Education: The Great Trial

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"General" Ben McKenzie, local wit and humorist, dressed in a blue seersucker suit, peered down his nose and through his glasses perched thereon and in a high, rasping, querulous voice began the fight. The Court seemed in considerable doubt as to what he was driving at. But when he sneered at the laws in the "great metropolitan City of New York" and in "the great white city of the Northwest," Lawyer Malone said: "We object. ... I do not consider further allusion to the geographical parts of the country as particularly necessary. . . . We are here rightfully as American citizens."

Judge Raulston interposed: "I want you gentleman from New York, or any other foreign State, to always remember that you are our guests. ..." "Your Honor," objected Mr. Malone, "we (Continued on Page 28)

(Continued from Page 17) want it understood that while we are in this courtroom we are here as lawyers, not as guests." A long fight then began concerning the differences between the caption of the act under which Scopes was indicted and the act itself. Attorney General Stewart led off for the State. He claimed that the Constitution in no way discriminated against religious beliefs. Lawyer Clarence Darrow dominated the proceedings and aggravated in doing so a small rent in left shirt sleeve into a gigantic tear.

Lawyer Darrow then began his long argument for the defense, basing it on the diversion of the caption of the act from the act itself and on the ambiguity of the indictment. "I am going to argue it [the case] as if it was serious. . . . The Book of Genesis, written when everybody thought the world was flat . . . religious ignorance and bigotry as any that justified the Spanish Inquisition or the hanging of witches in New England. . . . The State of Tennessee has no more right to teach the Bible as the Divine Book than it has the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Confucius, the Buddha or the Essays of Emerson. . . . Who is the Chief Mogul that can tell us what the Bible means ? . . . Nothing was ever heard of all that [Christian divisions] until the Fundamentalists got into Tennessee. . . . Here is one thing I cannot account for, that is the hatred and the venom and feeling of people with very strong religious convictions. . . . Joshua made the sun stand still. The Fundamentalists will make the ages roll back. . . . This is as brazen and bold an attempt to destroy liberty as was ever seen in the Middle Ages. ..."

The trial was continued.

Ramifications of the Scopes trial ran all the way from a proposal by residents of Dayton that a Fundamentalist college be founded there with William Jennings Bryan as president, to expressions of astonishment in the Muslam newspapers of Constantinople at "such antiquated ideas."

In Los Angeles, Calif., U. S. Secretary of the Navy Cuntis D. Wilbur advertised an address before the Bible class which he once taught. He tried to reconcile Evolution and the Bible by dissenting from literal interpretation of the latter and rejecting "God in a vacuum."