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2 The Contrarian and the Commoner Darrow and Bryan No scientific fact . . . can disturb religion, because facts are not in conflict with each other. —William Jennings Bryan The human being who has the least intelligence has the most faith. —Clarence Darrow Bryan and Darrow inhabited one of those peculiar moments in history when two individuals really did personify two major, antagonistic streams of thought in American society. Both had made their reputations in progressive causes, allied with the Democratic Party. But they saw different avenues to reform. Bryan believed religion informed all walks of life, including politics and science.1 Darrow saw education, including science, and modernist thought as the way of changing an unjust society and improving the lot of the underclass.2 Religion, he believed, too often was an impediment to enlightenment and just as corrupt as a capitalistic system that treated workers like little more than stockyard commodities. Both were at odds with the Gilded Age aristocracy. They sincerely sought to improve the lot of laborers, farmers, and others on the lower ends of the economy. Bryan had unshakable faith in the common man. Darrow called himself a pessimist, apparently with little faith in humanity, but he fiercely defended the rights of the common man. The two men’s differences grew more pronounced with time. History has been cruel to Bryan, the “boy orator” from Nebraska, threetime presidential candidate, and leading progressive. But he may deserve a scathing assessment. Rushing to the Scopes fray, he appears to have been motivated partly by principle, partly by vanity as he presumed to take on the the contrarian and the commoner · 31 greatest trial lawyer of the day. This from a man who had not practiced law in three decades. Inherit the Wind and journalist H. L. Mencken’s anti-eulogy are the essentials of a history that often has diminished Bryan to a patron of ignoramuses. But he was a substantial figure because he helped define the Democratic Party for the era, to the point of writing the party platform five consecutive times from 1896 to 1912. In addition to his presidential runs in 1896, 1900 and 1908, he served as secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson. Throughout his political career, Bryan pitted himself against the intellectual elite, and the grinding, dirty factory of urban America. Biographer Michael Kazin stated, “Only Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had a greater impact on politics and political culture during the era of reform that began in the mid-1890s and lasted until the early 1920s.”3 The Boston Daily Globe, in Bryan’s obituary, chronicled his national campaigns and offices, but set those against his final days, chugging about the Tennessee countryside, exhorting small-town crowds from a train.4 Similarly, the Chicago Tribune said he had turned the Tennessee trip into “a rear platform speaking tour” as he spoke to nearly 50,000 people in one day. This was the man, according to the Tribune, who dominated the national Democratic Party for nearly three decades.5 According to the Washington Post, “It would be difficult to find a man in American life today who had more staunch friends and more bitter enemies than William Jennings Bryan. . . . His voice has been heard, probably , by more people than any man on earth.”6 Darrow’s commitment to the working class came not from the campaign platform but via the bar. Before the Scopes trial, Darrow’s reputation was built largely on his advocacy for labor and opposition to the death penalty. His defense of Eugene Debs and other American Railway Union officials in 1894 was his first big labor case. Darrow resigned from the Chicago & Northwestern Railway Company to defend the workers, who were arrested for defying an injunction that ordered strikers back to work. Though Debs and the others eventually were found guilty of defying the order, Darrow’s reputation as a labor lawyer soared in the next decade. In 1902–1903, he represented striking miners before a presidentially appointed coal commission , winning an eight-hour workday, a 10 percent pay raise, and recognition of the United Mine Workers. The trial of William “Big Bill” Haywood, the secretary-treasurer of the Western Federation of Miners, was a national sensation. A bomb killed the Idaho governor at his Coeur d’Alene home after he requested federal troops to help put down a miners’ strike. In July 1907, a jury found Haywood and one other union official not guilty, and was unable to reach...

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