Authors: Edward J. Larson
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (13 page)
By the twenties, Darrow unquestionably stood out as the most famous—some would say infamous—trial lawyer in America. Born into an educated, working-class family in rural Ohio, Darrow first gained public notice in the 1890s as a Chicago city attorney and popular speaker for liberal causes. He secured the Democratic nomination to Congress in 1896, but spent most of his time campaigning for the party ticket, headed by presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, and lost by about one hundred votes. Darrow took up the cause of labor about this time, beginning with the defense of the famed Socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs against criminal charges growing out of the 1894 Pullman strike. “For the next fifteen years Clarence Darrow was the country’s outstanding defender of labor, at a time when labor was more militant and idealistic and employers more hardened and desperate than ever before or since,” the liberal
Nation
observed during the Scopes litigation. “The cases he was called upon to defend were almost invariably criminal prosecutions in bitterly hostile communities.”
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The final such case, a dramatic 1911 murder trial involving two union leaders accused of blowing up the Los Angeles Times building, tarnished Darrow’s reputation with labor when the defendants confessed their guilt after Darrow had professed their innocence.
Nation
observed during the Scopes litigation. “The cases he was called upon to defend were almost invariably criminal prosecutions in bitterly hostile communities.”
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The final such case, a dramatic 1911 murder trial involving two union leaders accused of blowing up the Los Angeles Times building, tarnished Darrow’s reputation with labor when the defendants confessed their guilt after Darrow had professed their innocence.
Thereafter, Darrow gradually shifted his practice to criminal law, defending an odd mix of political radicals and wealthy murderers. Both types of cases kept Darrow’s name in the national headlines. The former type also connected the Chicago attorney with the New York-based
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Clarence Darrow at the time of the Scopes trial. (Courtesy of Bryan College Archives)
ACLU: they joined forces to defend Benjamin Gitlow, for example. The latter type generated the most publicity, such as the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case, one of the most sensational trials in American history, in which Darrow used arguments of psychological determinism to save two wealthy and intelligent Chicago teenagers from execution for their cold-blooded murder of an unpopular former schoolmate, a crime that the defendants apparently committed for no other reason than to see if they could get away with it. Although Darrow’s defense outraged many Americans who believed in individual responsibility, it reflected his long-standing and oft-proclaimed repudiation of free will.26
Darrow was not content with simply questioning popular notions of criminal responsibility, but delighted in challenging traditional concepts of morality and religion. One historian described Darrow as “the last of the ‘village atheists’ on a national scale,” and in this role he performed for America the same part that his father once played in his hometown.
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“He rebelled, just as his father had rebelled, against the narrow preachments of ‘do gooders,’” Darrow biographer Kevin Tierney concluded. “He regarded Christianity as a ‘slave religion, encouraging acquiescence in injustice, a willingness to make do with the mediocre, and complacency in the face of the intolerable.”
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In the courtroom, on the Chautauqua circuit, in public debates and lectures, and through dozens of popular books and articles, Darrow spent a lifetime ridiculing traditional Christian beliefs. He called himself an agnostic, but in fact he was effectively an atheist. In this he imitated his intellectual mentor, the nineteenth-century American social critic Robert G. Ingersoll, who wrote, “The Agnostic does not simply say, ‘I do not know [if God exists].’ He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know.... He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know—he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact.”
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“He rebelled, just as his father had rebelled, against the narrow preachments of ‘do gooders,’” Darrow biographer Kevin Tierney concluded. “He regarded Christianity as a ‘slave religion, encouraging acquiescence in injustice, a willingness to make do with the mediocre, and complacency in the face of the intolerable.”
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In the courtroom, on the Chautauqua circuit, in public debates and lectures, and through dozens of popular books and articles, Darrow spent a lifetime ridiculing traditional Christian beliefs. He called himself an agnostic, but in fact he was effectively an atheist. In this he imitated his intellectual mentor, the nineteenth-century American social critic Robert G. Ingersoll, who wrote, “The Agnostic does not simply say, ‘I do not know [if God exists].’ He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know.... He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know—he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact.”
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Good intentions underlay Darrow’s efforts to undermine popular religious faith. He sincerely believed that the biblical concept of original sin for all and salvation for some through divine grace was, as he described it, “a very dangerous doctrine”—“silly, impossible and wicked.”
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Darrow once told a group of convicts, “It is not the bad people I fear so much as the good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel—he believes in punishment.”
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During a public debate on religion, he added, “The origin of what we call civilization is not due to religion but to skepticism.... The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.”
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Darrow once told a group of convicts, “It is not the bad people I fear so much as the good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel—he believes in punishment.”
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During a public debate on religion, he added, “The origin of what we call civilization is not due to religion but to skepticism.... The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.”
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Darrow often invoked the idea of organic evolution to support his arguments, but it was never central to his thinking. He claimed to understand modern biology but mixed up Darwinian, Lamarckian, and mutation-theory concepts in his arguments, utilizing whichever best served his immediate rhetorical purposes. He frequently appealed to science as an objective arbitrator of truth, but would only present scientific evidence that supported his position. In short, he was a lawyer. In public debates on religious topics, for example, when confronted with the popular defenses of theism offered by such leading scientists as Arthur Eddington, James Jeans, and Robert Millikan, Darrow would dismiss their expertise as not involving religion and their evidence as hearsay. In contrast, Darrow readily embraced the antitheistic implications of Darwinism.
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Darrow’s social views shaped his scientific ideas rather that the other way around, and the theory of evolution proved most helpful in his efforts to debunk the biblical notions of creation, design, and purpose in nature. “From where does man get the [selfish] idea of his importance? He gets it from Genesis, of course,” Darrow wrote in his autobiography. “In fact, man never was made. He was evolved from the lowest form of life.” This view, Darrow maintained, provided a better basis for morality than traditional Christian concepts of eternal salvation and damnation by observing, “No one can feel this universal [evolutionary] relationship without being gentler, kindlier, and more humane toward all the infinite forms of beings that live with us, and must die with us.”
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Of course, Darrow could present a different face in court, such as during the Leopold-Loeb case, when he sought mercy for the defendants by attributing their actions to misguided Social Darwinist thinking.
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Of course, Darrow could present a different face in court, such as during the Leopold-Loeb case, when he sought mercy for the defendants by attributing their actions to misguided Social Darwinist thinking.
Darrow welcomed the hullabaloo surrounding the antievolution crusade. It rekindled interest in his legalistic attacks on the Bible, which once appeared hopelessly out of date in light of modern developments in mainline Christian thought. In response to 1923 comments about evolution by William Jennings Bryan, for example, Darrow could again make front-page headlines in the
Chicago Tribune
by simply asking Bryan questions such as, “Did Noah build the ark?” and if so, “how did Noah gather [animals] from all the continents?”
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Leading Chicago ministers complained that both Bryan’s comments and Darrow’s questions missed the point, but the public loved it.
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So did Darrow. When the Scopes trial arose two years later, Darrow volunteered his service for the defense—the only time he ever offered free legal aid—seeing a chance to grab the limelight and debunk Christianity. “My object,” Darrow later wrote, “was to focus the attention of the country on the programme of Mr. Bryan and the other fundamentalists in America.”
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Chicago Tribune
by simply asking Bryan questions such as, “Did Noah build the ark?” and if so, “how did Noah gather [animals] from all the continents?”
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Leading Chicago ministers complained that both Bryan’s comments and Darrow’s questions missed the point, but the public loved it.
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So did Darrow. When the Scopes trial arose two years later, Darrow volunteered his service for the defense—the only time he ever offered free legal aid—seeing a chance to grab the limelight and debunk Christianity. “My object,” Darrow later wrote, “was to focus the attention of the country on the programme of Mr. Bryan and the other fundamentalists in America.”
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Neither Scopes in particular nor free speech in general mattered much to Darrow, and this troubled many within the ACLU leadership. Baldwin wanted the focus on academic freedom. Acting chair John Haynes Holmes, a liberal Unitarian minister, later complained that Darrow “in the thought processes [regarding religion] was a mid-Victorian arrived too late on the scene.”
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During the twenties, the ACLU executive committee was never openly hostile toward religion per se, and several of its members feared that Darrow’s militant agnosticism would imperil Scopes’s defense. In his autobiography, Hays clearly took the ACLU’s opposition to antievolution laws out of an antireligious context when he wrote, “We have insisted upon the propagandizing rights of various groups—Communists, IWW’s, evolutionists, birth-controllers, union organizers, industrialists, freethinkers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and even of Fascists, Nazis, and Lindbergh.”
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Yet in Darrow he saw a soul-mate who could turn a small Tennessee courtroom into an international grandstand. Together they went to Dayton.
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During the twenties, the ACLU executive committee was never openly hostile toward religion per se, and several of its members feared that Darrow’s militant agnosticism would imperil Scopes’s defense. In his autobiography, Hays clearly took the ACLU’s opposition to antievolution laws out of an antireligious context when he wrote, “We have insisted upon the propagandizing rights of various groups—Communists, IWW’s, evolutionists, birth-controllers, union organizers, industrialists, freethinkers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and even of Fascists, Nazis, and Lindbergh.”
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Yet in Darrow he saw a soul-mate who could turn a small Tennessee courtroom into an international grandstand. Together they went to Dayton.
The ACLU’s commitment to civil liberties for workers did more to influence the course of the Scopes trial than simply bringing together Darrow and Hays; it also fired the organization’s opposition to antievolution laws. Henry R. Linville, president of the Teachers Union of New York City, served on the ACLU executive committee throughout the twenties. Linville held a doctorate in zoology from Harvard University and chaired the biology department at New York’s DeWitt Clinton High School when that institution developed the modern secondary school biology curriculum. George W. Hunter, author of the book at issue in the Scopes trial, had been Linville’s colleague at Clinton and his successor as chair of the school’s biology department. Linville’s own high school texts stressed evolutionary concepts and presented humans within the context of their biological environment.
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Linville brought to the ACLU both a biology teacher’s firsthand experience with instruction in evolution and a labor leader’s commitment to protecting free speech and academic freedom for all public school teachers.
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Linville brought to the ACLU both a biology teacher’s firsthand experience with instruction in evolution and a labor leader’s commitment to protecting free speech and academic freedom for all public school teachers.
Academic freedom had been an ongoing concern of the ACLU from the organization’s inception; naturally, it related to free speech, yet the interest ran even deeper. The pacifists who helped form the National Civil Liberties Bureau abhorred wartime efforts to promote patriotism and militarism in the schools. They defended teachers fired for opposing American involvement in the war and fought against efforts to purge the public school curriculum of German influences. After the war, when the ACLU turned its attention to defending unpopular speakers, its efforts widened to include fighting classroom restrictions on unpopular ideas. “The attempts to maintain a uniform orthodox opinion among teachers should be opposed,” the ACLU’s initial position statement declared. “The attempts of education authorities to inject into public schools and colleges instruction propaganda in the interest of any particular theory of society to the exclusion of others should be opposed.”
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This statement primarily reflected the ACLU’s opposition to school patriotism programs. Building on wartime developments in New York, the Lusk Committee proposed legislation in 1920 to dismiss public school teachers who “advocated, either by word of mouth or in writing, a form of government other than the government of the United States.”
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The ACLU helped persuade New York governor Al Smith to veto this bill in 1921, but Smith’s successor signed similar legislation into law a year later. Dozens of other states required public school teachers and college professors to sign loyalty oaths. Powerful patriotic organizations, including the American Legion, lobbied for promoting “Americanism” in the public schools by mandatory patriotic exercises (typically a flag salute) and through classroom use of education materials that praised the military and disparaged all things “foreign” (often including the international labor movement). Publicity generated by the ACLU forestalled these programs in some places, but an ACLU lawsuit challenging compulsory military training for male students attending the state University of California at Los Angeles failed. The rise of a militantly anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan during the early 1920s led to ACLU efforts to protect both Catholic teachers from mass firings in Klan-dominated school districts and the free-speech rights of the Klan in Catholic communities. Repeatedly, the ACLU was drawn into courtrooms over education. Indeed, during the 1920s, it had to go to court to protect its own right to sponsor programs in New York City schools after the local board of education barred all ACLU representatives from “talking in school buildings” under a general regulation requiring classroom speakers to “be loyal to American institutions.”
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The ACLU helped persuade New York governor Al Smith to veto this bill in 1921, but Smith’s successor signed similar legislation into law a year later. Dozens of other states required public school teachers and college professors to sign loyalty oaths. Powerful patriotic organizations, including the American Legion, lobbied for promoting “Americanism” in the public schools by mandatory patriotic exercises (typically a flag salute) and through classroom use of education materials that praised the military and disparaged all things “foreign” (often including the international labor movement). Publicity generated by the ACLU forestalled these programs in some places, but an ACLU lawsuit challenging compulsory military training for male students attending the state University of California at Los Angeles failed. The rise of a militantly anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan during the early 1920s led to ACLU efforts to protect both Catholic teachers from mass firings in Klan-dominated school districts and the free-speech rights of the Klan in Catholic communities. Repeatedly, the ACLU was drawn into courtrooms over education. Indeed, during the 1920s, it had to go to court to protect its own right to sponsor programs in New York City schools after the local board of education barred all ACLU representatives from “talking in school buildings” under a general regulation requiring classroom speakers to “be loyal to American institutions.”
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Attempts to propagandize public education did not begin in the twenties. In fact, Massachusetts Puritans founded America’s first public schools during the colonial era partly to promote their distinctive religious and political system. The common-school movement spread during the nineteenth century (at least in part) as a means to indoctrinate into American ways the large number of non-English immigrants entering the United States. Most public school curricula traditionally included American civics, Bible reading, and daily prayers. “Schools were not established to teach and encourage the pupil to think,” Clarence Darrow wrote of his own nineteenth-century education. “From the first grade to the end of the college course [students] were taught not to think, and the instructor who dared to utter anything in conflict with ordinary beliefs and customs was promptly dismissed, if not destroyed.”
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