Inherit The Truth - Publicity and Drama - Humor

Humor

Anticipating that Scopes would be found guilty, the press fitted the defendant for martyrdom and created an onslaught of ridicule. Time's initial coverage of the trial focused on Dayton as "the fantastic cross between a circus and a holy war." Life adorned its masthead with monkeys reading books and proclaimed, "the whole matter is something to laugh about." Hosts of cartoonists added their own portrayals to the attack. (The greatest collection of cartoons available would be the 14 reprinted in L. Sprague de Camp's The Great Monkey Trial.) Both Literary Digest and the popular humor magazine Life (1890–1930) ran compilations of jokes and humorous observations garnered from newspapers around the country.

Overwhelmingly, the butt of these jokes was the prosecution and those aligned with it: Bryan, the city of Dayton, the state of Tennessee, and the entire South, as well as fundamentalist Christians and anti-evolutionists. Rare exceptions were found in the Southern press, where the fact that Darrow had saved Leopold and Loeb from the death penalty continued to be a source of ugly humor. The most widespread form of this ridicule was directed at the inhabitants of Tennessee. Life described Tennessee as "not up to date in its attitude to such things as evolution." Time related Bryan's arrival in town with the disparaging comment, "The populace, Bryan's to a moron, yowled a welcome."

Attacks on Bryan were frequent and acidic: Life awarded him its "Brass Medal of the Fourth Class," for having "successfully demonstrated by the alchemy of ignorance hot air may be transmuted into gold, and that the Bible is infallibly inspired except where it differs with him on the question of wine, women, and wealth." Papers across the country routinely dismissed the efforts of both sides in the trial, while the European press reacted to the entire affair with amused condescension.

Famously vituperative attacks came from journalist H. L. Mencken, whose syndicated columns from Dayton for The Baltimore Sun drew vivid caricatures of the "backward" local populace, referring to the people of Rhea County as "Babbits," "morons," "peasants," "hill-billies," "yaps," and "yokels." He chastised the "degraded nonsense which country preachers are ramming and hammering into yokel skulls." However, Mencken did enjoy certain aspects of Dayton, writing, "The town, I confess, greatly surprised me. I expected to find a squalid Southern village, with darkies snoozing on the horse-blocks, pigs rooting under the houses and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I found was a country town full of charm and even beauty—a somewhat smallish but nevertheless very attractive Westminster or Balair." He described Rhea County as priding itself on a kind of tolerance or what he called "lack of Christian heat," opposed to outside ideas but without hating those who held them. He pointed out, "The Klan has never got a foothold here, though it rages everywhere else in Tennessee." Mencken attempted to perpetrate a hoax, distributing flyers for the "Rev. Elmer Chubb," but the claims that Chubb would drink poison and preach in lost languages were ignored as commonplace by the people of Dayton and only the Commonweal bit. Mencken continued to attack Bryan, including in his famously withering obituary of Bryan, "In Memoriam: W.J.B.", in which he charged Bryan with "insincerity"—not for his religious beliefs but for the inconsistent and contradictory positions he took on a number of political questions during his career. Years later, Mencken did question whether dismissing Bryan "as a quack pure and unadulterated" was "really just." Mencken's columns made the Dayton citizens irate and drew general fire from the Southern press. After Raulston ruled against the admission of scientific testimony, Mencken left Dayton, declaring in his last dispatch, "All that remains of the great cause of the State of Tennessee against the infidel Scopes is the formal business of bumping off the defendant." Consequently, the journalist missed Darrow's cross-examination of Bryan on Monday.