By Jack Cashill

(cont.)

To prevail in court, the ACLU first needed to find a “victim” of the new law, and it advertised widely to do just that. The boosters of Dayton, Tennessee knew a solid commercial opportunity when they saw one. They encouraged an agnostic young gym teacher, John T. Scopes, to make a point of teaching evolution, persuaded the city attorneys to prosecute the case (One, Sue Hicks, had to be the inspiration for Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue), drew up a warrant for the Justice of the Peace to serve on Scopes, alerted the ACLU and, of course, contacted all the Tennessee newspapers. As Edward J. Larson comments in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the trial, Summer of The Gods, “The show had begun.”

The show featured two heavyweights of American popular culture, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. Both men presented problems for the progressives: Bryan, because on all other issues he was one of them; Darrow, because he said out loud what they would only say among themselves.

At issue, now as then, was just who controls the education of America’s youth. Despite three losses in his bid to be president, Bryan retained his populist faith in the will of the people. “Teachers in public school.” he stated succinctly, “must teach what the taxpayers desire taught.” Arguing in much the same vein as many of the Kansas petitioners, Bryan made no objection to teachers saying what they chose outside of class or even teaching evolution within as a theory, but not, he insisted, “as true or as a proven fact.”

Power attorney Clarence Darrow had no faith in the common people and even less in God. “We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States,” he declared openly in court, “and that is all.” A militant agnostic, Darrow considered Bryan’s fundamentalism “a fool religion” and, much to the remorse of his ACLU handlers, was not adverse to saying so.

The Scopes trial was a test run for liberal propaganda strategies that would endure to the present. Darrow, himself, proved to be an early master of the art of selective, self-congratulatory tolerance. “I never condemn, never judge,” he told the court before unleashing a hateful fury of name-calling that would make James Carville blush.

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