A Religious Orgy in Tennessee (11 page)

The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.

From
The Baltimore Evening Sun
, August 10, 1925

The translation of Bryan to a higher sphere was a body blow to the imbecility called Fundamentalism, and its effects are already visible. Not only has the Georgia Legislature incontinently rejected the anti-evolution bill; there has been a marked improvement in the discussion of the whole subject throughout the South. While Bryan lived it was almost impossible, in most Southern States, to make any headway against him. His great talent for inflaming the mob, and his habit of doing it by lying about his opponents, made many Southern editors hesitate to tackle him. In a region where education is backward, and popular thinking is largely colored by disreputable politicians and evangelical pastors, such a fellow was dangerous.

But a dead man cannot bite, and so the Southern editors now show a new boldness. I speak, of course, of the general. A few daring spirits have been denouncing Bryan as a charlatan for a long while, and some of them have even carried their readers with them. I point, for example, to Julian Harris in Columbus, Ga, and to Charlton Wright in Columbia, S.C.—two highly civilized men, preaching sense and decency without fear. But the average Southern editor, it must be manifest, has been, in the past, of a different sort. What ails the South, primarily, is simply lack of courage. Its truculence is only protective coloration; it is really very timid. If there had been bolder editors in Tennessee there would have been no anti-evolution bill and no Scopes trial.

But, as I say, the removal of Bryan to Paradise gives heart to skittish spirits, for his heirs and assigns are all palpable fifth-raters, and hence not formidable. In South Carolina, for example, the cause falls to the Hon. Cole L. Blease, who is to Bryan what a wart is to the Great Smokey Mountains. In Tennessee itself he is succeeded by a junta of hedge lawyers, county school superintendents, snide politicians and rustic clergymen—in brief, by worms. It will be easy to make practice against them.

The circumstances of Bryant's death, indeed, have probably done great damage to Fundamentalism, for it is nothing if it is not a superstition, and the rustic pastors will have a hard time explaining to the faithful why the agent of God was struck down in the midst of the first battle. How is it that Darrow escaped and Bryan fell? There is, no doubt, a sound theological reason, but I shouldn't like to have to expound it, even to a country Bible class. In the end, perhaps, the true believers will have to take refuge from the torment of doubt in the theory that the hero was murdered, say by the Jesuits. Even so, there will be the obvious and disquieting inference that, in the first battle, the devil really won.

The theory I mention is already launched. I find it in the current issue of the
American Standard
, a leading fundamentalist organ, edited by an eminent Baptist pastor. This journal, which is written in good English and attractively printed, voices the opinion of the more refined and thoughtful Fundamentalists. What it says today is said by scores of little denominational papers tomorrow. Its notion is that the Catholics, represented by Dudley Field Malone, and the Jews, represented by Darrow (!), concentrated such malicious animal magnetism upon poor Bryan
that he withered and perished. The late martyr Harding, it appears, was disposed of in the same way: his crime was that he was a Freemason. Thus Fundamentalism borrows the magic of Christian Science, and idiot kisses idiot.

But something remains for the rev. clergy to explain, and that is Bryan's vulnerability. If he was actually divinely inspired, and doing battle for the True Faith, then how come that he did not throw off Malone's and Darrow's sorceries? He had ample warning. Dayton, during the Scopes trial, was full of whispers. At least a dozen times I was told of hellish conspiracies afoot. Every pastor in the town knew that demons filled the air. Why didn't they exorcise these dreadful shapes? One must assume that they prayed for the champion of light. In fact, they prayed openly, and in loud, ringing, confident tones. Then why did their prayers fail?

I do not propound such questions in an effort to be jocose; I offer them as characteristic specimens of Fundamentalist reasoning. The Fundamentalist prayer is not an inner experience; it is a means to objective ends. he prays precisely as more worldly Puritans complain to the police. he expects action, and is disappointed and dismayed if it does not follow. The mind of the Fundamentalist is
extremely literal—indeed, the most literal mind ever encountered on this earth. He doubts nothing in the Bible, not even typographical errors. He believes absolutely that Noah took two behemoths and two streptococci into the Ark, and he believes with equal faith that the righteous have angels to guard them.

Thus the dramatic death of Bryan is bound to give him great concern, and in the long run, I believe, it will do more to break down his cocksureness than ten thousand arguments. Try to imagine the debates that must be going on in Dayton itself, in Robinson's drug store and on the courthouse lawn. What is old Ben McKenzie's theory? How does the learned Judge Raulston, J., explain it? And the Hicks boys? And Pastor Stribling? I venture to guess that the miracle—for everything that happens, to a Fundamentalist, is a miracle—has materially cooled off enthusiasm for the Bryan Fundamentalist University. If Darrow could blast Bryan, then what is to prevent him blasting the university, and so setting fire to town?

My belief is that the last will soon be heard of that great institution. It will engage the newspapers for a few weeks or months longer, and various enterprising souls will get a lot of free publicity by subscribing to its endowment, and then it will be quietly shelved. I doubt that anyone in Tennessee wants it—that is, anyone who has any notion what a university is.

The yokels of the hills may be bemused by it, as they are bemused by the scheme to put God into the Constitution. But the rest of the Tennesseeans are eager only to shove Fundamentalism into a cellar, and to get rid of the disgrace that it has brought upon the State.

They will tackle it with more vigor than last time when it next takes to the warpath. They have learned a lesson. Already, indeed, they make plans for the repeal of the anti-evolution law—a long business, but certainly not hopeless. It was supported by the politicians of the State simply because those in favor of it were noisy and determined, and those against it were too proud to fight. These politicians will begin to wobble the moment it becomes clear that there are two sides engaged, and they will desert Genesis at the first sign that the enemy has artillery, and is eager to use it. They are, like politicians everywhere, men without conscience. One of the chief of them began life as a legislative agent for the brewers. When Prohibition came in he became a violent Prohibitionist.

Their brethren elsewhere in the South are of the same sort; it is hard to find, in that whole region, a politician who is an honest man. the news from Georgia shows
which way the wind is blowing. If it had seemed to them that Fundamentalism was prospering, the Georgia legislators would have rammed through the anti-evolution bill with a whoop. But the whisper reached them that there were breakers ahead, and so they hesitated, and the measure was lost. Those breakers were thrown up by a few determined men, notably the Julian Harris aforesaid, son of Joel Chandler Harris.
^*
What he accomplished in Georgia, almost single-handedly, will not be lost upon the civilized minorities of the other Southern States. Imbecility has raged down there simply because no one has challenged it. Challenged, it will have hard going, there as elsewhere.

With Bryan alive and on the warpath, inflaming the morons and spreading his eloquent nonsense, the battle would have been ten times harder. But Bryan was unique, and can have no successor. His baleful rhetoric died with him; in fact, it died a week before his corporeal frame. In a very true sense Darrow killed him. When he emerged from that incredible cross-examination, all that was most dangerous in his old following deserted him. It was no longer possible for a man of any intelligence to view him as anything save a pathetic has-been.

From
The Baltimore Evening Sun
, September 14, 1925

The Liberals, in their continuing discussion of the late trial of the infidel Scopes at Dayton, Tenn., run true to form. That is to say, they show all their habitual lack of humor and all their customary furtive weakness for the delusions of
Homo neanderthalensis
. I point to two of their most enlightened organs: the eminent
New York World
and the gifted
New Republic
. The
World
is displeased with Mr. Darrow because, in his appalling cross-examination of the mountebank Bryan, he did some violence to the theological superstitions that millions of Americans cherish. The
New Republic
denounces him because he addressed himself, not to “the people of Tennessee” but to the whole country, and because he should have permitted “local lawyers” to assume “the most conspicuous position in the trial.”

Once more, alas, I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the
World's
contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge. Did Darrow, in the course of his dreadful bombardment of Bryan, drop a few shells, incidentally, into measurably cleaner camps? Then let the garrisons of those camps look to their defenses. They are free to shoot back. But they can't disarm their enemy.

The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us.

I do not know how many Americans entertain the ideas defended so ineptly by poor Bryan, but probably the number is very large. They are preached once a week in at least a hundred thousand rural churches, and they are heard too in the meaner quarters of the great cities. Nevertheless, though they are thus held to be sound by millions, these ideas remain mere rubbish. Not only are they not supported by the known facts; they are in direct contravention of the known facts. No man whose information is sound and whose mind functions normally can conceivably credit them. They are the products of ignorance and stupidity, either or both.

What should be a civilized man's attitude toward such superstitions? It seems to me that the only attitude possible to him is one of contempt. If he admits that they have any intellectual dignity whatever, he admits that he himself has none. If he pretends to a respect for those who believe in them, he pretends falsely, and sinks almost to their level. When he is challenged he must answer honestly, regardless of tender feelings. That is what Darrow did at Dayton, and the issue plainly justified the act. Bryan went there in a hero's shining armor, bent deliberately upon a gross crime against sense. He came out a wrecked and preposterous charlatan, his tail between his legs. Few Americans have ever done so much for their country in a whole lifetime as Darrow did in two hours.

The caveat of the
New Republic
is so absurd that it scarcely deserves an answer. It is based upon a complete misunderstanding of the situation that the Scopes trial revealed. What good would it have done to have addressed an appeal to the people of Tennessee? They had already, by their lawful representatives, adopted the anti-evolution statute by an immense majority, and they were plainly determined to uphold it. The newspapers of the State,
with one or two exceptions, were violently in favor of the prosecution, and applauded every effort of the rustic judge and district attorney to deprive the defense of its most elemental rights.

True enough, there was a minority of Tennesseeans on the other side—men and women who felt keenly the disgrace of their State, and were eager to put an end to it. But their time had passed; they had missed their chance. They should have stepped forward at the very beginning, long before Darrow got into the case. Instead, they hung back timorously, and so Bryan and the Baptist pastors ran amok. There was a brilliant exception: John R. Neal. There was another: T.R. Elwell. Both lawyers. But the rest of the lawyers of the State, when the issue was joined at last, actually helped the prosecution. Their bar associations kept up a continuous fusillade. They tried their best to prod the backwoods Dogberry, Raulston, into putting Darrow into jail.