Photographs and other memorabilia 
of the famous trial still cover 
the walls of Robinsons’ Drug Store. 
for an entire field. We have nothing to 
fear from the vast majority of funda- 
mentalists who, like many citizens of 
Dayton, live by a doctrine that is legiti- 
mately indigenous to their area. Rather, 
we must combat the few yahoos who 
exploit the fruits of poor education for 
ready cash and larger political ends. 
It was easy to dismiss Bryan because 
he was such a fool in his political dotage. 
Mencken wrote in his sharpest prose: 
Once he had one leg in the White House 
and the nation trembled under his roars. 
Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola 
belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who 
belabor half-wits in galvanized iron taberna- 
cles behind the railroad yards. ... It is a 
tragedy, indeed, to begin life as a hero and 
to end it as* a buffoon. 
Many current creationists seem equally 
pitiable in their pronouncements: can 
anyone take seriously a link between 
Darwinism and the four evil p’s? 
But Mencken also understood the 
I 
dangers, for he wrote in his final lines: 
Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical 
though it may be in all its details. It serves 
notice on the country that Neanderthal man 
is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of 
the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and 
devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challeng- 
ing him too timorously and too late, now 
sees its courts converted into camp meet- 
ings and its Bill of Rights made a mock of 
by its sworn officers of the law. 
Do movements of intolerance ever 
start in any other way, given our perva- 
sive tendencies toward geniality? Do 
they not always begin in comedy and 
end, when successful, in carnage? Who 
did not regard Hitler as an object of 
pitiful derision after the beer hall 
putsch. And who can read the famous 
words of Protestant theologian Martin 
Niemoeller without a shudder: 
First the Nazis went after the Jews, but I 
wasn’t a Jew, so I did not react. Then they 
went after the Catholics, but I wasn’t a 
Catholic, so I didn’t object. Then they went 
after the workers, so I didn’t stand up. Then 
they went after the Protestant clergy and by 
then it was too late for anybody to stand up. 
Clarence Darrow understood the 
roots of intolerance only too well when 
he said in Dayton: 
If today you can take a thing like evolution 
and make it a crime to teach it in the public 
schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime 
to teach it in the private schools and next 
year you can make it a crime to teach it to 
the hustings or in the church. At the next 
session you may ban books and the news- 
papers. . . . Ignorance and fanaticism are 
ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding 
and gloating for more. Today it is the public 
school teachers; tomorrow the private. The 
next day the preachers and the lecturers, 
the magazines, the books, the newspapers. 
After a while. Your Honor, it is the setting 
of man against man and creed against creed 
until with flying banners and beating drums 
we are marching backward to the glorious 
ages of the sixteenth century when bigots 
lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to 
bring any intelligence and enlightenment 
and culture to the human mind. 
Ever the cynic, H.L. Mencken evalu- 
ated this impassioned plea: “The net 
effect of Clarence Darrow’s great 
speech yesterday seems to be precisely 
the same as if he had bawled it up a 
rainspout in the interior of Afghani- 
stan.” We had better proclaim the same 
message today into a downspout that 
resonates across the nation. 
Stephen Jay Gould teaches biology, ge- 
ology, and the history of science at 
Harvard University. 
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