Today (9th) is the anniversary of one of the most dramatic events in U.S. History! The gathering of the gladiators.

[Grins]

Last edited Wed Jul 9, 2025, 05:53 PM - Edit history (1)

Around 2010 I was in a used bookstore and came across this book. A biography of someone I knew of, but not that much. And for $5 for a book in good condition? I bought it. And wound up devouring it! What follows comes from that book.

It’s 1925.

0n 21 March of that year, the state of Tennessee passed “The Butler Act,” a law that made it unlawful to teach the theory of evolution in public schools. That passage activated a group founded just five years earlier – The American Civil Liberties Union, that was seeking its first court victory. They wanted to test the Constitutionality of the law in court.

What many do not know is that it was all planned out in advance, at a table at Dayton’s Robinson’s Drug Store with the cooperation of the store owner, F.E. Robinson. To make a case, a local mining engineer in Dayton, Tennessee called on a popular local coach and substitute teacher, John Scopes, who never taught biology, to deliberately and publicly violate the law.

He did, and was arrested 07 May 1925. His trial in court became The State of Tennessee vs. John Scopes; or, as most of us know it, the Scopes Monkey Trial.

If you have ever read or seen the stage play or the movie, “Inherit the Wind,” this is that trial. And the stage play and the movie - if you take out the interpersonal relationships, is pretty accurate as to what went on in that courtroom.

This was going to be a big public trial. And knowing that, the World's Christian Fundamentals Association, wanting to protect their product, asked populist leader, Williams Jennings Bryan, to assist the prosecution. And Bryan jumped in! It was his presence that was going to make this trial into a BIG, not-to-be-missed event.

On the defense side of the case, the ACLU engaged Clarence Darrow to assist them. Financially supporting the ACLU was the Baltimore Evening-Sun who then employed perhaps the most famous newsman in the nation – H.L. Mencken. In exchange for financial assistance, the Sun would get full access to the defense team with Mencken sitting in.

And the fun part.

The aim of Darrow and the ACLU was – to get Scopes acquitted! But Mencken said no! After all, Scopes was guilty! So the best way to handle the case was to convert it into, “a headlong assault on Bryan” and “not that poor worm of a schoolmaster.” Mencken’s goal – get Bryan on the stand! To “make him state his barbaric credo in plain English, and to make a monkey out of him before the world.”

And that’s what they did.

And the world came rushing to Dayton, Tennessee in trains and busses. Miles from any existing telegraph line, miles of wires had to be installed, with Western Union sending 30 telegraph operators. Telephone companies and the Post Office hired additional staff. A bank of phone booths for reporters was installed. A nearby field was cleared to allow planes carry newspapers to Dayton to be in the hands of readers. Courtroom windows were washed, floors scrubbed and the walls got fresh paint. WGN Chicago arranged for the installation of special lines, at a cost of $1,000 a day ($20,000 in 2025 dollars), just so they could carry the entire trial live. Ringling Brothers sent live moneys! That’s how big the trial had become.

Mencken had long championed the “beleaguered cities” over the “barbaric yokels” from the hinterland. His hostility was its ties to Protestant Fundamentalism which he consider an anathema to the nation. He was now an active combatant in the struggle of civilization and science vs. bigotry and superstition.

Now also a target – the south and its culture. Chattanooga News:

“If any cities of the south have any (Civil War) Colonels, there should be a rush-order for them at once. They should be addicted to wide hats, long cigars, and have a mania for mint julips, and say ‘Suh,’ on all occasions."

100-years ago today, July 9th 1925, the gladiators arrived in Dayton, Tennessee to do battle in the circus.

Mencken arrives in Dayton, and surprised that so many of the locals knew who he was, and were readers of his American Mercury. On his walk through town he encounters Bryan. They greet each other amicably and parted, wrote Mencken, “in the manner of two Spanish Ambassadors.”

While John Scopes found it embarrassing to Dayton that “every Bible-shouting, psalm singing orator poured out of the hills,” Mencken reveled in it!

10 July 1925, the trial begins.
Judge John T. Raulston enters the courtroom. Carrying a Bible. And accompanied by a fundamentalist minister – and his family!

A jury is picked before lunch. From the book:

“Most of the (jury) candidates were middle-aged farmers from rural Rhea County, with little formal education, all of whom subscribed to fundamentalism. Evolution was not only foreign to their way of thinking, but also a challenge to their beliefs. ...Inevitably, the jury presented to the rest of the nation the spectacle of illiterate farmers sitting in judgment in a trial that revolved around scientific theory.”

And here is something most do not know. Nellie Kenyon of the Chattanooga News found Mencken and interviewed him. She tells him of a “Holy Roller” meeting outside of town.

Mencken: “What’s a Holy Roller meeting?”

Hearing her answer, Mencken wants to go to one. She takes him. It’s about 2 or 3 miles out of Dayton. They park their Model T Ford and sneak up. And Mencken got an eyeful!

“…a tall, thin mountaineer in dungarees, pacing back and forth. At each turn he thrust his arms into the air. ‘Glory to God! Hally-oo-ya!’ Throwing back his tousled head, the preacher shouted toward the stars and the distant hills, in an archaic English that fascinated Mencken.

Suddenly there was a change in mood, and a little group of women began a monotonous, unintelligible chant. ...What followed, Mencken later recalled, ‘quickly reached such heights of barbaric grotesquerie that it was hard to believe it was real.’ …The climax came when the preacher began to speak in tongues. Each second his voice rose to a higher register, and then, Mencken later wrote, it broke into ‘a shrill inarticulate squeak, like that of a man throttled. He fell headlong across a pyramid of supplicants. A comic scene? Somehow, no. The poor half-wits were too horrible in earnest. It was like peeping through a knothole of the writings of people in pain.’”

Mencken was in disbelief. He thought it was a joke. His leg being pulled. All the way back to their car and on the road back to Dayton, Mencken would frequently ask Kenyon, “That was real?”

So fascinated was Mencken by what he had seen he would go back the next night to see it again.

What he had just seen represented all the bunkum of Bryan and the lawyers for the prosecution. This was what he was fighting against. And he would write about it. In articles that went across the nation – to include the South. That did not like being ridiculed. And they let him know it.

Baltimore Evening Sun:

“Such is human existence among the fundamentalists, where children are brought up on Genesis and sin is unknown….I have done my best to show you what the great heritage of mankind comes to in regions where the Bible is the beginning and end of wisdom, and the mountebank, Bryan, parading the streets in his seersucker coat, is pointed out to sucklings as the greatest man since Lincoln.” – Mencken.

That didn’t go over well in Dayton. Or with John Scopes who began to resent Mencken.

At one point in the trial, Tennessee Assistant Attorney General, Ben McKenzie*, sitting with the prosecution, shook his finger at the defense attorneys and commented on the inability of “New York lawyers” who could not understand Tennessee’s law that was, “so simple a 10-year old Rhea County boy could understand it.” (Not exactly a compliment to Rhea County boys.)

The defense protested. Defense counsel Dudley Malone jumped to his feet!

“We are here not as New Yorkers or Chicagoans, but as American citizens defending our liberties!”

JUDGE Raulston said perhaps the “foreign” counsel did not understand as well as the prosecution. Yeah; he’s not biased at all!

Darrow then explained to the judge and jury what the trial was really about. And did it - facing the WGN microphone so everyone would know:

“If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man, and creed against creed, until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”

If you are familiar with "Inherit the Wind,” that soliloquy is in there!

Telegraphs transmitted 200,000 words from Dayton – a record. Darrow’s response to the court was printed in newspapers at length. Mencken wrote of Darrow’s argument to the court:

“You have but a dim notion of it who have only read it. It was not designed for reading, but for hearing. The clanging of it was as important as the logic. It rose like a wind and ended with a flourish of bugles.”

Despite Darrow’s breathtaking response – it didn’t go over well with the locals, and that would include the jury. Darrow was depicted as the anti-Christ.

The case had drawn the attention of the world. How could anyone attack the basic principles of nature within a courtroom? But in Dayton, they were losing in court.

The next day (11th) William Jennings Bryan finally spoke. It was not his best, but it served its purpose. The crowd sided with Bryan.

No one expected Darrow’s co-counsel, Dudley Malone, to speak, but he couldn’t hold back.

“Keep your Bible! Keep it as a consolation. Keep it as your guide. But…keep your Bible in the world of theology where it belongs!”

(Pointing his finger at Bryan) There is never a dual with the truth. The truth always wins and we are not afraid of it. The truth is no coward. The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the forces of government. The truth does not need Mr. Bryan! ...We are ready to tell the truth as we understand it, and we do not fear all the truth that they present as facts.”

Wrote a reporter:

“Women shrieked their approval, men could not contain their cheers.”

Even to an anti-evolutionist sitting in the audience it was, “the finest speech of the century!” The press broke silence and gave a standing ovation.

Scopes himself would later write, “Malone’s words, read today, seem dry and uninspiring; delivered in the full heat of battle…it was electric!” Decades later it remained for Scopes as “the most dramatic event I have attended in my life.”

Even William Jennings Bryan would tell Dudley, “It was one of the greatest I ever listen to. I have forgotten the others.”

Court resumed on July 17th, with a prayer. This day the defense would present its experts to demolish the fundamentalist’s case. Judge Raulston made a decision on letting them testify; his answer was, “No.”

“When court adjourned for the day, a disgusted Mencken decided to leave Dayton. Other reporters would leave with him."

“The trial has blown up. …Nothing remained except the ‘formal business of bumping off the defendant’.” – Mencken.

BOOM!!! H.L. Mencken left Dayton!! That proved to be the biggest miscalculation in journalist judgement!!! By leaving Dayton, Mencken missed the most dramatic climax of the trial, one he later “regretted heartily.”

Because that next day – William Jennings Bryan would be the star witness for the defense! If the court would not allow the defense its expert witnesses on Darwin, then it would call in an ‘expert’ to testify on the authenticity of the Bible! Which is what Mencken wanted from the start!

July 18, 1925

The defense called William Jennings Bryan to the stand!

When the defense called Bryan to the stand, the crowd gasped. And Bryan loved it. Basked in it like a preening peacock in the sun! For now. Then this happened:

Darrow: Does the statement, “The morning and the evening were the first day,” and “The morning and the evening were the second day,’ mean anything to you?

Bryan: I do not think it necessarily means a 24-hour day.

Darrow: Now if you call those periods, they may have been a very long time.

Bryan: They might have been.

Darrow: The creation might have been going on for a very long time?

Bryan: It might have continued for millions of years.

And there it was! Darrow got Bryan to say - on his own - in court that a “day” in Genesis could be more than 24-hours. Bryan admitted that it could be “millions of years” and not six 24-hour days.

And the crowd was stunned! Bryan admitted to one of the basic tenets of Darwinism. In one afternoon Darrow had turned the case. Darrow would later write to Mencken:

“I made up my mind to show the country what an ignoramus he was and I succeeded.”

The trial portion would end the next day.

And the first order of business that day for the Judge - expunge Bryan’s damning testimony the day before from the official record! But saved for history by the reporters in the courtroom, and the reporters listening to WGN Chicago.

At that point, Darrow declined to give a closing argument, meaning – the prosecution could not give a closing argument. A great move as that deprived Bryan the chance to get another bite at the apple with another bloviating oration.

The jury was out for all of nine-minutes. “Guilty.” A pathetic $100 fine was levied that the Baltimore Evening Sun offered to pay.

A weak “victory” as fundamentalists and evolutionists continued to clash over public schools. Soon after the conclusion of the trial:
- Baptists in Kentucky elected to contribute no money to schools where evolution was taught.
- The Florida legislature proposed a law to not employ teachers who taught Darwinism.
- In Texas, the Board of Regents would rule that “no infidel, atheist, or agnostic” be employed at the university.
- In Washington, DC, a group of fundamentalists proposed that Congress refuse salaries to those who taught “disrespect for the Bible.”

“Heave an egg out a Pullman window and you will hit a Fundamentalist almost anywhere in the United States today.” – Mencken.

And he was right. Even today, the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma (so far) have passed or advanced bills to have the 10 Commandments displayed in every state schoolroom. Just this week the IRS said it would allow religions to make political speeches from pulpits without penalty.

William Jennings Bryan would die 5-days later.

Mencken would write a withering obituary. Snip:

“(Bryan’s eyes) were blazing points of hatred. The glittered like occult and sinister gems. Now and then they wandered to me, and I got my share. It was like coming under fire.

What was behind that consuming hatred? At first I thought it was Evangelical passion. …One day it dawned on me that Bryan, after all, was an Evangelical Christian only by a sort of afterthought – that in his career in this world, and the glories therein, had actually come to an end before he ever began whooping for Genesis. So I came to this conclusion: that what really moved him was a lust for revenge. The men of the cities had destroyed him and made a mock of him; and now he would lead the yokels against them. …The hatred in the old man’s burning eyes was not for the enemies of God; it was for the enemies of Bryan.

…It is hard to believe, watching him in Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod…full of almost pathological hatred of all learning, of human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything he was not.

The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille.”

You have seen movies where some editor suddenly screams, "Stop the presses?" That never happens. But it did that day!

Mencken had stepped on and crushed the bilious bastard who had become a hero to fundamentalists, the Klan, and others who simply chose not to speak ill of the dead. And the threats to the Baltimore Evening Sun came pouring in! Significantly threatening enough for the managing editor to "Stop the presses!" Mencken had to tone down his opinion piece. Mencken, who the next year would take down Boston's Watch and Ward Society over censorship was, for the first and last time - censored.


Source: “Mencken: The American Iconoclast,” Marion Elizabeth Rogers, pages 271- 294, Oxford Books.

* Ben McKenzie was Assistant Attorney General for the state of Tennessee. McKenzie was a member of the prosecution team and a strong advocate for a literal interpretation of the Bible, specifically Genesis. At a rally during the trial, McKenzie exclaimed:

"As for the Northern lawyers, who had come down to teach the 'ignorant yokels' what to believe, they had better go back to their homes, the seat of thugs, thieves, and Haymarket rioters, and educate their criminals, rather than to try and proselyte here in the South, where people believe in the Christian religion, and know that Genesis tells the full and complete story of creation."

He made this statement in the context of the Scopes trial:

"Better to kill all children under two years of age than to have teachers who will wreck the lives of children with atheist theories which will put them on the toboggan slide which leads to hell."

Weeks after the trial, McKenzie was arrested near Dayton for illegally transporting liquor; or, for what the good Christians of Tennessee then called "the enemy of all good, the friend of all evil."
Darrow asked McKenzie if he needed him as his counsel. Darrow's offer was refused.