Ballyhoo

The blatant ballyhoo for the trial, next month, at Dayton, Tenn., of Teacher John Thomas Scopes, indicted by a grand jury under Tennessee's anti-evolution law (TIME, May 18), continued to occupy an exaggerated amount of space in the newspapers. Actual developments were few.

In Dayton, Judge J. L. Godsey, counsel for the defense, entered a motion in the Circuit Court to quash the indictment on the grounds 1) that the act under which it was brought violates the Constitution of Tennessee in its guarantee of religious freedom and 2) that the indictment itself is "vague" and violates the U. S. Constitution in its guarantee of information to one accused, as to the nature of his crime and its guarantee of free speech.

In Manhattan, Teacher Scopes was rushed about, nervous and bewildered, to conferences where lawyers who were allegedly interested solely in seeing justice done squabbled amongst themselves as to who should be chosen and in what order they should rank. In the excitement, Teacher Scopes became the forgotten instrument of a Great Cause. In the minds of one group of the Scopes advisors, this Cause was the dignified one of abstract academic freedom. This group wanted Lawyer Charles E. Hughes to lend distinction to the case. Others were for "jazzing" the case, splashing it in even larger type through 'the headlines of newspapers, thoroughly airing and "teaching the people" the theory of evolution. These men wanted Lawyers Clarence Darrow and Dudley Field Malone for popular appeal, Lawyer Bainbridge Colby for a modicum of distinction. Hardly consulting the defendant himself, the latter group won, after mollifying Lawyer Malone with assurances that he would get as much publicity out of the trial as any one, that his Irish Catholicism and the fact that he has been divorced were not viewed as undesirable qualities in him.

Then there was a banquet, at which Teacher Scopes stammered a few embarrassed words and the important lawyers indulged in brilliant jocularities. Scopes left for Dayton, leaving his friends to allege that he had refused syndicate offers aggregating $150,000, had refused to be pointed out, as most celebrities long to be, to a Ziegfeld Follies audience by Cowboy Comedian Will Rogers.

Lawyers Darrow, Malone and Colby called at the Museum of Natural History to confer with Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn and to be shown by him the complete paleontological evidence of Evolution. With this evidence, the barristers declared themselves "satisfied."

In Chicago, it was announced that A Civic Biology, one of the text books containing an unBiblical account of the creation for the use of which Teacher Scopes was arrested to test the Tennessee law, had been placed on the reading list of that city's high and junior high schools.

In England, George Bernard Shaw, in the course of a debate with Hilaire Belloc, described William Jennings Bryan, leader of the prosecution in the Scopes case, as "a man with an extraordinary uplift and no discoverable brains of any kind."

The Westminster Gazette (London), editorially referring to the same uplifter, called him "too absurd for serious people to consider."

In Tulare (Calif.), the daily Register exhumed the following resolution of the school board of Lancaster, Ohio, in 1828: "You are welcome to use this school house to debate all proper questions in. But such things as railroads and telegraphs are impossible, and rank infidelity. There is nothing in the Word of God about them. If God had designed that His intelligent creatures should travel at the frightful speed of 15 miles an hour by steam, He would have foretold it by the mouth of His holy prophets. It is a device of Satan to carry the souls of the faithful down to Hell."

In Manhattan, Lady Darwin, daughter-in-law of Evolutionist Charles Darwin, asked her opinion of the Tennessee ballyhoo, replied: "I think men are beginning to make monkeys of themselves."