Historians who know nothing else about American
religion often know one thing for sure: in July of 1925
fundamentalists got their noses rubbed in the dirt at the
Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. That building,
of course, housed the famous Monkey Trial, the place where
rural traditionalism met and finally bowed to the forces of
urban secularism. This image, perpetuated by numerous
journalists, by the popular play and movie Inherit the Wind,
and even by respected textbooks, contains some truth and
considerable mistruth. The task is to get it all sorted
out.
The energies that culminated at Dayton had been brewing
for more than a half century. From the 1870s, Southern
evangelicals led the fight against evolutionary teaching
(commonly and somewhat misleadingly called Darwinism
following the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's On the
Origin of Species). After the Civil War, conservative
Protestants in the North concerned themselves primarily with the
defense of the authority of the Bible. Although they occasionally mobilized against the teaching of evolution, they left that fight mostly to their Southern cobelligerents. (Why Southern rather than Northern conservatives decided to draw a line in the sand over that
issue remains unclear. Perhaps traditional assumptions remained so prevalent in Southern culture that Southern legislators believed they could translate
them into law without fear of reprisal.)
The 1920s cradled a lasting conflict. Between 1923 and
1925 four Southern states (Oklahoma, Florida, North
Carolina, and Texas) tried, with mixed success, to stop the
teaching of evolution in the public schools. In the spring
of 1925 Tennessee joined the fray by passing the Butler Act,
the strongest bill to that point. This law made it illegal
"to teach any theory that denies the Story of Divine
Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead
that man has descended from a lower order of animal." Even
so, many prominent Tennesseans found themselves
uncomfortable with the anti-evolution position. In early
May a Dayton mine manager and a local druggist (the latter
also part-time chairman of the schoolbook committee) met
with John Scopes, a young high school science teacher, to
discuss resistance. They knew that the American Civil
Liberties Union had offered to support any Tennessee teacher
willing to defy the statute. They decided to take up the
challenge, with Scopes serving as the reluctant point man.
Scopes's friends arranged to have him arrested for
teaching the forbidden doctrine. The ACLU quickly assembled
its counsel, including the famous trial lawyer Clarence
Darrow, a religious agnostic known for defending political
and labor radicals. William Jennings Bryan, an attorney, a
prominent Presbyterian layman, and three-time Presidential
candidate on the Democratic ticket, volunteered his services
as counsel for the State. Though hardly a scholar, since
the early 1920s Bryan had been waging a highly publicized
battle against evolutionary thought, which he considered the
nemesis of Christian civilization.
The days surrounding the trial found Dayton swamped
with hundreds of reporters, its streets bedecked, carnival-like, with concession stands, toy monkeys, and the
bookstands and soapboxes for opportunists of all stripes.
Pioneering radio broadcasters and photographers crowded the
courtroom. Cable relayed the events to Europe. Historian
George M. Marsden sets the scene (Religion and American
Culture, 184-85).
This was at the height of the age of . . . media-generated national crazes, as well as controversies
over changing mores, jazz, new dances, styles of dress
for women, and sexually-suggestive Hollywood movies.
Proponents of the new, more lenient culture were
already deeply antagonistic toward defenders of the
old-style Victorian mores, and so made the most of a
drama in which science could be pitted against
religion, city against rural, and North against South.
The trial itself proved as eventful as the verdict
uneventful. The arguments focused upon the state's right to
specify what was taught in public classrooms, not the
scientific merits of evolution per se. In the course of
eight sweltering days of spirited debate, Bryan himself took
the stand as an expert witness on the Bible. (How the
Bible, rather than John Scopes or the Butler Act, came to be
on trial is an intriguing story in itself.) Some observers
felt that Bryan acquitted himself ably, while others
believed that he disgraced conservative Protestant
Christianity by his inability to answer some of Darrow's
questions about the Bible's consistency and accuracy. At
the end, the jury found Scopes guilty and the judge fined
him $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court later reversed the
judgment against Scopes on a technicality, although it
upheld the constitutionality of the Butler Act. Bryan died
of a heart attack five days after the trial while napping in
a Dayton residence.
Guiding Student Discussion
If sketching the bare facts of the events leading up to
the trial is fairly easy, enabling students to grasp its
long-range sources and significance in American culture
proves more challenging. But also more interesting. You
might begin by asking students why so many reasonable
Americans pitted themselves against a theory so strongly
supported by the professional scientific community. The
answer lay in the assumptions that had informed the thinking
of many conservative Protestants (and for that matter many
conservative Catholics and Jews) from the mid-nineteenth
century onward. Drawing upon Common Sense Realism, a
philosophy rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment, Victorian
Americans widely presumed that true science consisted of
unbiased observation of the plainly observable facts of
nature. Since the fossil evidence for partly evolved human
beings remained sketchy at best, some conservative
Christians attacked evolution as scientifically unsupported.
Moreover, since Holy Scripture had proved itself truthful in
other respects, there was no reason to doubt the veracity of
the Genesis account of human origins. The point was clear:
the Bible had proved itself more, not less, scientific than
the upstart science of Darwinism. Bryan spoke for millions
when he snorted of Darwin's theory: "It is millions of
guesses strung together."
Students need to understand that resistance to Darwinism stemmed from
other, less tangible sources as well. The most salient,
undoubtedly, was the sense that evolutionary teaching
undermined the authority of the Bible in general. If the
Scriptural account of human beginnings had to be reinterpreted as merely symbolic, then what else would have to be reinterpreted as merely symbolic? The miracles of
Jesus? The Resurrection? Students do not need to share the
world-view of conservative Protestantism in order to
appreciate the apprehension that thoughtful (as well as not-so-thoughtful) adults felt when a fundamental source of authority was called into doubt.
A host of additional factors, which students can
readily grasp, fueled the flames. Fundamentalists took
note, for example, of the social location where Darwinism
arose: among agnostic intellectuals in Britain. And under
the guise of Nietzschean philosophy it seemed to serve as a
covering rationale for the Might-Makes-Right ideology of
German aggression in the Great War. Fundamentalists also
noticed that evolutionary assumptions flourished among upper-class academic elites, especially in the urban Northeast and
Midwest. Resistance grew especially acute when such
conservatives saw their sons and daughters going off to
college and, faced with teachings that contradicted their
parents' beliefs, seemed to lose their faith entirely.
Finally, students should view the events in Dayton not
simply as a response to outside threats but as a product of
conservative initiatives. Rather than assuming (as many
historians do) that conservative Protestants were backwoods
rubes fighting for their lives in the face of a modern
juggernaut, what would happen if we turned that scenario
around and assumed that fundamentalists represented the
aggressors? Nearly every day throughout the 1920s
barnstorming evangelist and healer Aimee Semple McPherson
appeared in somebody's daily newspaper. Billy Sunday's star
shone almost as brightly. Within the evangelical subculture
scores of personalities, such as evangelist Paul Rader and
author William Bell Riley (mentor of Billy Graham), functioned
with unquestioned authority. One thing remained clear for
such conservatives: the battle for the schools would serve
as a battle for the historically Christian character of
American civilization itself. Evolutionary teaching in the
schools thus acquired powerful symbolic value, much as
alcohol or immigrant Roman Catholics had in previous
decades. Fundamentalists, like almost everyone else, proved
that they were prepared to fight, and fight hard, for the
dominance of their symbols.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of teaching these
materials will be the question, who really won in Dayton?
On one hand it is evident that conservatives suffered a
crushing defeat in the minds of secular newspaper editors
and journalists like H. L. Mencken. They also fell into
everlasting disrepute among academics, humanists, and
scientists alike. To this day the term fundamentalist
evokes images of bigotry and ignorance on secular and not-so-secular college campuses. On the other hand, the
teaching of evolution effectively disappeared from the
nation's public schools until the 1960s. And even then the
fight went on. After World War II, the ranks of Southern
Baptists and Pentecostals, who resisted evolutionary
teachings privately if not always publicly, swelled by the
millions. The rise of creation science in the 1980s, and
the continuing skirmishes in the courts over those matters
into the late 1990s, lend credence to Gallup polls that show
that nearly half of adult Americans and one-fourth of
college graduates continue to doubt Darwinian explanations
of human origins. Far from being an aberration, the Scopes
Trial represented one of the deepest and most persistent
conflicts of modern American culture. The goal is to help
students see it as an integral though painful part of
different Americans' attempts to come to terms with
modernity, and with each other.
Historians Debate
In recent years, a growing stream of historical works
have debunked the notion that Americans have always
considered religion and science at odds with each other.
That point is persuasively made in David N. Livingstone's
Darwin's Forgotten Defenders (1987). However, the
nineteenth-century assumptions that eventually led to the
trial are traced in Theodore Dwight Bozeman's Protestants in
an Age of Science (1977). The classic account of the trial
itself remains Ray Ginger's Six Days or Forever? (1958).
(The title is potentially misleading, however, since Bryan
held to the "day-age theory" which allowed for the
possibility that the six days of creation represented a
longer period.) Ginger's work is entertaining but hardly
evenhanded. For a more sympathetic treatment of
conservative grass-roots concerns one should see the
relevant chapters in Norman F. Furniss's The Fundamentalist
Controversy (1963) or George Marsden's briefer analysis in
Religion and American Culture (1990). The legal issues are
clearly set forth in E. J. Larson's Trial and Error (1989).
For in-depth analysis, one might turn to Sheldon Norman
Grebstein's primary source compilation (now, sadly, out of
print, but available in most libraries), Monkey Trial: The
State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes (1960). This
collection includes a chronology of events, transcripts from the trial, and primary sources including the texts of the
Butler Act, relevant sections from Genesis, Darwin's Origin
of Species, and the textbook used by Scopes. The continuing appeal of anti-evolutionary thinking in America receives persuasive
treatment by a noncreationist historian of science, Ronald
L. Numbers, in The Creationists (1992).
Grant Wacker holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and is currently Professor of the History of Religion in America at the Duke University Divinity School. He is the author of Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness (1985) and is coeditor, with Edith Blumhofer and Russell P. Spittler, of Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism (1999). He is working on two books: a monograph to be titled Heaven Below: Pentecostals and American Culture, 1900-1925, and a survey textbook of American religious history with Harry S. Stout and Randall Balmer.
Address comments or questions to Professor Wacker through TeacherServe "Comments and Questions."