Excerpts from - Kirkwood



Excerpts from

The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents (2002)

by Jeffrey P. Moran

The only real victors in the Scopes antievolution trial of 1925 were the monkeys. As the state of Tennessee prepared to indict a schoolteacher, John Scopes, for violating a new law against teaching evolution, it seemed that everyone in the South who owned a monkey converged on the site of the trial in Dayton, Tennessee, to offer the pet as an exhibit for the prosecution or defense, to pose for reporters, or to parade the primate down Main Street . . . Elsewhere in the South, zookeepers contended with record crowds as men, women, and children elbowed in to inspect their purported primate relatives. The Glendale Zoo in Nashville, for example, reported a 50 percent jump in attendance in the weeks leading up to the July trial. And by the time the Scopes trial began, Dayton flappers, young women who flouted convention, had launched a short-lived fashion trend for shoulder straps made of toy monkeys. If monkeys had not evolved by the time of the Scopes trial, they had at least ascended.

The trial went less well for the humans. The celebrity attorney for the prosecution, William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic candidate for president, began the trial with a reputation as one of the nation’s great reformers but by the end found himself branded an ignorant bigot. On the defense, Clarence Darrow came down to Dayton fresh from saving two notorious killers from the electric chair, but he was unable to prevent John Scopes’s conviction on a mere misdemeanor and later found himself outfoxed on the appeal. And the leading citizens of Dayton, who had launched the trial as a way to gain favorable publicity for their town, instead heard the name “Dayton” transformed into a synonym for backwardness and religious fanaticism. Such ironies seemed to proliferate in the fertile Tennessee soil.

In a decade that gave birth to the phrase “trial of the century” and then immediately overworked the expression into a cliché, the Scopes trial nevertheless stood out. Nearly 200 journalists from throughout the United States and abroad filed on the order of 135,000 words daily during the trial. One sociologist estimated that the reportage would fill 3,000 volumes of 300 pages apiece. Every day, newsreel crews sent out miles of film from Dayton, and a Chicago newspaper created history’s first radio network hookup to broadcast the trial to a waiting nation . . .

The case erupted out of tectonic shifts in American culture. Millions of Americans in the 1920s were in revolt against the dominant Victorian morality and took their moral cues from advertising, Hollywood, scientists, and intellectuals rather than from the nation’s Protestant establishment. In the vanguard of the revolt was the so-called New Woman, the model of the educated, independent feminist who repudiated the sexual morality of the past. The antievolution movement derived much of its moral fervor from the conviction that Darwinism was partly responsible for these Jazz Age rebellions. This war between the old culture and the new was also bound up with a growing split between an older rural America and the nation’s burgeoning cities, for the new culture was very much a product of city life. The antievolution movement was in many ways an expression of rural resentment toward the rise of the city. Further, in a way that is perhaps difficult to see today . . . the Scopes trial exposed a deep cleavage between the more traditional American South and a North that was rapidly growing more urban and diverse. Finally, even as the nation’s religious leaders fretted about their loss of influence in the Jazz Age, their churches were shaking with a clash between theological liberals and a rising movement of fundamentalist Protestants—a war waged in part on the battleground of evolution. Culture, urbanism, regionalism, religion—all these issues became entangled in the struggle over evolution at Dayton, Tennessee . . . [1-3]

[By] the turn of the twentieth century, most of the leading Protestant theologians in England and the United States had adapted to the Darwinian environment. They achieved this accommodation both by tailoring their own aspirations to fit the new evolutionary consensus and by adjusting Darwin’s theories to suit them better . . . leading Protestant theologians came to argue that religion and science occupied entirely separate spheres. Theology was to give up its former status as arbiter of the natural and supernatural and henceforth confine itself more closely to the arenas of faith and morality. There, beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, religion could survive and perhaps, they hoped, even thrive. But this change also meant that religion was now in the position of accommodating scientific discoveries, rather than the other way around.

At the same time, theologians and natural scientists, the majority of whom remained pious Christians, chose selectively which elements of Darwin’s theory to accommodate. Even as they accepted the fact of organic evolution, they generally threw aside the theory of natural selection, for its alleged cruelty and directionlessness contradicted their belief in a caring and immanent God . . . Theological liberals such as Henry Ward Beecher retreated to the shelter of “theistic evolution,” claiming that evolution was merely the working out of God’s blueprint for the universe and that natural history revealed clear evidence of organic progress toward perfection. The argument from design, they believed, still held. Some went further and simply proclaimed that humans were not part of the evolutionary process at all, but a separate creation by God . . .

The theistic, sanitized version of evolution began to make its way into textbooks and classrooms at the university and secondary levels in the 1880s . . . Biology education at the college level, including that provided by institutions with a religious affiliation, rapidly reoriented itself around the central concept of organic evolution. High schools moved more slowly. Although none of the natural science books for the high school market around the turn of the century presented a particularly good explication of evolution, almost all of them included the concept. In general, public disputes over evolution seemed to belong to the past.

Few observers at the time could have predicted that two decades later, the nation would witness an antievolution crusade popular enough to sponsor forty-one antievolution bills in twenty-one states and powerful enough to suppress teaching of the subject in three states and countless localities. Fewer still would have guessed that the mantle of leadership for this crusade would come to rest on William Jennings Bryan, the “Boy Orator of the Platte” and Democratic voice of political reform. What had changed? [6-8]

To the casual observer, the simple answer is that everything had changed. Most critical for the emergence of the antievolution movement of the 1920s were what we might call the depredations of modernity . . . The United States was changing rapidly, and during and after the Great War [1914-1918], the specter of radical social and theological change inspired a deep sense of unease among millions of citizens. This broad anxiety about the future of the nation would find an outlet in the antievolution movement, and it would lend the crusade against Darwin its peculiar moral urgency.

To the millions of Americans who had grown accustomed to thinking of their country as a virtuous rural paradise for native-born white Protestants, life in the Jazz Age presented a series of painful shocks . . . The 1920 census recorded that for the first time in history, more Americans lived in the city than in the country. Life in these burgeoning cities also seemed more remote than ever from the rural ideal . . . “Revolt has become the characteristic of our age,” observed a pair of prominent authors. “The intellectuals are in revolt against the entire civilization. The revolt against the old sex attitudes, with their silences and stupidities, is a vital part of this entire revolt against a decaying culture.” The 1920 census suggested that this urban culture of revolt was likely to become the dominant way of life in America.

Equally alarming for many observers was the new independence of women . . . The New Woman of the 1920s—educated, independent, and feminist—may have been only an ideal, but she bore little resemblance to the thoroughly domestic archetype of the Victorian matron . . .

To many conservative Christians, the cultural degradation presented by modernity—urbanization, “mongrelization,” sensationalism, and the flock of other “isms” that characterized life in the Jazz Age—had its theological counterpart in the threat posed by “modernism,” a more liberal approach to interpreting the Bible. Thus, as conservative Protestants struggled to reassert their dominance in their own churches against the modernist heresy. Like the clash over the direction of American culture, the battle over the soul of American Protestantism being waged by modernists and the growing ranks of their fundamentalist opponents was to spill over into the antievolution controversy.

The antievolution movement cannot be understood apart from its roots in the subvariety of Protestant Christianity that came to be known in 1919 as fundamentalism. Although the roots of fundamentalism were old and diverse, theological fundamentalism in the 1910s came to be associated with five or six central doctrines that all “true Christians”—especially ministers and faculty at the theological seminaries—must believe, including the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Jesus, the sacrifice of Jesus to atone for human sins, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and either the biblical miracles or the inevitability of Jesus’ return to earth to usher in a millenium of peace. The doctrine made sense as an attempt by conservative theologians to shore up Christian belief where the progress of science seemed to threaten it most.

The fundamentalist movement developed its theology and identity in opposition to modernism—the theological liberals’ effort to reconcile science and faith after the Darwinian revolution. Modernists such as Shailer Mathews at the University of Chicago asserted that the Bible employed symbolic and allegorical language to convey God’s meaning to the ancient chroniclers. Modernists thus accommodated what was known as the “higher criticism,” which used historical and literary tools to uncover the Bible’s historical context. Modernists also embraced scientific discoveries, including evolution, as part of God’s continuing revelation to his followers, and they had few qualms about leaving behind the Bible’s literal descriptions of the natural world.

Conservative believers argued that such claptrap substituted human whims for divine authority. “The Bible is either the Word of God or merely a man-made book,” William Jennings Bryan explained in an article in 1923 . . . [8-12]

‘Big Picture’ Questions

1) Is the Scopes trial accurately described as simply “science” versus “religion”? Explain.

2) Can the trial be understood without understanding America in the 1920s? Explain.

3) Was the trial ultimately a conflict of individual personalities? In what ways was it a regional conflict? A cultural conflict? A religious conflict? How did these forces interact with one another?

Further Information:

Clash of Cultures in the 1910s and 1920s

Tennessee vs. John Scopes: The “Monkey Trial” (1925)

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