Scopes Monkey Trial: October 2007 Archives

“More Sparring Between Darrow and Bryan”

Oct

Wed

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Mr. Darrow—Do you consider that every religion on earth competes with the Christian religion?

Mr. Bryan—I think everybody who does not believe in the Christian religion believes so—

Mr. Darrow—I am asking what you think?

Mr. Bryan—I do not regard them as competitive because I do not think they have the same source as we have.

Mr. Darrow—You are wrong in saying "competitive"?

Mr. Bryan—I would not say competitive, but the religious unbelievers.

Mr. Darrow—Unbelievers of what?

Mr. Bryan—In the Christian religion.

Mr. Darrow—What about the religion of Buddha?

Mr. Bryan—I can tell you something about that, if you want to know. Confucious or Buddha?

Mr. Darrow—What about the religion of Confucious or Buddha?

Mr. Bryan—Well, I can tell you something about that, if you would like to know.

Mr. Darrow—Did you ever investigate them?

Mr. Bryan—Somewhat.

Mr. Darrow—Do you regard them as competitive?

Mr. Bryan—No, I think they are very inferior. Would you like for me to tell you what I know about it?

Mr. Darrow—No.

Mr. Bryan—Well, I shall insist on giving it to you.

Mr. Darrow—You won't talk about free silver, will you?

Mr. Bryan—Not at all.

Gen. Stewart—I object to him—counsel going any further with this examination and cross-examining his own witness. He is your own witness.

Mr. Darrow—Well, now, general, you understand we are making up a record, and I assume that every lawyer knows perfectly well that we have a right to cross-examine a hostile witness. Is there any doubt about that?

Gen. Stewart—Under the law in Tennessee if you put a witness on and he proves to be hostile to you, the law provides the method by which you may cross-examine him. You will have to make an affidavit that you are surprised at his statement, and you may do that.

Mr. Bryan—Is there any way by which a witness can make an affidavit? That the attorney is also hostile?

Mr. Darrow—I am not hostile to you. I am hostile to your views, and I suppose that runs with me, too.

Mr. Bryan—But I think when the gentleman asked me about Confucius I ought to be allowed to answer his question.

Mr. Darrow—Oh, tell it, Mr. Bryan, I won't object to it.

Mr. Bryan—I had occasion to study Confucianism when I went to China. I got all I could find about what Confucius said, and then I bought a book that told us what Menches said about what Confucius said, and I found that there were several direct and strong contrasts between the teachings of Jesus and the teaching of Confucius. In the first place, one of his followers asked if there was any word that would express all that was necessary to know in the relations of life, and he said, "Isn't reciprocity such a word?" I know of no better illustration of the difference between Christianity and Confucianism than the contrast that is brought out there. Reciprocity is a calculating selfishness. If a person does something for you, you do something for him and keep it even. That is the basis of the philosophy of Confucius. Christ's doctrine was not reciprocity. We were told to help people not in proportion as they had helped us—not in proportion as they might have helped us, but in proportion to their needs, and there is all the difference in the world between a religion that teaches you just to keep even with other people and the religion that teaches you to spend yourself for other people and to help them as they need help.

Mr. Darrow—There is no doubt about that; I haven't asked you that.

Mr. Bryan—That is one of the differences between the two.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
— Flannery O'Connor

“An Excerpt From A Speech Never Given”

Oct

Wed

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William Jennings Bryan wrote an eloquent closing remarks speech for the Scopes trial. Though he sometimes makes logical assumptions (which he shared with most people then) to support his argument, he makes some good points. This is one.

The evolutionist does not undertake to tell us how protozoa, moved by interior and resident forces, sent life up through all the various species, and cannot prove that there was actually any such compelling power at all. And yet, the school children are asked to accept their guesses and build a philosophy of life upon them. If it were not so serious a matter, one might be tempted to speculate upon the various degrees of relationship that, according to evolutionists, exist between man and other forms of life. It might require some very nice calculation to determine at what degree of relationship the killing of a relative ceases to be murder and the eating of one's kin ceases to be cannibalism.

— William Jennings Bryan

“An Exchange Between Bryan and Darrow”

Oct

Tue

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An exchange between William Jennings Bryan (currently on the stand) and Clarence Darrow…

The Witness—These gentlemen have not had much chance—they did not come here to try this case. They came here to try revealed religion. I am here to defend it, and they can ask me any question they please.

The Court—All right.

(Applause from the court yard.)

Mr. Darrow—Great applause from the bleachers.

The Witness—From those whom you call "yokels."

Mr. Darrow—I have never called them yokels.

The Witness—That is the ignorance of Tennessee, the bigotry.

Mr. Darrow—You mean who are applauding you?

(Applause.)

The Witness—Those are the people whom you insult.

Mr. Darrow—You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion.

The Court—I will not stand for that.

Mr. Darrow—For what he is doing?

The Court—I am talking to both of you.

Gen. Stewart—This has gone beyond the pale of a lawsuit, Your Honor. I have a public duty to perform, under my oath and I ask the court to stop it. Mr. Darrow is making an effort to insult the gentleman on the witness stand, and I ask that it be stopped, for it has gone beyond the pale of a lawsuit.

The Court—To stop it now would not be just to Mr. Bryan. He wants to ask the other gentleman questions along the same line.

“Trial of the (Last) Century”

Oct

Mon

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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.

Monkey

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Scopes Monkey Trial: October 2007 Archives

“More Sparring Between Darrow and Bryan”

“An Excerpt From A Speech Never Given”

“An Exchange Between Bryan and Darrow”

“Trial of the (Last) Century”

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