Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
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Justice Black could scarcely contain his frustration over the outcome of the Epperson case. In a sharply worded separate opinion, he restated his long-standing opposition to striking statutes on account of their supposed purpose. “It is simply too difficult to determine what those motives were,” Black wrote. Drawing on personal experience as an Alabama politician during the antievolution crusade, the 82-year-old justice suggested an alternative purpose for the Arkansas law. Rather than favoring religious creationism, he wrote in Bryanesque fashion, “It may be instead that the people’s motive was merely that it would be best to remove this controversial subject [of origins] from its schools.”19 In an apparent reply to Black, Fortas added to a later draft of his opinion the Darrowlike comment, “Arkansas’ law cannot be defended as an act of religious neutrality.... The law’s effort was confined to an attempt to blot out a particular theory because of its supposed conflict with the Biblical account, literally read.”20 Forty-three years after the Scopes trial, Black and Fortas here replayed one aspect of the debate between Bryan and Darrow—yet this time, the Darrow position clearly prevailed.
Certainly, the media played it as a long-overdue victory for Scopes. “Court Rules in a ‘Scopes Case’,” read the headline in one major national news magazine. Time led off with a reference to Inherit the Wind. Life mixed fact and fiction by reminding readers that the issue first “erupted in a glorious explosion in the tiny burg of Dayton, Tenn., where in 1925, as every student of American humor knows, Spencer Tracy gave Fredric March the verbal thrashing of his life.” A front-page article in the New York Times described the Epperson case as “the nation’s second ‘monkey trial’,” but declared that it “reached a strikingly different result” from the first one.21
Even the seemingly decisive Epperson decision, however, failed to resolve the fundamental issues raised by the Scopes trial. This occurred in part because Fortas simplified those issues along lines suggested in the Scopes legend. In its effort to portray McCarthy-era intolerance, Inherit the Wind implied that antievolution laws left only biblical creationism in the classroom. Fortas carried this interpretation into the Epperson decision when he stressed that “Arkansas did not seek to excise from the curriculum of its schools and universities all discussion of the origin of man” but solely teaching about evolution. Some antievolution leaders of the 1920s might have liked to have only creationism taught, but Bryan publicly argued for the state to bar teaching evolution on the express assumption that public school teachers already could not present the biblical view.22 By thus casting his argument as one for neutrality in education on the controversial topic of human origins, Bryan was able to gain support for antievolution laws from non-fundamentalists.
Defense counsel at Dayton did not endorse the idea of teaching both evolution and creationism in science courses. Darrow consistently debunked fundamentalist beliefs and never supported their inclusion in the curriculum. Hays and the ACLU argued for academic freedom to teach Darwinism but most likely did not consider the possibility that some teachers might want to cover creationism. Malone came the closest of anyone at Dayton to endorsing a two-view approach to teaching origins when in his great plea for tolerance he declared, “For God’s sake let the children have their minds kept open—close no doors to their knowledge.” Yet this came shortly after he had shouted at prosecutors, “Keep your Bible in the world of theology where it belongs and do not try to ... put [it] into a course of science.”23 Addressing the relatively easy case of teaching only creationism as opposed to effectively ending classroom study of human origins, Fortas struck down the Arkansas antievolution law as “an attempt to blot out a particular theory from public education.”24
Fortas clearly intended to free public schools from restrictions against teaching evolution, but his written opinion backfired when certain fundamentalists misinterpreted it as an invitation to include creationist views in public education. “In Epperson v. Arkansas the Supreme Court overturned a law prohibiting instruction in evolution because its primary effect was unneutral,” a creationist legal strategist argued. “This unneutral primary effort [arose] ... from an unneutral prohibition on only evolution without a similar proscription on Genesis.”25 Following such reasoning, some fundamentalists called for balancing instruction in evolution with creationist teaching as a supposedly constitutional alternative to excluding any one theory. Fortas may have thought that the earlier Supreme Court ruling barring religious instruction in public schools adequately covered this situation, but he did not anticipate the tenacity of fundamentalists who believed that scientific support existed for their creationist beliefs. Bills and resolutions mandating equal time or balanced treatment for creationism soon began appearing before state legislatures and local school boards throughout the nation. Proponents turned the Scopes legend to their benefit by widely quoting a fictitious statement attributed to Darrow at Dayton, “It is ‘bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origins.’ ”26
Of course, the force of this movement sprang from the vast number of Americans who hold creationist views, and not from any encouragement given it by either the Epperson opinion or the Scopes legend. “Debate over the origin of man is as alive today as it was at the time of the famous Scopes trial in 1925,” pollster George Gallup reported, on the basis of a 1982 public opinion survey, “with the public now about evenly divided between those who believe in the biblical account of creation and those who believe in either a strict interpretation of evolution or an evolutionary process involving God.” This and other polls consistently found over 80 percent support for including creationist theories in the curriculum.27
On the strength of such sentiments, three states adopted laws mandating creationist instruction in public schools before the Supreme Court stepped in to stem the tide. In 1974, Tennessee mandated “an equal amount of emphasis” in biology textbooks for alternative theories of origins, expressly including the Genesis account. Seven years later, Arkansas and Louisiana enacted laws requiring “balanced treatment” in biology instruction for “creation-science”: the Arkansas act linked this so-called science to the study of a biblically inspired list of creation events, such as a worldwide flood, while the Louisiana statute defined it as “scientific evidence for creation and inferences from those scientific evidences.”28 These three laws fell in separate lawsuits, and the media compared each of them to the Scopes case.
The Scopes legacy did more than merely influence media coverage of these cases; it shaped their very tone and timber. Drawn by the Scopes connection, the ACLU led the fight against all three statutes, with prominent New York counsel serving as their agents in the latter two cases. “It is a strange feeling,” the ACLU’s 97-year-old founding director Roger Baldwin commented upon passage of the Louisiana statute, “here’s where I came in [with Scopes], and here’s where the ACLU goes out to another battle to defend the same principles of freedom.” 29 Challengers stressed the Scopes connection in all three lawsuits because it highlighted the religious purposes underlying the statutes and thereby provided a ready basis for striking them down. The first two statutes obviously violated establishment clause principles by expressly mandating public school instruction in biblical doctrines, and federal courts quickly disposed of them. The Louisiana statute simply called for teaching about scientific evidence for creation, however, and its defenders maintained that such teaching would not constitute religious instruction. Here, the Scopes legacy helped the challengers to prevail.
“The case comes to us against a historical background that cannot be denied or ignored,” a federal appeals-court panel noted in its analysis of the Louisiana statute. “The Act continues the battle William Jennings Bryan carried to his grave. The Act’s intended effect is to discredit evolution by counterbalancing its teaching at every turn with the teaching of creationism, a religious belief. The statute therefore is a law respecting a particular religious belief ... and thus is unconstitutional.” A bare majority of the circuit’s fifteen judges affirm
ed this ruling on review, but seven dissented—and tried to turn the Scopes legacy inside out. “The Scopes court upheld William Jennings Bryan’s view that states could constitutionally forbid teaching the scientific evidence for the theory of evolution,” Judge Thomas Gibb Gee wrote for the dissenters. “By requiring that the whole truth be taught, Louisiana aligned itself with Darrow; striking down this requirement, the panel holding aligns us with Bryan.” Both sides thus claimed the moral high ground that was by then almost universally associated with the Scopes defense.30
The battle over the Scopes legacy continued when the Supreme Court agreed to review the Louisiana statute. “We need not be blinded in this case to the legislature’s preeminent religious purpose in enacting this statute,” Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., wrote for the majority. He then referred “to the Tennessee statute that was the focus of the celebrated Scopes trial in 1925” as an antecedent for the Louisiana law. Writing for the dissent, however, Justice Antonin Scalia offered quite a different view of the Scopes precedent. “The people of Louisiana,” he contended, “including those who are Christian fundamentalists, are quite entitled, as a secular matter, to have whatever scientific evidence there may be against evolution presented in their schools, just as Mr. Scopes was entitled to present whatever scientific evidence there was for it.”31 These clashing applications of the Scopes legend illustrate its broad appeal as folklore. Brennan could just as easily invoke it to support freedom from religious establishment as Scalia could use it to support academic freedom to teach alternative theories.
Some fundamentalists already have adopted the latter approach. When state or local education officials seek to follow the Supreme Court decisions on religious instruction in public schools by stifling conservative Christian teachers from presenting evidence for creationism in science classrooms (as happens with increasing frequency), antievolutionists often liken it to the alleged persecution of John Scopes. Courts readily dismiss the analogy by reasoning that Scopes wanted to teach a scientific theory while the others wanted to present their religious beliefs. This does not satisfy fundamentalists, however, who view their beliefs as truer than any scientific theory, because for them religion (and not science) is founded on personal experiences and relationships.
In a thoughtful discussion about such a case that arose in California during the early 1990s, the Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter concluded that the issue ultimately involves questions of epistemology. Who does have “the right,” he asked, to decide what gets taught as science in the public schools? Creationist parents and teachers, based on their relatively subjective religious beliefs, or professional scientists and educators, based on their relatively objective scientific theories? “The rhetorical case against the creationist parents rests not merely or mostly on arcane questions of constitutional interpretation,” Carter observes, “the case rests on the sense that they themselves are wrong to rely on their sacred texts to discover truths about the world.”32 Darrow fully realized this at Dayton, and used his defense of Scopes to challenge fundamentalist beliefs. To the extent that lawyers defending the evolutionist position in later lawsuits appeal narrowly to constitutional interpretation, fundamentalist beliefs remain unchallenged.
Certainly the court decisions since the Scopes case have not slowed the spread of creationism. Instead, they have encouraged fundamentalists to abandon evolution-teaching public education for creation-affirming church or home schooling. This relatively new development built on the earlier movement for separate fundamentalist colleges that went at least as far back as the fundamentalist—modernist controversy and gained momentum after the Scopes trial. Concern over teaching evolution contributed to both developments. In his foreword to a 1974 biology textbook written for fundamentalist high schools, for example, the creationist leader Henry M. Morris attributes “the widespread movement in recent years toward the establishment of new private Christian schools” to the perception among fundamentalist pastors and parents that “a nontheistic religion of secular evolutionary humanism has become, for all practical purposes, the official state religion promoted in the public schools.”33 His text offers a markedly different theology for the science classroom.
Not all conservative Christians reacted to the Scopes legacy with such defiance, however, especially after a self-proclaimed “new evangelical” strain of American Protestantism emerged following the Second World War under the inspiration of William Bell Riley’s hand-picked successor, the evangelist Billy Graham. In his public ministry, Graham ignored the Scopes trial and antievolutionism. In 1954, he endorsed The Christian View of Science and Scripture, a new book by the Baptist theologian Bernard Ramm that sought to reconcile conservative Christians to modern science by interpreting the Genesis account as a pictorial depiction of progressive creationism spanning eons. Ramm’s influential book, which cleared a path to the serious study of science for a generation of evangelical college students, dismissed “Bryan’s miseries at the Scopes trial,” as Ramm called them, as part of a “sordid history” that “we will not trace.”34 This approach fit Graham’s objective of resurrecting a biblically orthodox creed free from the cultural baggage that made fundamentalism unacceptable to most educated Americans. Mindful of the ridicule heaped on Bryan for his testimony at Dayton, scholars within the new evangelical movement typically view militant antievolutionism as deadweight to be cast off.
Many other American Christians feel even less direct impact from the Scopes legacy than evangelicals. Modernists and mainline Protestants typically share the common culture’s reaction to the trial and legend. Despite their traditionalism, American Catholics did not join Bryan’s antievolution crusade, in part because they already had their own parochial schools and colleges, which left them in the position of spectators to the Dayton trial and its aftermath. Rooted in a historic faith adaptable enough to accept theistic evolution, Roman Catholics sat out this culture clash. Yet the issue will never wholly disappear so long as fundamentalists continue to object to teaching evolution, which they persist in seeing as damnable indoctrination in a naturalistic worldview that undermines belief in God.
Certainly the Scopes legacy clings fast to Tennessee, where most people still profess the Christian faith and most Christians lean toward fundamentalism. Republicans targeted that traditionally Democratic state during the 1994 elections, with strong support from conservative Christian political forces. In an attempt to survive the onslaught, the state’s senior Democratic U.S. senator went so far as to prepare a television commercial touting his support for school prayer, but to no avail. Republicans swept into power throughout Tennessee, and new legislation to restrict teaching evolution in public schools soon appeared in the state senate with the support of fundamentalist groups and individuals. About the same time, the Alabama board of education ordered that new biology textbooks carry a disclaimer identifying evolution as “a controversial theory ... , not fact,” and the Georgia house of representatives passed a measure facilitating instruction in creationism. “Yet it’s the Tennessee debate that has helped put the issue on the national stage,” USA Today reported. “It was in Tennessee in 1925 that the two sides squared off in Scopes’ epic trial.” The feature article discussed the 70-year-old trial at length, and included pictures of Darrow, Bryan, and Scopes.35
Largely due to the Scopes connection, the new legislation drew international attention. “Seventy years after John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution in Dayton, Tenn., the State Legislature here is considering permitting school boards to dismiss teachers who present evolution as fact rather than a theory of human origin,” began a front-page article from Nashville in the Sunday New York Times.36 The British Broadcasting Corporation sent a camera crew to cover the story, complete with interviews in Dayton. Some American network news accounts featured clips from Inherit the Wind. Newspaper articles inevitably dwelt on the Scopes trial. Amid a flurry of hostile media coverage, the senate education committee approved the proposal by an eight-to-one vote, and
sent it on to the full senate, which debated the two-sentence bill for three days. “Coming more than 70 years after Tennessee’s 1925 anti-evolution law was held up to international ridicule during the Scopes Monkey Trial, the bill again has brought national attention to Tennessee’s ongoing debate of how to teach the origins of life on Earth. Cameras and reporters jammed into the Senate for the debate,” the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported.37
Opponents dubbed the bill “Scopes II” and “Son of Scopes.” They devoted more effort to warning of its public-relations impact than to defending the theory of evolution. “This echo of the 1925 law that led to the Scopes monkey trial,” the Nashville Banner commented, “can’t help but make the state look bad.” The ACLU vowed to challenge the law in court, with its Nashville director warning, “I have already had several calls from teachers who are willing and interested in being plaintiffs, people who are interested in being the next John Scopes.” Finally, the senate’s presiding officer and senior member declared, “I can’t vote for this bill, but I don’t want anybody to think I don’t know God,” and the bill failed by a vote of twenty to thirteen. Observers credited the Scopes legacy for the defeat.38
The legislation evoked mixed reactions in Dayton. “I believe if they had the trial again today it would turn out about the same way,” Harry Shelton had commented a few years earlier, although he grudgingly conceded, “Now they permit the teaching of evolution in most schools—as long as you teach it as a theory and not as a fact.” Another former student called the new legislation “Silly, silly,” and Fred Robinson’s now elderly daughter added, “It’s a lot of hooey.” Teachers at the new regional high school keep quiet about the proposal at the request of their principal. The town’s population has tripled since 1925, spurred by a new furniture factory and better roads to Chattanooga. Memories of the trial draw tourists, too, with a Scopes Trial Museum in the old courthouse and an annual Scopes Festival featuring dramatic reenactments in the courtroom. The local newspaper editor likes the proposed new statutory limits on the teaching of evolution. “To my knowledge, it’s never been proven, even when we put on the trial here,” he noted. From the hill above town, Bryan College’s creationist biology professor agreed, adding that the bill “strikes a very profound chord in an awful lot of people.” In addition, these people—fundamentalists mostly—continue to read and hear arguments (much like those once made by Bryan) that challenge the scientific authority of Darwinism. With Bryan College faculty overseeing the town’s portrayal of the Scopes trial, the Commoner and his ideas still get a fair hearing in Dayton.39