OUR NAMESAKE'S ANNIVERSARY!

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Today is July 10, and it marks the 82nd anniversary of the beginning of the Scopes 'Monkey Trial' in Dayton, Tennessee.

The trial would run for just 15 days, but during that time it gripped the imagination of the public, markedly so for a contest that had little personal consequences: the defendant, John Scopes, was merely a 'cats paw' for the ACLU, which recruited the substitute teacher to deliberately violate the state's Butler Act (passed earlier that year) which forbade the teaching of evolution, and his conviction led to a paltry fine ($100) and no jail time.

The consequences for the culture at large were considerable, however. The stakes had been greatly raised by the interjection of two celebrities who shared considerable ego and an eagerness to place their reputations on the line in behalf of their ideology: Three-time presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Williams Jenning Bryan, an avowed critic of Darwinism, weighed in for the prosecution, while the celebrated attorney and non-believer Clarence Darrow took up the case for the defense.

The circus atmosphere of the trial was greatly aided by various publicity stunts, many of them associated with the town fathers of Dayton, who saw the trial as a gold mine for the local economy---indeed, some of them had privately encouraged Scopes and the ACLU from the beginning. They got their wish, as Dayton was flooded with the curious and the committed. Eventually, the sheer number of spectators and the summer heat led to the trial to being moved outside, like a Greek tragedy with a roped-off 'bullpen' of spectators.

(The high theatricality of all this has not escaped notice: every year there is a dramatic reenactment of the event during the (I can't make this up) Scopes Trial Festival, now celebrating its 20th anniversary next weekend. It certainly was not lost on playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, who based their 1955 play 'Inherit the Wind' on the proceedings. This play was more of a veiled critique of McCarthyism than a historical account of the 'monkey trial', and it and especially the 1960 Stanley Kramer film version tinker with the facts for dramatic purposes.)

As it happened, Darrow made a monkey of Bryan by putting him on the stand and ridiculing his beliefs---which, while it garnered the most favorable publicity for evolutionists, also was irrelevant to the statute in question. Scopes was convicted and fined. The ACLU probably thought that this defeat on tactics would lead to a victory in the court of public opinion, but they were sadly mistaken. The Butler law remained on the books for decades to come, and the publicity attended the trial roused fundamentalists in many other states to pass similar anti-evolution laws. The 'monkey trial' was an enormous setback for science education in the United States.

There is a wonderful site that embeds the Lawrence-Lee play in the context of the Scopes trial, available here. The most authoritative book on the subject of the trial is almost certainly Edward J. Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion".

Larson, who is both a lawyer and a historian, occupies an interesting position in the contemporary struggle between advocates of 'intelligent design' (ID) and evolutionary biology: on the one hand, he is a pretty enthusiastic advocate for evolution, a former student of Ronald Numbers, whose work speaks for itself; on the other hand, he was at one time a Fellow of the pro-ID Discovery Institute (DI), but dissented from the 'Wedge' document produced by the DI and asked that his name not be associated with it.

Chris Mooney, since I'm pretty sure you know more about this that I do, there's an article here: a first-person account by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's of their past involvement with the DI, and gradual disenchantment with same, would be interesting reading matter, I think!