The Great Trial

It is six months since a shy, blond young schoolman, of moderate intelligence and average personality, achieved international fame by getting himself convicted by the righteous state of Tennessee of having "taught evolution" out of school books approved by that state's educational authorities. It is six months since lavender-gallused Clarence Darrow hunched his shoulders, thrust his jaw and tortured the late William Jennings Bryan with satiric courtroom questions about his faith in Holy Writ. Six months since pamphlet-scattering mountebanks, itinerant fanatics, land-sharks, pickpockets and cheap-johnny "scientists" jostled in the steaming streets of little Dayton, Tenn. Six months since the nation's press bawled daily headlines about a classic struggle between Reason and Religion, Brains and Bigotry, Science and Superstition.

Teacher John Thomas Scopes remains convicted. The "classic struggle" has been permitted, by its erstwhile foam-mouthed partisans on both sides, to dwindle into obscurity. The anti-evolution law stands in Tennessee, but, satisfied with their momentarily magnificent gesticulations, the evolutionist newspapers no longer keep bright the diadem of obloquy with which they crowned that state.

Last week Teacher Scopes' lawyers filed with the Supreme Court of Tennessee a brief appealing his conviction. It outlined the final argument in the case. It tried to contest the issue which the prosecution first raised and then eluded in the first trial -- the religious issue. It endeavored not only to reverse Teacher Scopes' judgment but to overthrow the Tennessee anti-evolution law, which latter was the original purpose of Scopes and his defenders, together with the vaguer purpose of educating the public upon the fact of evolution.

The country's leading newspaper, the New York Times, published its account of the Scopes appeal on page 6. In Lawyer Darrow's home town the Chicago Tribune published it on page 18. The New York Herald Tribune found space on page 13. None thought the matter worthy of editorial mention. Thus passes the glorious news of the world.

Signed by nine lawyers ending up with Arthur Garfield Hays, from whose Manhattan office it went forth, the advance document of what will be argued next month at Nashville set forth the following points:

1) The anti-evolution statute makes fundamentalism an established religion in Tennessee; it is therefore unconstitutional.

2) It is unreasonable, and therefore exceeds the police power of the state, which is unconstitutional.

3) It is a statute discriminatory against non-fundamentalist teachers, who may not honestly teach biology if required to credit the Biblical account of the creation.

4) It is an indefinite statute, giving the Bible as a standard but failing to distinguish among the numerous versions of the Bible.

5) The verb employed in the statute, "to teach," is susceptible of many interpretations.

The brief cited statesmen from Thomas Jefferson (who wrote religious liberty into the constitution of Virginia) to President Coolidge (who besought tolerance in religion when he addressed the American Legion this fall in Omaha). It referred to Lawyer Bryan's insistence that the only real issue of the trial was a religious one, and his insistence that literal interpretation of the Bible was the religion he and his colleagues were championing. It reduced to absurdity the notion of setting up the Bible as an educational criterion, in this fashion:

"Is my geography correct? Look to the Bible, because we cannot teach anything contrary thereto. And yet, when the Bible was written, very little of the world was discovered. Is my astronomy correct? Look to the Bible. And yet, the Bible was written before the invention of the telescope. Is my geology correct? Is my biology correct? Look to the Bible. . . . If perchance the majority somewhere should not be a Christian majority, the Koran or the Book of Mormon or any other might equally well be set up as a standard of truth, knowledge and scientific learning."