Some trials are about people; others are about events; and still others are about issues. The "Scopes Trial" of 1925, the so-called "monkey trial," was about a clash between religion and science in public education. Though the trial itself took only a few days, the great issues that separated William Jennings Bryan from Clarence Darrow still divide our nation today. Neither a jury verdict nor a Supreme Court decision will make them go away. They are concerns as old as mankind and as new as genetic engineering.
As has become all too common with regard to famous and infamous trials, the popular perception of what transpired in the courtroom comes not from the transcript of the court proceeding itself, but rather from the motion picture and/or stage play that was based - often loosely - on the trial. Inherit the Wind was both a prize-winning play and movie. These fictionalized accounts presented the conflict as stark and simple: the forces of fundamentalist darkness versus those of progressive light. The William Jennings Bryan character, Scopes's prosecutor, was a burlesque of know-nothing religious literalism. The Clarence Darrow character, Scopes's defender, was the champion of tolerance, understanding and pluralism.
In the most dramatic scene, the Darrow character calls the Bryan character as an expert witness on the Bible. The attack is scathing and merciless, as the man of science destroys the man of religion before our very eyes. The questions are devastating: how could the early days of creation be measured before the creation of the sun? Were they really twenty-four hour days? How could Joshua order the sun to stop, when we all know that the earth moves around a fixed sun?
The fictional answers are true to the caricature of know-nothing literalism manufactured by the author of Inherit the Wind: God knows how to measure time without a sun. Of course they were twenty-four hour days. God can make the sun move and stop.
As usual, the real story, as told in the trial transcript and in contemporaneous accounts, was more complex and far more interesting. The actual William Jennings Bryan was no simple-minded literalist. And he certainly was no bigot. He was a great populist, who cared deeply about equality and about the downtrodden.
Indeed, one of his reasons for becoming so deeply involved in the campaign against evolution was that Darwin's theories were being used - misused, it turns out - by racists, militarists and nationalists to push some pretty horrible programs. The eugenics movement, which advocated sterilization of "unfit" and "inferior" stock, was at its zenith, and it took its impetus from Darwin's theory of natural selection. German militarism, which had just led to the disastrous World War, drew inspiration from Darwin's survival of the fittest. The anti-immigration movement, which had succeeded in closing American ports of entry to "inferior racial stock," was grounded in a mistaken belief that certain ethnic groups had evolved more fully than others. The "Jim Crow" laws, which maintained racial segregation, were rationalized on grounds of the racial inferiority of blacks.
Indeed, the very book - Hunter's Civic Biology - from which John T. Scopes taught Darwin's theory of evolution to high school students in Dayton, Tennessee, contained dangerous misapplications of that theory. It explicitly accepted the naturalistic fallacy and repeatedly drew moral instruction from nature. Indeed, its very title, Civic Biology, made it clear that biology had direct political implications for civic society. In discussing the "five races" of man, the text assured the all-white, legally separated high school students taught by Scopes that "the highest type of all, the Caucasians, are represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America." The book, the avowed goal of which was the improvement of the future human race, then proposed certain eugenic remedies. After a discussion of the inheritability of crime and immorality, the author proposed an analogy: "Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites."
From the analogy flowed "the remedy": "If such people were lower animals, 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. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country."
These "remedies" included involuntary sterilizations, and eventually laid the foundation for involuntary "euthanasia" of the kind practiced in Nazi Germany.
Nor were these misapplications of Darwinian theory limited to high school text books. Eugenic views held sway at institutions of higher learning such as Harvard University, under racist President Abbott Lawrence Lowell. Even so distinguished a Supreme Court Justice as Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld a mandatory sterilization law on the basis of pseudoscientific assumption about inheritance and genetics. His widely quoted rationale - that "three generations of imbeciles are enough" - was later cited by Nazi apologists for mass sterilization. Ironically, the journalist character in the play and movie was based on the real life reporter H.L. Mencken, whose newspaper paid some of the legal expenses for the defense. The real life Mencken was himself a rabid racist as well as an anti-religious bigot.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that William Jennings Bryan, who was a populist and an egalitarian, would be outraged - both morally and religiously - at what he believed was a direct attack on the morality and religion that had formed the basis of his entire political career.
Nor was Bryan the know-nothing Biblical literalist of Inherit the Wind. For the most part, he actually seems to have gotten the better of Clarence Darrow in the argument over the Bible. To Darrow's question, "Do you think the earth was made in six days?", Bryan's actual answer was, "I do not think they were twenty-four hour days." He then proceeded to suggest that these "days" were really "periods" and that the creation may have taken "6,000,000 years or 600,000,000 years."
When Darrow questioned Bryan about the Biblical story of Joshua ordering the sun to stand still, he obviously expected Bryan to claim that the sun orbited around the earth, as the Bible implies. But Bryan disappointed him by testifying that he believed that "the earth goes around the sun." He then proceeded to explain why the divinely inspired author of the Joshua story "may have used language that could be understood at that time."
All in all, Bryan does quite well in defending his position and Darrow comes off as something of an anti-religious cynic. The law was on Darrow's side, although it took more than half a century for the Supreme Court to vindicate his position. But the primitive and misapplied evolution taught by John Scopes was neith good science nor good morality. Censorship of the kind dictated by the Tennessee anti-evolution law was not the proper response to the dangers of teaching high school students the kind of racist rubbish contained in the textbook used by Scopes. Religion does indeed have its proper role in constraining the misapplications of science, but not in the classrooms of public schools.
This is an excerpt from Alan Dershowitz's commentary on the Scopes Trial of 1925. This commentary is found as the Introduction to a book called The Scopes Trial published by Gryphon Editions in 1990. Dershowitz has spent most of his career as a law professor at Harvard University and is a high profile criminal defense attorney. He is a noted author and influential modern commentator.