Lone Star College The Rural Urban Divide Discussion Please read the passages at the attached file and answer the following questions in your own words. You

Lone Star College The Rural Urban Divide Discussion Please read the passages at the attached file and answer the following questions in your own words. Your answer to each question should be 3-5 sentences in length.

1. How did Mencken characterize the town of Dayton, TN?

2. How did Mencken characterize the people who lived in Dayton?

3. How does Mencken characterize Darrow’s performance?

4. According to Mencken, who won the trial? Why did that person win?

5. How would you characterize Clarence Darrow’s examination of William Jennings Bryan? Was Darrow’s examination effective?

6. How would you characterize Bryan’s responses to Darrow’s questions? Were Bryan’s responses effective?

7. Who do you think won the exchange between Darrow and Bryan? Why?

8. The Scopes Monkey Trial illustrates a division that existed between rural and urban Americans in the 1920s. Rural Americans tended to have more faith in revealed religious truth, and urban Americans tended to have more faith in scientific understanding. What is an issue you think divides rural and urban Americans today? Digital History
Printable Version
Journalist H.L. Mencken’s Account of the Scopes Trial
Digital History ID 1077
Author: H. L. Mencken
Date:1925
Annotation: Widely known for his attacks on America’s Puritan tradition and its booboisie, H.L. Mencken was
perhaps the most influential American journalist of the first half of the twentieth century and an ardent
champion of such American writers as Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Mark Twain.
His coverage of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial ridiculed defense attorney William Jennings Bryan for his
“peculiar imbecilities” and “theologic bilge.”
Document: July 9 On the eve of the great contest Dayton is full of sickening surges and tremors of doubt. Five
or six weeks ago, when the infidel Scopes was first laid by the heels, there was no uncertainty in all this smiling
valley. The town boomers leaped to the assault as one man. Here was an unexampled, almost a miraculous
chance to get Dayton upon the front pages, to make it talked about, to put it upon the map. But how now?
Today, with the curtain barely rung up and the worst buffooneries to come, it is obvious to even town boomers
that getting upon the map, like patriotism, is not enough. The getting there must be managed discreetly,
adroitly, with careful regard to psychological niceties. The boomers of Dayton, alas, had no skill at such things,
and the experts they called in were all quacks. The result now turns the communal liver to water. Two months
ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke.
I have been attending the permanent town meeting that goes on in Robinson’s drug store, trying to find out
what the town optimists have saved from the wreck. All I can find is a sort of mystical confidence that God will
somehow come to the rescue to reward His old and faithful partisans as they deserve–that good will flow
eventually out of what now seems to be heavily evil. More specifically, it is believed that settlers will be
attracted to the town as to some refuge from the atheism of the great urban Sodoms and Gomorrah.
But will these refugees bring any money with them? Will they buy lots and build houses? Will they light the fires
of the cold and silent blast furnace down the railroad tracks? On these points, I regret to report, optimism has
to call in theology to aid it. Prayer can accomplish a lot. It can cure diabetes, find lost pocketbooks and retain
husbands from beating their wives. But is prayer made any more officious by giving a circus first? Coming to
this thought, Dayton begins to sweat.
The town, I confess, greatly surprised me. I expected to find a squalid Southern village, with darkies snoozing
on the horse blocks, pigs rooting under the houses and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I
found was a country town of charm and even beauty….
July 10 (the first day) The town boomers have banqueted Darrow as well as Bryan, but there is no mistaking
which of the two has the crowd, which means the venire of tried and true men. Bryan has been oozing around
the country since his first day here, addressing this organization and that, presenting the indubitable Word of
God in his caressing, ingratiating way, and so making unanimity doubly unanimous. From the defense
yesterday came hints that he was making hay before the sun had legally begun to shine–even that it was a
sort of contempt of court. But no Daytonian believes anything of the sort. What Bryan says doesn’t seem to
these congenial Baptists and Methodists to be argument; it seems to be a mere graceful statement to the
obvious….
July 11 The selection of a jury to try Scopes, which went on all yesterday afternoon in the atmosphere of a blast
furnace, showed to what extreme lengths the salvation of the local primates has been pushed. It was obvious
after a few rounds that the jury would be unanimously hot for Genesis. The most that Mr. Darrow could hope
for was to sneak in a few bold enough to declare publicly that they would have to hear the evidence against
Scopes before condemning him. The slightest sign of anything further brought forth a peremptory challenge
from the State. Once a man was challenged without examination for simply admitting that he did not belong
formally to any church. Another time a panel man who confessed that he was prejudiced against evolution got a
hearty round of applause from the crowd….
In brief this is a strictly Christian community, and such is its notion of fairness, justice and due process of law.
Try to picture a town made up wholly of Dr. Crabbes and Dr. Kellys, and you will have a reasonably accurate
image of it. Its people are simply unable to imagine a man who rejects the literal authority of the Bible. The
most they can conjure up, straining until they are red in the face, is a man who is in error about the meaning of
this or that text. Thus one accused of heresy among them is like one accused of boiling his grandmother to
make soap in Maryland….
July 13 (the second day) It would be hard to imagine a more moral town than Dayton. If it has any bootleggers,
no visitor has heard of them. Ten minutes after I arrived a leading citizen offered me a drink made up half of
white mule and half of coca cola, but he seems to have been simply indulging himself in a naughty gesture. No
fancy woman has been seen in the town since the end of the McKinley administration. There is no gambling.
There is no place to dance. The relatively wicked, when they would indulge themselves, go to Robinson’s drug
store and debate theology….
July 14 (the third day) The net effect of Clarence Darrow’s great speech yesterday seems to be preciously the
same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan. That is, locally, upon the process
against the infidel Scopes, upon the so-called minds of these fundamentalists of upland Tennessee. You have
but a dim notice of it who have only read it. It was not designed for reading, but for hearing. The clangtint of it
was as important as the logic. It rose like a wind and ended like a flourish of bugles. The very judge on the
bench, toward the end of it, began to look uneasy. But the morons in the audience, when it was over, simply
hissed it. During the whole time of its delivery the old mountebank, Bryan, sat tight-lipped and unmoved. There
is, of course, no reason why it should have shaken him. He has these hillbillies locked up in his pen and he
knows it. His brand is on them. He is at home among them. Since his earliest days, indeed, his chief strength
has been among the folk of remote hills and forlorn and lonely farms. Now with his political aspirations all gone
to pot, he turns to them for religious consolations. They understand his peculiar imbecilities. His nonsense is
their ideal of sense. When he deluges them with his theologic bilge they rejoice like pilgrims disporting in the
river Jordan….
July 15 (the fourth day) A preacher of any sect that admit the literal authenticity of Genesis is free to gather a
crowd at any time and talk all he wants. More, he may engage in a disputation with any expert. I have heard at
least a hundred such discussions, and some of them have been very acrimonious. But the instant a speaker
utters a word against divine revelation he begin to disturb the peace and is liable to immediate arrest and
confinement in the calaboose beside the railroad tracks…
July 16 (the fifth day) In view of the fact that everyone here looks for the jury to bring in a verdict of guilty, it
might be expected that the prosecution would show a considerable amiability and allow the defense a rather
free play. Instead, it is contesting every point very vigorously and taking every advantage of its greatly superior
familiarity with local procedure. There is, in fact, a considerable heat in the trial. Bryan and the local lawyers for
the State sit glaring at the defense all day and even the Attorney-General, A. T. Stewart, who is supposed to
have secret doubts about fundamentalism, has shown such pugnacity that it has already brought him to forced
apologies.
The high point of yesterday’s proceedings was reached with the appearance of Dr. Maynard M. Metcalf of the
John Hopkins. The doctor is a somewhat chubby man of bland mien, and during the first part of his testimony,
with the jury present, the prosecution apparently viewed his with great equanimity. But the instant he was
asked a question bearing directly upon the case at bar there was a flurry in the Bryan pen and Stewart was on
his feet with protests. Another question followed, with more and hotter protests. The judge then excluded the
jury and the show began.
What ensued was, on the surface, a harmless enough dialogue between Dr. Metcalf and Darrow, but
underneath there was tense drama. At the first question Bryan came out from behind the State’s table and
planted himself directly in front of Dr. Metcalf, and not ten feet away. The two McKenzies followed, with young
Sue Hicks at their heels.
Then began one of the clearest, most succinct and withal most eloquent presentations of the case for the
evolutionists that I have ever heard. The doctor was never at a loss for a word, and his ideas flowed freely and
smoothly. Darrow steered him magnificently. A word or two and he was howling down the wind. Another and he
hauled up to discharge a broadside. There was no cocksureness in him. Instead he was rather cautious and
deprecatory and sometimes he halted and confessed his ignorance. But what he got over before he finished was
a superb counterblast to the fundamentalist buncombe. The jury, at least, in theory heard nothing of it, but it
went whooping into the radio and it went banging into the face of Bryan….
This old buzzard, having failed to raise the mob against its rulers, now prepares to raise it against its teachers.
He can never be the peasants’ President, but there is still a chance to be the peasants’ Pope. He leads a new
crusade, his bald head glistening, his face streaming with sweat, his chest heaving beneath his rumpled alpaca
coat. One somehow pities him, despite his so palpable imbecilities. It is a tragedy, indeed, to begin life as a
hero and to end it as a buffoon. But let no one, laughing at him, underestimate the magic that lies in his black,
malignant eye, his frayed but still eloquent voice. He can shake and inflame these poor ignoramuses as no
other man among us can shake and inflame them, and he is desperately eager to order the charge.
In Tennessee he is drilling his army. The big battles, he believes, will be fought elsewhere.
July 17 (the sixth day) Malone was in good voice. It was a great day for Ireland. And for the defense. For
Malone not only out-yelled Bryan, he also plainly out-generaled and out-argued him. His speech, indeed, was
one of the best presentations of the case against the fundamentalist rubbish that I have ever heard.
It was simple in structure, it was clear in reasoning, and at its high points it was overwhelmingly eloquent. It
was not long, but it covered the whole ground and it let off many a gaudy skyrocket, and so it conquered even
the fundamentalist. At its end they gave it a tremendous cheer–a cheer at least four times as hearty as that
given to Bryan. For these rustics delight in speechifying, and know when it is good. The devil’s logic cannot
fetch them, but they are not above taking a voluptuous pleasure in his lascivious phrases..
July 18 All that remains of the great cause of the State of Tennessee against the infidel Scopes is the formal
business of bumping off the defendant. There may be some legal jousting on Monday and some gaudy oratory
on Tuesday, but the main battle is over, with Genesis completely triumphant. Judge Raulston finished the
benign business yesterday morning by leaping with soft judicial hosannas into the arms of the prosecution. The
sole commentary of the sardonic Darrow consisted of bringing down a metaphorical custard pie upon the
occiput of the learned jurist.
“I hope,” said the latter nervously, “that counsel intends no reflection upon this court.”
Darrow hunched his shoulders and looked out of the window dreamily. “Your honor,” he said, “is, of course,
entitled to hope.”… The Scopes trial, from the start, has been carried on in a manner exactly fitted to the antievolution law and the simian imbecility under it. There hasn’t been the slightest pretense to decorum. The rustic
judge, a candidate for re-election, has postured the yokels like a clown in a ten-cent side show, and almost
every word he has uttered has been an undisguised appeal to their prejudices and superstitions. The chief
prosecuting attorney, beginning like a competent lawyer and a man of self-respect, ended like a convert at a
Billy Sunday revival. It fell to him, finally, to make a clear and astounding statement of theory of justice
prevailing under fundamentalism. What he said, in brief, was that a man accused of infidelity had no rights
whatever under Tennessee law…
Darrow has lost this case. It was lost long before he came to Dayton. But it seems to me that he has
nevertheless performed a great public service by fighting it to a finish and in a perfectly serious way. Let no one
mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that
Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid
of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp
meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law. There are other States that had
better look to their arsenals before the Hun is at their gates.
Source: Baltimore Evening Sun
Copyright 2019 Digital History
Digital History
Printable Version
The Scopes Trial: Examination of William Jennings Bryan by Clarence Darrow
Digital History ID 1160
Date:1925
Annotation: Today, William Jennings Bryan is best known from the play and film Inherit the Wind, which
depicted Bryan as a pompous windbag, a stammering and credulous believer in the literal accuracy of ever word
of the Bible. This portrayal makes it difficult for present-day Americans to understand that Bryan was
instrumental in transforming the Democratic party into a force for social reform and a leading proponent of such
innovations as a progressive income tax, direct election of Senators, and women’s suffrage.
He opposed Darwin’s theories not because he was opposed to science, but because he believed that Social
Darwinism—the attempt to apply Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest to
society—was misused to justify imperialism and class privilege.
Document: Q–You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven’t you, Mr. Bryan?
A–Yes, sir, I have tried to.
Q–Then you have made a general study of it?
A–Yes, I have; I have studied the Bible for about fifty years, or sometime more than that, but, of course, I
have studied it more as I have become older than when I was but a boy.
Q–You claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?
A–I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there: some of the Bible is given
illustratively. For instance: “Ye are the salt of the earth.” I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that
he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God’s people.
Q–But when you read that Jonah swallowed the whale–or that the whale swallowed Jonah– excuse me please-how do you literally interpret that?
A–When I read that a big fish swallowed Jonah–it does not say whale….That is my recollection of it. A big fish,
and I believe it, and I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make both what He
pleases.
Q–Now, you say, the big fish swallowed Jonah, and he there remained how long–three days– and then he
spewed him upon the land. You believe that the big fish was made to swallow Jonah?
A–I am not prepared to say that; the Bible merely says it was done.
Q–You don’t know whether it was the ordinary run of fish, or made for that purpose?
A–You may guess; you evolutionists guess…..
Q–You are not prepared to say whether that fish was made especially to swallow a man or not?
A–The Bible doesn’t say, so I am not prepared to say.
Q–But do you believe He made them–that He made such a fish and that it was big enough to swallow Jonah?
A–Yes, sir. Let me add: One miracle is just as easy to believe as another
Q–Just as hard?
A–It is hard to believe for you, but easy for me. A miracle is a thing performed beyond what man can perform.
When you get within the realm of miracles; and it is just as easy to believe the miracle of Jonah as any other
miracle in the Bible.
Q–Perfectly easy to believe that Jonah swallowed the whale?
A–If the Bible said so; the Bible doesn’t make as extreme statements as evolutionists do….
Q–The Bible says Joshua commanded the sun to stand still for the purpose of lengthening the day, doesn’t it,
and you believe it?
A–I do.
Q–Do you believe at that time the entire sun went around the earth?
A–No, I believe that the earth goes around the sun.
Q–Do you believe that the men who wrote it thought that the day could be lengthened or that the sun could be
stopped?
A–I don’t know what they thought.
Q–You don’t know?
A–I think they wrote the fact without expressing their own thoughts.
Q–Have you an opinion as to whether or not the men who wrote that thought Gen. Stewart–I want to object,
your honor; it has gone beyond the pale of any issue that could possibly be injected into this lawsuit, expect by
imagination. I do not think the defendant has a right to conduct the examination any further and I ask your
honor to exclude it.
The Witness–It seems to me it would be too exacting to confine the defense to the facts; if they are not
allowed to get away from the facts, what have they to deal with?
The Court–Mr. Bryan is willing to be examined. Go ahead.
Mr. Darrow–I read that years ago. Can you answer my question directly? If the day was lengthened by
stopping either the earth or the sun, it must have been the earth?
A–Well, I should say so.
Q– Now, Mr. Bryan, have you ever pondered what would have happened to the earth if it had stood still?
A–No.
Q–You have not?
A– No; the God I believe in could have taken care of that, Mr. Darrow.
Q– I see. Have you ever pondered what would naturally happen to the earth if it stood still suddenly?
A– No.
Q–Don’t you know it would have been converted into molten mass of matter?
A–You testify to that when you get on the stand, I will give you a chance.
Q–Don’t you believe it?
A–I would want to hear expert testimony on that.
Q–You have never investigated that subject?
A–I don’t think I have ever had the question asked.
Q–Or ever thought of it?
A–I have been too busy on thinks that I thought were of more importance than that.
Q–You believe the story of the flood to be a literal interpretation?
A–Yes, sir.
Q–When was that Flood?
A–I would not attempt to fix the date. The date is fixed, as suggested this morning.
Q–About 4004 B.C.?
A–That has been the estimate of a man that is accepted today. I would not say it is accurate.
Q–That estimate is printed in the Bible?
A–Everybody knows, at least, I think most of the people know, that was the estimate given.
Q–But what do you think that the Bible, itself says? Don’t you know how it was arrived at?
A–I never made a calculation.
Q–A calculation from what?
A–I could not say.
Q–From the generations of man?
A–I would not want to say that.
Q–What do you think?
A–I do not think about things I don’t think about.
Q–Do you think about things you do think about?
A–Well, sometimes. (Laughter in the courtyard.)
Policeman–Let us have order….
Stewart–Your honor, he is perfectly able to take care of this, but we are attaining no evidence. This is not
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