A Religious Orgy in Tennessee Read online

  The prevailing attitude toward Neal himself was also very amazing. He is an able lawyer and a man of repute, and in any Northern State his courage would get the praise it deserves. But in Tennessee even the intelligentsia seem to feet that he has done something discreditable by sitting at the trial table with Darrow, Hays and Malone. The State buzzes with trivial, idiotic gossip about him—that he dresses shabbily, that he has political aspirations, and so on. What if he does and has? He has carried himself, in this case, in a way that does higher credit to his native State. But his native State, instead of being proud of him, simply snarls at him behind his back.

  IV

  So with every other man concerned with the defense—most of them, alackaday, foreigners. For example, Rappelyea, the Dayton engineer who was first to go to the aid of Scopes. I was told solemnly in Dayton, not once but twenty times, that Rappelyea was (a) a Bowery boy from New York, and (b) an incompetent and ignorant engineer. I went to some trouble to unearth the facts. They were (a) that he was actually a member of one of the oldest Huguenot families in America, and (b) that his professional skill and general culture were such that the visiting scientists sought him out and found pleasure in his company.

  Such is the punishment that falls upon a civilized man cast among fundamentalists. As I have said, the worst of it is that even the native intelligentsia help to pull the rope. In consequence all the brighter young men of the State—and it produces plenty of them—tend to leave it. If they remain, they must be prepared to succumb to the prevailing blather or resign themselves to being more or less infamous. With the anti-evolution law enforced, the State university will rapidly go to pot; no intelligent youth will waste his time upon its courses if he can help it. And so, with the young men lost, the struggle against darkness will become almost hopeless.

  As I have said, the State still produces plenty of likely young bucks—if only it could hold them! There is good blood everywhere, even in the mountains. During the dreadful buffooneries of Bryan and Raulston last week two typical specimens sat at the press table. One was Paul Y. Anderson, correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the other was Joseph Wood Krutch, one of the editors of The Nation. I am very familiar with the work of both of them, and it is my professional judgment that it is of the first caliber. Anderson is one of the best newspaper reporters in America and Krutch is one of the best editorial writers.

  Well, both were there as foreigners. Both were working for papers that could not exist in Tennessee. Both were viewed by their fellow Tennesseeans not with pride, as credits to the State, but as traitors to the Tennessee Kultur and public enemies. Their crime was that they were intelligent men, doing their jobs intelligently.

  *Herrin was the site of a 1922 massacre of strikebreakers by union sympathizers. Homestead was the site of an 1892 battle between Pinkertons hired by Andrew Carnegie and steelworkers.

  XIV

  Bryan

  From The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 27, 1925

  I

  It was plain to everyone, when Bryan came to Dayton, that his great days were behind him—that he was now definitely an old man, and headed at last for silence. There was a vague, unpleasant manginess about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty, though a close glance showed him carefully shaved, and clad in immaculate linen. All the hair was gone from the dome of his head, and it had begun to fall out, too, behind his ears, like that of the late Samuel Gompers. The old resonance had departed from his voice: what was once a bugle blast had become reedy and quavering. Who knows that, like Demosthenes, he had a lisp? In his prime, under the magic of his eloquence, no one noticed it. But when he spoke at Dayton it was always audible.

  When I first encountered him, on the sidewalk in front of the Hicks brothers’ law office, the trial was yet to begin, and so he was still expansive and amiable. I had printed in The Nation, a week or so before, an article arguing that the anti-evolution law, whatever its unwisdom, was at least constitutional—that policing school teachers was certainly not putting down free speech. The old boy professed to be delighted with the argument, and gave the gaping bystanders to understand that I was a talented publicist. In turn I admired the curious shirt he wore—sleeveless and with the neck cut very low. We parted in the manner of two Spanish ambassadors.

  But that was the last touch of affability that I was destined to see in Bryan. The next day the battle joined and his face became hard. By the end of the first week he was simply a walking malignancy. Hour by hour he grew more bitter. What the Christian Scientists call malicious animal magnetism seemed to radiate from him like heat from a stove. From my place in the court-room, standing upon a table, I looked directly down upon him, sweating horribly and pumping his palm-leaf fan. His eyes fascinated me: I watched them all day long. They were blazing points of hatred. They glittered like occult and sinister gems. Now and then they wandered to me, and I got my share. It was like coming under fire.

  II

  What was behind that consuming hatred? At first I thought that it was mere evangelical passion. Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love. But even evangelical Christians occasionally loose their belts and belch amicably; I have known some who, off duty, were very benignant. In that very courtroom, indeed, were some of them—for example, old Ben McKenzie, Nestor of the Dayton bar, who sat beside Bryan. Ben was full of good humor. He made jokes with Darrow. But Bryan only glared.

  One day it dawned on me that Bryan, after all, was an evangelical Christian only by sort of afterthought—that his career in this world, and the glories thereof, had actually come to an end before he ever began whooping for Genesis. So I came to this conclusion: that what really moved him was a lust for revenge. The men of the cities had destroyed him and made a mock of him; now he would lead the yokels against them. Various facts clicked into the theory, and I hold it still. The hatred in the old man’s burning eyes was not for the enemies of God; it was for the enemies of Bryan.

  Thus he fought his last fight, eager only for blood. It quickly became frenzied and preposterous, and after that pathetic. All sense departed from him. He bit right and left, like a dog with rabies. He descended to demagogy so dreadful that his very associates blushed. His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up—to lead his forlorn mob against the foe. That foe, alas, refused to be alarmed. It insisted upon seeing the battle as a comedy. Even Darrow, who knew better, occasionally yielded to the prevailing spirit. Finally, he lured poor Bryan into a folly almost incredible.

  I allude to his astounding argument against the notion that man is a mammal. I am glad I heard it, for otherwise I’d never believe it. There stood the man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic—and once, I believe, elected—there he stood in the glare of the world, uttering stuff that a boy of eight would laugh at! The artful Darrow led him on: he repeated it, ranted for it, bellowed it in his cracked voice. A tragedy, indeed! He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. Now he was passing out a pathetic fool.

  III

  Worse, I believe that he somehow sensed the fact—that he realized his personal failure, whatever the success of the grotesque cause he spoke for. I had left Dayton before Darrow’s cross-examination brought him to his final absurdity, but I heard his long speech against the admission of expert testimony, and I saw how it fell flat and how Bryan himself was conscious of the fact. When he sat down he was done for, and he knew it. The old magic had failed to work; there was applause but there was no exultant shouts. When, half an hour later, Dudley Field Malone delivered his terrific philippic, the very yokels gave him five times the clapper-clawing that they had given to Bryan.

  This combat was the old leader’s last, and it symbolized in more than one way his passing. Two women sat through it, the one old and crippled, the other young and in the full flush of beauty. The first was Mrs. Bryan; the second was Mrs. Malone. When Malone finished his speech the crowd stormed h
is wife with felicitations, and she glowed as only a woman can who has seen her man fight a hard fight and win gloriously. But no one congratulated Mrs. Bryan. She sat hunched in her chair near the judge, apparently very uneasy. I thought then that she was ill—she has been making the round of sanitariums for years, and was lately in the hands of a faith-healer—but now I think that some appalling prescience was upon her, and that she saw in Bryan’s eyes a hint of the collapse that was so near.

  He sank into his seat a wreck, and was presently forgotten in the blast of Malone’s titanic rhetoric. His speech had been maundering, feeble and often downright idiotic. Presumably, he was speaking to a point of law, but it was quickly apparent that he knew no more law than the bailiff at the door. So he launched into mere violet garrulity. He dragged in snatches of ancient chautauqua addresses; he wandered up hill and down dale. Finally, Darrow lured him into that fabulous imbecility about man as a mammal. He sat down one of the most tragic asses in American history.

  IV

  It is the national custom to sentimentalize the dead, as it is to sentimentalize men about to be hanged. Perhaps I fall into that weakness here. The Bryan I shall remember is the Bryan of his last weeks on earth—broken, furious, and infinitely pathetic. It was impossible to meet his hatred with hatred to match it. He was winning a battle that would make him forever infamous wherever enlightened men remembered it and him. Even his old enemy, Darrow, was gentle with him at the end. That cross-examination might have been ten times as devastating. It was plain to everyone that the old Berseker Bryan was gone—that all that remained of him was a pair of glaring and horrible eyes.

  But what of his life? Did he accomplish any useful thing? Was he, in his day, of any dignity as a man, and of any value to his fellow-men? I doubt it. Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker. The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment’s notice. For years he evaded Prohibition as dangerous; then he embraced it as profitable. At the Democratic National Convention last year he was on both sides, and distrusted by both. In his last great battle there was only a baleful and ridiculous malignancy. If he was pathetic, he was also disgusting.

  Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

  The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.

  XV

  Round Two

  From The Baltimore Evening Sun, August 10, 1925

  I

  The translation of Bryan to a higher sphere was a body blow to the imbecility called Fundamentalism, and its effects are already visible. Not only has the Georgia Legislature incontinently rejected the anti-evolution bill; there has been a marked improvement in the discussion of the whole subject throughout the South. While Bryan lived it was almost impossible, in most Southern States, to make any headway against him. His great talent for inflaming the mob, and his habit of doing it by lying about his opponents, made many Southern editors hesitate to tackle him. In a region where education is backward, and popular thinking is largely colored by disreputable politicians and evangelical pastors, such a fellow was dangerous.

  But a dead man cannot bite, and so the Southern editors now show a new boldness. I speak, of course, of the general. A few daring spirits have been denouncing Bryan as a charlatan for a long while, and some of them have even carried their readers with them. I point, for example, to Julian Harris in Columbus, Ga, and to Charlton Wright in Columbia, S.C.—two highly civilized men, preaching sense and decency without fear. But the average Southern editor, it must be manifest, has been, in the past, of a different sort. What ails the South, primarily, is simply lack of courage. Its truculence is only protective coloration; it is really very timid. If there had been bolder editors in Tennessee there would have been no anti-evolution bill and no Scopes trial.

  But, as I say, the removal of Bryan to Paradise gives heart to skittish spirits, for his heirs and assigns are all palpable fifth-raters, and hence not formidable. In South Carolina, for example, the cause falls to the Hon. Cole L. Blease, who is to Bryan what a wart is to the Great Smokey Mountains. In Tennessee itself he is succeeded by a junta of hedge lawyers, county school superintendents, snide politicians and rustic clergymen—in brief, by worms. It will be easy to make practice against them.

  II

  The circumstances of Bryant’s death, indeed, have probably done great damage to Fundamentalism, for it is nothing if it is not a superstition, and the rustic pastors will have a hard time explaining to the faithful why the agent of God was struck down in the midst of the first battle. How is it that Darrow escaped and Bryan fell? There is, no doubt, a sound theological reason, but I shouldn’t like to have to expound it, even to a country Bible class. In the end, perhaps, the true believers will have to take refuge from the torment of doubt in the theory that the hero was murdered, say by the Jesuits. Even so, there will be the obvious and disquieting inference that, in the first battle, the devil really won.

  The theory I mention is already launched. I find it in the current issue of the American Standard, a leading fundamentalist organ, edited by an eminent Baptist pastor. This journal, which is written in good English and attractively printed, voices the opinion of the more refined and thoughtful Fundamentalists. What it says today is said by scores of little denominational papers tomorrow. Its notion is that the Catholics, represented by Dudley Field Malone, and the Jews, represented by Darrow (!), concentrated such malicious animal magnetism upon poor Bryan that he withered and perished. The late martyr Harding, it appears, was disposed of in the same way: his crime was that he was a Freemason. Thus Fundamentalism borrows the magic of Christian Science, and idiot kisses idiot.

  But something remains for the rev. clergy to explain, and that is Bryan’s vulnerability. If he was actually divinely inspired, and doing battle for the True Faith, then how come that he did not throw off Malone’s and Darrow’s sorceries? He had ample warning. Dayton, during the Scopes trial, was full of whispers. At least a dozen times I was told of hellish conspiracies afoot. Every pastor in the town knew that demons filled the air. Why didn’t they exorcise these dreadful shapes? One must assume that they prayed for the champion of light. In fact, they prayed openly, and in loud, ringing, confident tones. Then why did their prayers fail?

  III

  I do not propound such questions in an effort to be jocose; I offer them as characteristic specimens of Fundamentalist reasoning. The Fundamentalist prayer is not an inner experience; it is a means to objective ends. he prays precisely as more worldly Puritans complain to the police. he expects action, and is disappointed and dismayed if it does not follow. The mind of the Fundamentalist is extremely literal—indeed, the most literal mind ever encountered on this earth. He doubts nothing in the Bible, not even typographical errors. He believes absolutely that Noah took two behemoths and two streptococci into the Ark, and he believes with equal faith that the righteous have angels to guard them.

  Thus the dramatic death of Bryan is bound to give him great concern, and in the long run, I believe, it will do more to break down his cocksureness than ten thousand arguments. Try to imagine the debates that must be going on in Dayton itself, in Robinson’s drug store and on the courthouse lawn. What is old Ben McKenzie’s theory? How does the learned Judge Raulston, J., explain it? And the Hicks boys? And Pastor Striblin
g? I venture to guess that the miracle—for everything that happens, to a Fundamentalist, is a miracle—has materially cooled off enthusiasm for the Bryan Fundamentalist University. If Darrow could blast Bryan, then what is to prevent him blasting the university, and so setting fire to town?

  My belief is that the last will soon be heard of that great institution. It will engage the newspapers for a few weeks or months longer, and various enterprising souls will get a lot of free publicity by subscribing to its endowment, and then it will be quietly shelved. I doubt that anyone in Tennessee wants it—that is, anyone who has any notion what a university is.

  The yokels of the hills may be bemused by it, as they are bemused by the scheme to put God into the Constitution. But the rest of the Tennesseeans are eager only to shove Fundamentalism into a cellar, and to get rid of the disgrace that it has brought upon the State.

  IV

  They will tackle it with more vigor than last time when it next takes to the warpath. They have learned a lesson. Already, indeed, they make plans for the repeal of the anti-evolution law—a long business, but certainly not hopeless. It was supported by the politicians of the State simply because those in favor of it were noisy and determined, and those against it were too proud to fight. These politicians will begin to wobble the moment it becomes clear that there are two sides engaged, and they will desert Genesis at the first sign that the enemy has artillery, and is eager to use it. They are, like politicians everywhere, men without conscience. One of the chief of them began life as a legislative agent for the brewers. When Prohibition came in he became a violent Prohibitionist.