The issues raised by the famed “Monkey Trial” of 1925 continue to resonate a century later.
The most “significant insignificant trial in American history,” as independent scholar Adam Shapiro framed it, took place a century ago in Dayton, Tennessee. According to Edward Larson, a history professor at Pepperdine University, it was a “collaboration to create a public spectacle”—one that turned out to be the “first battle in a conflict in which we are trapped to this day,” as Binghamton University professor of education and history Adam Laats characterized the eight-day “circus” memorably, if inaccurately, depicted in Inherit the Wind, the 1955 play made into a 1960 movie.
The three historians of science, along with other scholars and an audience of about 70 people, watched the fictionalized film version of the court case at the opening of a two-day conference, The Scopes Trial at 100: Secularism, Race, and Education, organized by Donovan Schaefer, associate professor of religious studies at Penn, and held in March in the Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion of Van Pelt Library. Next door in the Lea Library, a fascinating exhibit of materials relating to the leadup and aftermath of the so-called “Monkey Trial” was on display. It included several original editions of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, one of the most influential scientific works of all time that gave rise to controversies about whether the theory of evolution could be compatible with theistic religion.
But the Scopes Trial was also, perhaps mainly, a proxy for other concerns: about intellectual freedom and the degeneration of civilization as symbolized by the violence of World War I and, for conservative Christians, the decadence of the Jazz Age. By the mid-1920s, Darwin’s grand idea that all life started in a simple form and had gradually, over eons, become more complex through a process of natural selection—whereby the fittest survived and reproduced—had been embraced as fact in much of the scientific community. As Shapiro pointed out, Nebraska had had its own anti-evolution trial, nine months before Tennessee, when a Lutheran college, in response to a pastor’s complaint, reneged on a job offer to a teacher who was judged “morally unfit” for the post because he had written articles explaining Darwin’s theory. The teacher sued for slander, and, as a local newspaper reported, “Genesis lost and Darwin won,” even as the case faded from memory.
The Butler Act, which made it unlawful to teach “any theory that denied the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” in state-funded schools, was passed by the Tennessee legislature in March 1925. The newly created New York-based American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seized on the law to take a stand for freedom of speech and advertised for a volunteer to bring a test case.
Dayton civic leaders grasped the chance to put their town on the map. They persuaded John Scopes, a local high school teacher, to accede to a “friendly indictment,” as Larson termed the charge. Two famous lawyers including former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate who had become convinced of the “morally erosive effects of evolutionary biology,” as Schaefer explained, volunteered to serve on the prosecution team, and Clarence Darrow, a high-profile ACLU ally and religious agnostic, represented the defense in the July 1925 proceedings.
What Schaefer called the “chain of visual artifacts leading up to, surrounding, and trailing in the wake of the Scopes Trial” began with cartoons. These mocking images published throughout the country helped instantiate the myth of Dayton as villain and Scopes as hapless victim. They also illustrated the interlocking religious, political, and cultural forces at play: fundamentalist perspectives on biblical authority versus theological modernism; individual liberty versus majoritarian democracy; God-fearing rural Southern folk versus secular outsiders from Northern cities seeking to impose their own value system; competing ideas about the control of public education; and issues of class and race.
While W. E. B. Du Bois (the legendary sociologist and activist who spent a year at Penn while researching his seminal work The Philadelphia Negro) saw the media spectacle as a distraction from more pressing economic and racial issues, the ballyhoo engendered by the town fathers and whipped up by contemporary journalists (ensuring a boost in newspaper circulations) echoed down the ages.
Scopes’s crime was a misdemeanor. He was fined $100, but as Laats made clear during the symposium, the conviction, which had been a foregone conclusion and was later overturned on a technicality, was not quite the victory Darrow had assured his client. The cause of the evolutionists did not prevail across the land; rather, the trial in Dayton “was the start of a century-long culture war.”
Laats described the United States in 1925 as “eerily familiar.” Racial tensions led to summertime riots in Northern cities. Congress had restricted immigration a year earlier, and foreign-born radicals were deported without trial under an extension of the 1917 Espionage Act. A platform plank condemning the Ku Klux Klan failed by a narrow vote at the 1924 Democratic convention. The Butler Act, on the books until 1967, was upheld when appealed by the ACLU and four other states passed antievolution laws over the next several years. The late 1920s were marked, according to Laats, by a “groundswell in anti-evolution institutions,” not least Bob Jones University, described by its evangelist founder as a place where parents could send their children assured that no “skeptical teacher” would lead them to question received beliefs.
The play and film versions of the trial, products of the McCarthy era, tended toward morality tales that ended with clear victories for a presumed liberal consensus. The character representing Darrow humiliates the character representing Bryan, who is made to look ridiculous. But Laats urged the conference attendees to note that the Darrow persona walks out of the courtroom carrying both the judge’s Bible and a copy of Darwin’s book as the Battle Hymn of the Republic is sung in the background.
Whose truth marched on? The Scopes trial amplified and escalated the conflicts it staged without resolving them. As audience members reflected with presenters on conference themes, the importance of intellectual humility was highlighted, as was the need to be wary of good versus evil narratives that have a way of distorting reality rather than illuminating it.
—Mary Ann Meyers Gr’76
