I don't share Bill Payne's point that Bryan died "in humiliation" a few days
after the Scopes trial. He died, yes, but after what most fundamentalists
regarded as a victory for their side: Scopes had in fact been convicted (the
law had been enforced), and the expert testimony of many religious
scientists and liberal theologians--testimony about the compatibility of
evolution and religious belief--had been kept out of the trial officially
(that is, the jury was not present when depositions were read into the
record). Bryan had not been able to gather a comparable group of experts on
his side, so this was really a victory for his side.
Several years after the trial, various scholars began to create the image
of the trial as a fundamentalist defeat, an image that was of course
promoted at the time by H.L. Menken but one that was not widely shared by
scholars for some years. (This according to Ron Numbers' recent book,
Darwinism Comes to America). In fact, the "e-word" was removed from most HS
biology texts (not even found in the index) for nearly 40 years afterwards.
I call this a victory--a big one--for fundamentlism.
Bryan may have been skewered by Darrow on the stand--I think one can make
that case pretty well--but he did not die in humiliation. His lengthy,
triumphalist closing statement shows this well. The judge ruled out closing
arguments once Scopes's guilt was admitted, and when he did so, Darrow was a
happy camper: he was afraid that the greatest political orator of his age
was going to steal the show from the greatest trial lawyer of his age, and
breathed a big sigh of relief. Only recently have fundamentalists begun to
skewer Bryan themselves, for his old-earth views (which were typical of
fundamentalists at the time). Shame on them, for never was there a more
deeply committed fundamentalist than Bryan, and he won at Dayton.
Ted Davis
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