One of the first New Yorker writers hired by Harold Ross, the founding editor, was Marquis James. The men were good friends whose wives were also good friends; the couples vacationed together. James’s début feature ran in the second issue, in February, 1925. I could have written this piece about that piece, a Profile of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a child of Theodore Roosevelt, based on the following passage alone: “She knows men, measures and motives; has an understanding grasp of their changes. That’s all there is to what is grandiosely known as ‘public affairs.’ ” Several issues later, James turned to the subject of John Francis Hylan, New York’s mayor. Then Ross sent him to Tennessee.
The A.C.L.U. had published a newspaper ad offering to defend anyone who would test the constitutionality of a new state law that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. A criminal case pitting religious fundamentalism against scientific modernism promised to be sensational and, for the host town, lucrative. Dayton, a small community near Chattanooga, had lost a factory to bankruptcy and needed the boost.
Civic leaders decided to stage a case. They asked a substitute high-school teacher, John Scopes, to consent to be indicted on charges of teaching that humankind descended from apes. Scopes, who was twenty-four, wasn’t convinced that he had taught evolution, but he definitely wasn’t trafficking in Adam’s rib. He agreed to be prosecuted.
James arrived in Dayton to find a swarm of journalistic competitors. Time, Life, and the Times were there. The Baltimore Sun wasn’t just there; it had dispatched its star columnist, H. L. Mencken—and had paid Scopes’s bail. State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes was to be the first trial broadcast live, on the radio. Venders sold stuffed toy monkeys.
James, having assessed the carnival, sketched three characters whose world views represented the contours of the case: an autodidactic blacksmith “who reconciles science and the Bible,” a formally educated “agnostic printer,” and the “hustling druggist” who owned the soda fountain where the legal spectacle had been concocted. James’s report appeared on newsstands on July 4, 1925, the week before jury selection began. The magazine, already devoted to witty biographical pieces, now carried a flicker of narrative, with players eased across a provincial stage. Clarence Darrow arrives for the defense. Scopes is a ghost. We meet the state’s best-known lawyer, who can “talk to a Tennessee mountaineer or a foreign ambassador in his own language,” and an area fundamentalist who can “discuss Michelangelo, Raphael, Manet, Monet and Degas, and contrast the Reverend DeWitt Talmadge’s conception of hell with that of Dante.” Elsewhere, Mencken, ever the hammer, simply calls everybody a moron.
“Have I mentioned that the population of Dayton is 1,903? Well, it is,” James writes. A tad hokey, but lines like that arguably lay runway for the stylings of Joseph Mitchell. Certain colloquialisms (“So the Scopes case. So Dayton.”) could pass for modern magazine striving. James draws connections that might elude a writer not from Enid, Oklahoma. Have I mentioned that James was from Enid? Well, he was. “There is an acre of hot dog stands, and the camp followers are drifting in,” he writes. “Camp followers”—as in tent revivals, circuses, war.
The piece foreshadows craziness, accurately. At trial, Darrow unexpectedly called William Jennings Bryan, the prosecution’s famous mouthpiece, as a witness. Bryan died five days after the verdict; no one had expected that, either. Scopes, convicted, was ordered to pay a hundred dollars. His appeals failed. He moved to Chicago, became a geologist, and went to work for Gulf Oil.
James went on to produce biographies of Sam Houston and Andrew Jackson; both books won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1930 and 1938, respectively. He was still writing for The New Yorker, if infrequently, in 1950, when he extolled the railroad man over the cowboy as the über-romantic figure of the American Southwest. James, who worked during an era when the magazine’s writers often used pseudonyms, signed some of his pieces “Quid,” which turned out to be the name of his Airedale, who eventually got sixteen hundred words in print, deservedly. That dog was hilarious. James put his name on the ode to Quid, and on the Scopes piece, too. ♦
