The Scopes trial was supposed to resume today with a continuation of Clarence Darrow’s questioning of William Jennings Bryan, but Judge Raulston announces that it won’t and that Bryan’s testimony will be stricken from the record because it “can shed no light on any issues that will be pending before the higher courts.” Darrow admits that he’s not sure Bryan’s testimony would help the state Supreme Court “or any other human being,” but says he wasn’t done. Now Bryan won’t be able to get his heart’s desire to put Darrow on the stand to expose his “religious attitude” (or maybe Attorney General Tom Stewart vetoed the silly idea).
With that, Darrow says screw it and asks for a directed verdict of guilty. The jury duly convicts and Scopes is fined $100. Which he will never pay.
Bryan’s been working on his closing speech for 3 months, and now won’t be able to give it.
Outside the court, Bryan sends Darrow the questions he wanted to ask him on the stand, related to Jesus’s divinity, the immortality of the soul, etc. Darrow mostly responds with longer versions of “Dunno, I’m an agnostic, dude.” Bryan says the Scopes trial has proved that the Bible is true. Um, sure. He says the issue of whether the Bible is true “dwarfs all other issues now under consideration by the people of the United States and of the world.” Christians, he says, “are at last awakened to the insidious attacks which have been made, under cover of scientific hypothesis, upon the authority of the Bible by unbelievers of every grade and class. The attack upon the authority of the Bible is organized, deliberate and malignant, and had only to be uncovered to be understood.” Bryan calls Darrow “the finished product of evolution... he embodies all that is cruel, heartless and destructive in evolution. He is our Exhibit A.”
Darrow, referring to Bryan’s statement as “rabies,” responds that Bryan is not a product of evolution, but a reversion to type.
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