Monkey Business

This place, this evidence room, stores the facts that matter, and matters of fact. It's all that stands between a reasonable doubt in the chaos of ignorance. It lies in a time between now and then. The sign on the door reads the last archive step across the threshold to the little town of Dayton, Tennessee, population a hair under two thousand in the year nineteen hundred and twenty five.

There's an old guy playing the banjo. All the folklan Piana be bror, grateful house can be, and they know the Bible be dif water if rod is the start of what came to be known as the Monkey Trial. It's one of the most famous trials in American history. The defendant, John T. Scoops, a high school teacher, charged with the crime a misdemeanor of teaching the theory of evolution. A lot of people think the arguments in this trial

marked a triumph of reason over superstition. Some of those people, okay, I confess, for a long time, I was one of them. Some of those people only really knew about this trial from a movie made about it in nineteen sixty called Inherit the Wind. It starred Spencer Tracy as the heroic

lawyer for the defense fanaticism. An ignorance is forever busy and needs feeding, And soon, your honor, we'll be marching backward through the lawyer sages about sixteenth century, when bigots burned a man who dat being enlightenment an intelligence to the human mind. Inherit the Wind began as a play written in nineteen fifty five. The playwrights weren't really interested in the nineteen twenties. They were interested in the nineteen

fifties and the political persecution of their day. McCarthyism. Me, I'm a historian, I'm interested in now the twenty twenties and the dilemmas of our day. So when I look at the nineteen twenties, it looks to me as if what was on trial was skepticism itself and the role of doubt and a democracy. We're going to do our own re enactment. I don't know, call it disinherit the wind. One thing before we get started that you really need to know. The Scopes Trial, the Monkey trial. It was

a show trial. A platform had been built for movie cameras and seeding for hundreds of spectators. Two hundred reporters were there too. Telegraph wires had been laid across the floor for speedy reporting. Hl Linklin, the themed newspaperman from the Baltimore Sun, who was there too, writing with his celebrated wit, the two parties are the farther marked poles of difference and leaning out into space, and one of them is right at all and the other is wrong Altogether.

Microphones and speakers had been installed so that all the people assembled outside could hear the goings on. Also this trial, not for nothing was it called the Trial of the century. Who was the very first American trial ever broadcast live on the radio. Who was a miracle of modern science. We're like moon men here, one of the radio announcers said,

we're the radio guys from outer space. Back in nineteen twenty five, the power of radio transmitters wasn't yet regulated, and the station broadcasting the Scoop's trial had a signal so strong it could be heard by half the country. This is WGN Chicago, the radio broadcast of the Chicago Tribune WGN, World's greatest newspaper. I'm Jill Lapour. Welcome to the second season of The Last Archive, the World's Greatest

podcast w GP. Where the show about how we know what we know and why it seems lately as if we don't know anything at all, and geez, maybe we never did. Last season was about truth and who killed it? Oh, who done it? We lined up the usual suspects, Facebook, Donald Trump, postmodernism. In the end, I argued that this case was like murder on the Orient Express. Everyone really had a hand in the killing. This season, we've got

a new case. I'm going to go back over the same decades, the last hundred years and trace the instability of knowledge. Not so much who killed truth, but what fed doubt. This season is about a kind of questioning that began with skepticism and ended up a century later with people finding it hard to believe anything. How did

that happen? In this season of the last Archive, we watch a shadow grow and grow, the long, dark shadow of doubt, the until Dayton came a man with his new ideas, old brand and heat that we came from monkeys long ago. What if he king help me? Leading with the gold found only grief? Harley would not let their all really done go. Salesman and quacks and all kinds of people who were just curious came from all over the country to Dayton, setting up shop for the trial,

lining the streets. Some preached, some performed with trained monkeys. The New York Times filed this report. Whatever the deep significance of the trial, if it has any, there is no doubt that it has attracted some of the world's champion freaks. Three days before the trial, William Jennings Bryant, attorney for the prosecution, arrived by train. A crowd of thousands greeted him at the station. Waving to the throngs, Brian doffed his hat a pith helmet to protect his

bald head from the sun. He looked as if he were on safari. Clarence Darrow, attorney for the defense, arrived two days later. John Scopes, the defendant, met Darrow at the train station, but hardly anyone else was there except a few reporters and photographers. Very little of this was about Scopes, or even about the teaching of evolution, at least in one high school classroom in Tennessee. The trial was a test case engineered by the ACLU. States around

the country had been discouraging the teaching of evolution. The Tennessee legislature had been the first to ban it. The ACLU wanted to expose how that band violated freedom of speech. Scopes himself was all but a bystander. He never took the stand in our reenactment. I'll hardly have reason to mention him again. The trial was set to open on a Friday, nine am. Sharp farmers and overalls from the

hillside farms. Silent, gaunt men. They occupied every seat and stood in the aisles and around the walls of the room. By eight forty five, every seat in the courtroom was filled. At home all over the country, Americans switched on their radios. That's something to hold in your mind this season of doubt. Learning about the world in our own houses instead of going out into it to see things for ourselves. Elephant

in the room here. We made this season of the Last Dark on lockdown during a pandemic year, stuck at home for people who weren't health workers or teachers or other essential workers. Most of what a lot of us learned about the world this year we learned from inside our homes, online on the internet. All this isolation and remoteness got me really interested in the work of mediation, a world mediated by technology. Mediation that's what media does,

That's what the word means. And learning about the world that way remotely turned out to be a big part of how I came to understand the history of doubt. We know what it's like now to check Twitter on your phone, to see the world so far away but feel that it's so close. Who was it like in nineteen twenty five to turn on the radio in your kitchen and hear a trial beaming in from Dayton, Tennessee. Gentleman and mister Attorney General, I am now calling for

trial the State at Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes. Scopes had been charged with violating a law that stipulated, well, just listen to it. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee that it shall be unlawful for any teacher to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach him stare that man has descended from a lower order of animals. So hold on.

This is tricky. Under the terms of Tennessee law, the prosecution didn't have to prove that Scopes had taught evolution. Scopes never denied that he had. The prosecution had to prove that the theory of evolution contradicts the Bible. Evolution is not truth, Brian planned to say on behalf of the prosecution. It is merely a hypothesis. It's millions of guesses strung together. But the Bible Brian believed was true, not just parables, literally true. Somehow this claim would have

to be evaluated by a jury. One way to think about the modern era is that it dethroned God as the arbiter of truth and erected a new God. Reason the fact replaced the mystery that anyway is what the scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment tried to do, but always

with a struggle, a struggle that never ended. Galileo said the earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way around, and the Catholic Church accused him of heresy, who was tried and convicted and spent the rest of his life under house arrest for doubting the truth of religion. To a lot of people, the Scope's trial was a kind of retrial of Galileo, except they thought, surely this time the reasonable person would not be sentenced and enlightenment

would prevail. That's a lot of pressure to put on a misdemeanor case in a little town in Tennessee. Names were drawn from a hat. Both the prosecution and the defense could object to any three jurors without cause, but no more. When I listened to this part of the trial, I imagine Americans at home listening, wondering to themselves, would I be qualified to sit on that jury? Could I

decide this case fairly? Picture Americans who teach Sunday school or said the prayers every night, or Americans who didn't believe in any God, who are atheists or agnostics, whatever anyone's views on religion. In a democracy, everyone's supposed to be able to set all that aside to sit on a jury, abide by the rules of evidence, an issue

a verdict, decide what's true and what's not true. But that depends on the jury and Clarence Darrow, attorney for the defense, happened to be an expert on jury selection. The more a lawyer knows of life, human nature, psychology, and the reactions of the human emotions, the better he is equipped for the subtle selection of his so called twelve men, good and true. Darrow a strategy for picking

the perfect jury. If a Presbyterian enters the jury box and carefully rolls up his umbrella and calmly and critically sits down, let him go, he is as called as the grave. Darrow was the most famous trial lawyer in the country from the big city of Chicago. Attorney for the damned, he was called the hero to the poor, the oppressed, the beleaguered, and the falsely accused. He'd played a role in some two thousand trials. In more than

a third, he'd been paid nothing. As far as picking a jury goes, the trick, Darrow always said was to only seat a man so likely to identify with your client that really he is trying himself. In Dayton, the court brought in a jury pool of one hundred men, white men. None of these men had much in common with a high school biology teacher. They were mainly farmers. Some couldn't read. The first man stood up to be question hl Menkin, the slick city reporter from Baltimore, picked

up his pen and licked it with spit. Listen carefully and you can hear the first volley in a culture war that is still reverberating today. And it'll be no them more possible in this Christian valley to get a jury. I'm prejudiced to gain scopes, and we'll be possible in wall Street to get a jury. I'm prejudiced against Bolshek. Darrow did his best to pull together a fair jury. By late afternoon, twelve men had been seated. They were sworn,

and then court adjourned until Monday morning. Overhead airplanes, little prop planes flew north to deliver footage of the proceedings to cinemas to be shown as newsreels over the weekend. Sunday, though, was hardly a day of rest. The judge went to church. He and his wife sat in the front pew incredibly and do you and me scandalously. William Jennings Bryan, attorney for the prosecution, delivered the sermon, and he preached about

the case. The attorneys for the defense charged that our objection to expert testimony is an attempt to evade the issue. William Jennings Bryan, Nebraska born a populist known as the Great Commoner. He wasn't much of a lawyer, he hadn't practiced law for more than thirty years at this point. Instead, he joined the prosecution's team because he was a celebrity. Bryan was a politician, a long time presidential contender, a

Democrat opposed to conservative Republican economic policy. He was also a fire and brimstone lay preacher, known as mister Fundamentalist. He'd led a national campaign against the teaching of evolution. He once told a political cartoonist, you should represent me as using a double barreled shotgun, fixing one barrel at the elephant as he tries to enter the treasury, and another at Darwinism the monkey as he tries to enter the school room. Brian opposed to Republicanism and to Darwinism.

Monday morning, the Scopes trial resumed in that courtroom in Tennessee. Just about everyone sided with Brian. They were pro bible and anti evolution. The racic issues of the case indeed, seemed to be a very little disgust at Dayton. What interest to everyone is its mere strategy by what device? Precisely well Brian Trimmell Clarence Darrow. For no one here seems to doubt that Brian railway, that is, if about goes to a fashion. But remember, the audience for this

trial wasn't only that courtroom in Dayton. It was also the millions of Americans tuning it at home. To that national audience. Darrow was making a point about the place of science in the American mind. Early on he delivered a speech that kept everyone listening in glued to their radios. Here we find today 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 Darrow knew he had two audiences, the whole country and that jury of

twelve men. He walked a tight rope, mostly though he appealed to the nation, the State of Tennessee, under an honest and fair interpretation of the Constitution, has no more right to teach the Bible as the divine book than that the Quran is one the book of Mormons, or the Book of Confucius, or the Buddha, or the Essays of Emerson, or any one of the ten thousand books to which human souls have gone for consolation and aid

in their troubles. Tennessee's constitution specifically protected religious freedom in language that borrowed very heavily from Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom, which had been written by Thomas Jefferson. Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free, no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship place or ministry whatsoever. So when Darrow said Tennessee couldn't require anyone to teach

the Bible as a divine book, he had constitutional cause. Obviously, the Tennessee legislature disagreed with them, or else they wouldn't have passed that evolution law. So Darrow had to go a lot further. And here he was talking to the jury. What is the Bible. Well, it is a book primarily of religion and morals. It is not a book of science, never was and was never meant to be. It is not a textbook or a text on chemistry. Is not a work on evolution that was a mystery, is not

a work on astronomy. The man who looked out at the universe and studied the heavens had no thought but that the Earth was the center of the universe. But we know better than that. They thought the Sun went around the Earth and gave us light and gave us night. He's orating like a prophet straight out of the King James Bible. We know better. I doubt if there is a person in Tennessee who does not know better. They

told us the best they knew. But man finds out what he can and yearns to know more and supplements his knowledge with hope and faith. Darrow talked about what was actually in the Bible, the story of Adam and Eve, and how much people disagreed about what the Bible even said. Different religions, different sects, there were so many just in Dayton. Then finally he got to scopes his crime, which he

said was no crime at all. He taught the doctrine of evolution, which is taught by every believed by every scientific man on earth. You could hear over the radio the sound of people trying to fan themselves like so many bird wings flapping. Inside the courtroom, the temperature had risen to one hundred degrees fahrenheit. People's pants and skirts stuck to their seats, but they were glued there anyway.

By Darrell's speech, he was two hours into it. Your Honor knows the fires that have been lighted in America to kindle religious bigotry and hate. You know that there is no suspicion which possesses the minds of men like bigotry and ignorance and hatred. Here's the part, the big part where Darrows is the lines that Spencer Tracy would later re enact and inherit the wind. The movie script, at least here is straight from the trial transcript. And okay,

it is a great speech, 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 faggots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. I'm all in. I suspect you're all in. Maybe the people listening to the radio in the big cities we're all into. But the audience in Dayton was not caught

his adjourn until nine tomorrow morning. Darrow's speech rose like a wind and ended like a flourish abulance. The very judge on a bench began to look uneasy, the Morons and the audience when it was over. Simply hisstor Mancin was a mean bastard. He hated that crowd into to see. He thought they were all idiots. He was just one voice. Though that day, telegraph operators wired more than two hundred

thousand words from Dayton, setting a record. During the whole time of Darrel's delivery, the old Mountebank Ryan sat tackle it's a done move. There is, of course no reason why it should have shaken him. He has hill that is locked up in his pen, and he knows it. If you get your history only from hl Mankin, then Clarence Darrow was brilliant, and William Jennings Bryan was a bigot. Mankin comes through loud and clear, but it can be

hard to hear everyone else. That's why we're here in the last archive to turn up the volume on the quieter voices. People have to believe something before they out it. Believe in gods or one God, or Karma, or the Torah or the Koran or the Bible. People believe, then some people began to doubt belief and out are partners engaged in an endless ancient dance. Skepticism itself was an

intellectual movement in ancient Greece. Every time a doubter is on trial, that trial has as its precedent one that took place more than two thousand years ago in Athens. Socrates is a doer of evil and corruptor of the youth. And he does not believe in the gods of the state, and he believes in other new divinities of his own. Socrates, a philosopher, a teacher, had stood accused of doubt because

he had asked questions about the gods. He waged his own defense, and if convicted by the jury hundreds of Athenians, he faced death. I should like to know in what I am affirmed to corrupt the young. I do not as yet understand whether you affirm that I teach others to acknowledge some god, but they are not the same gods which the city recognizes. Or do you mean to say that I am a teacher of atheism? I mean that you are a complete atheist. Socrates argued that the

prosecutor made a common error. He'd mistaken belief for knowledge. To believe is to know little. To doubt, though, is to know even less, except to have one very important bit of knowledge, knowledge that you don't know much. By way of illustration, Socrates told the court the story about meeting a man with a reputation for wisdom. When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought

wise by many, and wiser still by himself. So I left them, saying to myself as I went away, well, although I do not suppose that either of knows anything really beautiful or good, I am better off than he, for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. This, Socrates insisted, was what the charges against him really came down to. It's not that he didn't believe in the divinity of

the sun or the moon. It's that he had demonstrated that people who are believed to be wise were ignorant, and they hated him for it. The jury found Socrates guilty of impiety and corrupting the young, and condemned him to death. In response, he imagined an afterlife in which he could further his inquiries by asking questions of the dead. I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge. For in that world they do not put a man to death for this. To doubt, to

really doubt, is to admit what you don't know. In the case of Socrates, it's to admit it so holy and so honestly that you're willing to die for it. Centuries later, in progressive era America, Socrates had become something of a cult hero, a symbol of the defensive free inquiry. Even Time magazine compared the Scopes trial to the trial of Socrates. But in Dayton, Tennessee in nineteen twenty five, Clarence Darrow didn't say things like I neither know nor

think that I know. He knew what he knew, and he sought to defend his client the ordinary way by casting doubt about the case made by the prosecution, led by William Jennings. Bryan Darrow often did this by mocking Brian, So did HL Lincoln, who called Brian an old buzzard. It is a tragedy indeed, to begin life as a hero and ended as before well, that no one laughing at him underestimate the magic clip eyes in his black

malignant eye is fraid stell eloquent woice. He can shake him and find him his pardon, Ramises has now the round of on us can shaken and fine mouth, and as desperate lager toward of the charge. On Thursday, the fifth day of the trial, Brian spoke at length for the first time, in order to object to the defense's motion to bring in expert witnesses, scientists who could argue for the scientific consensus about the theory of evolution. It is, I think apparent to all that we have now reached

the heart of this case. To permit an expert to testify upon this issue would be to substitute trial by experts for trial by jury, and to announce to the world your honor's belief that this jury is too stupid to determine a simple question of fact. There is not a scientist in all the world who can trace one single species to any other, and yet they call us ignoramuses and bigots because we do not throw away our Bible. The one beauty about the Word of God is it

does not take an expert to understand it. Brian pointed out that the people of Tennessee had elected their legislature to enact their will. The people, he said, get to decide what's taught in schools, not experts. An expert cannot be permitted to come in here and try to defeat the enforcement of a law by testifying that it is a bad law. The place to prove that or teach that was to the legislature. On Friday, one week into the trial, the judge sustained Brian's objections. The evidence of

experts would shed no light on the issues. Therefore, the court is content to sustain the motion to exclude the expert testimony. I do not understand why every suggestion of the prosecution to meet with an endless waste of time and a bare suggestion of anything that is perfectly competent on our part should be immediately overrule. I hope you do not mean to reflect upon the cult. Well, your honor has the right to hope, I have the right to do something else. Perhaps the judge would sit Daryl

for contempt. Darrel would apologize. Meanwhile, the two prize fighters went back to their corners. This is how a show trial works. Trials are imperfect means of reaching the truth. But this show trial was also a culture war, and a culture war really never arrives at the truth because its combatants are only interested in the glory of the skirmish. They like to hear the sound of their own voices on the radio. Every move, every maneuver in a culture

war makes things worse. The next bout was slated to begin on Monday morning. On Saturday, Darrow, deprived of his team of experts scientists, told a friend that he decided he needed only one witness to prove his case. I'm going to put a Bible expert on the stand about day after tomorrow, greatest in the world. He thinks a master stroke. Never mind about the master stuff, and don't

talk so loud. Too many reporters around here. If Daryl couldn't bring in scientists to prove the truth of doubt, he could bring in a believer to prove the error of faith, the defense called to the stand. It's surprise, witness William Jennings Bryan, the old buzzard himself. That's possidence.

On Monday morning, the beginning of the second week of the Scopes trial, the courthouse was so crowded it was feared the floor might collapse, so the judge moved the trial outdoors to the lawn under a giant tent, and then Darrow announced that he planned to call Brian to the stand as a witness for the defense. Has word spread, the crowd grew from five hundred to more than three thousand. Where do you want me to sit, mister Brian? You are not objecting to going on the stand, not at all.

Do you want, mister Brian swan? No? I can make an affirmation, I can say, so help me God, I will tell the truth. No, I take it. You will tell the truth, mister Brian. You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven't you, mister Brian, Yes, sir, I have tried to. I have studied the Bible for about fifty years. Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted? I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there. Some of

the Bible is given illustratively. For instance, ye are the salt of the earth. I would not insist that a man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saying God's people. Darrow asked Brian whether the whale really swallowed Jonah that sort of thing he asked him when the flood happened, and whether it really wiped out every living thing except for Noah and his wife and the

animals on his arc. Mainly, Brian said he didn't know anything but what was in the Bible, and he wasn't curious about anything else either. Mister Bryan's complete lack of interest in many of the things closely connected with such religious questions as he had been supporting for many years, was strikingly shown again and again by mister Darrow. Okay, so Brian didn't have a lot of intellectual curiosity, but mocking him the way a lot of newspaper reporters did

the way Darrow did was also wildly unfair. It misses most of what's worth knowing here. Long before William Jennings. Bryan became famous as a fundamentalist long before the Scopes trial. He'd been a reformer, a defender of the poor. Even Darrow had supported him. Back then, Brian had nearly been elected president. He'd run three times. Also, he didn't hate science. He hated Darwinism, but he reserved a special censure for a particular kind of Darwinism, Social Darwinism, the idea that

among humans it's right that only the fit survived. In a speech he gave countless times, Brian explained his position on evolution. I object to Darwinian theory because I fear we shall lose the consciousness of God's presence in our daily life if we must accept the theory that through all the ages, no spiritual force has touched the life of a man and shaped the destiny of nations. But

there is another objection. The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate, the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak. In other words, social Darwinism implied that the poor were unfit and that they deserved to be poor. In a speech called the menace of Darwinism. Brian laid out his support for a raft of progressive reforms that aim to check the very idea

that only the fittest should survive. Pure food laws have become necessary to keep manufacturers from poisoning their customers. Child labor laws have become necessary to keep employers from dwarfing the bodies, minds, and souls of children. That by ology textbook that Scopes used in his classroom, its discussion of evolution also happened to endorse the forced sterilization of people like epileptics, the mentally ill, and those who were called

feeble minded. If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this. But we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places, and in various ways preventing inner marriage and the possibility of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. That's textbook social

Darwinism eugenics. In nineteen twenty one, when Kentucky's Baptist Board of Missions called for a law to ban the teaching of evolution, Brian decided to wage a national crusade he saw in secular modernity the end of Christian sympathy, compassion, and charity. Four years later, in nineteen twenty five, Brian's crusade brought in to the Scoop's trial, where he squared off against Clarence Darrow. Mister Brian, because you tell me how old the earth is, no, sir, I couldn't. The

Tennessee Attorney General leapt from his chair and interrupted. He begged for this to stop. What is the purpose of all of this? But Brian was delighted to have the chance to answer for both the court and the jury and the listeners across the country tuned into their radios. The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible. And I am perfectly willing that the world shall know that these gentlemen have no other purpose

than ridiculing every Christian who believes in the Bible. We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramus is from controlling the education of the United States. And you know it. I am simply trying to protect the Word of God against the greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States. I want the papers to know that I am not afraid to get on the stand in front of him and let him do his worst. I want the world

to know the judge let it go on. The audience sweated and swatted it flies, The sun bore down, the telegraph machines clattered. Daryl kept questioning Brian, how long had it taken God to create the earth and everything in it? Seven days? Have you any idea of the length of these periods? No, I don't. Do you think the sun was made on the fourth day? Yes? And they had an evening and morning without the sun. I am simply saying it is a period. They had an evening in

mourning for four periods without the sun. Do you think I believe in creation as they're told? And if I'm not able to explain it, I will accept it. Was every thing in the Bible true? Or was it worth doubting? Or had Darrow gone far past doubting the Bible and then to mocking people who believe it? The only purpose mister Darrow has is to slur the Bible. I object

to your statement. I am examining your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes fool ideas like if in the beginning there was only Adam and Eve and they had two sons, where did Kane find a mate? Did you ever discover where Kane got his wife? No, sir, I leave the agnostics to hunt for her. There were no others recorded, but Kane got a wife. That is what the Bible says. The judge asked the jury to ignore all of Brian's testimony. Darrow declined to make a

closing argument. What else was there to say? That meant that Brian couldn't make one either. The jury then took nine minutes to deliberate. He found Scopes guilty of a misdemeanor under state law. The judge find him one hundred dollars. Narah had lost his case. It was lost long before

he came to date. But it seemed to me that he has never last performed a great public service by finding it to a finish and in a perfectly serious way, it served notice on the country and at neanderthall Man is organizing in these far alarmed back quarters of the land, led by a fanatic, a rate of sense and avoid of conscience. It had been and was always meant to be a show trial. Even though Daryl lost. The trial did what the aco you wanted. It got progressives worried

about fundamentalists, But what had the trial actually shown? That a gulf was growing between believers and skeptics. That gulf has grown wider since contempt, though, is not progress or enlightenment or a march towards some glorious, tolerant new world. It's just a dumb ass culture war. You may find on you be lad. It will only bring you bread or a house that build on sandy your nefa. And wherever you may turn there the life on you will learn that the old read it done bed after all.

Five days after the close of the Scoop's trial, William Jennings Bryan died in his sleep. It was as if fending off Clarence Darrow had sapped the very life out of him. All around the country people tried to make sense of the Trial of the century. One journalist, Walter Lippmann decided the best way to reckon with the implications of the trial was to imagine Brian in the afterlife. Lippman pictured Brian meeting up there with Socrates and Thomas Jefferson.

Crazy mashup right, but so cool, also very last archive. And remember Socrates always said, then in the afterlife he'd be very excited to continue his inquiry into the nature of belief. Here's how Lippman thought their conversation might go. Socrates speaks first. I shall ask you a few questions. Mister Jefferson can answer them all where you're not. Mister Jefferson accused of being an enemy of religion. That is a foolish question. You may not know it, mister Socrates,

but he was twice president of the United States. I was denounced as an atheist by many good people. Were you an atheist? No? But I disestablished the church in Virginia on what theory? Socrates was asking Jefferson about Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom, which Jefferson had written and which had found its way into the Tennessee Constitution. Too. Let us be frank, did you not overthrow a state religion based on revelation and established in its place the religion

of rationalism. It's getting very warm in here, question relentlessly by Socrates. This is what's called the Socratic method. Who's getting pretty hot up there for Jefferson too. I mean, within the context of this truly weird but also great imaginary scene said in the afterlife. Because here's the problem with doubt. It's not the absence of belief. Skepticism is a belief in inquiry, and belief in inquiry is foundational

to the United States. That's how a democracy works. But Socrates kept on pressing Jefferson about the limits of his tolerance for any belief other than the belief in reason. Couldn't skepticism become its own religion. Jefferson had established a public school and a university to teach knowledge as acquired by the use of reason, a rejection of knowledge as

revealed by God. But Socrates kept asking questions. And then your taxpayers believed that the best knowledge could be acquired by human reason, Some believed it, some preferred revelation, and which prevail those who believed in the human reason? Were they the majority of the citizens, they must have been. The legislature accepted my plans. You believe, mister Jefferson, that the majority should rule, yes, providing it does not infringe

the natural rights of man. If you believe in majority rule, a system of government where the people get to decide what's true, what happens when people are just wrong, then Socrates turned to a very sweaty William Jennings. Bryan, you must have seen where all this was going, towards a seemingly unresolvable conflict between fundamental American principles, majority rule and the freedom of thought. Did you say you believe in the separation of church and state? I did. It is

a fundamental principle. If the right of the majority to rule a fundamental principle, it is. Is freedom of thought a fundamental principle? Jefferson? It is, well, how would your gentlemen compose your fundamental principles if a majority, exercising its fundamental right to rule, ordain that only Buddhism should be taught in the public schools, I'd move to a Christian country. I'd exercise the sacred right of revolution. Do you do, Socrates?

I'd reexamine my fundamental principles. And that's what will be up to two in this season of Doubt, re examining our fundamental principles episode after episode, from hypnosis to propaganda to conspiracy theories, Q and on, your decade will come to as we crawl into the deeper, darker recesses of the Last Archive. The Last Archive is written and hosted by me Jillapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon and Ben nat of Haafrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and

our executive producer is Mioobell. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Fact checking by Emy Gains, Original music by Matthis Bossi and John Evans Stillwagen, Symfinet. Our research assistants are Olivia Oldham and all of our riskin cuts our full proof player. There's a Yoshia Mau, Raymond Blankenhorne, Matthias Bosse, Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschenfeld, Becca A. Lewis, Andrew Parella, Robert Roccatta and Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries.

At Pushkin. Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, John Schnarz, Carl Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig and Daniella Lacan. Special thanks to Simon Leak and Oliver Leek. Thanks also to Edward J. Larson for his incredible book Summer for the Gods and for answering questions about the trial for this episode. Many of Our sound effects are from Harry Jenette Junior and the Star

Janette Foundation. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share, and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jill Lapour.