Clarence Darrow (after objecting to the prayer at the opening of the court) “thunders” his first speech (transcript) of the Scopes Monkey Trial, an argument to quash the indictment. Like pretty much all the big moments that will come in this trial, the jury isn’t present. “This is as brazen and bold an attempt to destroy liberty as was ever seen in the Middle Ages,” he says of the Butler Act, “Of all the strange, weird, impossible and medieval things, of all the combinations of bigotry and ignorance brought together to make this statute, I can’t conceive of anything greater.” “Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always they are feeding and gloating for more. Today, it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.” Darrow is on a roll.
H. L. Mencken, writing in The Baltimore Evening Sun, says Darrow’s speech “was not designed for reading, but for hearing. The clanging of it was as important as the logic. It rose like a wind and ended like a flourish of bugles.” Still, Mencken says, Bryan has the local people behind him: “These are his people. They understand him when he speaks in tongues.” Mencken is on a roll.
Standard Oil of New Jersey adopts an 8-hour day on its oil fields, down from 12, evidently John D. Rockefeller’s initiative. They will be paid something like 20% less for the shorter day’s work.
This trial seems such a portent of our current political state. Read "Trump" for "Bryan" and you get this: "The fellow is full of such bitter, implacable hatreds that they radiate from him like heat from a stove. He hates the learning that he cannot grasp. He hates those who sneer at him. He hates, in general, all who stand apart from his own pathetic commonness. And the yokels hate with him, some of them almost as bitterly as he does himself. They are willing and eager to follow him -- and he has already given them a taste of blood."
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