A hundred years of polarization
The Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925 can teach us something about our present
Just a century ago, from July 10th to July 21st of 1925, the town of Dayton, Tennessee, served as the stage for a clash between Science and Obscurantism — or Atheism and Piety, depending on your point of view — that would attain mythical proportions: the trial of a high school teacher, John Scopes, accused of violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee state law that determined that:
“It shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach 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.”
This law had been approved just a few months earlier. Previously, the state Senate had considered killing the proposal in a committee, even before submitting it to a vote, but then Billy Sunday happened.
Sunday was a mass phenomenon, a televangelist and megachurch preacher before TV and megachurches even existed. His itinerant sermons attracted multitudes, and for all accounts, he was a very physical performer, even calling himself “a gymnast for Jesus”.
This gymnast was also a fundamentalist. Historian Edward J. Larson quotes him as declaring, “When the word of God says one thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go to hell”. When Tennessee legislators noticed that Sunday's anti-evolution tour of Memphis had attracted approximately 200,000 constituents, the Butler Act was quickly resurrected. It was a law born of showmanship and religious populism.
The 1955 theatre play Inherit the Wind and its several adaptations for cinema and TV (including the most famous one, the movie from 1960 starring Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly, and Fredric March, nominated for four Oscars) suggest that Scopes (represented by the fictional character Bertram Cates) was sort of caught unawares by the law, while just doing his job of trying to give his pupils the best education possible. In the play and films, he's incarcerated and ostracized by a rabidly intolerant community.
In reality, John T. Scopes wasn't even a biology teacher, but a football coach who sometimes served as a substitute teacher. After the passing of the Butler Act, the ACLU offered to provide the defense for any schoolteacher who dared defy the law. Some citizens of Dayton saw in this an opportunity to make the city famous and attract business (in the end, it was estimated that 3,000 people descended on Dayton for the trial), and Scopes was recruited for the task. It's uncertain whether he ever actually taught a class on evolution. He was never imprisoned. As Larson tells it:
The young teacher was neither jailed nor ostracized. Quite to the contrary; in the month before his trial, Scopes was feted at a formal dinner in New York City; embraced by the presidents of Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford universities, received at the Supreme Court in Washington, and awarded a scholarship for graduate study at the University of Chicago.
The law was born out of showmanship, and the trial was designed from the beginning as another big spectacle. In the end, Scopes was found guilty and sentenced to pay a fine of $ 100 (approximately $ 2,000 in today's purchasing power). In 1927, the sentence was overruled on a technicality by the Tennessee Supreme Court. The State Attorney General decided not to appeal the decision, effectively killing the case and squelching any hopes of taking the Butler Act before the Supreme Court in Washington. In the end, the prohibition on teaching evolution in Tennessee's public schools remained in the books until 1967.
Much has been written about the two leading contenders in the trial, Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution. They were both titans in their time.
Darrow was a famous lawyer and orator specializing in “lost causes”, like the defense of Communist agitators, labor unionists, and, in the year before the Scopes case, of the infamous New York Chicago thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb (both of whom he saved from the death penalty). He held a deep conviction that the interference of religion in politics and law-making was a social evil that had to be fought, especially the interference based on literal interpretations of the Bible.
Bryan had built a political career, including almost winning the 1896 presidential election on the Democratic ticket, campaigning as an economic populist who defended farmers and poor workers against bankers, financiers, and railroad barons. In the early 20th century, he reinvented himself as a religious populist, campaigning against Darwinism and advocating for biblical fundamentalism, as well as arguing for faith-based education in public schools.
But a third intellectual titan was also involved: journalist H.L. Mencken, perhaps the most influential American journalist of the 20th century. He covered the trial for the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper, and his articles on the case — collected in the book A Religious Orgy in Tennessee — show a deep horror (“fear and loathing” are the words that come to mind) for the dangers of the political empowerment of religious populism.
“Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate", he wrote. “Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience”. His obituary of Bryan (who died five days after the trial concluded) is on par with the scathing anti-elegy that, decades later, Hunter S. Thompson wrote about Richard Nixon.
If Mencken's treatment of evangelicals sounds a little too harsh, it's important to note that the man was the consummate elitist — full of prejudices and proud of every single one of them. He very clearly divided humanity into a small minority of “superior” types, capable of moving civilization forward, and a large “inferior” majority, capable only of gross superstition and wanton destruction. Coincidentally — and like everyone else who ever shared (or today shares) such views —, he saw himself as part of the enlightened minority.
Today, he'd be cancelled in seconds and revel in it. But, as journalist Art Winslow wrote, he was a complex man — an irreducible paradox. Amid his harsh elitism, he could find space for compassion and faith in the powers of education: referring to the Scopes trial, he commented that “the real prisoners” made by the Butler Act were the people of Tennessee.
He was quite cynical about democracy (“If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y”; “I have often pointed out how politics, under democracy, invariably translates itself from the domain of logical ideas to the domain of mere feelings, usually simple fear”), but also very distrustful of political authority of any kind, and a defender of democratic liberties and individual rights (“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under”; “But the cops of Chattanooga, like their brethren elsewhere, do not let constitutions stand in the way of their exercise of their lawful duty”).
Mencken was especially scornful of democracy’s tendency to betray itself: “I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity.”
If historical distance can help us put Mencken's immense snobbery into the context of a past era, it also reveals how little elitist sensibilities have changed. It's not hard to see parallels between Mencken's “Neanderthals” and Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”. His anti-government libertarianism is a more sophisticated version of Elon Musk's.
It can be said that none of those involved in the “Monkey Trial” won: Bryan died a ridiculed man, more remembered today by the clownish caricature presented in Inherit the Wind than for any of the highlights of his biography; on the other hand, the Butler Act survived for decades. Now, as it was then, extreme polarization brings with it a heady high of self-righteousness that, in the end, can be quite self-defeating.