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.
I guess my point was mainly that battle lines were drawn for and against evolution, with various philosophical reasons that had very little to do with science.
I make no public judgment of Mr. Bryan’s character. It should be noted that he, like us, was a part of the culture of his time. You may be interested to read this article: William Jennings Bryan - Wikipedia
I think it was the opposite. My city in Canada was named Berlin until a 1916 referendum changed its name.
This merely highlights that our conclusions are driven largely by an agreed view…a philosophical view…we follow the crowd despite the evidence.
its like the pink soap is an excellent stain remover wives tale. the crowd believed it, despite the evidence.
I do not see it [monkey trial] as as proof of YEC. It simply explains that historically, the YEC approach was the dominant one in society at that time in that location. Its evidence, but not proof.
adamjedgar
I do not see it [monkey trial] as as proof of YEC. It simply explains that historically, the YEC
approach was the dominant one in society at that time in that location. Its evidence, but not
proof.
The law which led to the trial did not mention YEC, but only the origins of “man”. When Bryan was questioned on the age issue, he refused to support a “Young Earth”. I think that the pro-evolution people simply assumed that being anti-evolution meant YEC, when there were many people at that time had other interpretations of Genesis. I am concerned that the pro-evolution people today assume that Bryan was just being stupid in not being able to articulate a YEC stance.
without having thought about this in any great depth…at face value and without having read any other references regarding the trial… yep i think i agree with that TomS.
More than just residual apparently! Leading up to WW2 there were very openly active pro-German (pro-Hitler) constituencies in the U.S. And they lead quite the propaganda war - and might easily have prevailed to hear some tell the tale! I forget what book or blog or post around here I was reading all about that, but apparently the un-sanctioned, un-supported efforts of even just a concerned private citizen or two made the difference of turning that pro-Nazi propaganda war around here in the U.S. so that it finally went definitively against Germany. Apparently that direction was far from inevitable, though! A scary thought.
[As written about in Rachel Maddow’s book “Prequel”]
The Seventh-Day Adventists and Missouri Synod Lutherans were the only young-earthers of note in the early 1900’s; the latter also favored geocentrism.
H. L Mencken used reporting on the Scopes trial to disparage those he disagreed with, the play Inherit the Wind fictionalizes the Scopes Trial to satirize McCarthyism rather than to accurately represent what happened, and many people assume a false dichotomy of young-earth, anti-evolution versus old earth and evolutionary. Both young-earthers and atheists like to claim that the other has been motivated by racism. Racist claims are found on both sides, but not generally as a foundational basis. I have a U.S biology textbook from the 1930’s that teaches eugenics as one’s biological duty. D. L. Sayer’s mystery Gaudy Night and P. G. Wodehouse’s The Coming of Bill have “scientific” eugenics as a prominent part of a significant secondary character’s views, before specific association with Nazis made eugenics less popular.
Something which I think is worth exploring - but it is beyond my ability to pursue seriously - is the influence of German science in the USA, with regard to racism in particular in medical education. The idea of the German scientist was a common trope in the early 20th century. And, to be sure, Robert Koch was indeed a major figure in the germ theory of disease. But Koch was also a racist. And I hink that the German theory of disease was used in support of racism: “inferior races” were the agents of the spread of disease. I understand that the institute founded in Germanyd by Koch - and which was named for his after his death - participated in the worst of Nazism (again, this is after Koch’s death).
That’s not “just a trope” I’m pretty sure! It’s fortunate for us that evil (like what Hitler was all about) is also very often quite stupid - thanks to the stupidity of racism and xenophobia etc. the U.S. got early access to no small amount of Jewish brain power (think Albert Einstein) - and I’m pretty sure he was far from alone. But it also makes for quite the moral quagmire, as you rightly suspect the moral hell of Nazi science / eugenics (which was alive and well here in the U.S. too). But the U.S. was willing to look the other way and grant a free pass to people like Werner Von Braun and probably others too in our desperate quest to get our own rocketry/space program off the ground (literally!) in our cold war race with the Soviets.
So … yeah … our hunger for knowledge and progress (especially the competitively motivated sort) caused us to suddenly set aside any thoughts of retributive justice against some few former Nazis. We could rationalize it by saying “well - they were acting under duress;” doing whatever it took to just survive where they were - going along with the crowd; stuff that 99% of us do and also would have done, which should tamp down any moral self-righteousness we like to hold on to. But still - who we chose to show such grace to very much had selfish motivation written all over it. Such is the messy moral underside of more historical “progress” than any of us wants to admit.