The 1925 prosecution of Tennessee high school teacher John T. Scopes was a mixture of high drama, comedy, and outright farce.
The laid-back, unassuming 25-year old had allegedly violated a recently-passed state law banning the theory of evolution from being taught in public schools. But Scopes himself, who never spoke a word until the final day of the trial, received little notice. The most important man at the trial was the special prosecutor, a man without whose participation “the trial of the century” may have only been a historical footnote: William Jennings Bryan.
Bryan had spent years trying to prohibit the theory of evolution from being taught in public schools. Because of this, he was portrayed in his own time, as well as ours, as an ignorant, Bible-thumping fundamentalist who tried to ban science just because it wasn’t consistent with his literalist interpretation of Genesis. But if we dig further, we can see that Bryan’s arguments were more interesting and complicated than he’s commonly given credit for. By examining his motivations and actions in context, we can gain a deeper appreciation for precisely why the evolution ban was misguided, and what lessons Bryan’s story can offer us as we navigate our own cultural and academic controversies.
Two recent books on the trial can help us through this fascinating history. The Trial of the Century, by attorney and Fox News host Gregg Jarrett and the sports journalist Don Yaeger, is a rollicking, highly informative history of the trial. Their book is mostly told from the perspective of Scopes’ lead attorney, Clarence Darrow. Gregg Jarrett even credits Darrow with inspiring him to become a lawyer, and his admiration for Darrow is evident throughout the book. Many of Darrow’s arguments shape the way Jarrett/Yaeger tell the story of the trial. They also provide an excellent defense of liberal education at the end of the book. Unfortunately, their description of Bryan is shallow and often slips into banal stereotypes.
Thankfully, Brenda Wineapple’s Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation rectifies that by offering a more balanced version of events. A professional historian, Wineapple generally avoids the temptation to tell the story of the Scopes trial as a simple good versus evil narrative. Leaning less on the theatrical atmosphere of the trial, she devotes more space to the backstories of her central characters, as well as their political and cultural contexts, so much so that she doesn’t even get to the trial until more than 200 pages into her book. Reading Wineapple’s work alongside Jarrett/Yaeger’s allows a fuller picture of Bryan to develop, giving us a better idea about who he was and why his anti-evolution project failed.
Known as the “Great Commoner” because he championed the cause of regular people against economic and political elites, Bryan had been a major player in American politics for decades. A staunch Progressive, he was the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee three times—1896, 1900, and 1908, losing each time. In the early 1920s, he began traveling the country and preaching against evolution, hoping to get it banned from school curricula. As a devout Christian, Bryan was concerned about rising levels of atheism in the West, fueled by the increasingly widespread acceptance of Darwinian evolution.
His anti-evolution campaign got its first victory when, in March 1925, Governor Peahy of Tennessee signed the Butler Act, which forbade any public school, including state universities, from teaching “any theory [that] denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
Shortly after the bill was signed, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) jumped into action. Their attorneys argued that the Butler Act denied teachers and students their First Amendment right to religious liberty, and were eager to challenge the law in court. They put out an advertisement in papers around the state, asking for a volunteer to offer himself up for prosecution and promising to represent him.
A group of businessmen in the little town of Dayton saw the advertisement and thought it could be a great opportunity to gain some publicity, which would hopefully rejuvenate the stagnant local economy. They reached out to their friend and local high school teacher John Scopes, who agreed to be charged. The local prosecutor, who was in on the scheme, contacted Bryan and invited him to serve as a special counsel. Bryan readily agreed.
“America has taken another step back to the Dark Ages,” declared Clarence Darrow in response to the news about the Butler Act. Darrow was perhaps the most famous trial lawyer in America, having participated in some of the most high-profile cases of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where he defended labor organizers and black victims of racial violence.
When he heard that Bryan would be serving on the prosecution, Darrow quickly volunteered his services to the ACLU. He saw the Scopes trial as an opportunity to “prove that America is founded on liberty and not on narrow, mean, intolerable and brainless prejudice of soulless religio-maniacs.” Darrow smeared Bryan before, during, and after the trial as an ignorant, bigoted, wanna-be theocrat, but as Wineapple shows, Bryan’s position was much more nuanced than Darrow gave him credit for. In the first place, he was hardly an opponent of science overall. In fact, he publicly recognized the vast benefits that scientific progress had afforded mankind. According to him, though, evolution was different.
While the state can and should provide guidelines for what is allowed to be taught in public schools, those guidelines should be broad—certainly broad enough to include a major, evidence-based, mainstream scientific theory.
Like others in the nascent fundamentalist movement, Bryan believed that Darwinism contradicted the Bible’s account of creation. But it was the metaphysical and social implications of evolution that bothered him the most. Christianity taught that all human beings, regardless of their circumstances or abilities, had intrinsic value. Darwinism, on the other hand, taught that only the fittest survive. It wasn’t a far leap—and many people at the time did make the leap—to say that only the fittest should survive. If Darwinian evolution were accepted as fact, Bryan feared, the strongest of the human species might kill off the weak. Wineapple notes that Bryan also worried about the state regulating human reproduction, in the name of improving the human race. In Bryan’s words, the state may institute “a system of breeding under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movement of the mass of mankind—an impossible system!” This was social Darwinism in action.
Wineapple writes that Bryan “confused social Darwinism with the theory of evolution,” implying that since Bryan hadn’t read much biology, he simply couldn’t tell the difference between the science of evolution and the pseudoscience of eugenics. But the truth is that most of Bryan’s contemporaries, including the nation’s top scientists, believed that social Darwinism was the logical conclusion of the biological theory of evolution. As Nicholas Spencer writes in his book on the entangled histories of science and religion, “Virtually no one, whether adamant fundamentalist or evolutionary atheist, thought Darwinism was ‘mere’ biology.”
Indeed, the very textbook used by Scopes in his classroom, G. W. Hunter’s A Civic Biology, explicitly says that social problems are essentially biological at their core. “If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved,” Hunter writes, “it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.” He goes on to write positively of eugenics, saying that if the “parasites” of society weren’t human, “we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.”
The idea that Darwinism would become the justification for eugenics wasn’t just an irrational fear dreamed up by Bryan. It was already becoming a reality. By 1925, dozens of states had passed forced sterilization laws. As Spencer notes, these states “sterilised criminals, drunks, promiscuous women, ‘morons’ and ‘imbeciles’ (‘scientific’ definitions of intelligence), as well as a number of unemployed, disabled and black citizens.” Between 1920 and 1970, as many as 70,000 Americans underwent compulsory sterilization.
Bryan was horrified at the thought of governments forcibly sterilizing people in the name of “improving” the human species. Unfortunately, he threw the baby out with the bathwater. Though widely popular at the time, social Darwinism and its more evil twin, eugenics, weren’t the same thing as, or even a necessary consequence of, the theory of evolution. Bryan may not have confused these ideas, but he did see eugenics as the fruit of a rotten tree. If the West was to be saved from tyranny and moral decadence, the whole evolutionary tree needed to be hewn down.
Bryan believed the common people could accomplish this by exercising their right to control what gets taught in public schools. In Keeping the Faith, Wineapple writes about how important the democratic ethos was for Byran. “The hand that writes the paycheck rules the school,” he said in one speech. It would be lunacy, he thought, for the people to pay teachers for the privilege of turning their children into atheists. And yet, this is exactly what schools were doing by teaching evolution as an incontrovertible fact. By this logic, it was the evolutionists who were limiting religious freedom, not the creationists.
Scopes’s defense attorneys weren’t buying it, though. They pointed to the explicitly religious language of the Butler Act and noted that there was even a significant number of Christians who saw no contradiction between “the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” and the theory of evolution. By using a particular form of Christianity to shape school curricula, the state had effectively established a state religion. This was basically the same conclusion that the Supreme Court came to in the 1968 case Epperson v. Arkansas, when it declared that an Arkansas anti-evolution law, which used almost identical language to the Butler Act, had violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
In their concluding chapter, Jarrett/Yaeger argue that state anti-evolution statutes weren’t just unconstitutional—they were also antithetical to the purpose of education, which is to facilitate “the free exchange of ideas and information, however unpopular they may be.” Bryan’s great failure is that he thought he could save Western civilization through censorship. And while the state can and should provide guidelines for what is allowed to be taught in public schools, those guidelines should be broad, certainly broad enough to include a major, evidence-based, mainstream scientific theory.
Even when real science gets twisted by ideologues, like evolution was by the social Darwinists, using the ham-handed fist of government to snuff it out only deprives students of the opportunity to engage with the subject. Jarrett/Yaeger compare the anti-evolution statutes to modern-day policies forcing critical race theory (CRT) into classrooms. Teachers and students who dissent from these politically leftist curricula are sometimes punished. On the other hand, laws banning CRT often have an unintended chilling effect on teachers, many of whom are now afraid of teaching anything about the history of race relations, especially the most controversial parts, lest they be accused of breaking the law. Jarrett/Yaeger persuasively argue that the pro- and the anti-CRT side go too far by mandating the conclusions that students must come to, rather than allowing classrooms to be a “marketplace of ideas” where “information should be freely exchanged.”
That just wouldn’t do for Bryan. He was, as Wineapple concludes, a “Christian utopianist” who firmly believed that he could use government regulation to create a better world. But by trying to impose his worldview by force of law, he tarnished his personal reputation and that of his movement, which was seen as illiberal, backwards, and repressive. Providentially, perhaps, he went to meet his Maker only a few days after the trial ended. Ultimately, Bryan’s final crusade against evolution is a cautionary tale about the practical limitations of state power. It is a tale well worth studying.