calls the earth flat (the Bible claims the earth is round: Psalm 102:12 [NIV] "as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us"—if it wasn't known that the earth was round, this would have made no sense whatsoever…"north from the south" would have been as good as "east from the west") proves that any tenuous grasp on understanding the Bible he has is superficial at best. At one point, he calls Bryan's Christianity a "foolish religion." Maybe he let that slip. Freudian thing.
The trial transcript is sometimes tedious (I skipped over picking the jury.) But as a document of one moment in history in which the entire nation was held captive by the media, it's interesting to go back to the source of all that and find out what was actually said. It's chock full of great period details, too.
H.L Mencken's coverage of the trial —vociferously arrogant, one-sided, and scathingly anti-Christian—is enlightening because it shows what a city boy from Baltimore who considers himself an in-tee-lekt-shool thinks about us poor, backward, ignorant hillbillies. If you think the mainstream media is surreptitiously anti-Christian and xenophobic about rural America now, you should read the blatant lambasting that Mencken laid down about the Scopes trial and the town of Dayton, Tennessee.
As I digest some of this material, I'll post quotes and general observations about this fascinating moment in 1925 when two universes collided. The resulting supernova is still being observed today.
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