Excerpt: Brenda Wineapple's Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
- NYS Writers Institute
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
100 years ago in Dayton, Tennessee...
William Jennings Bryan (seated at left in the bow tie) being questioned by Clarence Darrow during the trial of the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, July 20, 1925. The court proceedings were moved outdoors that day by the judge because of the extreme heat. (Photo credit: Smithsonian Institution Archives)
In Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, Brenda Wineapple takes us into the early years of the twentieth century — years of racism, intolerance, and world war — to illuminate, through this pivotal legal showdown, a seismic period in American history.
At its heart, the Scopes “Monkey” Trial — the courtroom drama that unfolded 100 years ago in Dayton, Tenn. -- dramatized conflicts over many of the fundamental values that define America and continue to divide Americans today: the clash between science and religion, modernity and tradition, freedom and authority.
We're pleased to share this excerpt from Wineapple’s book and we hope you'll join us Wednesday for a conversation with the author, a Q&A with the audience, and a book signing. Books will be for sale.
7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 23
NYS Museum -- Huxley Theatre
222 Madison Avenue
Albany NY 12230
Free and open to the public
The conversation will be moderated by Henry M. Greenberg, shareholder at Greenberg, Traurig, past president of the New York State Bar Association, and chair of the Commission to Reimagine the Future of New York's Courts.
Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
By Brenda Wineapple
Chapter One: The Beginning of Wisdom
1858–1914
Clarence Darrow, the famous labor lawyer from Chicago, had stood tall in the public’s eye for almost two decades, and even those who didn’t much like him respected his vigorous defense of what seemed to be hopeless cases. That was until he himself was put on trial, twice, in 1912 and 1913, for attempting to bribe a juror. Though he was acquitted the first time, the second trial ended in a hung jury. His reputation seemed beyond repair. Then came the 1920s and his second act, and Clarence Darrow was over sixty years old.
Earlier, in 1887, when Darrow first arrived in Chicago, it was a city of immigrants, of Poles and Hungarians, Irish and Italians, Germans and Jews, a smoldering place of grime, noise, wind, and graft with more than a million people and still growing, a city where the smell of blood wafted from the stockyards and animals screeched in the slaughterhouses.
Chicago was perfect for Clarence Darrow, a young and ambitious lawyer from the provinces eager to put village life behind. Before Darrow arrived, Bryan had been in Chicago studying law for two unhappy years and yearned, he said, to return to the rural life he idealized. But Darrow adored the city, with its noise and energy and people living there from all over the world. America’s rail lines converged in Chicago. “Corn, hogs, wheat, iron, coal, industrialism—a new age moving across a continent by railroads,” the novelist Sherwood Anderson would recall. In his novel Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser sent his hungry heroine Carrie Meeber to Chicago, where she gazed longingly at bright merchandise she couldn’t afford in that city of Armour, Swift, McCormick, Pullman, and Marshall Field, the Chicago barons. John D. Rockefeller had endowed the new University of Chicago. “Education ran riot at Chicago,” Henry Adams said drily.
The civic leader and social reformer Jane Addams had opened the doors of her Hull House settlement in Chicago’s sweatshop district and offered hot lunches, university extension courses, and lectures, along with gymnastics and language classes, to the immigrants who had flooded into the city. Hull House residents prodded the city council into building a public bathhouse and agitated for the inspection of factories. This too was Chicago. The homeless slept on the floors of City Hall. British author H. G. Wells said Chicago was like a prospectors’ camp, and German sociologist Max Weber compared the city to a human with its skin removed.Darrow embraced all of it. For him, there was no going back.
Clarence Darrow had been raised in Kinsman, Ohio, a village about two miles east of Farmdale, in the northeastern part of the state, where he’d been born in 1857. His parents, abolitionists, helped fugitives escape slavery to find safe harbor in Canada, and every Sunday Darrow’s father would read to his brood of children from the sermons of the abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker. And it was a brood. Seven children had survived infancy, including Clarence, and together they lived in a wood-frame octagon house, a style which the phrenologist and reformer Orson Squire Fowler had been promoting as an efficient and healthful and ventilated use of space, with more light and fewer dark hallways. (P. T. Barnum had one built in Connecticut.)
By most mid-nineteenth-century measures, the Darrows were fairly eccentric. One of Darrow’s brothers was christened Channing Ellery after William Ellery Channing, the antislavery preacher; another was named Edward Everett Darrow to honor the orator, diplomat, and former Massachusetts governor, Senator Edward Everett. “Seward” was Clarence’s middle name, out of his parents’ admiration for New York senator William Seward (later Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State), who had proclaimed “there is a higher law than the Constitution”—that of inalienable human freedom.
Clarence Darrow believed that too, up to a point. Human law was made by human hands.
Copyright © 2024 by Brenda Wineapple. All rights reserved.
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