A Religious Orgy in Tennessee Read online

  Articles originally published in The Baltimore Sun are © 1925 and reprinted with the permission of the The Baltimore Sun. Permission also granted by Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, in accordance with the terms of the bequest of H.L. Mencken. “In Tennessee” is reprinted from the July 1, 1925, issue of The Nation. Permission also granted by Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, in accordance with the terms of the bequest of H.L. Mencken. Permission to reprint “To Expose a Fool” from The American Mercury, October 1925, is granted by Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, in accordance with the terms of the bequest of H.L. Mencken.

  Cover photo shows H.L. Mencken (upper right with hands clasped behind his back) standing on a table to look over the crowd at the proceedings at the Rhea County Courthouse. This photograph is courtesy of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, H.L. Mencken Collection.

  Special acknowledgement is made to Averil Kadis, of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and Tom Davis, of Bryan College, for assistance with research and permissions.

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, New York 11201

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:

  Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis), 1880-1956.

  “A religious orgy in Tennessee” : a reporter’s account of the Scopes “monkey” trial / H.L. Mencken. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Articles originally published in The Baltimore Sun, The Nation, or The American Mercury.

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-031-0

  1. Scopes, John Thomas—Trials, litigation, etc.—Press coverage—Maryland—Baltimore. 2. Evolution—Study and teaching—Law and legislation—Tennessee. 3. Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis), 1880-1956—Political and social views. I. Title.

  KF224.S3M46 2006

  345.73′0288—dc22

  2006022870

  v3.1

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by Art Window

  I: The Tennessee Circus

  II: Homo Neanderthalensis

  III: In Tennessee

  IV: Mencken Finds Daytonians Full of

  Sickening Doubts About Value of Publicity

  V: Impossibility of Obtaining Fair Jury

  Insures Scopes’ Conviction, Says Mencken

  VI: Mencken Likens Trial to a Religious Orgy,

  with Defendant a Beelzebub

  VII: Yearning Mountaineers’ Souls Need

  Reconversion Nightly, Mencken Finds

  VIII: Darrow’s Eloquent Appeal Wasted on Ears

  That Heed Only Bryan, Says Mencken

  IX: Law and Freedom, Mencken Discovers,

  Yield Place to Holy Writ in Rhea County

  X: Mencken Declares Strictly Fair Trial Is

  Beyond Ken of Tennessee Fundamentalists

  XI: Malone the Victor, Even Though Court

  Sides with Opponents, Says Mencken

  XII: Battle Now Over, Mencken Sees;

  Genesis Triumphant and Ready for New Jousts

  XIII: Tennessee in the Frying Pan

  XIV: Bryan

  XV: Round Two

  XVI: Aftermath

  XVII: To Expose a Fool

  Photographs

  Appendix: The Examination of William Jennings Bryan by Clarence Darrow

  About the Author

  Introduction

  By Art Winslow

  We have the stage antics of baseball-player-turned-evangelist William Ashley Sunday—Billy Sunday—and the weak ankles of the Tennessee General Assembly to thank for the high theater of the Scopes Trial of 1925. As recounted by Edward J. Larson in his excellent Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory, the state senate, considering a ban on the teaching of evolution in public schools, had already rejected the idea in committee when Billy Sunday swept into Memphis for an eighteen-day revival that February.

  Long before Elvis was to earn fame with his gyrations, this gymnast for Jesus, Larson tells us, “jumped, kicked and slid across the stage” while denouncing the “tommyrot” of evolution, the possibility “that we came from protoplasm, instead of being born of God Almighty.” When the legislators noticed that Sunday’s sermons had drawn an aggregate audience of some 200,000 constituents, the senate committee reversed itself, leading to passage of the Butler Act, signed into law in March by Governor Austin Peay virtually unchanged from the wording crafted by its author, a farmer named John Washington Butler.

  “It shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals,” the Butler Act stipulated. To transgress it was a misdemeanor, punishable by a minimum fine of $100 and a maximum of $500 for each offense.

  Tennessee was not the only state in which sentiment against Darwin’s ideas soaked enough ground to seep into public policy. Two years before, in 1923, Oklahoma had banned textbooks that promoted Darwinism, and in 1924 California required teachers to approach evolution as a theory only. Kansas was a seedbed for anti-evolution activists as well, including the lecturer Charles L. Clayton, who tried to blur the boundaries between science and religion by asserting an intelligent force, a “Doctrine of Design,” which can be seen as the forebear of modern-day belief in “Intelligent Design.”

  One of the preeminent leaders of the anti-Darwin movement at the time was William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate, two-time Nebraska Congressman and onetime Secretary of State for Woodrow Wilson. Known as the “Great Commoner,” Bryan’s 1922 book In His Image made clear his feelings on the subject of evolution:

  While “survival of the fittest” may seem plausible when applied to individuals of the same species, it affords no explanation whatever, of the almost infinite number of creatures that have come under man’s observation. To believe that natural selection, sexual selection or any other kind of selection can account for the countless differences we see about us requires more faith in chance that a Christian is required to have in God.

  * * *

  The Bible does not say that reproduction shall be nearly according to kind or seemingly according to kind. The statement is positive that it is according to kind, and that does not leave room for the changes however gradual or imperceptible that are necessary to support the evolutionary hypothesis.

  Bryan also wrote, “If we accept the Bible as true we have no difficulty in determining the origin of man,” and that Darwinian doctrine “has been the means of shaking the faith of millions,” is “absurd and harmful to society,” and further, it “attacks the very foundations of Christianity.” Darwinism “offers no reason for existence and presents no philosophy of life; the Bible explains why man is here and gives us a code of morals that fits into every human need,” Bryan observed.

  Bryan’s involvement in the Scopes trial had an air of preordainment about it, for the proceeding itself smacked of intentionality from the outset. In early May 1925, the fledgling American Civil Liberties Union publicized its eagerness to find a test case against the newly minted Butler Act by offering to defend any teacher accused under it. George Rappelyea, a manager for the Cumberland Coal and Iron company in Dayton, Tennessee, saw notice of that in the Chattanooga Daily Times and, sensing opportunity, brought it to the attention of Frank Earle Robinson, proprietor of a local drug store but also chair of the Rhea County School Board. Before another day had elapsed, a meeting was arranged that included Rappelyea, Robinson, school superintendent Walter White, a pair of the city’s lawye
rs (Sue Hicks and his brother Herbert Hicks, who went on to work for the prosecution), and John Scopes, an athletic coach and substitute teacher who agreed to be the defendant to test the law. Scopes was not the school’s designated biology teacher, but he had filled in and perhaps even taught evolution in a way that contravened the law (the defense did not contest the matter at trial).

  Generation of publicity was the primary motivation, and that came with a vengeance. A warrant was sworn out, the A.C.L.U. was notified, and so were members of the press. Various parties, including the Christian Fundamentals Association, quickly urged Bryan to join the cause, and in a week he did, saying, “They came here to try revealed religion. I am here to defend it.” Bryan aided lead prosecutor A.T. Stewart, who was attorney general for the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit and a future Senator. Rounding out the team was Bryan’s son, the Hicks siblings, and a former Dayton assistant attorney general, Ben McKenzie, and his son as well.

  On the opposing side, Clarence Darrow, perhaps the country’s best-known trial lawyer, agreed to join the A.C.L.U.’s Arthur Garfield Hays and home-state eminence John R. Neal, a law school dean from Knoxville, in defending Scopes. (“Scopes isn’t on trial. Civilization is on trial,” Darrow quipped.) Also brought on board was Darrow friend and prominent divorce lawyer Dudley Field Malone—who had served as Assistant Secretary of State under Bryan in the Wilson administration. Overseeing the trial was the presiding judge of the Eighteenth Circuit, John Raulston, a devout Baptist.

  And then there was H.L.Mencken. As an unattributed witticism in Marion Rodgers’s Mencken: The American Iconoclast put it, “If the Scopes Trial had not existed, H.L. Mencken would have had to invent it.” Scopes himself went so far as to suggest, four decades after the trial, that “In a way it was Mencken’s show,” the journalist’s lacerating critique of the Bible Belt (a term Mencken coined, along with “booboisie”) garnering most of the lasting attention.

  Mencken’s exact relation to the defense team in the Scopes trial remains somewhat vague, but it certainly transcended boundaries that would be considered proper for a journalist today. Rodgers reports that Hays asked Mencken to help with the Scopes defense strategy. Mencken’s other recent biographer, Terry Teachout (The Skeptic), writes that “there is no question that he provided pre-trial advice to the A.C.L.U.,” but Mencken’s claim that it was his idea to put Bryan on the stand, and the suggestion that he helped persuade Darrow to join the defense team, may be overstatements. By all accounts, Mencken considered the ruination of Bryan to be a goal that eclipsed the protection of a schoolteacher, fitting for someone who considered his journalistic aim “to combat, chiefly by ridicule, American piety, stupidity, tin-pot morality, cheap chauvinism.”

  Mencken was the ultimate crusader, estimating late in his career that he had written more than 5 million words in his nineteen books and as a reporter, critic, columnist and editorialist for Baltimore’s “Sunpapers” and the magazines Smart Set and the American Mercury, the last of which he not only edited but co-founded. Much of his prodigious energy was spent critiquing religion, particularly fundamentalist Protestantism, and its effect on civic life; he felt his own messianic calling in battling ignorance whenever he saw it infecting the public sphere. He was a believer in higher and lower orders of humanity, and penned columns that can be especially startling to encounter today, laced with racist and anti-Semitic or class-based bias.

  The great paradox of Mencken is irreducible. The thrilling energy of his prose, the lucidity of his thought, the striking humor, the unabashed honesty and lack of restraint, the fearlessness to say what he thought no matter the offense that might be taken—those created a deeply admiring readership. The biliousness of his attacks, the withering scorn he subjected so many to in various group libels—those created a sense of hatred. Teachout reports that in 1926, a year after the Scopes trial, roughly 500 editorials about Mencken were published in American newspapers, and four-fifths of those were unfavorable.

  To read Mencken is to understand why columnist Walter Lippmann would remark, in the Saturday Review of Literature, that “He calls you a swine, and an imbecile, and he increases your will to live,” and yet, “What Mr. Mencken has created is a personal force in American life which has an extraordinarily cleansing and vitalizing effect.” The humorist S.J. Perelman called Mencken “the ultimate firework” and credited him with loosening up journalism from its gray moorings. When Mencken’s diary was published in 1989 and raised the ire of many, he was defended in a group letter to the New York Review of Books signed by Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut and others, who hailed him as “a tremendous liberating force in American culture.”

  In his essays and reporting, Mencken comes off as an unusual fusion of anti-authoritarian and demotic impulses, disdainful of the crowd and group-think. In a piece titled “The Foundations of Quackery,” which appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun two years before the Scopes trial, he remarks “I have often pointed out how politics, under democracy, invariably translates itself from the domain of logical ideas to the domain of mere feelings, usually simple fear.” That conviction—that it was simple fear being played upon, in this instance by the anti-Darwin movement—drove much of his coverage of the Scopes trial, just as it inflected his writing lifelong.

  The Scopes trial lasted eight days in courtroom time, eleven days by the calendar, July 10 - 21 in stifling heat. Mencken’s reportage covers many of the oddities of the setting and proceedings: the carnival atmosphere that surrounded the courthouse, the tussle over prayers at the opening of each court day, Judge Raulston’s decision to disallow expert testimony before the jury (he allowed some to be read into the record). That may have been the stroke that caused Mencken to abandon Dayton on July 18, before the trial ended. In his memoirs, Mencken reported leaving to avoid dereliction of his duties to the American Mercury, but his departure meant that he missed Darrow’s examination of Bryan on the stand, called there by the defense to serve as an expert witness on the Bible. The parrying between Darrow and Bryan in the two-hour exchange appears in the appendix of this book, the trial transcript perhaps most remarkable for what Bryan tries mightily to avoid saying.

  In the end, despite the publicity it generated, what the 3,000 curious outsiders who flocked to Dayton saw was a trial whose cultural repercussions far exceeded its legal import. Rather than managing to hook the large constitutional issues it could have—concerning the validity of the restriction on teaching evolution—it was limited to a finding of whether or not John Scopes had violated the Butler Act. He had, even though the textbook he used, George Hunter’s Civic Biology, had been approved by the state; it took the jury only nine minutes to decide on a guilty verdict. Scopes was fined $100. On appeal, in 1927 the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned it on a technicality: the judge had determined the penalty rather than the jury, which had the right under the state constitution. Since Scopes was no longer employed by the State of Tennessee, the court remarked, “We see nothing to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case” and recommended to Attorney General Stewart that he drop the matter, which he did, ending Darrow’s hopes that the case could be brought to the Supreme Court.

  William Jennings Bryan died five days after the end of the trial. The full fury of what Mencken felt is represented in the original obituary essay he wrote, which appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun on July 27 and is reprinted here. The critic Alfred Kazin, in his On Native Grounds, said that while Mencken’s essay on Bryan was “one of the cruelest things he ever wrote,” it “was probably the most brilliant” as well. For one of the few times in his life, though, Mencken censored himself due to an immediate outcry, and produced a softer, second version for the paper. His rethinking appeared in the American Mercury in October, and can be found in the ending of these pages. Even in giving his own prose a purgative scrub, Mencken retains his punch: “If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum,” he wrote of Bryan.

  The unresolve
d issues at the heart of the Scopes trial remained vexing questions for decades. Mississippi and Arkansas went on to pass statutes inspired by the Butler Act, and other states imposed less onerous restrictions on the teaching of evolution.

  In Epperson v Arkansas in 1968, however, the Supreme Court overruled the Arkansas Supreme court, finding that the language so closely modeled on Butler’s (making it unlawful in a state-supported school “to teach the theory or doctrine that mankind ascended or descended from a lower order of animals,” or to adopt or use a textbook that did) “must be stricken because of its conflict with the constitutional prohibition of state laws respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” (Susan Epperson was a high school teacher from Little Rock, contesting the law.) Justice Abe Fortas, who wrote the majority opinion, stated “there can be no doubt that Arkansas has sought to prevent its teachers from discussing the theory of evolution because it is contrary to the belief of some that the Book of Genesis must be the exclusive source of doctrine as to the origin of man.… Plainly, the law is contrary to the mandate of the First, and in violation of the Fourteenth, Amendment to the Constitution.”

  Almost two decades later, in 1987, the Supreme Court invalidated a Creationism Act that had been passed in the state of Louisiana. In Edwards v Aguillard, the parents of public school children challenged the statute, the state represented by Governor Edwin Edwards. The state law required that if evolution was taught, it must be accompanied by instruction in “creation science.” The act was found in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority, affirmed an appellate court conclusion that “the Act does not serve to protect academic freedom, but has the distinctly different purpose of discrediting evolution by counterbalancing its teaching at every turn with the teaching of creationism.” Further, he noted, “the preeminent purpose of the Louisiana Legislature was clearly to advance the religious viewpoint that a supernatural being created humankind.”