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- Book Review: Summer for the Gods
- Soil: The Other Half of the Foundation, in Fine Homebuilding
- Critters Kindle Military Curiosity, in InTech
YOUR HOST
Civil Commotion
The Intersection of Religion, Law, and Politics
Thursday, December 30, 2004
Eager to attract attention to their languishing town, Dayton, Tennessee boosters thought that responding to the ACLU’s classified advertisement seeking a teacher willing to test the state’s new anti-evolution statute might be just the thing.
Although Rappleyea and Robinson pressed the young teacher to accept the challenge, Scopes could have refused. Sue Hicks stood at his side; the two young men were close friends. “After we had discussed that possibility for a while, Scopes said he would be glad to do it, and I said I wouldn’t mind to prosecute him,” Hicks reported. Rappleyea then called over a nearby justice of the peace, swore out a warrant for Scopes “arrest,” and handed it to a waiting constable to “serve” on the accused. After Scopes left for a game of tennis, Rappleyea wired the ACLU in New York while Robinson called the Chattanooga Times and Nashville Banner. Walter White, for his part, hailed the local stringer for the Chattanooga News with the words, “Something has happened that’s going to put Dayton on the map!”Thus began, at the lunch counter of the Dayton drugstore, the most famous misdemeanor trial in all of American history.
It might be difficult to imagine today, but evolutionists and creationists once coexisted peacefully. Religious “modernists” accepted the logic of evolution as evidence of a Plan, and many of the leading advocates of evolution counted themselves faithful Christians. Fundamentalists, though, believers in the inerrancy of the Bible, were always made uncomfortable by evolution’s apparent conflict with the Genesis creation story – and when “Social Darwinism” and then “eugenics” entered the national vocabulary they began to fight back.
Their leader was William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner and, three times, the Democratic Party candidate for president. His star had begun to fade by the 20’s, though, and he used the issue to catapult himself back into public prominence. Coincidentally, the World Christian Fundamentals Association held its annual meeting in Tennessee as the prosecution of Scopes drew near and Bryan, a speaker at the convention, offered to assist the prosecution; Hicks accepted the offer on the grounds that Bryan’s involvement would add luster to the show.
In New York Clarence Darrow, who had initially rejected participating in the trial, was aroused. Bryan! Darrow considered Bryan a demagogic buffoon, offered his services to Scopes at no charge, and headed to Dayton.
The stage was set.
H.L. Mencken was in Dayton to cover the Trial of the Century.
Judge and jury will go to extreme lengths to assure the prisoner the last and least of his rights. He will be protected in his person and feelings by the full military and naval power of the State of Tennessee. No one will be permitted to pull his nose, to pray publicly for his condemnation or even to make a face at him. But all the same he will be bumped off inevitably when the time comes, and to the applause of all right-thinking men.And so he was – but not before Darrow had lured Bryan into the witness box — a stage built on the courthouse lawn, in fact, especially for the occasion — with a clever appeal to his vanity, and then made a fool of him. Mencken was there to report that, too.
Thus he fought his last fight, eager only for blood. It quickly became frenzied and preposterous, and after that pathetic. All sense departed from him. He bit right and left, like a dog with rabies. He descended to demagogy so dreadful that even his associates blushed. His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up – to lead his forlorn mob against the foe. That foe, alas, refused to be alarmed. It insisted upon seeing the battle as a comedy. Even Darrow, who knew better, occasionally yielded to the prevailing spirit. Finally he lured poor Bryan into a folly almost incredible.The Tennessee Supreme Court overturned Scopes’ conviction on a technicality, and he was never retried.
I allude to his astounding argument against the notion that man is a mammal. I am glad I heard it, for otherwise I’d never believe it. There stood the man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic – and once, I believe, elected – there he stood in the glare of the world, uttering stuff that a boy of eight would laugh at!
The fight goes on, though, with little significant change in the underlying issues or the language used to debate it - and the Scopes trial is the icon, the endlessly-cited exemplar for all disputes between the forces of religion and science. Garry Wills, for instance, huffing at the re-election of George Bush and alluding to the nationwide push to introduce Intelligent Design in the nation’s biology classes, complained as recently as last November in a New York Times opinion piece that Scopes is about to be re-fought.
Indeed it is, and Edward Larsen’s Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion is a superb guide to the terrain, a carefully drawn summary of the positions of both sides as well as a blow-by-blow account of one specific battle. Larsen reports disinterestedly, too; he writes with enthusiasm, but more as if he’s examining an especially interesting bug than as a partisan rooting for one side or the other. He won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for history with this book, and deserved it.
Nobody can follow the news and fail to understand that religion-based conflict is going to a part of the America public policy landscape for a long while to come. This is the indispensable guide.
Filed by Bob Felton at 4:51 PM | PermaLink |
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