Biblical History Part 11
"Inherit the Wind"
Copied from the sermon notes of Pastor Don Elmore
February 26, 2016
Scripture Reading: Proverbs 11:29 “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.”
My wife and I saw on the cable channel, two weeks ago, on Turner Classic Movies--Inherit the Wind. I had seen it when it first came out, which was a long, long time ago--1960. That was the year that I graduated from high school. That was so long ago that I forgot almost the entire movie. I just remembered a few of the scenes.
It was a movie that told the story of the Scopes or Monkey Trial that was held in Dayton, Tennessee. I had mistakenly thought, in my own mind, it was Cleveland, Tennessee. But that’s how long ago I saw the movie. It was the trial that depicted Evolution Versus Creation in the public schools.
The movie tells the story of the Butler Law which prohibited the teaching of evolutionary theory in Tennessee’s public schools, and how the Jewish American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York sought to test the constitutionality of that law. It advertised in Tennessee newspapers for a teacher willing to challenge the law and offered to pay all his/her trial expenses.
George Rappleyea, a Rhea County businessman and evolutionist, saw the Jewish ACLU’s advertisement. He knew that such a test case would attract national attention resulting in economic opportunities for the somewhat depressed Rhea County/Dayton area. Rappleyea spoke to other community leaders about the ACLU offer, and they agreed that a trial generating national attention would benefit the economy of Rhea County.
RAPPLEYEA
What kind of name is Rappleyea, anyway? I’ve never heard of anyone else by that name. In fact, his full name was George Washington Rappleyea! His last name comes from Apple-year—you take the last letter and make it the first letter and you get Rappleyea.
He was born on July 4, 1894. Born on the Fourth of July! How much crazier can it get? In college, Rappleyea was in the Army Signal Corps which was then tied to military intelligence. He is said to have graduated with a degree in civil engineering at the age of 18. He also had a doctorate in chemistry and metallurgy but no one has been able to confirm when and where he got those degrees.
Three years before the trial, when he was 28 years-old, he is supposed to have been hired as the superintendent of the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company in Dayton. There are problems with this hiring. The company had peaked in the 1880s and 1890s, and was in a steep decline by the year 1922. They would be totally gone in just a few more years. So, why would a company that was soon going to be out of business hire a young superintendent from New York? But he was only there for a short time, indicating he was brought in specifically for a project—one that had nothing to do with coal or iron mining.
What did Rappleyea do after the trial? No one seems to know what he did for the next twelve years—his bio is a blank. But in late 1937 he worked as a representative of the shipyards in Baltimore, Maryland. He then labored as a director of the Wheeler Shipyard in New York. Neither job had anything to do with coal mining or iron mining. Nor had they anything to do with his non-confirmed degrees in chemistry or metallurgy.
By 1940, Rappleyea moved to New Orleans and became the Vice-President of Higgins Boat Industries. This company manufactured the famous Higgins landing boats for the Navy.
In 1946, he became treasurer of Marsallis Construction Company. And do you know what one of the leaders of this company did? He gained his fame as being one of the pilots who dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese.
And do you know what else this company that Rappleyea was involved with did? It accumulated weapons--including guns, tanks, ammunition, landing ships, planes and even a cache of atomic weapons which were stored in a secret, hidden place in Mississippi. This was a secret operation that was later divulged in a book written by William Bradford Hule to be a CIA backed operation to destabilize the government of Cuba!
So, the person who is admitted to be the local architect of the Scopes Monkey trial, leaves the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company after a few years and eventually becomes an officer in a company that is tied to the CIA and a plot to destabilize Cuba! Truth is stranger than fiction.
So, which story is correct? Was the Scopes Trial manufactured locally by a few Dayton cronies sitting in a coffee shop trying to drum up business for the town that was going through a tough time, or was it deliberately staged by the Feds to promote Darwinism and damage Christianity?
THE SCOPES TRIAL STORY
Rappleyea and the other town leaders summoned before them John Scopes, a 24-year-old substitute teacher and coach at the local high school who had substituted for the biology teacher during the last weeks of school. Scopes told the town leaders that, while substituting, he used a textbook entitled A Civic Biology, which contained the evolutionary theory in one chapter.
The town leaders informed Scopes of the Butler Law and asked whether he would be willing to challenge the law. Scopes agreed, and within a short time, the town constable arrested him. Afterwards, Scopes, who was never jailed, returned to the tennis game from which he had been summoned.
Wait a minute. Scopes wasn’t even a regular teacher? He was just a substitute teacher? He had substituted for biology for just two weeks. He wasn’t even teaching the subject that he studied in college and was approved to teach on his Tennessee teaching certificate?
The town leaders interrupted his game of tennis to ask him if he would mind being arrested for breaking the law in Tennessee for teaching a chapter out of a book that he was just a substitute teacher in? And he later said that he never even taught evolution. He just prepared the students for the final exam. But he agreed and was arrested and was never put in jail. He just went on his way!
Scopes was asked first if he would mind being arrested for breaking the Butler law. He was playing tennis when they interrupted his game to ask him this question. After they received his answer, he went back to finishing his game of tennis. How crazy is that?
Immediately after Scopes’ arrest, Rappleyea sent a telegram to the ACLU informing them of the arrest. Other town leaders notified all of Tennessee’s major newspapers. Reporters arrived in Dayton from all over the United States and the world. The Baltimore Sun sent H. L. Mencken, a famous columnist known for his cynicism and wit, to cover the trial. The Sun also offered to pay Scopes’ fine if he was found guilty.
H. L. MENCKEN
Now, let’s have a look at H. L. Mencken. Mencken had a long-standing animosity towards William Jennings Bryan. Mencken despised Bryan as being a demagogue, and his reporting on Bryan’s career displayed a consistent bias dating from as far back as 1904. It didn’t matter if Bryan was in favor of women suffrage, the popular election of senators, the progressive income tax and the federal reserve banks, Mencken was against him.
Bryan wasn’t that good of a Christian if he was in favor of these four anti-Biblical Jewish changes in America’s history. Christians were asleep as the Jews began their Talmudic adjustments in the former Christian nation. In fact, Darrow supported Bryan on two of his three campaigns for president!
Mencken wrote his obituary on Bryan with the words that denounced Bryan as “a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without any shame or dignity” whose every political act was motivated by “ambition—the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or failing that, to get his thumb in their eyes.”
Yikes! Common sense would tell us to be wary of accepting statements from such a biased enemy. There was a conspiracy by Mencken and other journalists to “get Bryan.” It was Mencken who persuaded the defense lawyers that they should go after Bryan, with the aim of making him look ridiculous, instead of trying to defend Scopes.
In her book, Mencken: the American Iconoclast, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers writes on page 272 that:
“Hay’s actions on behalf of free speech had made him a key figure at the ACLU. In 1925, the organization was only five years old, and was seeking its first court victory. Hays called on Mencken to help prepare their strategy. The aim of Darrow and his team was to have Scopes acquitted, but Mencken disagreed. The best way to handle the case, he argued, was to ‘convert it into a headlong assault on Bryan.’ It was he who was the international figure, ‘not that poor worm of a schoolmaster’” [Scopes].
“Mencken proposed that the lawyer put Bryan on the stand if possible, ‘to make him state his barbaric credo in plain English, and to make a monkey of him before the world.’ The team agreed, although Hays still insisted Scopes could be acquitted.”
Mencken also stereotyped the people of Dayton as being religious fanatics. While many of the population admitted to being conservative Christians, the residents disliked being described as “mountaineers”, “hillbillies”, “yaps”, “yokels”, “peasants from the hills of East Tennessee” and “morons”. A mention of the Monkey Trial today more than likely evokes Mencken rather than Scopes. His biting commentary on the Bible Belt and the trial itself was one of the highlights of the entire event. Yet, even Scopes disagreed with Mencken’s description of the people of Dayton as many of them were his friends. Scopes dismissed Mencken as “a sensationalist.”
The media’s focus on Scopes’ arrest attracted the attention of William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate, Secretary of State under President Wilson, a great orator, and fundamentalist who volunteered to prosecute the case.
When Clarence Darrow, agnostic and famous criminal attorney, learned that Bryan was involved in Scopes case, he volunteered to defend Scopes. He realized that the case was no longer about Scopes’ guilt or innocence; instead it was a battle between fundamentalism and freedom of thought. The trial began on July 10, 1925. The courtroom overflowed with spectators and reporters and radio microphones from WGN in Chicago. This event marked the first time a trial was covered by a radio broadcast.
Bryan and Darrow selected a jury that was composed of all-white, middle-aged men who were farmers, poorly educated, and mostly church goers. The jury was selected in record time. There were 22 possible candidates from which 12 were chosen. There were five Baptists, four Methodists, one Campbellite, and two whose religious affiliation was unknown.
And the Judge was John T. Raulston. He instructed the grand jury to indict Scopes, despite the meager evidence against him and the widely-reported stories questioning whether the willing defendant had ever taught evolution in the classroom. In addition, Raulston quoted the book of Genesis in a strange opening remark, barred testimony from scientists, and warned the jury not to question the merits of the law. This, of course, bears on the question of jury nullification. The point is, the trial was scripted to yield a guilty verdict.
After objections by Darrow to beginning each day’s proceedings with a prayer, the prosecution began its case and quickly established that Scopes broke the law by teaching evolution in a public classroom. The defense had prepared its case around the testimony of expert witnesses on science and evolutionary theory. The judge, however, ruled the experts’ testimony inadmissible because Darrow refused the opportunity for Bryan to question them on the stand. How could the defense refuse the prosecution their right to do this?
Most of the reporters, including H. L. Mencken, considered the trial to be over except for closing arguments, which would take place the following Monday. Assuming that the closing arguments would be uneventful, they left Dayton and missed the “battle of the century.”
On Monday, when the trial resumed, Darrow switched his tactics. Instead of experts on evolutionary theory and science, he called an expert on the Bible to the stand—prosecuting attorney, William Jennings Bryan. Assuming that he would have an opportunity to cross-examine Darrow, Bryan cooperatively took the stand. This was totally omitted in the movie.
In his questioning, Darrow sought to portray Bryan as an ignorant bigot and, in fact, got Bryan to admit that he did not interpret the Bible literally, a basic tenet of fundamentalism. At this admission, the spectators’ support swayed to Darrow’s side, and the judge halted the questioning. The court was held outside due to the intense heat and the large crowd. There was a fear that the floor could give way with the large crowd in attendance.
The next day, the judge ordered that Bryan’s testimony be stricken from the record as irrelevant to Scopes’ guilt or innocence. To prevent Bryan from giving a closing speech, Darrow requested that the jury find Scopes guilty, which it did in fewer than ten minutes of deliberation.
What? The defense requested that the jury find their client guilty! Who has ever heard of such a thing? What a bizarre trial. And the jury made their decision in less than ten minutes!
This important fact was totally left out of the movie. It was the defense’s strategy all along. Get Bryan on the stand, then request that your client be found guilty, and then Darrow does not have to be a witness on the stand. The trial was over; no closing statements either.
Bryan won the trial, but Darrow and Scopes won a moral victory. Five days after the conclusion of the trial, Bryan died in his sleep.
The judge fined Scopes $100; however, because the conviction was eventually overturned on a technicality, Scopes did not have to pay the fine. Despite the expectations of the combatants, the trial did not address the constitutionality of the Butler Act, which remained a state law in Tennessee until its repeal in 1967.
SCOPES' FIANCE
The movie also had a story of one of the local community’s leading fundamentalist preacher’s daughter (Rachel Brown) being engaged to John Scopes. She was called as a witness in the trial and her information was damaging to Scopes. She was upset by William Jennings Bryan using her as a witness after she had talked to him in private. Her engagement to Scopes also troubled her relationship with her father, one of the main antagonists against Scopes. Thus, the title of the movie: Inherit the Wind. The title was arrived at from our introductory verse.
She gave testimony that Scopes had said that he left her father’s church after her father had preached an obituary of a high school boy, Tommy Stebbins, who died after the boy’s family had left the church. The boy had drowned at the local creek and the preacher said that he would suffer eternal damnation because his family never had him baptized. The family was upset at the preacher, as was Scopes and several other people. Because of this position, Scopes left the church.
This was all Hollywood—no truth in it at all: No one was drowned; no funeral; no girl was on the witness stand; Scopes didn’t have a fiancé; Scopes didn’t leave the church because of this event and the preacher didn’t even exist. It was all made-up. It was all fiction. Just a romantic twist added to the fake story.
The people of Dayton, Tennessee were depicted in the movie as being bias, narrow-minded fundamentalists who got very upset at Scopes and Darrow. Several protest meetings were shown and there was a scene where the congregants were marching down the street and shouting at Scopes at the jail. There was even one episode where Scopes was hit by an object thrown by one of the protestors that went right through the jail window and hit the accused teacher in the head. That, too, was all made-up by Hollywood.
The movie ended with Scopes being found guilty and sentenced to pay $100. And since Darrow had urged the jury to find Scopes guilty, so they could file an appeal in the Tennessee Supreme Court, Darrow was released from his deal of appearing on the witness chair as Bryan had just done. Bryan then gave his closing statement that he had work for weeks on, as the audience was leaving. During his speech, Bryan had a heart attack and died. After everyone departed the courtroom, Darrow was the only person that remained. He took a copy of the Bible and put it together with Darwin’s evolution book, and walked out of the courtroom with the two books. The movie ended. All fake.
THE SCOPES TRIAL WAS FAKED
The movie, Inherit the Wind was a fake. So was the Scopes Trial. Look at what Wikipedia says about the Scopes Trial:
Scopes Trial
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he purposely incriminated himself so that the case could have a defendant.”
What? The trial was deliberately staged and the defendant purposely incriminated himself? The article from Wikipedia continues:
“State Representative John W. Butler, a Tennessee farmer and head of the World Christian Fundamentalist Association, lobbied state legislatures to pass anti-evolution laws. He succeeded when the Butler Act was passed in Tennessee, on March 25, 1925. Butler later stated, ‘I didn’t know anything about evolution... I’d read in the papers that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense.’ Tennessee governor Austin Peay signed the law to gain support among rural legislators, but believed the law would neither be enforced nor interfere with education in Tennessee schools. William Jennings Bryan thanked Peay enthusiastically for the bill: ‘The Christian parents of the state owe you a debt of gratitude for saving their children from the poisonous influence of an unproven hypothesis.’”
We are told the hoax was started when the Jewish ACLU offered to defend anyone accused of violating the Butler Act against teaching evolution. Well, what the ACLU did was backwards. The ACLU is not supposed to be inciting unlawfulness, it is supposed to step in to defend a person AFTER he has been arrested. Apparently, no teachers in Tennessee came forward. So, the ACLU convinced a man who was just out of college.
He was a substitute teacher who had just graduated from the University of Kentucky who had filled in for a couple of weeks for the biology teacher. He couldn’t even remember if he taught evolution or not. In fact, he told one of the reporters that he skipped the evolution chapter entirely. In other words, Scopes was innocent. Oh, now I get it. That is what Wikipedia meant, when he purposely discriminated himself.
In the movie, Inherit the Wind, Scopes (Bertram Cates) is shown being arrested in class, thrown in jail, burned in effigy, and taunted by a fire-snorting preacher. He is engaged to the daughter of the preacher who taunted him.
None of this ever happened. It was all Hollywood. Scopes was a bachelor and he didn’t even have a girlfriend, although he dated a couple of girls from Dayton. In the Scopes trial, no women participated.
And, believe it or not, in the entire eight-day trial, Scopes was never called to the stand and never testified. The whole trial was supposed to be about whether or not he taught evolution in his class, but it was never even discussed once. Scopes remained speechless during the whole eight-day trial.
The movie begins with an off-key vocal dirge on the song “Old Time Religion” repeated for numerous choruses. Drums pound ominously in the background as sinister men (clergymen and businessmen) gather to do foul deeds in the name of God. They intrude into the biology classroom where John Scopes is caught teaching evolution with enthusiasm and conviction, and there indict Scopes for breaking the law against teaching evolution. Scopes is immediately jailed and remains in jail throughout the trial.
Out of fear, Scopes sends a letter to a newspaper requesting help assuming, it would appear, that the news media can always be counted on to defend evolution. The notorious H. L. Menken comes to the rescue and enlists the aid of the famous lawyer, Clarence Darrow. And none too soon, for the Fundamentalist Christians of Dayton hate John Scopes and gather outside his jail cell window to throw things at him and chant that they are going to lynch him.
The truth of the matter was that no one visited John Scopes' classroom. Scopes was not a biology teacher. Scopes only filled in for two weeks near the end of the school year for the biology teacher, Mr. Ferguson, who was ill. Scopes didn’t even have a college degree in science (he had an undergraduate major in law at the University of Kentucky).
It does not appear that anyone outside his school knew or cared what Scopes taught in school. Scopes has always maintained that he never taught evolution during the two weeks he substituted for the biology teacher but rather simply reviewed the students for their final exam. In Sprague de Camp’s book, ‘The Great Monkey Trial,’ there is recorded a remarkable conversation between Scopes and reporter William K. Hutchinson of the International News Service which occurred during the last days of the trial; Scopes said:
“There’s something I must tell you. It’s worried me. I didn’t violate the law...I never taught that evolution lesson. I skipped it. I was doing something else the day I should have taught it, and I missed the whole lesson about Darwin and never did teach it. Those kids they put on the stand couldn’t remember what I taught them three months ago. They were coached by the lawyers.”
“Honest, I’ve been scared all through the trial that the kids might remember I missed the lesson. I was afraid they’d get on the stand and say I hadn’t taught it and then the whole trial would go blooey. If that happened they would run me out of town on a rail.”
When Hutchinson replied that that would make a great story, Scopes said “My god no! Not a word of it until the Supreme Court passes my appeal. My lawyers would kill me.” (de Camp, page 432)
Hutchinson did claim he overheard Clarence Darrow coaching the students on what to say, but even with coaching, only one of the students clearly implied that Scopes taught evolution. To this day, the press is keeping their little secret; Clarence Darrow, who was presumably supposed to defend his client from a law that forbad the teaching of evolution, apparently coached his client’s students to perjure themselves by claiming that John Scopes taught evolution when in fact he hadn’t!
This is proof the trial wasn’t just staged, it was faked. Once you start coaching witnesses to lie, you have crossed the line from staging into hoaxing. What a joke!
The lead defense attorney coaches some of Scopes' students to lie about the main theme of the trial—that Scopes was guilty because he taught them evolution. It was the defense lawyer, not the prosecution that did this. The defense lawyer is providing fake evidence that his client is guilty? Who has ever heard of such a thing? This, of course, was left out of the movie.
SCOPES
What happened to Scopes after the trial? In the movie, he was fired from his job as teacher in the Rhea County school system. But did he go on and teach somewhere else? No.
He was given a scholarship to study geology at the University of ____? Can anyone guess? The University of Chicago. Everything seems to come back to this evil city. Was this the reward that Scopes received for being the participant in this faked trial?
After graduation from the University of Chicago, he worked for Gulf Oil of South America in Venezuela for a couple of years where he married an American lady who was living there in 1930. He was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, where he was married, although he was an agnostic.
He then returned, due to health reasons, back to America in 1930. He returned to the University of Chicago for a third year of graduate study. After two years without professional employment, he took a position as a geologist with the United Gas Company, for which he studied oil reserves. He worked in Houston, Texas then in Shreveport, Louisiana, until he retired in 1963. While working in Houston, he could have met the Bushes and Cheney. He died on October 21, 1970 in Shreveport, Louisiana at the age of 70.
CLARENCE DARROW
Wait til you hear who Clarence Darrow’s genealogy comes from. Clarence Darrow’s mom was Emily Eddy. Two of the founders of the Theosophy movement met at the Eddy’s farm in Vermont. The Vermont Eddys were cousins of Clarence Darrow. The inventor of Christian Science was Mary Baker Eddy. She was from the same Eddy clan as Darrow. This should explain the success that Mrs. Eddy had of promoting her Christian Science beliefs.
Another distant cousin of Darrow was William Jennings Bryan. These both are related to the Bryan clan who lived in Connecticut in the late 1600s.
Darrow never graduated from law school. He attended the University of Michigan but never got a degree, neither undergraduate nor law. Nevertheless, it is said that he passed the bar exam and was admitted to the bar in 1878. Darrow married Jessie Ohl in 1880, whose parents were Michael Ohl and Sarah Ziegler (Jewish). So, Darrow married a Jew.
Darrow had previously been the lawyer who defended Eugene Debs in the Pullman strike of 1894; he was also involved in the Big Bill Haywood trial of 1906. In both cases, he was defending Socialists. And he also defended Leopold and Loeb, two Jewish boys who were accused of murdering a neighbor boy (also Jewish) in cold blood. Leopold was a graduate of what university? The University of Chicago which was grounded and funded by J. D. Rockefeller. All three of these cases were fakes.
A RESPONSE TO McCARTHYISM
Playwrights have used Inherit the Wind as a metaphor for censorship or thought control; the play is their response to McCarthyism. Although the basis of the play is a historical event, the Jewish playwrights are not referring only to the Scopes trial (1925), the Butler Law, and the creationism-evolutionism conflict, they are also referring to the McCarthy era (the late 1940s and 1950s). Inherit the Wind was first published and produced in 1955, when blacklisting, and sometimes, imprisonment of Americans suspected of being members of the Communist party were at their height.
Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy led an effort to identify Communists, who, he claimed, had infiltrated the federal government by the hundreds. During this period, the United States House of Representatives formed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), in front of which American citizens were subpoenaed and forced to testify against or identify Communists. Because of their influence over American values, many people from the entertainment industry were called to testify, and several who were suspected of having connections to communism were blacklisted (denied employment because of their “unacceptable” opinions).
BRYAN TAKES THE STAND
One of the strangest parts of the trial, but it wasn’t really the trial at all since the jury was absent, was on the seventh day. For this reason, the judge threw out all the testimony. Bryan took the witness stand and Darrow hurled his questions.
What! The prosecution lawyer takes the stand with the defense lawyer asking him questions, not about whether Scopes taught evolution, but questions about the Bible. Why wasn’t the jury there? Probably because it didn’t have anything to do with the case. It was all deliberately staged.
Look at the transcript taken from the trial:
Darrow--Mr. Bryan, do you believe that the first woman was Eve?
Bryan--Yes. Darrow--Do you believe she was literally made out of Adams’s rib?
Bryan--I do.
Bryan could have settled the entire case if he would have given the correct answer to this question. What if he answered Darrow, with “Yes, I believe that the Bible says that Eve was made from the rib of Adam.” Not just “I do.”
He could have gone on and said, “And, Mr. Darrow, that proves our point. Who were Eve’s parents then? Was she born from a mother who was a monkey? No. She didn’t have any parents at all, per what the Bible indicates.
Nor did Adam. He was created from the soil and received the Spirit of God that was blown into his mouth by God himself. He wasn’t born from monkey parents either, according to the Bible. In fact, the Bible states that he was placed on the earth.
Adam and Eve were a special creation. They were created from above. Jesus talks about another race who were created from below. The Bible says that Adam and Eve have God as their Father. Jesus talks about another race who has the Devil as their Father.
And let’s go on. For how long did Adam and Eve and their descendants live? The Bible tells us that most of them lived anywhere from 700 to almost 1000 years. This lasted until Noah’s flood.
Hmmm. Is that evolution or devolution, Mr. Darrow? How could it be evolution if the number of years of life has dropped off from over 900 to around 100?
Evolution is a Jewish myth that says that all men are descended from a lower form of animal. It totally ignores the creation of Almighty God and the covenants that God made and who He made them with.
Darrow--Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?
Bryan--No, sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her. Darrow--You have never found out?
Bryan--I have never tried to find.
Darrow--You have never tried to find?
Bryan--No.
Darrow--The Bible says he got one, doesn’t it? Were there other people on the earth at that time?
Bryan--I cannot say.
Darrow--You cannot say? Did that ever enter your consideration?
Bryan--Never bothered me.
Darrow--There were no others recorded, but Cain got a wife.
Bryan--That is what the Bible says.
In this series of questions and answers, Mr. Bryan could have once again destroyed Mr. Darrow’s argument with the correct answer. What if he would have answered: “Thank you, Mr. Darrow. That proves, once again, that the Bible is the correct teacher of the origin of man; not the agnostics and their perverted view of evolution.
Cain was cast out of the Garden and was afraid of whom? Who was he afraid was going to kill him? You indicated by your questioning that there was no one on the earth for him to be afraid of. But he was afraid, wasn’t he?
There were many people outside of the Garden who were not descended from Adam and Eve. Cain was afraid that he would be murdered by a person or persons of another race who lived outside of the Garden. The correct answer was that Cain’s wife was someone of the Oriental race. Cain and his wife’s children were mongrels (mixed seed).
How could Cain have built the first city if no one was there to live in it? He built a city for four people to live in (Cain, his wife and two children)? Is that scientific, Mr. Darrow?
So, you see that the Bible and Evolution teach different viewpoints on the creation of mankind. God created Adam and Eve which is directly opposed to the theory that man evolved from a lower form of animal. We are a Christian people and we do not want our children to be taught the lies that spring from Jewish myths. We want to obey our God.
Darrow went on and asked Bryan another Bible question:
Darrow--The Bible says Joshua commanded the sun to stand still for the purpose of lengthening the day, doesn’t it, and you believe it?
Bryan--I do.
Darrow--Do you believe at that time the entire sun went around the earth?
Bryan--No, I believe that the earth goes around the sun.
Darrow--Do you believe that the men who wrote it thought that the day could be lengthened or that the sun could be stopped?
Bryan--I don’t know what they thought.
Darrow--You don't know?
Bryan--I think they wrote the fact without expressing their own thoughts.
Darrow--Have you an opinion as to whether or not the men who wrote that thought…
General Stewart--I want to object, your honor; it has gone beyond the pale of any issue that could possibly be injected into this lawsuit, except by imagination. I do not think the defendant has a right to conduct the examination any further and I ask your honor to exclude it.
Bryan--It seems to me it would be too exacting to confine the defense to the facts; if they are not allowed to get away from the facts, what have they to deal with?
The Court--Mr. Bryan is willing to be examined. Go ahead.
Darrow--I read that years ago. Can you answer my question directly? If the day was lengthened by stopping either the earth or the sun, it must have been the earth?
Bryan--Well, I should say so.
Darrow-- Now, Mr. Bryan, have you ever pondered what would have happened to the earth if it had stood still?
Bryan--No. Darrow--You have not?
Bryan-- No; the God I believe in could have taken care of that, Mr. Darrow.
Darrow-- I see. Have you ever pondered what would naturally happen to the earth if it stood still suddenly?
Bryan-- No.
Darrow—Don’t you know it would have been converted into molten mass of matter?
Bryan--You testify to that when you get on the stand, I will give you a chance.
Darrow—Don’t you believe it?
Bryan--I would want to hear expert testimony on that.
Darrow--You have never investigated that subject?
Bryan--I don't think I have ever had the question asked.
Darrow--Or ever thought of it?
Bryan--I have been too busy on things that I thought were of more importance than that.
But what if Bryan had answered Darrow in this manner: This story about Joshua and his long day, is a result of a misinterpretation of the Bible. The Bible says that the sun stopped. It doesn’t say what it stopped doing. The interpreters assumed that it means that it stopped moving. But the context of the story says that the sun stopped shining.
The story shows that God had a covenant people and He was their king. Joshua was fighting five armies who were enemies of God’s people and the day was very hot, like it is here, and his men were very faint. They needed help. So, Joshua prayed. Immediately, there appeared a thunder storm that sent hail stones that killed more of the enemy than Israel had killed, and cooled off the heat so his men could fight the rest of the day. If the earth was motionless, how could there be a thunderstorm? It was a miracle.
So, Mr. Darrow it wasn’t a story about a long day…it was a story about God’s covenant people and how God intervened in a special way to help His people achieve victory over five armies of their enemies. The story indicates that God was king over just His people, not all the people of the earth. That is the reason why the Butler Law is correct. We should obey our God and not man.
The same thing could have been done with his questions that dealt with Jonah being swallowed by a big fish, how long did the Genesis account tell about creation, what or who was the serpent in the Garden, and so on.
CONCLUSION
Mencken was part of the entertainment, but the Scopes trial was from the very beginning nothing more than a big JOKE. The Jewish ACLU had announced that it would defend any teacher who was charged under the new law specially forbidding the teaching of Evolution in public schools. So, they had their man available who was an officer of the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company who found a part-time teacher who allowed as how he MIGHT have taught a science class from time to time and that he MIGHT have argued in favor of evolution in the class. Then they started the circus.
The ACLU sent a big city lawyer down to Dayton, and William Jennings Bryan showed up as his opposition lawyer. He had no official standing, and his famous speech was delivered after the trial had ended. But the town got a nice infusion of cash, the teacher’s fine was eventually dropped due to a technicality, and everybody shook hands and went home.
Then, during the efforts to weed out Communist agents in the United States government after World War II, a pair of Jewish Leftists in New York, wrote a fictionalized play about the trial for making supporters of traditional America value look evil. The play was quickly picked up by Jewish Leftists in Hollywood and turned it into a movie—Inherit the Wind.
It having been 35 years since the actual Scopes trial, no one could recall any of the details linking anything about Mencken, and everything that any modern American knows, or thinks they know, about the trial comes from the movie. Jewish Leftists trot the movie out from time to time as propaganda. The entire trial was faked. Fake news was alive and well in 1925.
Some of the major reasons this was a fake trial:
- It was planned by Rappleyea, who afterwards became engaged with the CIA and its involvement with Cuba.
- The Jewish ACLU was the activator of the case. They asked who wanted to be arrested for the case, instead of being a defendant for the person arrested.
- The jury was picked in record time. It didn’t matter to either side who was on the jury. The jury took less than ten minutes to give their decision.
- The main reporter, Mencken, was very antagonistic toward Bryan. He convinced the defense to “get Bryan” and lose the case and then appeal the decision to the Tennessee Supreme Court.
- Darrow was related to Bryan. Darrow was also related to the Eddy clan of Christian Science fame. His wife was Jewish and he was a part of other fake trials.
- Bryan knew Scopes. He gave Scopes' high school graduation speech.
- Scopes admitted that he never taught the evolution chapter. In fact, he was a substitute teacher and only taught the science class for two weeks. His students were pressured by Darrow to say that Scopes taught them evolution. Only one student testified to the affirmative.
- Scopes' fiancé, his fiancé’s father, the rebel-rousing townspeople, Scopes being hit in the face by a thrown object in the jailhouse, Scopes' effigy being burnt, Scopes being in jail, etc. were all made-up, fictitious Hollywood drama.
- The most important day of the trial, the seventh day, was held outside the courtroom because of the intense heat and the danger of the floor collapsing with the large number of people attending. The strangest thing was the jury was absent. The entire seventh day proceedings were thrown out.
- On the eight day, Darrow told the court that his client was guilty and that immediately ended the trial. Darrow would not have to take the stand. Bryan’s ending conclusion speech was also canceled. How bizarre is that?
The following year, the case was appealed to the Tennessee State Supreme Court where the court rejected the arguments of appeal, but overturned the conviction on a technicality--the judge should not have decided upon the fine, the jury should have. Judges, under law, could not set fines at that time more than $50, and the Butler Act called for a fine of at least $100.
Despite the turnover, the Attorney General decided not to retry this bizarre case. In 1967, some 42 years later, the state legislature repealed the Butler Act. In 1968 the United States Supreme Court ruled that such acts were unconstitutional on separation of church and state grounds.
Blessed be the LORD God of Israel.
