Scopes Case First Rumble of Big Drive
Bar Teaching’s From All U. S. Schools, Bryan Plan.
BY WILLIAM J. LOSH.
Staff Correspondent
The United Press
DAYTON, Tenn.—A constitutional amendment banishing the evolutionary theory from all American schools forever is the distant goal of organized fundamentalism.
It seems that the proceedings in the Scopes trial which will start in this little town Friday are only the first faint rumbling of a major battle that ultimately may be fought by the entire American nation.
William Jennings Bryan, mainstay of the prosecution of Scopes, flung down the gage of battle in an address to the Progressive Dayton club at the Asqua hotel Tuesday night.
Basis for Challenges?
If the Tennessee anti-evolution law is held invalid in the lower courts, he said, it will be appealed through all stages to Washington. If the United States supreme court holds it unconstitutional, it will be appealed to the American people.
The defense Wednesday was discussing the possibility of challenging a number of the jury panel when the trial opens because several were present and applauded the commoner.
Mr. Bryan has given Dayton just the keynote it wanted for the Scopes trial, by declaring in his speech that “the contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death.”
Bryan lost no time in getting into action after his arrival here Tuesday when the Royal Palm Express was flagged on her way north from Florida and Bryan, beaming broadly, stepped down into the arms of an enthusiastic reception committee.
“In With Both Feet.”
Within 10 minutes the distinguished associate counsel for the prosecution had his coat off, in an other half hour he was bending over the soda water fountain in Robinson’s drug store, “where the argument started,” consuming a strawberry ice cream soda. And Tuesday night, at a banquet, where he met young Scopes for the first time since presenting the teacher with a diplomat at high school graduation exercises at Salem, Ill., several years ago, Bryan flung down the gage of battle.
“It has been in the past a death grapple in darkness,” Bryan said. “From now on it will be a battle in the light, a battle to the death between evolution and Christianity.”
The commoner is taking things just as seriously as his opponents, Clarence Darrow and Dudley Field Malone, associate counsel for the defense, could wish. His attitude is that of a militant crusader, and when news photographers urged him to wave his broad brimmed hat, he snapped out:
“No monkey business.”
One or Other Must Go
In his talk Tuesday night Mr. Bryan said in part :
“Why has this case aroused so widespread an interest Surely it is not the size of the fine that is possible under the Tennessee law. That cannot be more than $500. What is the secret of the world’s interest in this case?
“It is that this trial uncovers an attack which for a generation has been made more or less secretly upon revealed religion, that is the Christian religion. Christianity is a revealed religion. We have no knowledge of it outside of the Bible, which Christianity regards as the revealed will of God.
“The Bible is our only standard of morality. Anything that attacks the Bible attacks revealed religion. A successful attack would destroy the Bible and with it revealed religion.
“If evolution wins, Christianity goes—not suddenly, of course, but gradually, for the two cannot stand together. They are as antagonistic as light and darkness, as antagonistic as good and evil.”
The Milwaukee Leader, Milwaukee, WI, July 9, 1925