Education: The Great Trial

Scene. In the fastnesses of Tennessee, the quiet of dawn is split asunder by wailing screams from a steam siren. It is the Dayton sawmill, waking up villagers and farmers for miles around. From 5 until 6:30 the blasts continue. The hamlet and the fantastic cross between a circus and a holy war that is in progress there come slowly to life.

Along the main street of the village, where everyone in town sees everyone else within five minutes, peddlers, hucksters, hot-sausage men (they call their wares "hot monkeys" now), pamphleteers, itinerant evangelists, prepare themselves and their goods for another day's trafficking.

The holder of the barbecue concession on the courthouse lawn builds up his fire and heaves half an ox on the coals. The field secretary of an anti-Evolution society picks his teeth and adds a note or two of his stock harangue, delivered thrice daily: "Shall we be taxed to damn our children?" An evangelist-bookseller looks proudly up at his billboards: HELL AND THE HIGH SCHOOLS, GOD OR GORILLA, BRYAN'S BOOKS FOR SALE HERE.

A preacher from Georgia in a bungalow on wheels drowsily draws on his outlandish costume—alpaca coat, shabby policeman's trousers and an opera hat— and hopes that the new day may bring him an audience for his weird sermon proving that Negroes are not human beings. The barker for a tent show called The She-Devil clears his throat.

In a forest clearing outside the town, exhausted Holy Rollers snore under the shrubbery after a night's orgy of insane gesticulation and acrobatics incited by a mouthing, syncopating professional ecstatic. Sid Strunk, the village policeman, ruminates over his breakfast coffee that it is a good thing they have brought reserves from Chattanooga. About 8 o'clock, dusty wagons, gigs, buggies and small automobiles come jogging in along the country roads. In them are gaunt farmers, their wives in gingham and children in overalls, who crowd toward the court house to get seats for the day's proceedings in the trial of Teacher John Thomas Scopes, alleged violator of the state's antievolution law, bewildered instrument of Science and Faith which have accidentally chosen Dayton as their battleground and in whose wake has come the usual camp-following of freaks, fakes, mountebanks and parasites of publicity.

Smirking, gabbling, cynical minions of the press throng with the farmers—and that is all of the crowd. For all the publicity she has stirred up, or rather because of it, Dayton has not attracted the visitors she expected—eminent scientists, statesmen, politicians, financiers, society figures.

Events. Such was the scene. Two days before the trial, Lawyer William Jennings Bryan, chief of the prosecution, lumbered off a train from Florida. The populace, Bryan's to a moron, yowled a welcome. Going to the house he had rented, Bryan took off his coat, wandered the streets in his shirt sleeves, a panoramic smile of blessing upon his perspiring countenance, an impressive pith helmet covering the bald, pink dome of his head.