Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties Part 7

Like the poet Langston Hughes, who found inspiration in Harlem street slang and the strains of popular music, Mencken celebrated the vitality of modern American culture. "Nothing could exceed the brilliancy of such inventions as joy-ride, highbrow, road-louse, sob-sister, frame-up, loan-shark, nature-faker, stand-patter, lounge-lizard, has-foundry, buzzwagon, has-been, end-seat-hog, shoot-the-chutes, and grape juice diplomacy," he wrote admiringly of his countrymen's newly invented words in The American Language The American Language in 1919. "They are bold; they are vivid; they have humor; they meet genuine needs." in 1919. "They are bold; they are vivid; they have humor; they meet genuine needs."

Despite this embarra.s.sment of literary riches, there was still room, according to Howard Ross, a straight-talking young editor and regular at the Round Table, for one more publication. Ross had been dreaming of editing his own magazine since returning from military service in Europe where he had run the U.S. army's newspaper, Stars and Stripes Stars and Stripes.

Born in Aspen, Colorado, in 1892, Harold Ross had started his first job on a newspaper at fourteen years old as a stringer for the Salt Lake City Tribune Salt Lake City Tribune. Over the next nine years he wrote and edited for seven different papers before leaving for France in 1917.

Ross met his future wife, the journalist Jane Grant, in Paris during the winter of 1918-19. Grant took one look at him and "decided he was really the homeliest man I'd ever met-he'd have have to be good with that face and figure." Ross's fidgety ungainliness did nothing to soften the impression of his huge hands and feet, widely s.p.a.ced teeth, big mouth and thick b.u.t.ternut-colored hair in a "high, stiff pompadour, like some wild gamec.o.c.k's crest" but he was engaging and modest and there was immense charm in his awkwardness. "He was always in mid-flight, or on the edge of his chair, alighting or about to take off." to be good with that face and figure." Ross's fidgety ungainliness did nothing to soften the impression of his huge hands and feet, widely s.p.a.ced teeth, big mouth and thick b.u.t.ternut-colored hair in a "high, stiff pompadour, like some wild gamec.o.c.k's crest" but he was engaging and modest and there was immense charm in his awkwardness. "He was always in mid-flight, or on the edge of his chair, alighting or about to take off."

Years later James Thurber described Ross's fuming over news that Thurber had been imitating him, to the delight of their friends. "'I don't know what the h.e.l.l there is to imitate-go ahead and show me,'" Ross snarled at Thurber. "All the time his face was undergoing its familiar changes of expression and his fingers were flying. His flexible voice ran from a low register of growl to an upper register of what I can only call Western quacking. It was an instrument that could give special quality to such Rossisms as 'Done and Done!' and 'You have me there!' and 'Get it on paper!'"

Janet Flanner, a friend of Grant who worked for Ross for over a decade, found him "a strange, fascinating character, sympathetic, lovable, often explosively funny, and a good talker who was the most blasphemous good talker on record." His swearing was constant, unconscious and entirely chaste. Ross's "G.o.ddam" and "Geezus" were simply interjections-they had nothing to do with any deity. Thurber said Ross was virtually unable "to talk without a continuous flow of profanity . . . it formed the skeleton of his speech, the very foundation of his manner and matter, and to cut it out would leave him unrecognizable to his intimates, or even to those who knew him casually."

Ross's sense of morality was as innocent as his swearing. Flanner remembered him discussing a couple having an affair: "I'm sure he's s-l-e-e-p-i-n-g with her." He was, she said, "the only man I've ever known who spelt out euphemisms in front of adults."

Their post-war gang in Paris included Alec Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Ring Lardner and Franklin Pierce Adams. When they returned to New York the collective friendship flourished against a new backdrop-the smoky back room of the Algonquin Hotel.

Ross and Grant married in 1920 and three years later moved into two large converted tenements on West 47th Street in the virtual slum of h.e.l.l's Kitchen. Their huge, elegant house, run by Chinese houseboys, was always open for an after-hours drink or a game of poker-complete with the added thrill of the possibility of being robbed while arriving or leaving. Guests included everyone from the outspoken nightclub hostess Tex Guinan to the boxer (and wannabe intellectual) Gene Tunney. They had two tenants, also Round Tablers, Hawley Truax and the temperamental Alec Woollcott whom Ross described receiving visitors "like a fat d.u.c.h.ess holding out her dirty rings to be kissed."

Woollcott was the frequent victim of his friends' mockery. "He was not so much a mere partic.i.p.ant in his own daily life as he was the Grand Marshal of a perpetual pageant, pompous in demeanor, riding a high horse, wearing the medals of his own peculiar punctilio and perfectionism," wrote James Thurber. "His men friends loved to put banana peels in his portentous path to bring him down, high horse and all, while his women friends, whom he could slay in the subject of a sentence and eulogize in the predicate, loved to catch him before he could fall, or to pick up his outraged bulk." Wolcott Gibbs, later writer and copy editor at the New Yorker New Yorker, thought his friends tolerated Woollcott's "insults because he also called them, or most of them, geniuses."

In the early 1920s Ross edited The Home Sector The Home Sector, a magazine devoted to veterans' issues, and, for a miserable few months in 1924, he worked at the humorous magazine Judge Judge. From the time he had arrived back from France he had dreamt of creating and editing his own magazine, and he and Grant had been saving money to fund it since their marriage. "He carried a dummy of the magazine for two years, everywhere," said his friend George Kaufman, "and I'm afraid he was rather a bore with it."

Ross's vision, as laid out in the mission statement he produced in the autumn of 1924, was a reflection of the considerations which governed his own and his friends' and a.s.sociates' att.i.tudes to life and work. The tone of his magazine, he said, would be marked by "gaiety, wit and satire" and though it would not be highbrow it would be sophisticated. "It would hate bunk." It would be au fait au fait with current events but "interpretative rather than stenographic" in its att.i.tude to them, and would deal neither in "scandal nor sensation." "It hopes to be so entertaining and informative as to be a necessity for the person who knows his way about or wants to." Ill.u.s.trations would be a distinguishing characteristic and it would carry "prose and verse, short and long, humorous, satirical and miscellaneous." with current events but "interpretative rather than stenographic" in its att.i.tude to them, and would deal neither in "scandal nor sensation." "It hopes to be so entertaining and informative as to be a necessity for the person who knows his way about or wants to." Ill.u.s.trations would be a distinguishing characteristic and it would carry "prose and verse, short and long, humorous, satirical and miscellaneous."

Ross intended his magazine's selling point to be avowedly directed at "a metropolitan audience." With no disrespect intended, he said, he was not concerned with the tastes of the "old lady in Dubuque" whom editors of national magazines had to consider. New York residents hoping to decide what to do in the evening would find news of the latest supper clubs and cabarets; local incidents and personalities would be reported upon in a pastiche of "the small-town newspaper style" with which Ross had grown up.

The prospectus was compelling, but in person Ross was less prepossessing. At the Round Table he was a listener rather than a performer, better at parry than thrust in repartee. His wit never sparkled like Dorothy Parker's or Alec Woollcott's. Although several of his friends agreed to allow Ross to use their names on his editorial board, they thought his ambitions ridiculous. As George Kaufman observed, Ross was "completely miscast as an editor" and none of their friends thought he had a chance of getting his magazine into print. "How the h.e.l.l could a man who looked like a resident of the Ozarks and talked like a saloon brawler set himself up as pilot of a sophisticated, elegant periodical?" asked the playwright Ben Hecht.

Ross's first stroke of luck came in the person of Raoul Fleishmann. Fleishmann, who preferred the Round Table (and its regular poker game) to the bakeries in which his family had made their millions, agreed in 1924 to invest $25,000 in Ross's idea, more than matching Ross and Grant's own savings of $20,000. Another Round Table habitue, a Broadway press agent called John Toohey, provided Ross's idea with a name-the New Yorker- New Yorker-and was amused to be given shares in the magazine as thanks. He did not antic.i.p.ate that they would ever translate into anything tangible.

The first issue of the New Yorker New Yorker came out on 17 February 1925. Despite art director Rea Irvin's characteristic typesetting (still used today) and his cover ill.u.s.tration of a dandy examining a b.u.t.terfly through a monocle, which straight away conveyed the sophisticated, self-reflective feel for which Ross was striving, the articles were labored and the editing jumbled. The wit was immature; jokes were printed with the punch-lines first; pieces were featured in more than one issue; typos abounded. "So I went to Florida for a rest," read one supposedly humorous comment on the Florida housing boom in April 1925. "Of course I left all my money there in real estate, and had to return by boat." came out on 17 February 1925. Despite art director Rea Irvin's characteristic typesetting (still used today) and his cover ill.u.s.tration of a dandy examining a b.u.t.terfly through a monocle, which straight away conveyed the sophisticated, self-reflective feel for which Ross was striving, the articles were labored and the editing jumbled. The wit was immature; jokes were printed with the punch-lines first; pieces were featured in more than one issue; typos abounded. "So I went to Florida for a rest," read one supposedly humorous comment on the Florida housing boom in April 1925. "Of course I left all my money there in real estate, and had to return by boat."

Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair Vanity Fair, went through the first edition in his office with one of his writers. He was all too aware that as several of his contributors were friends of Ross's the New Yorker New Yorker might become a rival. "Well, Margaret," he said to his colleague as they finished, "I think we have nothing to fear." Ross needed to learn, commented Niven Busch (who later became a might become a rival. "Well, Margaret," he said to his colleague as they finished, "I think we have nothing to fear." Ross needed to learn, commented Niven Busch (who later became a New Yorker New Yorker writer), "that there is no provincialism so blatant as that of the metropolitan who lacks urbanity." writer), "that there is no provincialism so blatant as that of the metropolitan who lacks urbanity."

The New Yorker New Yorker was "the outstanding flop of 1925." Advertisers failed to materialize. Circulation dipped below 3,000. In early May, Ross, Fleishmann, Hawley Truax (Ross's tenant and a director of the magazine) and the professional publisher John Hanrahan met at the Princeton Club and decided to cut their losses. The initial investment of $45,000 had gone and Fleishmann was owed another $65,000. It was costing between $5,000 and $8,000 a week to keep the magazine afloat. As they walked away from the meeting, Fleishmann overheard Hanrahan say, "I can't blame Ross for calling it off, but it surely is like killing something that's alive." Hanrahan's words struck Fleishmann deeply, and when he saw Ross later that afternoon he told him that he was willing to try and raise outside capital to help the was "the outstanding flop of 1925." Advertisers failed to materialize. Circulation dipped below 3,000. In early May, Ross, Fleishmann, Hawley Truax (Ross's tenant and a director of the magazine) and the professional publisher John Hanrahan met at the Princeton Club and decided to cut their losses. The initial investment of $45,000 had gone and Fleishmann was owed another $65,000. It was costing between $5,000 and $8,000 a week to keep the magazine afloat. As they walked away from the meeting, Fleishmann overheard Hanrahan say, "I can't blame Ross for calling it off, but it surely is like killing something that's alive." Hanrahan's words struck Fleishmann deeply, and when he saw Ross later that afternoon he told him that he was willing to try and raise outside capital to help the New Yorker New Yorker survive. survive.

Success was slow in coming and for a while the New Yorker New Yorker was a standing joke even among its contributors. When Ross asked Dorothy Parker why she hadn't come into the office to write a piece for him, she replied tartly, "Somebody was using the pencil." Although magazine word rates were high during this period, Ross could afford to pay his writers very little. In the magazine's first ten months he used 282 different contributors. was a standing joke even among its contributors. When Ross asked Dorothy Parker why she hadn't come into the office to write a piece for him, she replied tartly, "Somebody was using the pencil." Although magazine word rates were high during this period, Ross could afford to pay his writers very little. In the magazine's first ten months he used 282 different contributors.

The editorial board Ross had a.s.sembled from among his Round Table friends often found it difficult to contribute, either because they were too busy or because contractual obligations to other publications (most often Vanity Fair Vanity Fair) forbade it. To hide their ident.i.ties they sometimes wrote under pseudonyms. Parker, who would become literary editor in 1927, turned in only one article and two poems in 1925. Bob Benchley, from 1929 the New Yorker New Yorker's drama critic, didn't write anything for the magazine until it had been running nearly a year. Alec Woollcott's column "Shouts and Murmurs" was not introduced until 1929. Henry Mencken only started contributing in the 1930s.

Ross's friends' early reticence was actually a blessing in disguise, because it forced him to seek out new talent, like E. B. White, James Thurber and the first "Talk of the Town" writer, Ralph Ingersoll, who perfectly captured the mood of "dinner table Conversation" that Ross hoped for. Gradually Ross and his team of writers and editors found their voice: informed but offhand, detached and amusing, always slightly tongue-in-cheek. By the end of their first year Scott Fitzgerald was writing to Maxwell Perkins from Paris asking for "all the gossip that isn't in The New Yorker The New Yorker or the or the World World."

In the summer of 1925 Jane Grant wrote to her friend Janet Flanner, an aspiring writer who had just moved to Paris and was living on her "hopes and good bistro food on the Left Bank." Grant told Flanner about Ross's new magazine, and asked her if she would like to write for it. What was it called, Flanner asked-and was it any good? It was called the New Yorker New Yorker, wrote Grant, and though it was not yet any good, it was going to be. Flanner was the New Yorker New Yorker's Paris correspondent for the next fourteen years.

Ross's leadership was idiosyncratic. He was conscientious, enquiring, demanding and critical. James Thurber saw him as a ma.s.s of contradictions: "a visionary and a practicalist, imperfect at both, a dreamer and a hard worker, a genius and a plodder, obstinate and reasonable, cosmopolitan and provincial, wide-eyed and world-weary." One day Ross called Thurber into his office. "Now in this casual way of yours here, you use a colon where anybody else would use a dash," he said. "I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm just bringing it up." Thurber argued his point and Ross "agreed to let the colon stand, for he was, as I have said and now say again, at once the most obdurate and reasonable of editors."

Ross's own areas of knowledge were patchy in the extreme and he was profoundly suspicious of "anything smacking of scholarship." Literature, music and art were virtually unknown to him. In 1931 the English painter Paul Nash came into the New Yorker New Yorker offices to meet Ross, who greeted him with the words, "There are only two phony arts, painting and music." Nash was a little surprised. "He is like your skysc.r.a.pers. They are unbelievable, but there they are." offices to meet Ross, who greeted him with the words, "There are only two phony arts, painting and music." Nash was a little surprised. "He is like your skysc.r.a.pers. They are unbelievable, but there they are."

Dorothy Parker thought Ross "almost illiterate." The only novels he had read were When Knighthood Was in Flower When Knighthood Was in Flower and and Riders of the Purple Sage Riders of the Purple Sage. He stuck his head around the corner of the subs' office one day to ask, "Is Moby d.i.c.k the whale or the man?"

From the start the New Yorker New Yorker, under Wolcott Gibbs's careful gaze, prided itself on its scrupulous copy-editing. When Henry Mencken referred to a European restaurant in which he said he had eaten but of which the subs could find no record, they refused to include it. Not until Ross brought the restaurant's menu into the office would they accept that it existed. "Ross has the most astute goons of any editor in the country," said Mencken.

By 1927 the New Yorker New Yorker was beginning to flourish. was beginning to flourish. Vanity Fair Vanity Fair featured Ross in its Hall of Fame for the year: "and finally because he is now editor-in-chief of featured Ross in its Hall of Fame for the year: "and finally because he is now editor-in-chief of The New Yorker The New Yorker." The British journalist Beverley Nichols, sent to New York in 1928 to model the American Sketch American Sketch in the in the New Yorker New Yorker's image, said Ross was producing a "high-powered, streamlined little magazine" that impressed its rivals-namely Nichols's publisher, George Doran. That year, for the first time, the New Yorker New Yorker turned a profit. Not only had it survived but it had thrived, and would continue to do so. Today, in much the same form as Ross first imagined it, his creation continues to disregard the old lady of Dubuque. Somebody once asked James Thurber whether he thought the turned a profit. Not only had it survived but it had thrived, and would continue to do so. Today, in much the same form as Ross first imagined it, his creation continues to disregard the old lady of Dubuque. Somebody once asked James Thurber whether he thought the New Yorker New Yorker had succeeded "because, or in spite of, Harold Ross?" His answer was that the magazine had been "created out of the friction between Ross Positive and Ross Negative." had succeeded "because, or in spite of, Harold Ross?" His answer was that the magazine had been "created out of the friction between Ross Positive and Ross Negative."

By the time the New Yorker New Yorker had rounded the corner, the heyday of the Round Table was over. Most of the regulars had moved on, going to Hollywood to write for the movies or producing their own plays on Broadway rather than merely reviewing them. Ross and Jane Grant's marriage broke up and they sold the house in h.e.l.l's Kitchen. had rounded the corner, the heyday of the Round Table was over. Most of the regulars had moved on, going to Hollywood to write for the movies or producing their own plays on Broadway rather than merely reviewing them. Ross and Jane Grant's marriage broke up and they sold the house in h.e.l.l's Kitchen.

Harold Ross, who would marry twice more, never found a greater pa.s.sion than the New Yorker New Yorker. Every apartment he lived in became an extension of his office until, appropriately, he moved into the Algonquin just before he died in 1951-having edited every single edition of the New Yorker New Yorker up until that point. Incurably restless to the end, it was said that after he died a fat envelope marked "Getaway Money" was found in his safety deposit box. up until that point. Incurably restless to the end, it was said that after he died a fat envelope marked "Getaway Money" was found in his safety deposit box.

Celebrated lawyer Clarence Darrow, in suspenders, leaning on the desk in front of his defense team in Dayton, leaning on the desk in front of his defense team in Dayton, Tennessee, July 1925. The defendant, science teacher John Tennessee, July 1925. The defendant, science teacher John Scopes, is in a white shirt with his elbows on the desk. Scopes, is in a white shirt with his elbows on the desk.

11.

"YES, WE HAVE NO BANANAS TODAY"

IS POSSIBLE THAT THE PLACE IN AMERICA LEAST PREPARED TO welcome journalists of the stamp of Harold Ross and his wearily sophisticated writers was the small mountain town of Dayton, Tennessee, population 1,800. But in the summer of 1925, according to the journalist Joseph Wood Krutch, Dayton was "selected as the site of an Armageddon." Over two hundred eager reporters, one from as far away as London, moved into this pious, provincial town to chronicle a great clash between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism.

In the 1920s the Deep South was dominated by evangelical Protestant fundamentalism which taught a literal acceptance of the Scriptures. If one could not believe that Christ actually rose from the dead, ministers argued, then one could not believe a word of what He said. Fundamentalists celebrated ignorance, preaching that simple faith was more important than all the learning in the world. Books, apart from the Bible, were violently mistrusted. If their contents were true, then they should already be in the Bible; if false, then reading them would imperil the soul. One Georgia a.s.semblyman said that a man needed only three books: the Bible, as a guide to behavior; the hymn book, for poetry; and the almanac, to predict the weather.

This return to the source was, like the revival of the Ku Klux Klan (which exploited fundamentalists in its recruiting process), a howl of protest against the forces of modernity sweeping the United States-urbanization, industry, immigration, technology, immorality. Anyone who dissented from their view of the universe was by definition a sinner, a heretic and an enemy. "The modernist juggles the Scripture statements of His deity and denies His virgin birth," raged one fundamentalist minister, "making Him a Jewish b.a.s.t.a.r.d, born out of wedlock, and stained forever with the shame of His Mother's immorality." Hearing this at the Algonquin, Dorothy Parker and her friends would have screamed with laughter and called for another c.o.c.ktail. The chasm between the two groups was unbridgeable.

Perhaps the bloodiest battleground between fundamentalists and modernists was the relatively new science of evolution. Darwin's On the Origin of Species On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859. Just over twenty years later, when Darwin was still alive, the presidents of nine leading Eastern colleges were asked by the New York had been published in 1859. Just over twenty years later, when Darwin was still alive, the presidents of nine leading Eastern colleges were asked by the New York Observer Observer whether their faculties taught evolution; the response was a shocked and unanimous no. Even though the theory of survival of the fittest would be used to promote racism and eugenics during the early twentieth century, at this stage the mere idea that man was descended from apes was unthinkable. whether their faculties taught evolution; the response was a shocked and unanimous no. Even though the theory of survival of the fittest would be used to promote racism and eugenics during the early twentieth century, at this stage the mere idea that man was descended from apes was unthinkable.

By the 1920s, though, progressive intellectuals had accepted Darwinism (and the concept that science would one day explain everything) so entirely that it had become an article of modernist faith. When a bill prohibiting the teaching of man's evolution from animals was brought before the Delaware legislature, it was facetiously referred to the Committee on Fish, Game and Oysters.

But pious Southerners still believed that the entire truth about the creation of the universe was contained in Genesis: "In the beginning G.o.d created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of G.o.d moved upon the face of the waters. And G.o.d said, Let there be light: and there was light."

The notion that man was descended from apes was seen as blasphemy. As a French visitor to the United States in the mid-twenties observed, one of the frightening implications of Darwinism, for Southerners who believed implicitly in white supremacy, was its message to black people. "If the monkey can become a man, may the Negro not hope to become white?" The Ku Klux Klan added Darwinists to their list of anti-American conspiracists which included Catholics, blacks, Jews and Bolsheviks. After being ousted from the Klan's high command in 1924, Edward Clarke became an anti-evolution campaigner.

Throughout the early 1920s the fundamentalist crusade to ban the teaching of evolution in schools gained pace. When the Texas legislature rejected a bill permitting censorship of school books, the state governor, "Ma" Ferguson, declared, "I am a Christian mother, and I am not going to let that kind of rot go into Texas textbooks." She blacklisted or bowdlerized the offending books to remove any mention of Darwinism.

In early 1925 the state of Tennessee became a particular focus for the anti-evolutionists, headed by William Jennings Bryan. Known as the "Great Commoner," the charismatic Bryan was a Southern folk hero, a sincere, energetic Jacksonian democrat with an abiding mistrust of education. "The only morality comes from the Bible, all our inst.i.tutions and our social life are founded on an implicit belief in it, and without that belief there is no ground on which moral teaching may be founded."

Bryan had three times run as Democratic candidate for president (and twice more as an independent) and served in President Wilson's Cabinet before resigning when Wilson led the United States into the First World War. Having moved to Florida hoping to improve his wife's health, Bryan was also a major beneficiary of the Florida property boom, receiving handsome payment for promoting the "Coral Gables Land a.s.sociation." His political causes-pacifism, Prohibition and female suffrage, as well as anti-evolutionism-sprang out of his twin convictions: a deep religious faith and a pa.s.sionate commitment to populism and social justice. He blamed Darwinism for the Great War and the decline of faith in 1920s America, and hoped to prevent schools and "infidel universities" from teaching scientific theories of evolution. "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain all the learning of the schools and lose his faith in G.o.d?" Bryan thundered. His audiences cheered as he reached his oratorical crescendo: "You can't make a monkey of me!" he would cry.

At the start of 1925 Bryan and the evangelist preacher Billy Sunday arrived in Tennessee's capital, Memphis, to put pressure on the state legislature to pa.s.s a bill proposed by John Washington Butler, a local farmer and Primitive Baptist lay leader. Butler had been worried by news "that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense," and proposed to make it illegal "to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." Masked Klansmen marched in support of the bill, despite Bryan's private disapproval of their order. The Butler Act was pa.s.sed that March. In New York, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) pledged to support anyone who dared defy this ban on the grounds that it was unconst.i.tutional.

It was the manager of Dayton's coal and iron mine, George Rappleyea, who first had the idea of using Dayton as a test case for the Butler Act. Rappleyea came from New York. He accepted the principles of evolution and, as a member of a modernist Methodist church, did not see it as incompatible with Christianity. Having read about the ACLU's declaration, he suggested to a group of local men gathered in Frank Robinson's drugstore and soda fountain (the hub of Dayton life) that they stage a test case of the Butler Act there. Robinson, who was also chairman of the Rhea County school board, liked the idea of generating some publicity for his sleepy town, as did the School Superintendent, Walter White.

Rappleyea persuaded his friend John Scopes, Rhea county's amiable young math and science teacher and part-time football coach, to continue teaching biology cla.s.ses from the state-approved textbook, Hunter's Civic Biology Civic Biology, which contravened the Butler Act. Having secured the ACLU's support, Rappleyea prosecuted Scopes for violating the law and Robinson notified the Chattanooga Times Chattanooga Times and the and the Nashville Banner Nashville Banner of his action. a.s.sociated Press picked up the story and the next day it was carried by every major newspaper in the country. of his action. a.s.sociated Press picked up the story and the next day it was carried by every major newspaper in the country.

The ACLU, which would eventually raise a fund of $11 million for Scopes's defense appeal, engaged Clarence Darrow to act as his head lawyer. Darrow had spent his long and distinguished career fighting for the rights of the individual, for freedom of speech and the privilege of dissent. Initial fears that he was too radical, and would allow the opposition to present the case as a clash between religion and G.o.dlessness, were finally discounted in view of Scopes's expressed preference for the experienced criminal lawyer.

Darrow himself had hesitated before committing himself to the case until he heard that his adversary would be William Jennings Bryan. Both men were Democrats, old allies in some causes and old sparring partners in others; in the past Darrow had even supported Bryan's presidential ambitions. Their relationship was cordial but plainspoken. As an evangelizing agnostic and an impa.s.sioned advocate for scientific knowledge in general and evolution in particular, Darrow was the perfect focus for the prejudices and fears of the team prosecuting John Scopes. Secular and anticlerical to the core, he denied the primacy that biblical fundamentalists a.s.signed to man above all other creatures and believed that the Christian doctrine of original sin was "silly, impossible and wicked." He said afterwards that he took up Scopes's cause because "there was no limit to the mischief that might be accomplished unless the country was roused to the evil at hand."

William Jennings Bryan arrived in Dayton three days before Scopes's trial began, declaring that it would be a "duel to the death." Welcomed as the popular hero he was, Bryan spent his time giving lectures to the school board about teaching evolution, preaching, posing for pictures at Robinson's drugstore and attending a banquet in his honor at the Progressive Dayton Club. Two ACLU lawyers from New York, Darrow's a.s.sociates, arrived two days later, having seen the extensive news coverage of Bryan's pre-campaigning. "Am I too late for the trial?" asked Dudley Malone, declaring, "The issue is not between science and religion, as some would have us believe. The real issue is between science and Bryanism."

In the days before the trial began, hot dog, sandwich and ice cream sellers catering to the unusual crowds mingled with trained chimps and revivalists, evangelists and holy rollers in Dayton's town square. Signs everywhere exhorted the faithful to read their Bibles daily and have faith that Jesus is their savior. "The Sweetheart Love of Jesus Christ and Paradise Street is at Hand," read one. "Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out," warned another. A few bold book-sellers hawked biology texts. Badges reading "Your Old Man's a Monkey" were sold. A string quartet of black musicians played.

Journalists absorbing the scene reported back to their editors via twenty-two newly installed Western Union telegraph operators. A movie camera platform had been placed in the courtroom and Rhea County's first airstrip was marked off in a field so that film coverage of the trial could be flown out to be shown on national newsreels. Equipment was installed to transmit proceedings to the nation by live radio; it was the first trial to be broadcast nationally.

Reporters flooded into Dayton, filling the town's one hotel and several boarding houses and crowding into Robinson's soda fountain. Inhabitants reveled in the national attention and the chance to boost their hometown. The local policeman's van bore a sign reading "Monkeyville Police"; a delivery man called himself the "Monkeyville Express"; the regional press declared its delight that the world was "taking note of the South." As Clarence Darrow said, "Most of the newspapers treated the whole case as a farce instead of a tragedy, but they did give it no end of publicity."

Perhaps the man most enjoying Dayton was Henry Mencken, covering the trial for the Baltimore Evening Sun Baltimore Evening Sun, which had stood for John Scopes to the tune of $500. Mencken could be seen everywhere, his relish for the unfolding events apparent on his broadly smiling face. As Scopes put it, his trial was really "Mencken's show." Joseph Krutch, a Tennessean journalist working in the North, was in Dayton reporting for The Nation The Nation. He said the scene "seemed arranged for [Mencken's] delight . . . Had he invented the Monkey Trial no one would have believed in it, but he had been spared the necessity of invention." Krutch admired Mencken, but, sensitive to his scorn for small-town Southern life, disliked how he charmed everyone on both sides and then wrote "brutally contemptuous" accounts of them.

"There was a friar wearing a sandwich sign announcing that he was the Bible champion of the world. There was a Seventh Day Adventist arguing that Clarence Darrow was the beast with seven heads and ten horns described in Revelation XIII, and that the end of the world was at hand," Mencken recounted. "There was an ancient who maintained that no Catholic could be a Christian. There was the eloquent Dr. T.T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss., come to town with a truck-load of torches and hymn-books to put Darwin in his place. There was a singing brother bellowing apocalyptic hymns. There was William Jennings Bryan, followed everywhere by a gaping crowd. Dayton was having a roaring time. It was better than the circus."

But Mencken, nostrils twitching for any whiff of hypocrisy, found that even in Dayton "there was a strong smell of antinomianism." The sweating evangelists preaching Armageddon outside the courthouse were mostly itinerant, hoping to take advantage of the crowds gathered to see evolution dispatched by Bryan once and for all; the townspeople, according to Mencken, did not permit their faith to impede their debaucheries. As a friendly female journalist explained to him, Dayton was, after all, the capital of Rhea County. "That is to say, it was predominantly epicurean and sinful. A country girl from some remote valley of the county, coming into town for her semiannual bottle of Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, shivered on approaching Robinson's drug-store quite as a country girl from up-State New York might shiver on approaching the Metropolitan Opera House."

To Clarence Darrow's surprise, the trial opened on the sweltering morning of Friday 10 July with a long prayer entreating the jury, the accused and the attorneys to be "loyal to G.o.d." Dayton's courtroom had been freshly painted yellow. It was packed solid by a mixture of journalists and fascinated locals, and loudspeakers conveyed the proceedings to the crowds that had overflowed on to the lawn.

As a concession to the unusual heat, Judge Raulston announced that the trial's partic.i.p.ants would be permitted to remove their coats and ties. Only the defense's Dudley Malone managed to keep his jacket on for the entire two weeks, admitting the temperature just so far as to dab his damp forehead with a linen handkerchief and earning Dayton's grudging respect for his stamina. Unusually, smoking was banned from the courtroom, but nicotine addicts (everyone but Bryan) were placated with well-placed spittoons and chewed their tobacco instead of smoking it.

While his defense team were relaxed and eagerly antic.i.p.ating the upcoming debate, John Scopes, looking like a college student in his slacks and open-necked shirt, was nervous. He had been happy enough to allow Rappleyea to bring him to court-he did not come from Dayton, and had no intention of remaining there; he was unattached and easy-going, with liberal views but no very strong opinions-but once there he found that all the hullabaloo made him uncomfortable. He spent as much of the next two weeks as he could hiding out down at the local swimming hole, escaping public attention. His presence wasn't really necessary, anyway: on leaving for Dayton, Clarence Darrow had declared, "Scopes is not on trial. Civilization is on trial." The defense had decided that their client need not testify. As Scopes put it later, he was nothing more than a "ringside observer at my own trial."

Bryan sat confidently in court with his stiff collar removed and his sleeves rolled up, fanning himself against the heat and flies with a huge palm leaf. He hadn't prosecuted a case for nearly forty years, but, as the mouthpiece of G.o.d, he was unintimidated. Bryan knew "he represented religion," said Darrow, adding in a d.a.m.ning phrase worthy of Mencken, "and in this he was the idol of all Morondom." Behind him, in a wheelchair, sat his invalid wife Mary, who suffered from severe arthritis with quiet dignity.

The judge, John Raulston, an acknowledged supporter of the law Scopes had violated, gave off an air that said, "Rest a.s.sured, we shall a.s.sa.s.sinate you gently." For, as Joseph Krutch observed, Raulston "had probably never in his life heard anyone question in other than timidly apologetic terms the combination of ignorance, superst.i.tion, and (sometimes) hypocrisy for which he stood; and he was confident that, so far at least as his his world was concerned, the debate as well as the legal verdict would be in his and his community's favor." world was concerned, the debate as well as the legal verdict would be in his and his community's favor."

That afternoon twelve jurors were selected. They were representative of Dayton's population-mostly regular churchgoers, simple, middle-aged farmers with little formal education. According to custom, no women were included among their number. An informal poll conducted during the trial showed that 85 percent of churchgoing Daytonians professed to believe the Bible literally, though they were more usually moderate Methodists than fervently fundamentalist Baptists.

Clarence Darrow's two-hour opening speech the following Monday was one of the most electrifying of his career, an impa.s.sioned defense of tolerance and secularism against fundamentalism. "Coatless and conspicuously suspendered as if to a.s.sure Dayton that he was as plain a man as any of its own citizens," according to Krutch, Darrow burst into a fierce attack on "what he called the ignorance, intolerance, arrogance and bigotry" of Dayton.

Having decided that there was no point saving his punches until his closing speech, on the basis that Bryan would be the final speaker, Darrow reb.u.t.ted the prosecution's populist opening argument that the people paying teachers' salaries should be allowed to dictate their curriculum. For years this had been Byran's argument against the teaching of evolution in public schools: a simple defense of majority rule. "The right right of the of the people people speaking through the legislature, to control the schools which they speaking through the legislature, to control the schools which they create create and and support support, is the real issue," Bryan had written before the case opened.

Darrow countered that the people of Tennessee had adopted a const.i.tution which granted every single one of them "religious freedom in its broadest terms." Violating that freedom by limiting what people were able to teach or learn was thus a breach of their individual liberty. The state of Tennessee, Darrow argued, had no more right to insist in schools that the Bible is a holy book than it had to present as sacred the Koran, the Book of Confucius, or the essays of Emerson. In this way Darrow hoped to show that Bryan was not a defender of democracy but a threat to it. He concluded with a solemn warning: "We are marching backwards to the glorious age of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted f.a.gots to burn men who dared bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind."

As Joseph Krutch reported, Darrow's eloquence and pa.s.sion made even Dayton stop to think. Riveted, the town's inhabitants forgot which side they were on, even bursting into applause for a particularly good strike by either side-but still placed their faith in Bryan as their champion to prove that, as Joseph Wood Krutch put it, "Learning is useless . . . Faith alone counts."

The next day, while electrical storms thundered outside the courthouse, Darrow formally objected to the prayers that initiated each day's proceedings. A Supreme Court decision permitted prayer in courtrooms, but it was not mandatory. "When it is claimed by the state that there is a conflict between science and religion there should be no . . . attempt by means of prayer . . . to influence the deliberations," he argued. Prayer, he said, was a personal matter, to be conducted in private. The prosecution team protested but later a compromise was reached allowing modernist ministers to alternate with fundamentalists so that a broader spectrum of faith was represented.

Darrow had not expected Raulston to agree with his opening argument that Scopes's const.i.tutional rights had been violated by the Butler Act, and on Wednesday the judge confirmed this opinion. Furthermore he would not permit the defense's scientific experts to take the stand and try to prove the facts of evolution. Once the parameters of the trial had been set, the proceedings could begin in earnest.

The prosecution called as witnesses some of Scopes's students, hoping their testimony would demonstrate how Scopes's use of the theory of evolution had undermined their faith in G.o.d. In response to Darrow's cross-examination, they said that they did not think science had done them any harm. After the trial, Darrow was delighted to overhear one saying to another, "Don't you think Mr. Bryan is a little narrow-minded?" He did not, perhaps, hear another Dayton teenager, also after the trial, comment, "I like him [Scopes], but I don't believe I came from a monkey."

When drugstore owner Frank Robinson took the stand he testified that Scopes had said to him that any teacher using Hunter's Biology Biology was violating the Butler Act. Darrow, cross-examining, asked first if Robinson sold Hunter's was violating the Butler Act. Darrow, cross-examining, asked first if Robinson sold Hunter's Biology Biology in his shop-he did-and then, as the audience began to laugh, asked him if it were true that he was a member of the school board. in his shop-he did-and then, as the audience began to laugh, asked him if it were true that he was a member of the school board.

Dudley Malone rose for the defense after Bryan spoke. He questioned Bryan's right to speak for all Christians and stated the defense's conviction that no conflict existed between Christianity and evolution. The newspaper headlines summarized their arguments. Bryan raged, "They call us bigots when we refuse to throw away our Bibles." Malone responded, "We say 'Keep your Bible,' but keep it where it belongs, in the world of your conscience . . . and do not try to tell an intelligent world and the intelligence of this country that these books written by men who knew none of the accepted facts of science can be put into a course of science."

Most journalists, including Henry Mencken and Joseph Krutch, went home during the first week. They had seen enough. After hearing that no scientific evidence was to be admitted, Mencken gave victory to the prosecution: "The main battle is over, with Genesis completely triumphant."

Krutch, however, thought that Bryan had failed his devotees. "Any pa.s.sionate revivalist from the hills could have been more effective. He would have believed. Bryan merely refused to doubt . . . [retreating] further and further into boastful ignorance." On one occasion, when asked if he denied that man was a mammal, Bryan had answered, "I do"-because he was unsure of its meaning, Krutch thought-and an incredulous Mencken fell with a loud crash from the table on to which he had climbed to get a better view.

None of them had predicted Darrow's masterstroke. At the beginning of the second week Bryan agreed to stand as witness in the role of biblical expert, facing Darrow's questioning; it was understood that Darrow would in turn submit to Bryan's examination. By this time the heat was so unrelenting and the crowds so immense that court proceedings had been moved out on to the lawn in front of the courthouse amid rumors that the floor was about to collapse.

Darrow, thumbs in his lavender braces, coolly declared that his intention in questioning Bryan was, "to show up fundamentalism . . . to prevent bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education system of the United States." Bryan leapt from his seat, purple with rage. Pounding his fist on the table in front of him, he shouted, "I am simply trying to protect the word of G.o.d against the greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States. I want the papers to know I am not afraid to get on the stand in front of him and let him do his worst!" Although he remained defiant in the face of Darrow's attack, Bryan's willful ignorance made him seem a fool; he simply lacked the wit that would have helped him counter Darrow's arguments. As Darrow said, "He did not think. He knew."

When Darrow asked Bryan what he thought about biblical miracles like Adam's rib, the Flood and Jonah and the whale, he replied, "One miracle is just as easy to believe as another." Pressed further about how he could believe in such improbabilities, he responded, "I do not think about things I don't think about." "Do you think about things you do think about?" queried Darrow. "Well, sometimes."

Darrow asked him how old he thought the universe might be-when G.o.d had made it and how long the seven days had lasted -and Bryan thundered, "I am more interested in the Rock of Ages than in the age of rocks." The triumphant Darrow looked on his opponent with pity: he had "made himself ridiculous" and still worse, "contradicted his own faith." For his part Bryan accused Darrow of insulting the people Bryan called "yokels" by trying to weaken their faith by making them admit that it was necessary to interpret the Bible. Darrow replied, "You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion." Eventually Raulston adjourned court for the day.

The next day Raulston ruled that Bryan's testimony was irrelevant and struck it from the record, forbidding any cross-examination of Darrow. "Mr. Bryan and his a.s.sociates forgot to look surprised," commented Darrow, evidently suspecting collaboration. The two teams were invited to make their closing remarks. Since Scopes had clearly broken the law, Darrow urged the jury to find Scopes guilty so that the case could be appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court where the const.i.tutionality of the law itself could be a.s.sessed.

Many of the jurors were keen for the trial to end so they could start harvesting their peach crop; it took them nine minutes to reach a guilty verdict. The trial had lasted two weeks. John Scopes, who had not once taken the stand, was fined $100. Although Bryan offered to pay his fine in the spirit of goodwill, Mencken's Baltimore Evening Sun Baltimore Evening Sun took care of it. took care of it.

Both sides claimed victory, although in fact they were both diminished by the trial and the hard glare of national attention that they had endured. Moderate onlookers resented the stark choice they had been offered between atheism and fundamentalism. Most people thought the case had exposed Bryan as a fool and Darrow as a know-it-all, without resolving the issue it had sought to address. And as Joseph Krutch observed, future generations who saw the Scopes case as a witch hunt and compared it to post-war McCarthyism missed "the fact that it was also a circus"-"a j.a.pe elaborately staged for their own amus.e.m.e.nt by typical intellectual playboys of the exuberant Twenties, and the real villains were . . . the responsible citizens and officials of Tennessee who should never have allowed it to happen."

Immediately after the trial ended, a still defiant William Jennings Bryan began making plans for a national anti-evolution lecture tour to capitalize on the publicity the Scopes case had created for his cause. Undeterred by Darrow's devastating examination, he planned to argue four points: that the theory of evolution contradicted the biblical account of creation; that the theory of survival of the fittest destroyed man's faith in G.o.d and love for one another; that studying evolution was spiritually and socially useless; and that a deterministic view of life as propounded by evolutionists undermined efforts to reform and improve society.

Bryan may have been undaunted by Darrow's arguments, but others saw him as a spent force. Krutch felt almost sorry for him. "Driven from politics and journalism because of obvious intellectual incompetence, become ballyhoo for boom-town real estate in his search for lucrative employment, and forced into religion as the only quasi-intellectual field in which mental backwardness and complete insensibility to ideas could be used as an advantage, he already knew that he was compelled to seek in the most remote rural regions for the applause so necessary for his contentment," he wrote. "Yet even in Dayton, as choice a strong-hold of ignorance and bigotry as one could hope to find, he went down in defeat in the only contest where he had met his antagonists face to face. Dayton itself was ashamed for him."

But Bryan would never get the chance to resurrect his reputation by touring the nation. After a few days spent lecturing locally he returned to Dayton where he died in his sleep during an afternoon nap, five days after the end of the trial. A reporter told Darrow, vacationing in the Smoky Mountains, that people were saying Bryan had died of a broken heart because of his cross-examination. "Broken heart nothing," said Darrow. "He died of a busted belly." In Baltimore, Henry Mencken hooted, "G.o.d aimed at Darrow, missed, and hit Bryan instead." In private he said to a friend, "We killed the son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h!"

Gloating such as Mencken's helped turn Bryan into a martyr and Darrow into a villain. As the tributes to him after his death showed, Bryan was still a hugely popular national figure despite his limitations. Even the New York Herald Tribune New York Herald Tribune congratulated him for trying "to do the right thing as he saw it." congratulated him for trying "to do the right thing as he saw it."

Although modernists claimed their nominal defeat as a triumph, calling the trial "the last significant attempt to discredit Darwin's theory" as if no further attempts to challenge it would ever be made, two years later thirteen states, both Northern and Southern, were still considering inst.i.tuting anti-evolution laws. In Mississippi and Arkansas they pa.s.sed into statute. Even where no changes to the law were made, local school boards increasingly presented science as theory rather than dogma, restricting the teaching of evolution and biology throughout the 1930s. In 1927 when the appeal on the Scopes case reached the Tennessee Supreme Court, it upheld the Butler Act but reversed the original and uncontested judgment of a fine on technical grounds, preventing the case's being appealed to the federal courts. The Butler Act was not repealed until 1967, when a teacher successfully claimed that it violated his right to free speech.

Scopes's trial, and the predominantly Northern, urban coverage of it, exemplified the rift in society between the "old" and "new" Americas-one traditional, rural, pious, slow-moving, the other fast-paced, industrial, go-getting, high-living. Throughout the 1920s America's population was shifting from predominantly rural to predominantly urban-but defenders of the threatened "old" values were not prepared to lie down and accept defeat.

The Spirit of St. Louis before Lindbergh's record-breaking flight, May 1927.

12.

THE SPIRIT Of ST. LOUIS RELIGION MAY HAVE VANQUISHED SCIENCE (AT LEAST ACCORDING to the law) in the Scopes case but modernity was a juggernaut that could not easily be turned back. In the 1920s numerous new technologies transformed the way people lived and worked, but the development of flight was perhaps the fastest-paced and the most revolutionary of the changes taking place. Man was a terrestrial creature and to imagine him moving through the air like a bird required a leap of faith and imagination as well as of machinery. Orville and Wilbur Wright had achieved lift-off for the first time at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina in 1903. The Frenchman Louis Bleriot successfully crossed the English Channel six years later. The Great War stimulated a new interest in aviation and by its end in 1918 planes were being used for fighting as well as reconnaissance. Over 50,000 aircraft were built in Britain alone during the war years.

The French, whose flying aces (aviators who had downed five enemy aircraft) had found international fame as gladiators of the air during the war, were as interested in the possibilities of peacetime flight as the Americans. The International Air Traffic a.s.sociation (IATA) was founded in Paris in 1919. Ten years later it had twenty-three members and its headquarters in The Hague attempted to standardize timetables and safety systems. Established in 1923, Air Union ferried pa.s.sengers-75 percent of whom were Americans in these early years-across the English Channel. It merged with Air Orient in 1933 to form Air France. Early flight conditions were an unsettling combination of discomfort and luxury: pa.s.sengers were expected to be up at dawn to catch their planes and even the shortest flights might make numerous emergency landings en route, but they were lavished with caviar while on board.

America's first air-mail service began in 1918, shuttling daily between New York and Washington. From 1923 the Post Office started contracting air-mail deliveries to private companies, and the following year letters could be sent across the continent by air mail from New York to San Francisco via Chicago and Cheyenne. In 1926 the Air Commerce Act was pa.s.sed, giving the U.S. Government power to regulate and encourage commercial aviation by building a national network of post routes, airports, beacons, floodlights, boundary markers and weather stations. The service was almost prohibitively expensive, though: until 1928, when it was reduced to a flat rate of five cents a letter, air-mail postage might cost twenty-five cents at a time when a land-mail postcard stamp cost only one cent.

From the start air mail was closely linked to pa.s.senger air travel. Because flying was so expensive, pilots flying the first air-mail routes were encouraged to carry paying pa.s.sengers. But mail planes could only accommodate one or two pa.s.sengers alongside the pilot, so transporting people rather than mailbags wasn't initially seen as a viable commercial enterprise. All that would change in 1927.

In the spring of 1922, a shy college dropout from Minnesota enrolled as the only student at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation's flying school in the provincial city of Lincoln. At the end of the first week, during which he had begun his practical training as an aviation mechanic, twenty-year-old Charles Lindbergh was taken up for his inaugural flight. He was as captivated as he had known he would be. As a child, Lindbergh had spent long afternoons lying on his back in a field near his house, screened by long gra.s.s, dreaming of swooping and floating among the clouds above him.

He used to imagine himself with wings, "soaring through the air from one river bank to the other, over the stones of the rapids, above log jams, above the tops of trees and fences." But the reality of flight was even more thrilling than he had hoped. In the air, he wrote later, "I live only in the moment in this strange, unmortal s.p.a.ce, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger." From the first second of that lift-off he knew that he had found his path in life. Just ten years of flying, he believed, "would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime."

Flying became for him an almost mystical experience. Lindbergh described flying by moonlight as times of transcendence. "Its light floods through woods and fields; reflects up from bends of rivers; shines on the silver wings of my biplane, turning them a greenish hue. It makes the earth seem more of a planet; and me a part of the heavens above it, as though I too had the right to an orbit in the sky."

In 1924 Lindbergh enrolled in the army's new Air Service from which, two years later, he graduated first in his cla.s.s. An army doctor who examined him during this period noted his perfect hearing and sight, describing him as an "optimum type-slow and purposeful, yet quick of reaction, alert, congenial, [and] intelligent." Lindbergh set himself the highest of standards for his conduct as well as his physical achievements, listing fifty-nine qualities towards which he strove including Diligence, Manliness, Zeal, Reserve, Concentration and Balance.