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Scopes Trial - Trial

Scopes Trial - Trial: Encyclopedia II - Scopes Trial - Trial

The original prosecutors were Scopes' friends, Herbert E. and Sue K. Hicks, a pair of brothers who were local attorneys (the latter was named for the mother who died giving him birth). Hoping to attract major press coverage, George Rappleyea, the person primarily responsible for convincing Scopes to allow himself to be charged with breaking the law, went so far as to write to the British novelist H. G. Wells asking him to join the defense team. Wells replied that he had no legal training in Britain, let alone in America, and declined ...

Scopes Trial: Encyclopedia II - Scopes Trial - Trial

Scopes Trial - Trial

The original prosecutors were Scopes' friends, Herbert E. and Sue K. Hicks, a pair of brothers who were local attorneys (the latter was named for the mother who died giving him birth).

Hoping to attract major press coverage, George Rappleyea, the person primarily responsible for convincing Scopes to allow himself to be charged with breaking the law, went so far as to write to the British novelist H. G. Wells asking him to join the defense team. Wells replied that he had no legal training in Britain, let alone in America, and declined the offer. However, John R. Neal, a law school professor from Knoxville, announced that he would act as Scopes' attorney-whether Scopes liked it or not--and became the notional head of the defense team.

Baptist pastor William Bell Riley, the founder and president of the World Christian Fundamentals Association, was instrumental in calling lawyer and three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and fundamentalist Christian to act as that organization's counsel.

In response, Clarence Darrow, a staunch agnostic, volunteered his services to the defense. After many changes back and forth, the defense team consisted of Darrow, ACLU attorney Arthur Garfield Hays and Dudley Field Malone, an international divorce lawyer who had worked with Bryan in the State Department while Bryan was Secretary of State.

The prosecution team was led by Tom Stewart, district attorney for the 18th Circuit (and future United States Senator), and included, in addition to Bryan and Herbert and Sue Hicks, Ben B. McKenzie, and William Jennings Bryan, Jr. The trial was covered by journalists from around the world, including H. L. Mencken for The Baltimore Sun, which was also paying part of the defense's expenses. It was Mencken who provided the trial with its most colorful labels such as the "Monkey trial" of "the infidel Scopes." It was also the first U.S. trial to be broadcast on national radio.

The ACLU had originally intended to oppose the Butler Act on the grounds that it violated the separation of Church and State within the public education system and was therefore unconstitutional. Mainly due to Clarence Darrow, this strategy changed as the trial progressed, and the earliest argument proposed by the defense once the trial had started was that there was actually no conflict between evolution and the creation account in the Bible. In support of this claim, they brought in eight experts on evolution. Other than Dr. Maynard Metcalf, the Judge would not allow these experts to testify in person. Instead, they were allowed to submit written statements so that their evidence could be used at the appeal. In response to this decision, Darrow made several sarcastic and insulting remarks to Judge Raulston, for which he was later found to be in contempt of court.

By the latter stages of the trial, Clarence Darrow had abandoned the ACLU's strategy altogether, and resorted to an all out attack on William Jennings Bryan. Only when the case went to appeal, did the defense return to the original claim that the prosecution was invalid because the law was essentially designed to benefit a particular religious group, which would be unconstitutional.

To support his contention that evolution was morally pernicious, Bryan cited the famous Leopold-Loeb trial involving Darrow the year before the Scopes Trial. Darrow had saved two rich young child murderers from the death sentence, and Bryan cited Darrow's own words:

This terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor … Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche's [evolutionary] philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? … It is hardly fair to hang a 19–year–old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.

Malone responded for the defense in a speech that was universally considered the oratorical triumph of the trial. Arousing fears of "inquisitions," Malone argued that the Bible should be preserved in the realm of theology and morality and not put into a course of science. In his gale-force conclusion, Malone declared that Bryan's "duel to the death" against evolution should not be made one-sided by a court ruling that took away the chief witnesses for the defense. Malone promised that there would be no duel because "There is never a duel with the truth." The courtroom went wild when Malone finished and Scopes himself declared Malone's speech to be the dramatic highpoint of the entire trial and insisted that part of the reason Bryan wanted to go on the stand was to regain some of his tarnished glory.