Today, July 10, is the 85th Anniversary of the beginning of the "Scopes Monkey Trial," the famous Tennessee court case that was ostensibly concerned with the issue of whether John T. Scopes, a 24-year old science teacher, was breaking the law by teaching evolution in a school, but soon (and forever after) became a historical touchstone in American educational history. A good overview (though some of the details are wrong) can be found here.
The facts of the case are probably known to many, but include some interesting historical trivia:
1. Scopes was actually found guilty. He had broken the law against teaching evolution and was fined, though the case was later overturned on a technicality.
2. Much of the trial was held outside, due to the sweltering July heat in Dayton, Tennessee.
3. The entire affair lasted only two weeks.
4. William Jennings Bryan, perhaps America's greatest orator and a powerful force in American politics at the turn of the last century (and the erstwhile Svengali of the anti-evolution claque), died five days after the original verdict in the Scopes case.
5. Clarence Darrow (the lawyer for the defendant, and forever after the American image of the genteel Southern lawyer) saw his final major court case, a murder trial in Hawaii, become a national celebrity case in 1932, with final arguments by the lawyers broadcast over the radio in the United States as the O.J. Simpson trial of its time.
Jim Keane, S.J.
Scopes was not found guilty. Darrow had Scopes plead guilty when it became clear that the PR campaign for the trial was going to change direction.
It only lasted two weeks because Darrow cut is short.
Bryant probably died because of Darrow's dishonorable and deceitful tactics that were meant for only one thing, to humilate Bryan.
Darrow was not a genteel Southern lawyer. He was a low life.
Darrow was a hero of mine while in college. Obviously, I changed that opinion.
Clarence Darrow, born and raised in Ohio and spending most of his adult life in Illinois, is a strange model for a "genteel Southern lawyer". Mr. Darrow's obituary in the New York Times stated,
"A kindly, homely personage who dressed in the certainty that clothes do not make the man, he went through life declaring himself an agnostic. But three years ago he declared he no longer had any doubts. He proclaimed himself a materialist whom it had taken fifty years to find out that there is nothing after death."
So maybe on some things that matter, Bryan was right and Darrow was wrong? Whether or not there is life after death would be considered by some to be far more important than whether great-grandfather walked on two legs or four.