Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

by Edward Larson

  As Slosson’s unanswered question suggests, historians at the end of the twenties did not perceive any slowing in the pace of fundamentalist political activism. When that trend became apparent over the next decade, some historians began attributing it to the movement’s alleged defeat at Dayton. As late as 1930, the ACLU and the Science League continued to issue grim bulletins about antievolution activity, however. At most, intellectuals saw the trial as a personal humiliation for Bryan. Both Hays, in 1928, and Darrow, in 1932, took this approach in their autobiographies, and Mencken proclaimed it in his writings. In 1929, two debunking biographies of Bryan presented such a view as history, one asserting that Darrow made “hash” of the Commoner.79

  None of the works cited suggest that the debunking of Bryan would slow the antievolution crusade, because liberal commentators of the day typically viewed fundamentalists as servile rubes immune to shame. In his highly critical 1931 History of Fundamentalism, for example, Stewart G. Cole ridiculed Bryan’s role in the Scopes trial, yet wrote that it quickened the pace of antievolution activity, especially after Riley, Straton, and others began competing to carry on the Commoner’s work. On balance, early historical reflection on the Scopes trial presented the episode as a sign of the times rather than as a decisive turning point.80 At the decade’s end, the legacy of the Scopes trial remained up for grabs.

  —CHAPTER NINE—

  RETELLING THE TALE

  THE MODERN SCOPES legend emerged during a thirty-year period bracketed by the appearance of two enormously popular creative works. The process began in 1931, when Harper’s magazine editor Frederick Lewis Allen published his surprise best-seller, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties, and culminated in 1960 with the release of Inherit the Wind, a popular motion picture based on a long-running Broadway play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Far more than anything that actually happened in Dayton, these two works shaped how later generations would come to think of the Scopes trial.

  In writing Only Yesterday, Allen never specifically intended to shape public perceptions of the trial; as the country sank into the Great Depression, he simply sought to relate the happier days of the Roaring Twenties in a lively, journalistic fashion. Without any formal training in historical methods but with a reporter’s knack for chronicling events, Allen drew up a calendar for the decade and used old almanacs and periodicals to fill in top news stories for each month. He then transformed his outline into a fast-paced narrative. As the major news story of mid-1925, the Scopes trial became the feature event of a middle chapter in Allen’s book.

  Allen presented the trial in cartoonlike simplicity. The growing “prestige of science” sapped the “spiritual dynamic” from modern America, he asserted. Fundamentalists, in reaction, clung to “the letter of the Bible and refused to accept any teaching, even of science, which seemed to conflict with it.” Modernists, in contrast, “tried to reconcile their beliefs with scientific thought; to throw overboard what was out of date.” Skeptics, “nourished on outlines of science,” abandoned religion. “All through the decade the three-sided conflict reverberated. It reached its climax in the Scopes case in the summer of 1925,” Allen wrote. “In the eyes of the public, the trial was a battle between Fundamentalists on the one hand and twentieth-century skepticism (assisted by Modernism) on the other.” Subplots, he suggested, included “rural piety” versus urban sophistication and the South against the North. The defense’s fight for individual liberty and the prosecution’s appeal to majoritarianism disappeared from Allen’s version of events, as did the ACLU and the WCFA. His account pit Darrow against Bryan in a bitter, farcical encounter set amid a media frenzy in the circuslike atmosphere of Dayton boosterism. “The climax—both of bitterness and of farce—came on the afternoon of July 20th,” when Bryan “affirmed his belief” in various Old Testament miracles under Darrow’s withering interrogation. “The sort of religious faith which he represented could not take the witness stand and face reason as a prosecutor,” Allen concluded. “Theoretically, Fundamentalism had won, for the law stood. Yet really Fundamentalism had lost ... and the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.”1

  In Only Yesterday, Allen reduced fundamentalism to antievolutionism and antievolutionism to Bryan. Both reductions grossly oversimplified matters and forced Allen to reconstruct the story. For example, he wrote that under Darrow’s questioning, “Bryan affirmed his belief that the world was created in 4004 B.C.,” whereas Darrow actually wrung out a concession that the Genesis days of creation represented long periods of time, leading to Darrow’s triumphant claim that “Bryan had contradicted his own faith.” Also, Allen never mentioned Bryan’s forced admission on the stand of his ignorance about science, which earlier commentators viewed as so important in debunking antievolutionism. Allen noted only the Commoner’s blind faith in the Bible. Yet equating Bryan with fundamentalism enabled Allen to become the first published commentator to transform Bryan’s personal humiliation at Dayton into a decisive defeat for fundamentalism generally. Of course, he could not cite much hard evidence to support his claim that Americans were losing their religion. Indeed, he conceded, “If religion lost ground during the Post-war Decade, the best available church statistics gave no sign of the fact.” He dismissed such statistics as superficial, however. “In the congregations,” he maintained, “there was an undeniable weakening of loyalty to the church and an undeniable vagueness as to what it had to offer them.”2 This had been true in his own life, but to extrapolate it to all Americans—and to suggest that the Scopes trial contributed to the process—was sheer speculation.

  Allen never claimed to offer more than he delivered. “This book is an attempt to tell, and in some measure to interpret, the story of what in the future may be considered a distinct era in American history,” he wrote in the preface. “One who writes at such close range, while recollections are still fresh, has a special opportunity to reveal the fads and fashions and the follies of the time [and] ... leave to subsequent historians certain events ... the effect of which ... may not be fully measurable for a long time.”3 This approach struck a responsive chord in the thirties. Allen geared his book for a popular audience and cautiously hoped for modest success, but nostalgia for the twenties propelled sales beyond his wildest dreams. It quickly became a best-seller and ultimately sold over a million copies—more than any other nonfiction book of the decade. More remarkably, it influenced historians and remained widely used as a college history text for more than half a century. “No one has done more to shape the conception of the American 1920s than Frederick Lewis Allen,” the historian Roderick Nash later observed about Allen’s book. It “has been the font at which most subsequent writers about the decade initially drank.” Owing to Allen’s method of “seizing on the decade’s most glamorous aspects and generalizing from a few headlines,” Nash added, “the book’s most enduring bequest to later historians has been the idea that older American values, traditions, and ideals meant little or nothing to the 1920s.”4

  By portraying the Scopes trial as a decisive defeat for old-time religion, Allen fit the episode neatly into his general conception of the twenties as a time when America repudiated its Victorian traditions. As a result, readers accepting Allen’s interpretation saw the trial as a step in the triumph of reason over revelation and science over superstition in modern America. Darrow might welcome such a verdict, but it did not particularly serve the interests of the ACLU, which had instigated the trial as a means to fight for freedom rather than against religion. In fact, Allen’s presentation of fundamentalism as a vanquished foe frustrated ongoing ACLU efforts to portray it as a persistent threat to individual liberty. Moreover, it may have encouraged evolutionists to let down their guard. The Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr immigrated into the United States in the year that Allen’s book appeared. “Looking back that far, my impression is that I thought that this trial was the end of the fundamentalist attacks on evolution,” he later wrote. “I believe my int
erpretation was widely shared by American evolutionists. As a result not much time and effort was spent by evolutionists in America to prove the fact of evolution and to refute the claims of the fundamentalists.”5

  In addition to attributing a decisive outcome to the trial, Only Yesterday perpetuated various misconceptions about events at Dayton. For example, not only did Allen pass along an altered version of Bryan’s trial testimony, he sharpened the entire episode. Darrow’s drawn-out questions “about Jonah and the whale, Joshua and the sun,” and the like, now appeared in rapid-fire succession, without any indication of Bryan’s various answers, and the dramatic call for Bryan to take the stand occurred “on the spur of the moment,” according to Allen, instead of as a carefully planned maneuver. He seriously confused the trial’s origins. In his account, the idea for the lawsuit came from Rappleyea and Scopes, not the ACLU; Scopes then intentionally broke the law and “was arrested” while Rappleyea “secured for Scopes the legal assistance of Clarence Darrow” and others. Allen surely did not mean to distort the story—he simply relied on inaccurate news accounts and his own faulty memory. Through his book, this version of events passed into the Scopes legend.6

  Later writers adopted Allen’s verdict and accepted his depiction of events. Gaius Glen Atkins relied heavily on Only Yesterday in writing his semipopular 1932 account, Religion in Our Times. The journalist Mark Sullivan did the same for his 1935 best-seller, Our Times: The United States, 1900-1925. Both books presented the trial as the decisive event in the history of American fundamentalism. For Atkins, it “marked the furthermost advance of the movement.” Sullivan called it the “explosive climax” of the fundamentalist controversy. Both portrayed Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan as the turning point when, as Atkins put it, religion was “made to look ridiculous.” Science and critical thought triumphed, he concluded: “The Scopes trial marked the end of the age of Amen and the beginning of the age of Oh Yeah!”7 William W. Sweet revised his widely used collegiate religious studies text, The Story of Religion in America, to reflect the new view. The 1930 edition of his book depicted the trial as a media event that did not reach the “broad issues” raised by fundamentalism. According to the 1939 edition, however, the trial resolved these issues in the public mind. “Bryan said evolution ... made God unnecessary, denied the Bible and destroyed all belief in the supernatural,” Sweet wrote. “Darrow attempted to make Bryan look ridiculous and submitted him to a mocking examination. It was Fundamentalism’s last stand.” The Scopes trial became a watershed event. Secular commentators generally concurred with the novelist Irving Stone’s 1941 analysis that the Darrow-Bryan clash “dealt a deathblow to Fundamentalism.”8

  Although Allen unintentionally misinterpreted events leading up to and including the trial itself, ongoing developments led later commentators to follow him. By the 1930s, fundamentalist political activity had decreased to such an extent that outside observers thought the movement had died. The Scopes trial offers a convenient explanation for this development, but the timing doesn’t quite fit. Riley, Straton, and other fundamentalist leaders initially perceived the trial as a victory for their side; none seemed despondent about it at the time. Furthermore, antievolution activism increased noticeably for several years following the verdict, with additional states imposing restrictions. Fundamentalist church membership continued to grow during the twenties and on into the future. While it is true that open warfare between fundamentalists and modernists quieted down during the late 1920s, and that the political crusade to outlaw teaching evolution ended by 1930, at most the Scopes trial contributed only indirectly to any apparent decline of fundamentalism.

  Each side went to Dayton confident that a full airing of the issues would aid its cause. “I am expecting a tremendous reaction as the result of the information which will go out from Dayton,” Bryan wrote shortly before the trial. The defense made similar pretrial predictions about its prospects, such as Scopes’s observation, “There is no doubt in my mind that through this open, frank discussion, a better understanding will result.” Each side left Dayton confident that it had achieved its objective.9 On this issue, discussion did not resolve disagreement; each side so deeply believed in its position that further information simply increased its vehemence.

  By focusing attention on the topic of teaching evolution, the Scopes trial encouraged both sides—with the result that, by the end of the decade, most states or localities where fundamentalists held political power had imposed antievolution restrictions by law, administrative ruling, or school board resolution. This included most of the South and some of the West. In the North, however, efforts to outlaw teaching evolution met with stiff resistance and humiliating defeat. In 1927 alone, antievolution bills lost in over half a dozen northern states. The most stunning setback occurred in Riley’s home state of Minnesota where, despite an all-out blitz by fundamentalists, the bill lost by an eight-to-one margin in the state legislature. “This dismal failure was a crushing blow,” Riley biographer William Vance Trollinger, Jr., wrote, and it “signalled the end of William Bell Riley’s efforts to secure antievolution legislation.”10 The campaigning ended, however, only after it became obvious that each side had reached the geographical limit of its influence. All of the commentators who later pronounced that fundamentalism had died in Dayton (such as Allen, Atkins, and Sullivan) came from the North, where the trial had set back antievolutionism. Southerners saw it differently. During the thirties, for example, the North Carolina sociologist Howard W. Odum could still report about his region that “upon all questions, political, financial, educational, scientific, and technical, the judgement of religion and scripture was likely to be invoked.”11. Furthermore, once in place, no southern antievolution restriction was repealed for over forty years.

  Alternative reasons existed for the decline in antievolution activity at the time. By the thirties, fundamentalists had less reason for concern about teaching evolution than before the Scopes trial. Not only had many states and school districts limited such instruction, but their restrictions influenced the content of high school biology textbooks everywhere. To serve the southern market and in response to heightened sensitivity about the topic, national textbook writers became increasingly less dogmatic in their presentation of Darwinism. This process began even before the trial. Worried about sales of its biology text, for example, one major publisher sought an endorsement from Bryan by offering to present evolution as a “theory” rather than “dogma.” Bryan welcomed the suggestion, but responded, “It would take a great deal in the way of elimination and addition to make it clear that evolution is presented only as a hypothesis.”12 After the Scopes trial, many biology textbooks underwent such revision.

  The evolution of George W. Hunter’s Civic Biology exemplified the process. The Tennessee Textbook Commission dropped the book from its approved list shortly after Scopes’s indictment for using it. A year later, the book’s publisher deleted a six-page section on evolution from copies of the text sold in some southern states, and Hunter began work on revising the entire book. He cut out the section title, The Doctrine of Evolution, and deleted charts illustrating the evolution of species. A revised passage about the “development of man” looked back only to “races of man who were much lower in their civilization than the present inhabitants” rather than to subhuman species, and included the biblically orthodox addition, “Man is the only creature that has moral and religious instincts.” A paragraph on “natural selection” remained, but with every sentence qualified as something that Darwin “suggested,” “believed,” or “said.” Hunter no longer hailed Darwin as “the grand old man of biology,” and the phrase about Darwin, “his wonderful discovery of the doctrine of evolution,” became “his interpretation of the way in which all life changes.” Indeed, the inflammatory word evolution disappeared altogether from the post-Scopes version of the text, and equivocation replaced certainty wherever evolutionary concepts remained. Other schoolbook writers followed Hunter’s example.13 By t
he time Hunter finished, antievolutionists had little grounds for complaint, though they scarcely would admit it.

  Fundamentalists continued to complain about Darwinism, of course, even if they stopped crusading against teaching evolution. Moreover, fundamentalism did not die. To the contrary, it attracted an ever-increasing number of adherents nourished on a steady diet of antievolution books, articles, and tracts published by conservative Christian presses. Riley continued to churn out antievolution pamphlets long after he gave up crusading for antievolution legislation. He often appeared with Harry Rimmer, an itinerant evangelist and self-proclaimed scientist who wrote dozens of antievolution booklets during the decade following the Scopes trial. On at least two occasions, these two popular antievolution speakers entertained large fundamentalist audiences by debating the relative merits of the “day/age” and “gap” theories for reconciling a literal reading of the Genesis account with geological evidence of a long earth history. Neither ever wavered in his commitment to the Adam and Eve account of human creation, however.

  At the same time, the Adventist science educator George McCready Price gained an increased following among fundamentalists for his creationist theory of flood geology that dispensed with any need for stretching the age of the earth beyond the under 10,000 years provided by an ultraliteral reading of the Genesis account of creation and Noah’s Flood. “In the years after the Scopes trial,” the historian of creationism Ronald L. Numbers noted, Price “emerged as one of the two most popular scientific authorities in fundamentalist circles, the other being Rimmer. In addition to appearing regularly in Adventist magazines, his prose frequently graced the pages of the most widely read fundamentalist periodicals.” As for Rimmer, the leading conservative Christian publisher, William B. Eerdmans, reprinted his antievolution booklets in a series of books that sold over 100,000 copies during the 1940s and 1950s. Although Rimmer and Price rarely championed antievolution laws, they laid a solid foundation of antievolutionism among American fundamentalists during the post-Scopes era.14