Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today, it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, 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 fagots to burn men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. (Clarence Darrow, quoted in Wineapple, 248)
This year is the centennial of the famous Monkey Trial, the trial of high-school biology teacher John Scopes for the teaching of evolution contrary to Tennessee state law. Far from being a minor event in a small town in Dayton, Tennessee, the trial featured two national-renowned heavy-weights. For the prosecution, William Jennings Bryan, thrice Democratic nominee for President and former Secretary of State under President Wilson led the way despite his lack of trial experience. For the defense, Clarence Darrow, famed attorney from a slew of cases that could be deemed progressive, led the attack. And the hearings were broadcast live. A plethora of national newspapers covered the story. For the moment, sleepy Dayton was the center of national attention as the orchestrators of the staged event had intended.
Recently, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation by Brenda Wineapple, (New York: Random House, 2024) focused on this story. Her book ranges far beyond the trial itself. By placing the trial in its historical context, Wineapple shows whether by coincidence or design, how relevant the trial one-hundred years ago is to events today. She lauds how Bryan intuits with stunning accuracy the frustration, anger, and anxiety over wide swaths of the American people due to the changes which were occurring in their country (Wineapple xvi). The lawyers defending Scopes were portrayed as invading vultures (from the North and New York City no less) who had come to Dayton to feast on the people and their customs (Wineapple xxiii). It was the religion of the South which was fighting to maintain its life against this northern onslaught.
For the new Fundamentalists, Bryan was one of them (“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Christian Century 39 1922:713-717). The Bible was the literal and infallible word of God. The Bible was at the center of an emotional crusade that Bryan felt was indispensable during this postwar period (Wineapple 112). As a defense lawyer wrote:
“If teachers are to be allowed to undermine the Bible, why object to them undermining American history?”
“I think you are right in insisting that people who pay taxes have a right to decide what will be taught as history (quoted in Wineappple 125).”
Edward Larson addresses the educational challenge in his book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997). According to Larson, Darwinism did not become a fighting matter for many fundamentalists until t began to influence their children’s education in the twenties. During the 19th century relatively few American teenagers attended high school and nearly none did so in the rural South (Larson 23-24). In an address to the West Virginia legislature in 1923, Bryan said:
“Teachers in public schools must teach what the taxpayers desire taught’ (quoted in Larson 44).
On day one of the trial, Bryan opined about the educated, elite lawyers facing him:
“[they are] a little oligarchy of intellectuals, attempting to force their views upon people through the public schools” (Wineapple 231).
Larsen characterizes the ACLU as an elitist organization dominated by liberal, educated New Yorkers (65). Today, the Jewish component of the ACLU might gain more coverage.
The comment of the judge is most revealing of the cultural dynamic at work.
“I want you gentlemen from New York or any other foreign state to always remember you are our guests (Wineapple 243)”.
The prosecution joins in the emphasis on foreign gentlemen, foreigners who’d invaded Tennessee (Wineapple 262).”
FOREIGN state. GUESTS. INVADERS. We are two countries still struggling how to live together as one and the 250th anniversary of our birth will not be a healing moment. It will only highlight that the Confederacy and the Union still are at war.
Naturally there was a racial component to this trial. If the origin of human beings could be traced to monkeys in Africa and not the garden of Eden paradise, then what did that mean for the concept of Nordic superiority? One should keep in mind that the time prior to the Monkey Trial had been a one of great migration and immigration. The country was being overwhelmed with dark swarthy people from southern and eastern Europe. Italians and Jews were not yet considered to be “white” in the color-coded hierarchy that prevailed. Comparing Black people to monkeys and other animals was one of the many ways white people dehumanized Africans and rationalized slavery (Wineapple 293).
Wineapple’s book highlights that there is more to the Scopes Trial than simply religion and science. As Matthew Stewart writes in his book review about Bryan (NYT August 11, 2024 online),
…the Great Commoner, an aging lion determined to rescue real Americans from an insidious “oligarchy of the professors,” jazz music, socialists and German philosophy.
He would champion:
…the little guy, the small farmer, the small business-owner, the craftsman and all the people left behind in the mad dash for cash known as the Gilded Age—as long as they were white.
As John Kaag writes in his review:
Divine Creation for Christians like Bryan, held within it the promise that human life amounted to something worthwhile (The Atlantic August 29, 2024).
The showdown at high noon that almost seems scripted for the movie it would become, includes this frequently quoted clash of ideas.
Bryan: The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible.
Darrow: No, we have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it.
In March 2025, the University of Pennsylvania held a two day conference on “The Scopes Trial at 100: Secularism, Race and Education” organized by Donavan Schaefer, Religious Studies. Perhaps one day the proceedings will be published.
On July 13, 2025, timed with the centennial of the beginning of the trial on July 10, the Sunday edition of USA TODAY NETWORK, printed a 12-page supplement on the “Trial of the Century.” It includes sections on the movie Inherit the Wind and biblical-related issues in the schools today. Oklahoma leads the way today in fulfilling the vision of Bryan.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past (William Faulkner). The Scopes Trial lives on. It is a story that can be retold as it was in the 1950s with the play Inherit the Wind about the McCarthy era later turned into a movie. Many of the issues raised in the trial or the context of the trial remain the ones America fights over today in the culture wars. At the moment the Confederacy is in ascendancy and the scrubbing of the historical record at the Smithsonian, the National Park, and return of Robert E. Lee to West Point highlight that the Lost Cause is not so lost anymore. The battle certainly will continue with the 250th.
