Clarence Darrow

On the afternoon of Monday 20 July 1925, in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, the most famous trial lawyer in America called a witness for the defence who was also a lawyer for the prosecution. The witness was William Jennings Bryan, three times the Democratic candidate for President and the best-known Christian layman in the country. He agreed to testify, and he was not sworn. "No," the defence lawyer said, "I take it you will tell the truth."¹ Bryan said he had studied the Bible for about fifty years, and that everything in it should be accepted as it was given.² For two hours the lawyer took him through it: Jonah and the whale, Joshua and the sun standing still, the date of the flood, the tower of Babel, where Cain got his wife. "One miracle is just as easy to believe as another," Bryan said.³ Near the end he lost his temper. "I am simply trying to protect the word of God against the greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States."⁴

The lawyer was Clarence Darrow. He was sixty-eight, and he had spent his life defending people whom everyone else had given up on: strikers, murderers, anarchists, and now a high-school teacher charged with teaching evolution. This chapter is about the unbelief he brought to that courtroom: where it came from, what he thought it meant, and why, when he was called an agnostic in front of a hostile crowd, he took it as a compliment.

A freethinker's house

Darrow was born in Ohio in 1857 and grew up in the village of Kinsman. He did not have a faith to lose in the way most people in this book did. The best account of his childhood is a novel he published in 1904, Farmington, which draws on his boyhood but is set in Pennsylvania and given to an invented narrator, so it cannot be used to date anything.⁵ Its picture is still worth reading, because it is the one he chose to paint.

The narrator's father "passed so rapidly through all the phases of religious faith, from Methodism through Congregationalism and Universalism to Unitarianism and beyond, that he never had time to stop long enough at any one resting spot to get ordained to preach."⁶ On Sundays he shut himself in his room with his books.⁷ "My parents were not members of the church," the narrator says; "in fact, they had little belief in some of its chief articles of faith." But the children went anyway, "obliged to go," and "Sunday was a sore cross to our young lives."⁸⁹ The neighbours "had no doubt that they were different from the horses and cattle, and would live in some future world that these other animals would never reach"; the boy privately thought the horses and cattle had the better of the arrangement.¹⁰¹¹ And the grown narrator draws the moral that ran through Darrow's whole life: "our opinions on religion and politics and life are only such as have come down to us from ignorant and remote ancestors, influenced we know not how."¹² In 1929, in his fullest statement on religion, he wrote of one thing he remembered: "When I was a boy the theologians used to assert that the proof of the Divine inspiration of the Bible rested on miracles and prophecies."¹³

So the first mark on his timeline stands for an inheritance rather than a faith: a boy raised among believers by a father who doubted.

The hope he did not want to give up

There is one sentence in his writings about his own doubt, and it is unexpected. In a pamphlet of 1929 on immortality, he wrote: "I know the reluctance with which I long approached the subject and my firm determination not to give up my hope."¹⁴ The man who mocked Bryan's literalism had once wanted very much to believe that the dead live on, and had held to that hope for a long time. When he gave it up he does not say, and no open source dates it. His timeline marks the doubt but leaves it undated, because the honest record gives no date.

Destiny

In Chicago Darrow became a lawyer for causes. In 1894 he resigned his post as a railroad's attorney to defend Eugene Debs, the leader of the Pullman strike; the Supreme Court decided against Debs the next year.¹⁵¹⁶ At the funeral of his friend John Peter Altgeld, the governor of Illinois who had pardoned the surviving Haymarket anarchists, he said that the hatred that pursued Altgeld "had but one cause, the fact that he really loved his fellow man," and he gave Altgeld the name his enemies had used as an insult: "John Pardon Altgeld, who opened the prison doors and set the captive free."¹⁷¹⁸

The idea that held all his causes together was not about God. It was about blame. In 1903 he published Resist Not Evil, arguing that punishment breeds the evil it answers.¹⁹ Tried for bribery in Los Angeles in 1912, he told the jury, "I believe we are all in the hands of destiny," and "we are no more responsible for the shape of our brains than we are for the shape of our faces."²⁰²¹ If people are made by heredity and circumstance, then the language of sin and judgment, human or divine, is cruel and mistaken. This is where his unbelief came from, as much as from any argument about Genesis.

He respected the believers who lived kindly. When his friend and frequent debating opponent, the liberal theologian George Burman Foster, died in 1919, Darrow spoke at the memorial in a Chicago theatre. "If religion means creeds and dogmas, he was not a religious man. If it means specific belief in a supreme being, he was not. If it means a firm conviction of immortal life, he still was not; but if it means infinite love, gentleness, charity and kindness to all living things, George Burman Foster was the most religious man I ever knew!"²² And he explained why he could not share Foster's hope: "If faith could be bought like a suit of clothes, we might choose our faith. But it comes from some conviction; and to me, at least, it cannot be an act of will."²³ Answering the line of poetry Foster loved, "I am the captain of my soul," he said: "No man is captain of his soul; he is not even a deck hand on a rudderless ship; he is a bubble cast up for an instant on an angry sea, then lost in the air and waves, to be seen no more."²⁴

Leopold and Loeb

In August 1924 Darrow spent three days before a Chicago judge pleading for the lives of two young men, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who had confessed to a murder. His argument was his philosophy applied. "Every human being is the product of the endless heredity back of him and the infinite environment around him."²⁵ The crime, he said, must have been "inherent in his organism, and came from some ancestor, or ... came through his education and his training after he was born."²⁶ "Nature is strong and she is pitiless. She works in her own mysterious way, and we are her victims."²⁷ He told the judge that Leopold had read Nietzsche at sixteen and taken him seriously. "Your Honor, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote."²⁸²⁹

The third mark on his timeline falls here. Before 1924 his determinism was an opinion; in that courtroom it became a defence of two lives. It also gave his most powerful opponent a weapon he would use a year later.

Dayton

In 1925 Tennessee made it a crime to teach in its public schools that man had descended from a lower order of animals. That summer a young teacher, John Scopes, agreed to be tried under the law, and the trial opened at Dayton on 10 July 1925.³⁰ Bryan joined the prosecution; Darrow joined the defence. On the second day Darrow told the court why he had come: "the fundamentalists are after everybody that thinks. I know why he is here. I know he is here because ignorance and bigotry are rampant, and it is a mighty strong combination."³¹ It was, he said, "as brazen and as bold an attempt to destroy learning as was ever made in the middle ages, and the only difference is we have not provided that they shall be burned at the stake, but there is time for that, Your Honor, we have to approach these things gradually."³²

The next day the court began with a prayer, and the defence objected that daily prayers in the courtroom might prejudice the jury. The Attorney-General of Tennessee, A. T. Stewart, answered that the objection came from "the agnostic counsel for the defense" and was "foreign to the thoughts and ideas of the people who do not know anything about infidelity and care less."³³ On 15 July Darrow rose to reply. Stewart, he said, "is perfectly justified in saying that I am an agnostic, for I am, and I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure; that is all agnosticism means."³⁴ The word "infidel," he added, "has no meaning whatever," because "everybody is an infidel that does not believe in the prevailing religion."³⁵ And he asked only that his own views not be held against his client.³⁶

His timeline places his declaration here, and it is typical of him that it came as a reply rather than a manifesto. Two days later, when the judge asked whether evolution had anything to say about immortality, he said again, "as for me I am an agnostic on that. I don't claim to know. I have been looking for evidence all my life and never found it."³⁷ Stewart, for his part, paid him a compliment of his own. "Mr. Darrow says he is an agnostic. He is the greatest criminal lawyer in America today. His courtesy is noticeable, his ability is known, and it is a shame, in my mind, in the sight of a great God, that a mentality like his has strayed so far from the natural goal."³⁸

Bryan made the believers' case to the court with real feeling. "The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes, skeptical, infidels, or agnostics, or atheists."³⁹ Many in Dayton agreed with him, and it is fair to say that he was defending what he believed was the most precious thing his neighbours possessed.

The cross-examination

The examination of 20 July turned on Bryan's literalism, and it showed its limits. Asked about Joshua commanding the sun to stand still, Bryan said he believed the Bible, and also that "the earth goes around the sun," and that the Almighty "may have used language that could be understood at that time."⁴⁰ Asked about the date of the flood and other ancient civilisations, he said, "I do not think about things I don't think about," and admitted he had never studied other religions or primitive man: "I have all the information I want to live by and to die by."⁴¹⁴² He agreed that the days of creation were "not six days of twenty-four hours."⁴³ When the crowd laughed, the two men lost patience with each other. "You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion," Darrow said.⁴⁴ Bryan said the purpose of the questions was "to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible." Darrow answered: "We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States and you know it, and that is all."⁴⁵⁴⁶ The day ended with a last exchange: "I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes."⁴⁷

The next morning the judge struck Bryan's testimony from the record. Darrow then asked the court to instruct the jury to find his client guilty, so that the case could go to a higher court; Scopes was fined a hundred dollars.⁴⁸⁴⁹ Bryan never gave his closing speech. He dictated it and it was published after his death, which came the following Sunday. In it he quoted Darrow's Nietzsche passage from the Leopold plea and called it "a damnable philosophy, and yet it is the flower that blooms on the stalk of evolution."⁵⁰⁵¹ In his last conversation, a journalist reported, Bryan said, "My fight is not with the agnostics or the atheists, I am not engaged in a controversy with them."⁵² His quarrel, he meant, was with Christians who had made room for evolution.

Why I Am an Agnostic

After Dayton he debated religion often. In 1927 he argued against the historian Will Durant that man is a machine; "I cannot prove to you that man is a machine," he admitted, but "if anybody complains it ought to be the machine!"⁵³⁵⁴ In 1925 he lectured on Voltaire, and told how Voltaire had tried to save a young man executed for singing irreligious songs and damaging a crucifix.⁵⁵

On 12 March 1929, back in his native Ohio, he spoke in Memorial Hall in Columbus at a forum where a Methodist bishop, a Catholic judge and a rabbi each explained their faith; more than four thousand people crowded into a hall built for three and a half thousand.⁵⁶ His talk, printed that year as "Why I Am an Agnostic," is his fullest statement. "An Agnostic is a doubter," it begins. "I am an Agnostic as to the question of God."⁵⁷⁵⁸ To say that God made the universe, he argued, explains nothing, because "the question immediately arises: Who made God?"⁵⁹ He answered Paley's argument from design, called the Bible "a human document," and found no evidence for a soul.⁶⁰ And he closed with two sentences that sum up his life's argument. "The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom." "The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith."⁶¹⁶²

The bishop who spoke before him, Edwin Holt Hughes, made the believers' practical case, and it deserves its place beside Darrow's: "Atheism, materialism, agnosticism are not great builders of Old People's Homes, or Orphanages, or Hospitals."⁶³ In the same year Darrow published The Myth of the Soul, in which "agnostic" seems almost too mild a word: "There is, perhaps, no more striking example of the credulity of man than the wide-spread belief in immortality."⁶⁴ This was the man who had once been determined not to give up that hope.

He died in Chicago in 1938. His autobiography, published in 1932, is still in copyright and is not quoted in this chapter.⁶⁵

Did his unbelief change shape?

It hardened, but it never changed its centre. Darrow began with an inheritance, a doubting father in a churchgoing village, and he never had a faith to break with. What he gave up, slowly and reluctantly, was the hope of a life after death. What he built in its place was a philosophy of causes: that every person is the product of heredity and circumstance, and that a world which understood this would punish less and pity more. His unbelief was the other face of that pity. He took the name agnostic gladly, as "a compliment," and meant by it only that he did not pretend to know what ignorant men were sure of; by the end of his life, on the question of immortality, he was sure enough himself.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher whose writings Darrow read in his plea for Leopold and whom Bryan called damnable, has his own chapter in this book.