Revisiting Scopes

Keeping the Faith (Random House, 544 pp.), the latest of many works on the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” is an indignant book. It makes its trajectory clear from its first page. Author Brenda Wineapple calls America a “secular country founded on the freedom to worship.” But various Christian demagogues in American history have tried to force people to worship God in a narrow-minded way, she warns. “Freedom to worship” has become a favorite phrase in liberal parlance in recent years, usually implying that religious freedom only entails the freedom to worship God privately, inside your church. America’s Founders did not employ the phrase.

During the Scopes Trial, the great 1925 battle over teaching evolution, officious religious people tried to tell secular people what to do. Of course, Wineapple sees the past repeating itself today, with “white supremacists promising that a revitalized white Protestant America” will “rise again, regardless of what or whose rights and freedoms might be trampled.” This is standard rhetoric in partisanship-as-history.

Much of Keeping the Faith tells the backstories of the trial’s major figures, including Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan, who defended Tennessee’s anti-evolution statute. After describing Bryan’s death, Wineapple calls him a “religious bigot,” a “liar,” and a “white supremacist.” Clarence Darrow, who defended the dissenting science teacher John Scopes, predictably comes through as the book’s hero.

Wineapple tells us Bryan was a capital-F “Fundamentalist”: a person who believed the Bible was the “literal and infallible word of God.” Wineapple puts inordinate emphasis on “literal” interpretation and what such a Biblical hermeneutic must entail. These fundamentalists had “no scientific knowledge whatsoever,” she says, but they opposed evolution nevertheless. (Never mind that certain scientists at the time, such as Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, also opposed Darwinism.) Bryanism represented “patent ignorance of history, geography, religion, diplomacy, and science.”

Despite such assertions, Wineapple herself does not always demonstrate a clear grasp of Christian doctrine. This leads to embarrassing misunderstandings. She is under the impression that fundamentalists believed the “immaculate conception was a fact.” She apparently equates the immaculate conception with Christ’s virgin birth, but the immaculate conception is actually a Catholic doctrine about the Virgin Mary’s sinless nature, a belief almost no Protestants have affirmed.

She also thinks Bryan supported young-earth creationism and affirmed a “literal” six-day creation. Instead, as other works on Bryan and the trial have shown, he was an old-earth creationist. His chief concern was opposing evolution, not promoting a strict reading of the “days” of Genesis 1. Bryan did not defend a literal “day” interpretation before or at the trial because he did not believe in it. Wineapple assumes instead that Bryan had “contradicted his own literal interpretation of the Bible” when he did not affirm 24-hour days of creation in response to Darrow’s questioning.

There is plenty to criticize about Bryan, of course, as earlier biographers have noted. Bryan’s taking the stand to defend the Bible against Darrow was a major error. At the most dramatic moment of the trial, a deathly ill Bryan became addled, though not in the specific ways Wineapple describes. For her, his alleged self-contradiction on creation sent Bryan into a screaming rage because he had been exposed as a hypocrite. It is more accurate to say the ailing Bryan was not used to facing direct questions from a hostile opponent. He ended up looking foolish, especially to contemptuous journalists such as H.L. Mencken.

Aside from Bryan’s fundamentalism, Wineapple devotes much of Keeping the Faith to Bryan’s poor record on race relations. This may be one of Wineapple’s chief justifications for retelling the trial’s story in tones nearly identical to Inherit the Wind, still the best-known popular portrayal of the trial. That play and subsequent movie secured Bryan’s reputation as a religious demagogue by the 1960s. To this negative image, Wineapple adds that he was a racial demagogue. Bryan’s racial views were indeed dismaying, often giving a pass to groups including the Ku Klux Klan. But virtually all Democrats at the time shared his stances. Democrats in those days remained the party of the white South and the Klan. But it’s never quite clear how Bryan’s racial views undergirded his fundamentalism, since he not only opposed evolution but also the related beliefs of social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism. Wineapple curiously insists that those ideas had no necessary connection to evolution.

The Scopes Trial is a fascinating topic, but if you want to learn more about it, I would recommend Edward Larson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book Summer for the Gods (1997). Larson not only evoked the extraordinary circumstances that made Dayton, Tenn., the site of the “trial of the century,” but he presented the trial as a struggle between majoritarian democracy (especially concerning what schoolchildren learn) and individual liberty (including the right of teachers to teach what they believe is true). That’s a classic American debate, one in which both sides can make plausible arguments. It’s also a more persuasive story than what Wineapple delivers: a simple tale of secular “good guys” versus religious “bad guys.”