make the money that lecturers and Florida real estate agents command, in case you should need us, we are willing, without fees or expenses, to help the defense of Professor Scopes in any way.” Neal quickly accepted the offer.12
BRYAN WAS SURE he could defeat the man he liked to call the nation’s foremost atheist. Darrow “is an outspoken believer in evolution and has the courage to carry the logic of evolution to its legitimate course,” Bryan wrote a Tennessee associate. “He will furnish us with abundant material.” The faint hearts at the ACLU tended to agree. Scopes had accepted Neal, Darrow, and Malone “before we got our grip on the case and without any consultation,” griped the ACLU’s Forrest Bailey, in a letter marked “Confidential” to journalist Walter Lippmann. “We did the very best we could to undo it.” In the holy chuch of liberalism, Darrow and Malone were irreverent “fakes,” Mencken explained to a friend. “Darrow is hated by all Liberals as a renegade. Malone is simply an Irishman who likes a fight.”
Reporters were pulled aside and reminded of Darrow’s faults. “The report that Mr. Darrow is an atheist … has led to grave shaking of heads,” wrote Philip Kinsley in the Tribune. “The spectacle of Mr. Darrow being questioned by Mr. Bryan before a jury of Tennessee hill men, almost certain to be old fashioned religionists, is not pleasant.” That seemed a silly thought—when did lawyers put each other on the stand? But Darrow felt the need to tell the press: “I am not an atheist. When it comes to the question of knowing whether there is a God, I am ignorant.”
The decision was left to Scopes. The “yokel”—as Mencken called him—showed his mettle at an ACLU parley in New York. “The arguments against Darrow were various: that he was too radical, that he was a headline hunter,” Scopes recalled. Nevertheless, “I wanted Clarence Darrow.” The thing was a circus already. Bryan’s entry had guaranteed that. “We should expect a gouging, roughhouse battle … a real gutter fight,” said Scopes. “Darrow had been in many such situations.” And so Hughes and Wells remained on the sidelines and Colby—aghast at the signs of hellzapoppin’—withdrew on the eve of the trial.
“There shortly will descend upon Dayton, Tenn., the greatest aggregation of assorted cranks, including agnostics, atheists, communists, syndicalists and new-dawners, ever known in a single procession,” the New York Post reported. “Greenwich Village is on its way … Men of science are being smothered in the rush of long-haired men and short-haired women, feminists, neurotics, free thinkers and free lovers … The vital issues on trial in Tennessee are being lost in the stampede of professional martyrs and a swarm of practicing egoists.”
The best that the ACLU could do was add Hays, its counsel, to the defense team. It proved to be a fortuitous choice. Hays was bright and combative. He and Darrow had complementary talents, became lasting friends, and would join in the defense of civil rights and liberties in several notable cases to come. Before he left New York, Scopes was feted at a City Club dinner, where Manhattan’s liberals gathered to raise money. Mary went as Darrow’s escort and sent Sara a description of Darrow’s speech. “His position is that only those men, and women, who bring light to man’s darkness are important: the great men of science—Darwin, Pasteur, Pavlov—men of knowledge who dispel superstition, fanaticism, disease, cruelty, who make the human race more intelligent,” she wrote. The cause of labor, which he had upheld so long, left men as it found them, “jungle creatures fighting for a bone more, a breathing spell more—but not the least bit more intelligent about their bondage, as addicted to their religions and fetishes, their political and social myths, as ever.” At the end of the night Darrow gave her “a little silver—not enough—for taxi fare,” she noted caustically. But she was back for breakfast the next day, and a ride along the Hudson. And Darrow promised to “skin the pants off old Bryan.”13
THE MONKEY TRIAL now became the talk of the English-speaking world. Dayton was swept and dusted, and hung with billboards and bunting. (“Read Your Bible” said a sign on the courthouse—no good omen for the defense.) The streets were jammed with flivvers; the sidewalks with gawkers and grifters. Traveling tent shows came to town. Chimpanzees did tricks, and hucksters sold lemonade, an infinite variety of monkey souvenirs—and redemption.
“The sweetheart love of Jesus Christ and Paradise Street is at