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October 5, 1997
Monkey Business
The Scopes case was a contrivance from the start; the ensuing media circus was inevitable.By RODNEY A. SMOLLA
SUMMER FOR
THE GODS
The Scopes Trial and
America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.
By Edward J. Larson.
Illustrated. 318 pp. New York:
Basic Books. $25.
here have been many trials of the century this century: Leopold and Loeb, Sacco and Vanzetti, Bruno Hauptmann, Sam Sheppard, the Rosenbergs, O. J. Simpson and Timothy McVeigh. Right up there with these is the Scopes ''monkey trial'' of 1925, in which John Scopes, a high school teacher, was prosecuted for violating a state law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. Edward J. Larson provides an excellent cultural history of the case in ''Summer for the Gods,'' though his book is wanting as trial drama.
Perhaps no historical account of the Scopes case will ever be dramatically effective after ''Inherit the Wind,'' the enduring play and movie that loosely fictionalized the trial. Yet, as Larson demonstrates, the case was a contrivance from the beginning. Immediately after the Tennessee Legislature passed the anti-evolution law, the American Civil Liberties Union took out newspaper advertisements across the state announcing its intention to challenge the law by assuming the defense of any public-school teacher willing to defy it. The civic leaders of Dayton, Tenn., saw the controversy as a chance to put their city on the map. Tennessee cities competed for the trial like present-day municipalities bidding for the Olympics. It was at the drugstore where Dayton's conspiracies were usually hatched that Scopes, who actually did not know much about evolution and was not even the regular biology teacher, was put up by the city leaders to test the law. The local prosecutor arranged for a congenial arrest, and the spectacle was on.
William Jennings Bryan, a firebrand fusion of progressive left-wing pacifist populism and right-wing religious fundamentalism, was brought in to assist with the prosecution. A colorful cadre of lawyers, led by Clarence Darrow, volunteered for the defense.
Any trial of the century must be a media circus, and this one had it all: Darrow versus Bryan, science versus religion, faith versus reason, individual liberty versus majority rule. Tennessee argued that its teachers must teach what Tennessee taxpayers wanted taught, and that proved strong enough for victory in 1925. Scopes was convicted after the jury deliberated for all of nine minutes.
Darrow lost the case but was widely perceived as having triumphed in his withering examination of Bryan. That a lawyer for the prosecution would be called as a witness by the defense was itself bizarre. But the trial judge in Dayton had refused to allow the defense to call to the stand any scientific experts to defend the theory of evolution. If Darrow could not present the case for science, he could at least attack the case for intolerant and overbearing religion.
And so he called Bryan to testify as an expert on the Bible. ''When you read that the whale swallowed Jonah,'' Darrow asked, ''how do you literally interpret that?'' Bryan responded that he believed in ''a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make both of them do what He pleases.'' In what was arguably the greatest cross-examination in courtroom history, Darrow got Bryan to concede that even he found it necessary to interpret the Bible to give certain passages meaning.
Larson, who teaches history and law at the University of Georgia, gracefully documents the history of Darwinism, the theory of evolution and the fits and starts through which evolution became pitted against the Bible and fundamentalist religion. He is particularly adept at explaining the role of Bryan, who during the trial, in the words of H. L. Mencken, was ''converted into a great sacerdotal figure, half man and half archangel -- in brief, a sort of fundamentalist pope.'' Bryan died in the days immediately following the trial, making him a sort of fundamentalist saint.
Bryan's and Darrow's ghosts still haunt us, and the Scopes trial still holds resonance, as we continue to litigate the role of religion in public life and the power of the state to prescribe what shall be taught in public schools. Read ''Summer for the Gods'' for that well-told story. For the trial of the century, rent the movie.
Rodney A. Smolla is a law professor at the College of William and Mary.
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