The Legendary Fight for Free Speech in Jarrett’s Trial of the Century

The Trial of the Century
By Gregg Jarrett with Don Yaeger
(Threshold Editions, 304 pages, $30)

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Americans today live in a country where there are constant news stories of the American Left — on college campuses, in woke corporations, and more — shutting down free speech. (READ MORE: Ireland Crushes Free Speech)

A recent Associated Press story headlined:

Experts say attacks on free speech are rising across the U.S. 

In Idaho, an art exhibit was censored and teens were told they couldn’t testify in some legislative hearings. In Washington state, a lawmaker proposed a hotline so the government could track offensively biased statements, as well as hate crimes. In Florida, bloggers are fighting a bill that would force them to register with the state if they write posts criticizing public officials.

Then there was this story in the New York Post:

Student claims he was sent home over shirt that said ‘there are only two genders’

The Post reported:

A 12-year-old boy from Massachusetts claimed he was sent home from school a few weeks ago for wearing a t-shirt that declared that there are “only two genders,” which he was told made other students feel “unsafe.”

Liam Morrison, a seventh grader at John T. Nichols Jr. Middle School in Middleborough, recounted the incident during a Middleborough School Committee meeting on April 13 — and his fiery speech went viral Sunday after being picked up by the popular right-wing Twitter account Libs of TikTok.

Morrison said he was pulled from gym class on March 21 and met with school officials, who told him during what he described as an “uncomfortable talk” that people were complaining about the message on his shirt, which they said made them feel “unsafe.”

All of this (and oh-so-much more!) comes to mind when reading Fox News legal and political analyst Gregg Jarrett’s new bestseller The Trial of the Century. (He is also the author of two other New York Times bestsellers, Witch Hunt and The Russian Hoax.)

Gregg, who wrote the book with Don Yaeger, another New York Times bestselling author, tells the gripping story of the famous free-speech showdown in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. 

The legendary story revolved around teacher John Scopes — and his right to teach evolution in school. The lawyers grappling over this issue were both, in their own right, superstars of the day.

On the side of opposing the teaching of evolution was William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was, without doubt, one of the most prominent men in America. He had been elected to Congress from Nebraska as what today would be seen as a progressive Democrat. He supported using the federal government to aid farmers, regulate railroads, and — sound familiar? — limit the power of corporations. Elizabeth Warren would have loved him. And certainly Democrats of the day did. 

Bryan had been nominated for president by Democrats not once but three times — 1896, 1900, and 1908 — losing all three times. When Democrats managed to elect Woodrow Wilson as president in 1912, Wilson promptly made Bryan his secretary of state. Resigning in 1915 over a disagreement on American policy in the already ongoing World War I, Bryan gradually shifted his interests from politics to religion, evolving as a serious religious fundamentalist.

It was in that capacity that Bryan began to lead the fight against teaching evolution in schools. It was a fight seen in the day as one between the English biologist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution — with Darwin believing that man was descended from a common ancestor, the latter quickly stereotyped as a monkey — versus those who believed in the biblical account of creation.

All this set the stage for what remains today one of the most famous trials over free speech in American history.

Tennessee had passed a law banning the teaching of evolution, which Bryan enthusiastically supported. When a young teacher named John Scopes began teaching biology in a Dayton, Tennessee, public school, he violated the law by teaching evolution.

To Scopes’ defense — the essence of this book — came the legendary American lawyer Clarence Darrow. The trial quickly evolved into a nationally focused showdown between the fundamentalist Bryan and Darrow, the defender of free speech.

In Jarrett’s words, on one side was: 

Clarence Darrow, the most brilliant lawyer in America, a celebrated defended of free speech, and the underdog.

In the other stood William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate who shattered the calmness and the complacency of the Gilded Age with his soaring rhetoric championing farmers, evangelical Christians, and many of those left behind by the rise of industrial capitalism.

As the two began to face off, with Bryan on the stand and Darrow questioning him, Jarrett writes:

[Dudley Field Malone, one of Darrow’s co-counsels] turned to John Scopes, the teacher at the center of this storm, and let down his stuffy persona to comment, “Hell is going to pop now.”

So crowded was the courtroom that the judge insisted on moving the trial outside for safety reasons. This in turn brought “thousands of people sitting on bleachers, straining to hear to every word and scrambling for the shade offered by a few maple and oak trees.”

In this setting unfolded a drama for the ages.

Jarrett describes his first time coming across this story, saying that he was “barely a teenager” when he “plucked a single volume off my father’s densely packed bookshelf” — his dad himself a lawyer. The book was Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense.

What captured the young Jarrett’s attention was Darrow’s:

passion for the law, his abiding sense of justice, and his unyielding commitment to civil liberties and intellectual freedoms…. Over time, he evolved into a heroic figure — a fearless iconoclast who despaired of the dangers of conformity, social control, and government intrusion. He dared to challenge traditional beliefs and defend controversial ideas when others would shy away. He upheld the right to individualism and self-determination.

What Darrow was standing up for is exactly what not enough American elites are standing up for today. This isn’t about children’s books with inappropriate sexual material being taught to 5-year-olds. This is about colleges, corporations, and more institutions in American society ensuring the open discussion, Darrow-style, of the ideas of the day. 

The story was made into a 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, starring American superstar actors in a fictionalized telling of the Scopes trial. Spencer Tracy played the Darrow role, with Fredric March in the Bryan role. The film was so memorable — it was nominated for four Oscars and numerous other film awards — that it has since been remade for television three different times.

Page by page, Jarrett details the intricacies of the Scopes trial in the kind of masterful way that could perhaps only be done by someone who is both a writer and a lawyer.

There is no spoiler alert in saying of this most famous trial that Darrow lost to Bryan. 

Yet, as Jarrett writes:

Yes, Clarence Darrow lost the trial. But he won the more important and enduring argument against imposing limits that suffocate intellectual independence, frustrate progress, and enervate the birth of new ideas. The human mind is an open canvas of possibilities. We should be free to paint it with our own brushstrokes.

In its day, the Scopes Monkey Trial was widely regarded as the Trial of the Century. It remains so not for the obsessive worldwide attention it garnered but because it advanced the indispensable proposition that no one should be told how to think.

Exactly.

It is startlingly true that too many Americans are not learning basic American history.

And the answer to that is for young Americans — and their seniors — to be reading books exactly like Gregg Jarrett and Don Yaeger’s Trial of the Century.

The post The Legendary Fight for Free Speech in Jarrett’s <i>Trial of the Century</i> appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.