This year marks the centennial of the “Monkey Trial” of John Scopes in July 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. I expect that there will be talk about the trial. I see that there is a new book about the trial, which I have not seen:
Brenda Wineapple
Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation
Random House, 2024
Of course, there is the play and movie “Inherit the Wind”, which, unfortunately, is what popular opinion is about the trial. There is a good book about the trial:
Edward Larson
Summer for the Gods
Basic Books, 1997
Thanks for sharing… I would not have thought it was almost 100 years already. That means the number of people who personally remember it is pretty much none, and even the list of people who have a personal connection to someone who remembered it is shrinking.
I’m sure we will see some organizations reflecting on what’s changed in those 100 years, with different conclusions depending on which organization it is.
“Inherit the Wind”, like “The Crucible”, is anti-McCarthy propaganda in the form of historical fiction, not intended to be an accurate picture of the historical setting of the play but widely misinterpreted as historical. Of course, the trial was a real event, a publicity stunt dreamed up by locals and prevented from getting appealed to Federal review by Darrow’s ignorance or carelessness that allowed it to be overturned on a technicality.
Bryan was an early supporter of women’s suffrage and accepted an old earth; he was turned off to evolution due to the way that evolution was invoked in support of evil social agendas of the “oppress the inferior” genre.
I think that there is the assumption, among the pro-evolution people, that the anti-evolution stance in the 1920s was Young Earth Creationism. It seems to be that the responses of Bryan were considered weak, to the extent of humiliation, when he was simply saying things like “I’m not saying that the days of creation were 24-hour days a few thousand years ago” - that was interpreted as inability to defend his (supposed) Young Earth Creationism.
I’ve read a couple of reviews of Wineapple’s book, and I got the impression that that assumption is still comon among the pro-evolution people today. But YEC was not popular in the first half of the 2oth century.
The error of equating non-evolutionary with young-earth is quite common both by young-earthers and nonbelievers. ID and Hare Krishna antievolutionism are conflated with young-earth, for example
I remember hearing that evolution of non-human life was tepidly accepted by some creationists at the time. Human evolution and shared ancestry was the real controversy.
The law that was the basis of the trial only mentioned any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.
I am concerned that the pro-evolution people are mischaracterizing the anti-evolution stance, in particular, Bryan’s responses to Darrow as being a failure - failure to defend Young Earth - that Bryan was showing shallow thought.
I would fully agree that the trial has turned into an apocryphal cultural myth. This is the case for many historical events that are bouncing around in the cultural consciousness.
I have never viewed the trial as a debate about science. For me, it is much more about 1st amendment rights. Science isn’t something that is debated in court. Rather, it is debated by scientists in the literature and in meetings, and the scientists are also the jurors. The debate in the trial (as I view it) was whether it was legal to ban the teaching of a scientific theory because it contradicted religious beliefs.
I think the trial is one of many examples of hypocrisy in our democracy. We used all of this lofty language about men being created equal, and yet slavery was there from the beginning. We have often held hypocritical positions when it comes to the letter of our laws, and I suspect this will always be true because we are human. Banning scientific theories in public schools because they run against religious belief is one of those hypocrisies we eventually got rid of.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote an excellent essay about this trial - “William Jennings Bryan’s Last Campaign”, published in Natural History magazine and in the book “Bully for Brontosaurus”.
It seems to me that William Jennings Bryan would have been called a social justice warrior in modern parlance (which is a good thing), but he attacked the science of evolution, based on how groups of people misapplied it. Gould wrote:
Lord only knows, he [Bryan] understood precious little about science, and he wins no medals for logic of argument. But when he said that Darwinism had been widely portrayed as a defence of war, domination, and domestic exploitation, he was right.
Gould later gives an example of a passage in a Biology textbook, published in 1914, which was used to teach children Biology, that was loaded with philosophies of Social Darwinism. I find that very sad, and explains to some extent the sociological baggage that evolution carries. I would expect that the teaching of evolution in schools has improved to stay strictly within the bounds of science, but there has been much damage done. To me, it highlights the need for good communicators of science to the general public - people that fairly present the science, without “dumbing it down” too much, in a way that a person with a fairly minimal amount of education can understand. These are all too rare.
Interesting how the politics and philosophy intersect science. And how the idea that “might is right” has been a trademark of oppression by the governing powers forever, even before Darwin, and now is more closely associated with those who are anti-science and anti-knowledge.
I am concerned about getting the story right. I have gotten the impression that the latest discussion about the trial, from the pro-evolution supporters, are telling us that the anti-evolution stance represented in the trial, was, at least in part, due to racism: that evolution said that non-white people had the same origins as white people. I;m not well informed enough to dispute that. I don’t know, for example, whether Bryan was a racist, or if so, whether that was part of his iion to opposition to evolution. Or whethe he has anti-racist, and that was part of his opposition. Or something more complicated.
There is there is another complication, which is the anti-German and pro-German feeling, involving World War I. I understand that there was residual pro-German feeling in the USA.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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