Flashback, July 1925: Darrow Cross-Examines Bryan at Scopes Trial

In a confrontation as heated as the Tennessee weather that week, William Jennings Bryan, the most radical major-party Presidential candidate until Jesse Jackson, endured hours of cross-examination on the literal interpretation of the Bible by Clarence Darrow, the longtime “attorney for the damned.”

When it was over, Darrow had not managed to avert a sentence of guilty for client John Scopes for teaching evolution, but he had left Bryan’s reputation as a populist in tatters and spawned some of the most simplistic assumptions in America’s long history of culture wars.

Appropriately, a trial that began as a stunt climaxed as one. The defense team at the Scopes “Monkey” Trial had no more intention of getting anything useful out of Bryan’s testimony than the prosecution had of putting the defendant’s livelihood and human rights at risk.

For a trial that was not just massively but maniacally covered (it was the first time a legal proceeding was filmed or broadcast live over the radio), innumerable myths have spring up about the eight-day case in Dayton, Tenn. Most of these derive from Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, especially in the 1960 film adaptation starring Fredric March and Spencer Tracy in the principal roles.

Lawrence and Lee could probably claim some form of dramatic license just by naming the two adversaries “Matthew Harrison Brady” and “Henry Drummond.” But so much of the centerpiece of the movie—Bryan’s cross-examination—was taken from the Scopes trial transcript that viewers could be forgiven for thinking just about everything in the film was true. 

Hollywood’s distortion of history, ranging from elementary facts to larger issues regarding the major figures’ motivations, fits in perfectly with what historian Garry Wills wrote about the trial in Under God: Religion and American Politics (1990): “Almost everything about the Scopes trial has been misinterpreted, and it is the ‘educated’ part of America that has accepted the distortions.”

In the popular imagination, for instance, the notion has taken hold that Bryan believed literally in every single word of the Bible. But a careful examination of the following small portion of the trial transcript—part of Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan--reveals that the great orator and three-time Democratic nominee for President was not what would nowadays be termed a fundamentalist:

CLARENCE DARROW: Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN: I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there. Some of the Bible is given illustratively; for instance, "Ye are the salt of the earth." I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people.

DARROW: But when you read that Jonah swallowed the whale -- or that the whale swallowed Jonah, excuse me, please -- how do you literally interpret that?

BRYAN: When I read that a big fish swallowed Jonah -- it does not say whale.

DARROW: Doesn't it? Are you sure?

BRYAN: That is my recollection of it, a big fish. And I believe it, and I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man, and can make both do what He pleases.

DARROW: Mr. Bryan, doesn't the New Testament say whale [Matthew 12:40]?

BRYAN: I am not sure. My impression is that it says fish, but it does not make so much difference. I merely called your attention to where it says fish, it does not say whale.

DARROW: But in the New Testament it says whale, doesn't it?

BRYAN: That may be true. I cannot remember in my own mind what I read about it.

DARROW: Now, you say the big fish swallowed Jonah, and he remained how long -- three days -- and then he spewed him up on the land. You believe that the big fish was made to swallow Jonah?

BRYAN: I am not prepared to say that; the Bible merely says it was done.

That hardly ended the distortions associated with the Stanley Kramer film. Among the other misimpressions:

* That Bryan’s testimony took place inside the courtroom. Temperatures were so high and the courtroom was so packed that the cross-examination was moved outside.

* That Scopes was targeted right in his classroom while teaching Darwin. Though Scopes had previously taught from the textbook George William Hunter's A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914), he had not done so on the day specified in the indictment. In fact, Darrow did not want to place his client on the witness stand lest the fact emerge at cross-examination—and the case be thrown out before it could be appealed.

* That Scopes was locked up at the start of the trial. This was an invention of the film, but there was no chance of it happening. For starters, the town fathers were not out to stamp out evolution (though they surely wouldn’t have minded it) so much as to increase tourism. (It was in the midst of a recession that had resulted in the town's population declining by half.) They believed—correctly, as it turned out—that the media would be out in full force if they could mount a challenge to Tennessee’s recently passed legislation banning the teaching of evolution in schools. Moreover, the whole thing was a put-up job: not only did the schools superintendent and owner of a local coal mine ask Scopes if he were willing to, in effect, act as a “test case” against the new Tennessee law, but a couple of members of the prosecution team were also friends of the schoolteacher.

* That Bryan bullied Scopes’ girlfriend. Never happened. In fact, not only did the “Great Commoner” offer to pay Scopes’ fine for teaching the class, but the defendant wrote in his memoir (published decades later) on his continuing admiration for Bryan.

* That Bryan’s testimony represented the turning point of the trial. Judge John Raulston, it was certainly true, was not in any way, shape or form impartial, but he was surely correct that Bryan’s testimony was highly irregular. His ruling should have carried the day, except that Bryan, eager to air his views, said he had no objection to the defense motion. (That horrible mistake was compounded by the fact that Bryan had not argued a case in nearly three decades.) In any event, Raulston ruled, the day after the testimony, that the jurors were to disregard every bit of it.

* That Bryan suffered a fatal heart attack toward the conclusion of the trial. The heat—not to mention Darrow’s cross-examination—was rough on Bryan, who suffered from diabetes. But he did not die immediately after his day on the stand, but five days after the end of the trial, in his sleep.

* That, despite their clash, Darrow retained deep respect for Bryan. The closing scene of the film shows Drummond reproving cynical reporter E.K. Hornbeck for his cruel summary of Brady’s life. In fact, Darrow was just as scathing. When he was told by reporters that Bryan had died—perhaps from a broken heart over the trial, it was suggested—Darrow muttered bluntly that it had to do more with "a busted belly," then offered something more palatable for public consumption.

*That H.L. Mencken, though displaying contempt for Bryan, kept an ironic distance from Darrow. The Hornbeck character was based, of course, on columnist-editor-lexicographer H.L. Mencken. Unlike his character in the film, Mencken acted as a virtual consultant to the Scopes defense team. In the modern media environment, that connection would itself be the subject of controversy because of the writer’s extreme lack of objectivity.

* That the case represented the Waterloo for teaching evolution in the schools. Not really. Scopes lost the case before Judge Raulston, but a higher Tennessee court overturned the verdict on a technicality (the jury, not Raulston, was supposed to figure out the size of the fine)—exactly what Darrow was hoping to avoid. He wanted the law to be overturned on its merits, rather than the denouement in this case.

*That Bryan objected to evolution largely because he couldn’t accept the notion of man’s descent from apes. This might be the greatest distortion of all in the movie. The crux of Bryan's opposition came down to what he believed to be a natural consequence of Darwinian evolutionary theory—the notion of “social Darwinism.” Several robber barons had argued that, since evolution favored the strong, they had no obligation to help the poor to survive. Bryan disagreed vehemently, and counterposed the Christian “gospel of love” against it.

This Day in Crime History (Net Tightens on Leopold & Loeb)

May 29, 1924—Eight days after their “thrill-killing” of a 14-year-old neighborhood boy, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were interrogated separately about their alibis and away from prying newsmen. 

Forty-eight hours later, with a growing body of circumstantial evidence contradicting their stories and unraveling their attempt at the perfect crime, the two rich, intellectual Chicago youths  confessed to what was already dubbed “the crime of the century.”

The Leopold and Loeb case has served as dramatic fodder for several films and plays:

* Rope (1929 Patrick Hamilton play, 1948 Alfred Hitchcock film)—Hitchcock’s version was, as much as anything, a virtuosic experiment in camera use, consisting only of several long, continuous takes.
* Compulsion (1959 film, based on the Meyer Levin novel)—A roman a clef, the version that most people are most likely familiar with, with Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell as the killers and Orson Welles their attorney.
* Swoon (1992)—shot in black and white, this version viewed the case as an example of the public’s hysteria over Leopold and Loeb’s sexual orientation.
* Never the Sinner (1985)—a play by John Logan that attempted to show that Leopold and Loeb, far from being exceptional, were much closer to the mainstream than anyone could guess.

Leopold, who was freed 34 years after his guilty plea, was so sickened by his portrayal in Compulsion--particularly by the suggestion that he killed Frank out of sexual motives--that he sued the producers. 

In one of those Bleak House-style proceedings that so many in the legal profession love so much, the case took 11 years to wind through the courts—and when it was all over, Leopold’s case was dismissed.

Why did the murder grab the public’s attention so much? Why does it still have a hold on us?

The case, of course, completed the transformation of Clarence Darrow from attorney for the beleaguered and downtrodden (e.g., labor unions, radicals) to defender of the damned (the people that nobody, but nobody, wanted to be associated with). 

Though not the icon he has been made out to be for several decades (midway through his career, he barely escaped being convicted for attempting to suborn a juror), Darrow was in deadly earnest—and at his best—in passionately battling against the death penalty as he tried to save Leopold and Loeb.

But there were other reasons for the horror and rapt interest people have long felt about this case:

* It challenged traditional notions of what caused crime. Darrow had long contended that poverty bred criminal activity, and, in the wrenching transition to an industrialized, urban America, there were many reasons to believe so. But the parents of both killers in this case were affluent—Leopold, the son of a millionaire box manufacturer, and Loeb, the son of a retired Sears Roebuck vice president. The youths were privileged and smart, with Leopold even a law student at the University of Chicago.

* The murder demonstrated “motiveless malignity.” The phrase, coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge about Iago in Othello, has come to stand in general for the mystery of evil. But this murder was not a crime of greed, passion or revenge. People could not believe that anybody could do something so heinous simply to get away with it.

* The relationship between the killers smacked of the taboo. Several years ago, I came across a book—published 25 years or so after the trial—that referred to Leopold and Loeb as having committed “unnatural acts” with each other. That last phrase hints at the less tolerant attitudes that existed in that pre-Stonewall era. Newspapers at the time left little doubt that the two were lovers—and speculated that young Frank had been molested before his murder, though the autopsy did not reveal this.

* The crime was, however, unusually gruesome. Leopold and Loeb killed Bobby Frank with a chisel, poured acid on him, and dumped his naked body in a culvert near Wolf Lake.

* The trial was the first time that forensic psychiatry was used in a court proceeding. After pleading the teenaged killers guilty, Darrow employed a novel strategy of calling on one “alienist” (or psychiatrist) after another to testify about their state of mind. (Ironically, when Judge John Caverly spared Leopold and Loeb from execution, his opinion hardly took account of all this testimony, instead citing their youth—leading Leopold to wonder if they could have simply submitted their birth certificates in lieu of all the evidence.)

What fascinates me about the case, however, are, at its core, its detective aspects—i.e., how the discovery of the body led to the identification of the killers.

Intelligent though they were, Leopold and Loeb were not the Nietzschean supermen they believed themselves to be. Several clues—mistakes of their own making—tripped them up, leading detectives to break them during interrogation:

* Leopold’s glasses. These small, horn-rimmed glasses belonged not to Bobby Frank but to someone else. At first, it seemed that the prescription was so common that it would be next to impossible to trace. But it turned out that the hinges had only been sold on three pairs of glasses in the Chicago area—and that one of these belonged to Leopold, who’d already been identified by a game warden around Wolf Lake as an avid ornithologist who frequently visited the area.

Leopold had a ready explanation at first—the glasses must simply have fallen out of his breast pocket while he was birding. But, when he was asked to demonstrate how this happened, the glasses stayed in his pocket. Then, after detectives asked him to lay his coat on the ground, they watched it immediately fall out, leading them to reason that this must have been the scenario when he removed his coat to avoid getting blood on him.

(Ironically, Leopold had, several weeks before, stopped wearing the glasses that led to his door. He'd been prescribed these after headaches began to bother him. Once this stopped, he no longer put them on, and had forgotten they were even in his pocket at the time of the crime.)

*The Underwood typewriter. The ransom letter sent to Bobby Frank’s father led at first to wrong suspects—a couple of teachers at the Harvard School, the prestigious prep school that Bobby attended, outside of which the abduction took place. Eventually, however, detectives figured out that the note had been written on an Underwood Portable—and Leopold’s maid informed them that she’d seen it in the house.

* The car. Leopold and Loeb claimed they had picked up two girls named “Mae” and “Edna” (impossible, of course, to trace) on the day of the murder, had dinner and dropped them off. (In fact, they had rented an auto the day of the crime, the better to disguise themselves as they carried out the thrill killing.) But the alibi came undone through someone who thought he was doing the boys a favor: the Leopold family chauffeur. Nathan couldn’t be the killer, he said, because Leopold’s own car was in the garage all day. This, of course, contradicted the boys’ statements that they had driven the Leopold family car.

With that, the detectives pressed harder and harder.

On the 31st, Leopold and Loeb had signed their confessions and entered the lore of American criminal psychosis.