The Scopes Trial and the Two Visions of US Democracy

Politics tamfitronics

Why should we care about “the Trial of the Century” nearly a century after it happened? Many Americans have long understood the 1925 prosecution of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, for breaking a new state law that forbade teaching “the Evolution Theory” in public schools as a conflict of profound simplicity in which religious bigotry clashed with scientific reason. In it, Clarence Darrow, a veteran stalwart of the legal left, skillfully defended Scopes, a biology instructor, while William Jennings Bryan, a thrice-failed nominee for president and devout fundamentalist, clumsily led the case for the state. The trial was broadcast to the entire the nation over an enterprising radio hookup.

Since Scopes freely admitted he had done the deed as charged, the guilty verdict came as no surprise. But what the court case achieved was something else: After Darrow put Bryan on the stand and humiliated him by exposing his lack of curiosity about both evolution and the Bible, many who had followed the trial concluded that the defense had won that round of the culture wars. The peerless and pitiless H.L. Mencken attended the trial and was among them: He hissed to his many readers that Bryan was “deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard.” The 1960 film Inherit the Wind powerfully dramatized that opinion for countless kids (like me) who saw it in liberal classrooms and on TV during that decade and beyond.

In her new history of the trial, Keeping the FaithBrenda Wineapple freshens this familiar narrative and suggests that something different, if equally momentous, was at stake during the weeklong proceedings at a redbrick county courthouse in the foothills of the Appalachians. While arguing about the Butler Act, the state law that censored the teaching of biology, each side was also setting forth a firmly held conception of democracy. “To Bryan,” Wineapple writes, “democracy meant majority rule and states’ rights. The people in each state should decide for themselves…what should be taught in state-supported schools.” But for Darrow, “there could be no democracy without reason, which is to say, without education and an educated people.” They fought for their clashing faiths in democracy at the court and everywhere newspapers were read and radios heard. Each man and his allies feared for the nation’s future if they could not persuade the public to take their side. And it is hard not to hear the echoes of a contemporary conflict in these fears as well: between citizens who demand a set of policy measures to “make America great”—and Christian—“again” and those who believe that civic tolerance and the freedom to speak and teach the truth are what give Americans the potential to live up to the nation’s vaunted, if abstract, ideals.

To explain how the Scopes trial became such a prominent affair, Wineapple devotes nearly half her text to the individuals and movements, intellectual and political, that preceded and presaged it. She offers chapters on the Populist revolt of the 1890s and about Prohibition and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. She describes the dispute among Protestant churchmen about whether to embrace the work of Charles Darwin or condemn it. Nietzsche gets her attention too, since Mencken praised him as “the high priest of the actual,” while Bryan warned that his “philosophy would convert the world into a ferocious conflict between beasts.”

On occasion, these contextual forays seem tangential to the background of the trial itself. What bearing did Mencken’s sympathy for Germany during World War I have on his contempt for the foes of Darwinism? But Wineapple uses them as a backdrop for the main focus of her book: the famous individuals who shaped her particular period of history. Here she excels at portraying them as if they were characters in an entertaining screenplay. No one has written a richer or more dramatic narrative of the trial or its leading combatants than Wineapple has in Keeping the Faith. An esteemed biographer of Hawthorne, Genet, and the siblings Gertrude and Leon Stein, she deftly traces the long roads the two main antagonists took to Dayton.

These paths sometimes even crossed. By the mid-1920s, Darrow had spent nearly four decades defending beleaguered figures on the left and the labor movement against their potent foes. Before the Supreme Court, he represented Eugene Debs, who had spearheaded a national railroad strike that was crushed by federal troops. He won an acquittal for Big Bill Haywood, a leader of a Western miners’ union accused of killing the anti-labor governor of Idaho. Darrow considered becoming a politician himself but decided he could do more for the cause by continuing to perform quite remarkably in court: Into late middle age, “the attorney for the damned” could address a jury both cogently and eloquently for an hour or more without glancing at a single note. And he never took himself too seriously. “When a reporter teased him about his rumpled clothes,” Wineapple writes, Darrow responded, “‘I buy just as good clothes as you boys do, only I sleep in mine.’”

A major-party politician, Bryan never warmed up to radicals, but he constantly pursued reforms that aimed to make the United States a more egalitarian land—at least for its white majority. Campaigning as the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908, he called for a progressive income tax and the federal regulation of banks and opposed the forceful colonization of the Philippines. In his final campaign, he won the endorsement of the American Federation of Labor—the first time that mainstream body of unions had ever backed a contender for the White House.

Not until he ceased running for office did Bryan begin crusading for causes that Darrow opposed: the prohibition of the commerce in alcohol and the squelching of teaching about evolution in public schools. In 1915, he also resigned his position as secretary of state to protest President Woodrow Wilson’s angry notes to Germany, which Bryan thought would lead the United States to enter the First World War. Darrow, by contrast, cheered on the Allied cause soon after the conflict began the previous summer.

Darrow and Bryan also parted ways on the matter of racial equality. Unlike the celebrated trial attorney, “the Great Commoner” was a lifelong exponent of Jim Crow. That nearly all white Democrats then shared his racist convictions underlined the fact that their passion for equality always cooled at the color line. Wineapple even suggests that Bryan’s belief in white supremacy may, in part, have stirred his hatred of Darwinism: “the theory of evolution helped make indefensible the notion that racial hierarchies could be fixed, separate, and consigned to hierarchies of superior and inferior,” she writes.

There was another reason Bryan decided to make the Scopes trial what became his final stand. Part of his zeal to prosecute Scopes stemmed from his confused understanding of what evolutionists had discovered and believed. For Bryan, Darwinism was always social Darwinism: He feared that students who imbibed it as scientific truth would come to believe that human beings were nothing but animals who survived through violence and hatred and would have no reason to care for what he called “the weak and the helpless” among them. Bryan even blamed evolutionists for turning eugenics into a reputable solution to the “problem” of what the textbook Civic Biology called “immorality and feeble-mindedness.” On this Bryan was not entirely wrong, for it was that very textbook that Scopes had taught in his class at Dayton High.

Yet no matter what drew Bryan to the case, his prosecution of Scopes ultimately hinged on a set of religious arguments: He kept insisting on opposing scientific theories based on mere “guesses” against the rock of religion instead of pointing out the nefarious uses to which evolutionary science could be put. This misstep allowed Darrow and the other members of his team to shift the court’s attention away from questions of society and to instead focus on how the Butler Act erroneously assumed that a believer in evolution could not also be a devout Christian.

Dudley Field Malone—Darrow’s dapper co-counsel—gave a brilliant speech arguing for experts to be allowed to testify about the facts of evolution. The Bible is a wonderful book, he acknowledged, but it is not a work of science. “Keep it as your consolation,” he advised the jury, “keep it as your guide, but keep it where it belongs, in the world of your own conscience…in the world of the Protestant conscience that I heard so much about when I was a boy.”

When Malone finished speaking, the courtroom, packed with supporters of the prosecution, erupted in cheers. Bryan even walked up to congratulate Malone, who had served under him at the State Department, for delivering “the greatest speech I have ever heard.” But the judge refused to allow any scientists to take the stand. All that was at issue, he ruled, was whether Scopes had broken the law.

If the proceedings had ended there, it is unlikely that the trial would have resonated in memory for so long or been the subject of so much controversy. But the day after the judge shot down the chance for the jury to hear about evolution, the defense announced that it was calling Bryan to the stand as a reputed expert on the Bible. Bryan agreed, on the condition that he could later question Darrow as well.

Darrow’s rapid queries were so effective because they exposed how little his opponent had thought about the claims of the book to which he swore unqualified faith. For two hours, the defense attorney grilled Bryan about the trustworthiness of Scripture. “Do you believe a whale swallowed Jonah?” “Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still?” “Do you think the earth was made in six days?”

Bryan avoided giving an unqualified assent to any of these questions. He admitted that the whale could actually have been just “a large fish” that God had perhaps not told to ingest a man. Neither did he speculate about how the Lord had suspended the laws of physics long enough to stop the rotation of the earth. His answers came off as evasive and defensive. Bryan knew much of the Bible by heart, but he had not studied it as would a theologian eager to correct errors of logic or judgment. On the stump and on the page, he had moved people by describing how faith in Scripture could comfort humanity and the creation of a just and peaceful world. But unable or unwilling to debate the truth of either biology or the Bible, he was no match for a shrewd adversary who asked probing questions and would not let up.

“The purpose” of Darrow’s cross-examination “is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible,” Bryan wailed. No, shouted Darrow, “we have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it.” Scopes would be found guilty, but Bryan had lost the intellectual debate. Despite his reputation as a fierce defender of the faith, his performance on the stand under Darrow’s “interrogation,” as Wineapple writes, was “sad and ridiculous, operatic and futile.” The next day, the defense and the prosecution agreed to end the trial. Bryan would have no opportunity to cross-examine Darrow.

The duel in Dayton would be the last time either man commanded a sizable national audience. Bryan died in his sleep the Sunday after the trial ended. The timing ensured that he would always be remembered for the worst moment in a career he had begun as a populist congressman from Nebraska in the early 1890s. Still, he kept enough respect among Democrats that, in 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt lauded Bryan at an unveiling of his statue alongside the Potomac River.

Darrow’s last big trial occurred toward the end of the same year that Scopes was convicted. It was the trial of Ossian Sweet, a Black physician, and a group of his brothers and friends. One of them had killed a member of a white mob, numbering in the thousands, that had sought to violently drive the Sweet family out of their home in a Detroit neighborhood that had barred African Americans from living there before. Darrow’s ardent plea to the all-white jury to dispense “justice” to an “often maligned and down-trodden” race helped acquit his clients. When Darrow died, in 1938, The Chicago Defendera leading Black newspaper, eulogized “his ability to regard all men as his brothers: a task and a responsibility which seems incapable of comprehension by those who profess to hold opposite religious views from those of himself.” The Defender added: “This should teach the white church a lesson.”

Today, religion is just as central to the struggle over the meaning of democracy in America as it was in that Tennessee country courthouse in 1925. But it now has a strongly partisan flavor. Republicans who claim to speak for the Christian majority applaud states that ban abortion and transgender surgery and remove books about LGBTQ people from school libraries. Teaching creationism, thankfully, is no longer high on the right wing’s cultural agenda. Democrats point to polls and election results that reveal that most voters favor a woman’s right to decide on her own healthcare and trust librarians to choose a range of books for children to read. Ironically, the most powerful official in each party professes to be a devout Christian: House Speaker Mike Johnson asserts that his “worldview” is the Bible, while President Biden attends Mass nearly every week.

Just as a century ago, neither side has any taste for compromise. For the broad, largely secular left, the good news is that white evangelicals—the solid base of the GOP—number only about 14 percent of the population; in Bryan’s day, they were probably close to a majority. But if Donald Trump wins this fall, religious conservatives will likely get their way on a variety of decisions by the executive branch concerning issues they hold dear.

Culture wars seldom end with a settlement that pleases both sets of belligerents, and until the left or the right wins a lasting victory, the United States will remain a society rent in two over the role of religion in our politics. But progressives used to appeal to large numbers of serious Christians, and the only practical approach to convincing, or neutralizing, any number of believers with whom one disagrees is to find a way to empathize with—or at the very least tolerate—their fears, while routinely defeating their favored candidates at the polls. “Tolerance,” Clarence Darrow explained at the end of the Scopes trial, “means a willingness to let other people do, think, act and live as we think is not right; the antithesis of this is intolerance and means we demand the right to make others live as we think is right, not as they think is right.” We have an excellent name for a system that allows ordinary people to make their own decisions about what a minority of others would force them to do. It’s called democracy.