Theodore
Roosevelt said of
William Jennings Bryan, “By George, he would make the greatest Baptist
preacher
on earth.” A Baptist preacher he might have been, too, were it not for
his
boyhood fear of water. As a young boy in
the 1860s in Salem, Illinois (the same small town in John Scopes
studied high school biology), Bryan dreamed
of
becoming a preacher in the Baptist Church of his father.
Witnessing his first baptismal immersion at
age six, however, changed his career plans. Bryan
later claimed that his fear of water was so great that it led to his
decision
to leave the Baptist
Church and
become
a
Presbyterian at age fourteen.
Bryan said, “My
early life ran quiet
as a
brook.” He enjoyed books and outdoor
sports. “The pleasantest memory of my
boyhood,” he said, “is that of my mother, who taught me until I was ten
years
of age.” Bryan
excelled in school, and graduated as the valedictorian and class orator
from Illinois
College.
He married a college sweetheart, Mary E. Baird, during his
first
year at
the Union College of Law in Chicago. Six years later, the young lawyer and
his
wife moved to a place Bryan saw as the
land of
opportunity, Nebraska.
In 1890, just
three
years after
settling in Nebraska, “the Boy Orator
of the Platte” launched a political
career that in six short
years would win him the Democratic Party’s nomination for President. His election to Congress came as a surprise;
he became the first Democratic congressman in Nebraska’s twenty years of statehood. After two terms in Congress, Bryan became
editor of the Omaha
World-Herald and traveled the Chautauqua lecture circuit promoting
populist
ideas. In 1896, Bryan
spoke on one of his favorite populist issues, free silver, at the
Democratic
National Convention in Chicago. He championed the idea that the dollar should
be backed by more plentiful silver rather than gold, as was the present
U. S.
policy. His speech—characterized, like
so many of his speeches, by a religious quality—for a monetary policy
more
favorable for debtors ended with the memorable words, “You shall not
press down
upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify
mankind upon
a cross of gold.” Tumultuous applause
erupted on the convention floor and continued for thirty minutes. Five ballots later, the thirty-six-year-old
Nebraskan became the youngest person ever nominated for the presidency. He lost in November to Republican William
McKinley, receiving 47 percent of the vote to McKinley’s 51. The national ticket took down with it many
Democratic candidates for Congress, including a young man from Illinois named
Clarence
Darrow, who lost his race by a mere 100 votes.
Twice again,
in
1900 and 1908,
Democrats nominated Bryan
as their candidate for president. “The
Great Commoner” campaigned hard on progressive issues such as
anti-imperialism,
consumer protection, regulation of trusts, and campaign finance reform,
but
lost both elections--in 1900, again to McKinley, and eight years later,
to Howard
Taft. Although his dream of the
presidency was never realized, Bryan
succeeded in transforming the Democratic Party from a conservative
party of
Civil War losers to a coalition more focused on the interests of
blue-collar
workers, farmers, and religious and ethnic minorities.
The Democrats
finally reclaimed
the White House in 1912 with the election of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson named Bryan his Secretary of State, but Bryan
resigned in disagreement with Wilson’s
decision to push the country toward involvement in World War I.
After leaving
the
Wilson
Administration, Bryan
devoted himself to advocacy of social reforms such as women’s suffrage
and
prohibition. With these issues, as
almost always the case for Bryan,
the source of his fire came from his deep Christian faith.
Bryan’s
politics, in fact, have been described as “applied Christianity.” He saw no line between politics and religion.
Bryan’s faith
and democratic
instincts led to
a profound suspicion of scientific elites and “modernism.”
He rebelled at the suggestion that reason
should test all things—to Bryan,
the soul ranked above the brain in importance.
He held science responsible for what he saw as a weakening
of
moral
standards. He watched with increasing
alarm, in the years immediately following World War I, as modernists,
with
their watered-down view of the Divine, took control of school boards
and
churches. The “real enemies,” Bryan contended,
were not
agnostics and atheists, but rather those
who would “suck meaning out of every vital doctrine of the
Christian
Church.”
In
particular, Bryan
grew
concerned about the influence of
teaching evolution in the schools. As a
young man, he had “looked into evolution.” He found the theory
improbable and
“resolved to have nothing to do with it.”
The evolution controversy at that time was largely
confined to
scientists and the highly educated. In
the 1900s, however, the controversy began to spread into the public
schools. When Bryan
read a book published in 1916, The Belief in God and Immortality,
by
Bryn Mawr psychology professor James H. Leuba, alarm bells rang. Leuba’s statistical study showing that
college education eroded young people’s religious faith convinced Bryan that
evolution
presented a real and present danger to the country’s moral health. Leuba concluded, “young people enter college
possessed of the beliefs still accepted …in the average home of the
land,” but
“40 to 45 percent” leave college denying or doubting “the fundamental
dogmas of
the Christian religion.” Equally shocking,
Bryan
thought,
was Leuba’s finding that most scientists were non-believers. The professor noted that “the smallest
percentage of believers is found among the greatest biologists; they
count only
16.9 per cent of believers in God.” Letters from worried parents only
added to Bryan’s
resolve to fight
evolution. His wife, in her husband’s
memoirs, explains: “His soul arose in righteous indignation when he
found from
the many letters he received from parents all over the country that
state schools
were being used to undermine the religious faith of their children.”
By 1920, Bryan identified
evolution as “the most
paralyzing influence with which civilization has had to contend during
the last
century.” The next year, he stepped to
prominence on the issue when he published a full-fledged attack on
evolution in
a pamphlet, “The Menace of Darwinism.” In his pamphlet, distributed
throughout
the country, Bryan
warned, “Under the pretense of teaching science, instructors who draw
their
salaries from the public treasury are undermining the religious faith
of
students by substituting belief in Darwinism for belief in the Bible.” He argued that persons “who worship brute
ancestors” should “build their own colleges and employ their own
teachers”
rather than use the public schools to preach their “godless doctrine.” For Bryan,
opposition to the teaching of evolution sprung almost as much from his
deep-seated majoritarian instincts as from his worries about the
“consummately
dangerous” theory.
The Great
Commoner’s increasingly
fevered attacks on evolution seemed to strike a chord, especially in
the South
where fundamentalism and democratic values predominated.
Bryan
expressed satisfaction with his support, and complaint about
Darwinists, in a
letter to a friend: “In this controversy, I have a larger majority on
my side
than in any previous controversy, and I have more intolerant opponents
than I
have ever had in politics.”
In speeches
around
the country,
Bryan
peppered
his criticism of evolution with catch phrases and humor.
“It is better to trust in the Rock of Ages
that to know the ages of rock,” he told his audiences.
At a Baptist Convention, he told the crowd of
churchgoers, “When I want to read fiction, I don’t turn to Arabian
Nights:
I turn to works of biology—I like my fiction wild.”
Bryan
criticized professors who “regard the discovery of the bones of a
five-toed
horse as a greater event than the birth of Christ.”
Bryan offered
what seemed to him a
commonsense appraisal of evolution’s plausibility.
Isn’t a theory self-evidently preposterous,
he asked, that linked “the rose to the onion, the lily-of-the-valley to
the
hog-weed, the eagle to the mosquito, the mocking bird to the
rattlesnake, the
wolf to the lamb, the royal palm to the scrub oak, and men to it all?”
He loved
to share with audiences examples of what seemed to him implausible
evolutionary
explanations for human body parts. He
ridiculed, for example, the idea that the eye began as a light
sensitive freckle. “The increased heat
irritated the skin—so the
evolutionists guess, and a nerve came there and out of the skin came
the
eye! Can you beat it?” Bryan exclaimed.
“Is it not easier to believe in a God who can
make an eye?” As proof of the confidence he held in his view, he
offered one
hundred dollars in cash to anyone who signed an affidavit declaring
that he or
she personally descended from an ape.
By 1923, Bryan focused
much of his efforts on securing
state legislation banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. In speeches to state legislative bodies, Bryan urged
enactment of
laws that contained no penalty provisions and proscribed only the
teaching of
evolution “as fact.” “A book that merely
contains it as an hypothesis,” Bryan
said, “can be considered as giving information as to views held, which
is very
different from teaching it as fact.”
Bryan
took his antievolution crusade to Tennessee
in
early 1925, where he spoke in Nashville
on the topic “Is the Bible True?” A Nashville attorney supporting legislation banning
evolution
sent copies of Bryan’s
speech to every member of the state’s General Assembly to “guide” their
deliberations on the issue. Within days
of his Nashville speech, legislation
was
introduced in each Tennessee
house prohibiting instruction on the subject of evolution in state
schools. Bryan wrote to the author of the
antievolution bill in the Tennessee Senate urging that he remove his
penalty
provision. He urged that a fine or jail
term was unnecessary and a possible drain on support for passage of the
bill,
but the provision stuck. When the Butler Act became law, Bryan offered
his praise. In a telegram to
Governor Austin Peay, he wrote, “The Christian parents of the State owe
you a
debt of gratitude for saving their children from the poisonous
influence of an
unproven hypothesis.”
On May 12,
1925,
five days
after the arrest of John Scopes, Bryan
received
a wire from William Bell Riley requesting his participation, on the
behalf of
his World ‘s Christian Fundamentals Association, in the upcoming trial
in Dayton. It had been thirty years since Bryan last
appeared in a
courtroom. No matter; he replied to
Riley from his lecture tour stop of Pittsburgh:
“I shall be pleased to act for your great religious organizations and
without
compensation assist in the enforcement of the Tennessee law provided of course it
is
agreeable to the Law Department of the State.”
Sue Hicks, the local prosecutor in Dayton,
sent a letter to Bryan
days later expressing pleasure in his willingness to join the
prosecution
team. “We will consider it a great honor
to have you with us in this prosecution,” Hicks wrote.
Bryan saw the
case as straightforward. The “real issue,”
he asserted, is “the right
of the people speaking through the legislature, to control the schools
which
they create and support.” Optimism shone
in his comments. “For the first time in
my life,” he told a fundamentalist conference, “I’m on the side of the
majority.”
Bryan’s decision
to join the
prosecution
raised the stakes of the trial, in the minds of many supporters of
evolution. Henry Fairfield Osborn,
president of the American Museum of Natural History and arguably
America’s most
prominent evolutionist, declared, “William Jennings Bryan is the man on
trial;
John Thomas Scopes is not the man on trial.
If the case is properly set before the jury, Scopes will
be the
real
plaintiff, Bryan
will be the real defendant.”
In the weeks
leading up to the
trial in Dayton, Bryan
corresponded regularly with his fellow prosecutors and met them once in
person
in Nashville. Noting the defense’s interest in landing big
name attorneys, Bryan
wrote to Sue Hicks, “The unbelievers are evidently very much worried
about the
case.” He added his suggestion that the
prosecution round out its squad with Samuel Untermeyer, a prominent New York
attorney. “Being a Jew, he ought to be
interested in
defending Moses from the Darwinites,” Bryan
suggested. Hicks replied that the
prosecution had plenty of talent already, as Judge Raulston already
tipped his
hand in discussions of the case with Attorney General Stewart. “Knowing the sentiment of the court (who by
the way is somewhat indiscreet in discussing the merits of the case
with the
Attorney General), General Stewart is confidant that [the defense]
motion to
quash the indictment will be overruled and all [prosecution] evidence
will be
admitted at the trial.”
Bryan
boarded the Royal Palm near his home in Miami
on
July 6, and arrived in Dayton
the next day, a Tuesday. Three hundred
people shouted greetings and applauded as Bryan,
wearing a large, white tropical cork helmet bought on a trip to Panama,
stepped
down from the last car of the train.
“Well, I’m here,” Bryan
announced to a crowd of reporters. “Long
have I looked forward to getting to Dayton.” After
a rest at a local residence that would
be his home for the next two weeks, Bryan
spent the rest of the hot summer afternoon wandering the streets of the
town. He chatted with residents, met
briefly with fellow prosecutors at a local law firm, downed an ice
cream sundae
at Robinson’s drugstore, and munched on radishes that had been handed
to him on
his arrival. In the evening, the Dayton
Progressive Club hosted a dinner in his honor at the Hotel Aqua. After
the
banquet dishes were picked up, Bryan
obliged the audience (which included John Scopes) with a speech in
which he
declared, “The contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to
the
death. If evolution wins, Christianity
goes.”
The next two
days
were busy
ones for Bryan. The evening after his welcoming banquet,
Bryan spoke to a couple hundred persons from a veranda overlooking the
Tennessee Valley at the Morgan Springs Hotel, about six miles into the
mountains above Dayton. As Bryan told rapt
listeners—his voice vibrating with feeling—about the coming religious
tide that
would sweep the nation, lightening lit up the valley below. An impressed reporter for the New York
Times, observing the scene, enthused, Bryan “is more than a great
politician, more than a lawyer on trial, more even than one of our
greatest
orators, he is a symbol of their simple religious faith.” The next
morning, he
addressed members of the local school board.
School Superintendent Walter White introduced Bryan as “the
greatest man in the world and
its leading citizen.”
Bryan reveled in
the attention he
received
during the opening days of the Scopes trial.
He let Attorney General present the prosecution’s case for
upholding the
law’s constitutionality, while he spoke from pulpits, on courthouse
lawns, and
wherever else admiring crowds gathered.
H. L. Mencken commented, “There are many…who believe that
Bryan
is no
longer merely human, but had lifted himself up to some level or other
of the
celestial angels…It would have surprised no one is he suddenly began
performing
miracles.” Bryan
spoke for over an hour to the congregation of the Methodist
Church in Dayton on Sunday.
Judge Raulston and his daughters listened
from the front pew as the local minister introduced Bryan as “the ambassador for Christ.”
Of course,
not
everyone in Dayton found Bryan
mesmerizing. Reporter H. L. Mencken, in
town to cover the trial, attacked Bryan
in his most caustic prose: "Once he had
one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his roars. Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt
and a brother to forlorn pastors who belabor halfwits in galvanized
iron
tabernacles behind the railroad yards….It is a tragedy, indeed, to
begin life
as a hero and to end it as a buffoon."
Bryan, who
spent
the first four
days of the trial listening and waving a large palm-leaf fan (Bryan
observed to
reporters that the palm leaf’s design is evidence of “the great eternal
plan of
adapting all nature to man’s use”), finally broke his prolonged silence
when
debate began on the question of whether the defense could present
expert
witnesses to testify about evolution or Biblical interpretation. Before Bryan
rose to deliver his much anticipated speech, Judge Raulston warned the
spectators who jammed the courtroom to hear the Great Commoner that too
much
applause might cause structural damage to the building.
The crowd
leaned
forward as Bryan
took a long drink
of ice water. With a copy of Hunter’s Civic
Biology in one hand and his fan it the other, he walked from the
prosecution table to the front of the courtroom. His
hands trembled. His wife observed later,
“I never saw him
quite so agitated.” Bryan began by
describing the question of
whether the defense would be allowed expert witnesses as “the broadest
question
that will possibly arise” in the trial.
The law is straightforward, Bryan
insisted, and nothing experts could say would be relevant to the guilt
or
innocence of John Scopes.
Within
minutes, his
voice
rising, Bryan swerved from an attack on
the
relevance of the defense evidence to a full-fledged attack on “the
absurdities”
of Darwin. Bryan
cared more about convincing the standing-room-only audience than the
judge; he
turned his back to the bench and spoke directly to the crowd. “The
Christian
believes man came from above, the evolutionist believes he must have
come from
below,” he declared. Opening his copy of
A Civic Biology, Bryan sarcastically dismissed the section
on
evolution
as nonsense. He ridiculed Hunter for
tossing man into a category with “thirty-four hundred and ninety-nine
other
mammals—including elephants!” Raising
his hands as if in terror, Bryan
exclaimed, “Talk about putting Daniel in the lion’s den!”
Turning from Hunter’s book to Darwin’s
Descent of Man, Bryan quoted Darwin
as tracing man’s ancestry to “Old World
monkeys”—“Not even from American monkeys,” Bryan
complained, “but from Old World
monkeys.” Evolutionists “have no proof” to
support
their theory, Bryan
continued, and they cannot even “tell you how life began.”
In addition
to
finding
evolution scientifically flawed, Bryan
argued that it threatened morality. With
a flushed face and holding his arms high over the audience, Bryan cried,
“The Bible is not going to be
driven out of this court by experts.”
The purpose of teaching evolution is plain, he concluded. It “is to banish from the hearts of the
people the Word of God as revealed.”
Bryan’s
hour-long speech sparked a
sustained,
but not overly enthusiastic, applause.
Many reporters thought his remarks, especially his
suggestion
that man
was not a mammal, were evidence of buffoonery.
At the least, the speech lacked intellectual rigor. Even
some of
Bryan’s
supporters
conceded that his oratory often showed few signs of a penetrating
intelligence. One friend of Bryan’s later
observed,
“Vague ideas floated through his mind but did not unite to form any
system or
crystallize into a definite practical position.”
After a
recess for
lunch,
Dudley Malone answered Bryan’s
speech for the defense. Malone
complimented his old boss at the State Department: “Probably no man in
the United States
has done more to establish certain standards of conduct in the…world of
politics,” Malone said. But Bryan, Malone
reminded
the crowd, “is not the only one who believes in God.”
He argued that now was not the time to fear
truth. “The children of this generation
are pretty wise,” Malone observed. “If
we teach them the truth as best we understand it, they might “make a
better
world of this that we have been able to make of it….For God’s sake, let
the
children have their minds kept open.” Malone, in his booming baritone,
moved to
his conclusion. The crowd erupted in the longest—and loudest—applause
of the
entire trial. The courtroom took fifteen
minutes to calm.
When the
afternoon
session of
court ended, and the spectators had left the courtroom, only three
persons
remained: Bryan, Malone, and Scopes. Bryan stared for a moment at the floor, then said
in a
low, shaking voice to Malone: “Dudley,
that
was the greatest speech I ever heard.”
“Thank you, Mr. Bryan,” Malone replied.
“I am terribly sorry that I was the one who had to do it.”
Bryan devoted
much of the weekend to
working
on his closing speech. He took a break
from his writing on Sunday night to deliver another rousing speech to
the
faithful in the nearby town of Pikesville. Prepare to meet “a gigantic conspiracy among
atheists and agnostics against the Christian religion,” he warned his
audience.
Bryan’s
memorable two-hour
confrontation with
Clarence Darrow occurred on the courthouse lawn on Monday July 20. [Editorial note: This dramatic
confrontation between Darrow and Bryan will be treated in more detail
in the
essay on Darrow.] Darrow’s relentless questioning and sarcasm took
its toll
on the Great Commoner. His anger finally
reached the boiling point. On his feet, shaking his fist at his
antagonist, Bryan shouted, “I want the
world to know that this man,
who does not believe in a God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee—.”
Darrow, also standing and shaking his fist, cut him off:
“I
object your
statement. I am exempting you on your
fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes.” Judge Raulston had enough.
He banged his gavel and announced that the
court stood adjourned until the next morning.
When the
court
reconvened, the
judge announced, “I am pleased to expunge this testimony, given by Mr.
Bryan
yesterday, from the records of this court.”
The evidence, Raulston concluded, could not aid in
determining
the guilt
or innocence of John Scopes. Years
later, W. C. Curtis, an expert witness for the defense, related another
reason
that the judge chose not to allow the examination of Bryan to
continue. Popular resentment against
Darrow grew to the
point that law enforcement officials met secretly with the judge to
urge that
he put an end to the trial. According to
Curtis, officials told Raulston, “This thing must be stopped. We cannot be responsible for what may happen
if it goes on. Someone is likely to get
hurt.”
In the eyes
of many
of his
followers, Bryan’s
concession in his testimony that the “days” of Genesis might be
“periods” made
obvious for the first time that his theory of Biblical interpretation
was not
one of strict literalism. Bryan’s
opposition to
evolution clearly had another source. In
the words of his biographer Lawrence Levine, “His literal acceptance of
the
Bible did not lead to his rejection of evolution so much his rejection
of
evolution led to his willingness to accept literally certain portion of
the
Bible.” Nearly a century after Dayton, one prominent evangelist faulted Bryan for his
non-literal reading of
Genesis. Jerry Falwell said Bryan “lost the
respect
of fundamentalists when he subscribed to the idea of periods of time
for
creation rather than twenty-four-hour days.”
The major
disappointment for Bryan in Dayton came when
the defense used a little known rule of Tennessee
criminal procedure to deprive Bryan
of the opportunity to deliver his carefully crafted summation. Under state law, when the defense waived its
right to give a closing speech, the prosecution was barred from
offering a
summation of its own. Clarence Darrow
explained his ploy: “By not making a closing argument on our side we
could cut
him down.” Darrow asked the court “to bring in the jury and instruct
the jury
to find the defendant guilty. We do not
think it fair,” he added, “to waste a lot of time when we know this is
the
inevitable result and probably the best result for the case.”
Bryan
spent most of the two days after the trial in Dayton
dictating to his secretary his undelivered closing speech—the speech Bryan called
“the
mountain peak of my life’s effort.” He wrote a few letters to friends,
including one to evangelist J. Frank Norris.
Bryan
told Norris, “Well, we won our case. It
woke up the community if I can judge from letters and telegrams.” On Friday, Bryan
traveled to Chattanooga
to make arrangements for publication of his speech, and that evening he
perused
the first proof sheet. Saturday, on the
way to Winchester, Tennessee
to deliver what would be the final speech of his life, Bryan shared
with his wife his determination
to continue with his antievolution crusade.
At eleven o’clock the next morning, back in Dayton,
Bryan
attended
Church with Mary Baird Bryan, and offered the prayer.
As he ate dinner following the service, Bryan told his
wife of a
recent physical examination that indicated that he probably had several
good
years still in him. He made a few calls
after dinner to arrange a vacation for he and his wife in the Smoky Mountains. At
three o’clock, after a brief discussion
with a publisher in Chattanooga to
discuss the
printing of his final speech, Bryan
laid down for a nap. He never woke
up. Bryan’s personal physician, Dr. J.
Thomas Kelly, concluded, “Bryan died of diabetes melitis, the immediate
cause
being the fatigue incident to the heat and his extraordinary exertions
due to
the Scopes trial.”
Five years
after
his death, in
response to the Great Commoner’s wish that a Christian college be
established
in the Tennessee hill country, Bryan College
opened its doors on a scenic Dayton
overlook.
Some
biographers
saw Bryan’s
last stand as a
contradiction of the progressive goals he fought for during most of his
life. Others recognized his opposition
to evolution as consistent with the themes that had long marked his
political career. For the Great Commoner,
who never really
understood the theory of evolution but fully understood the theory’s
misuse—and
who saw things as black and white, not gray—the decision to fight
evolution was
an easy one. Not only did evolution
threaten to leave students feeling lost in an uncaring universe, it
also
provided ammunition for those who, calling it “survival of the
fittest,” would
sterilize the abnormal or forget the weak.
Given a choice, Bryan
said, “I would rather begin with God and reason down than begin with a
piece of
dirt and reason up.”
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