A Retrospective on the Significance and Legacy of the “Trial of the Century”
— AN OVERVIEW —
PREFACE
- The historical and scientific context for the Scopes Trial of 1925.
- What were the main issues at stake in the trial?
PART 1
- The facts, the myths, and the legacy related to the Trial – and why it was so significant in subsequent American history.
- The value and necessity of Christian apologetics.
PART 2
- A contemporary update: The Sepocs Trial of 2025.
- How has American society and culture radically changed over the past century?
- The case for Intelligent Design.
- The Summa: “Follow the evidence wherever it leads to its logical conclusion.”
— PART 1 —
THE SCOPES TRIAL
(July 10-21, 1925)
Ref. Jefrey D. Breshears, “The Scopes Trial,” in Dictionary of Christianity and Science (Zondervan, 2017), pp. 621-22.
Prelude to the “Monkey Trial”
The Set-Up.
In 1925, the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act, a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools.
It shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities… 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.
Offenders shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and fined between $100 and $500.
Immediately, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), founded five years earlier in 1920 by notable left-wing activists including Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas and Arthur Garfield Hayes, challenged the constitutionality of the Tennessee law and offered support to any teacher who would defy the law. Sitting in the soda fountain area of a drugstore in Dayton, Tennessee – about 40 miles north/northeast of Chattanooga – George Rappleyea, the manager of the local Cumberland Coal and Iron Company and an ardent evolutionist, suggested to the drugstore proprietor, Fred Robinson, that they challenge the new state statute. Robinson, the chairman of the local school board, agreed that a controversial, high-profile trial could be good for business and “put Dayton on the map.” The county school superintendent, Walter White, actually approved of the anti-evolution law, but he also liked the idea of generating publicity for the town.
Together, these city leaders convinced John T. Scopes (1900-70), a 24-year-old general science teacher at Central High School, to be arrested for teaching evolution to high school students. Scopes, whose father was an avowed socialist and an agnostic, apparently held no strong political or religious views. Although he disapproved of the new state law, he was not an outspoken critic of it. Purportedly, he had read a passage from George William Hunter’s state-approved Civic Biology textbook to his science class that contained the line, “We have now learned that animal forms may be arranged so as to begin with the simple one-celled forms and culminate with… man himself.”
Following the pre-arranged script, Robinson, Rappelyea, and other conspirators immediately arranged to have Scopes arrested. So essentially, the Scopes Trial was little more than a scheme to create “a big sensation,” pump up the local economy, and bring the town some notoriety.
To generate publicity, Robinson contacted the Chattanooga News and the Nashville Banner to report the arrest of a local teacher for violating the new anti-evolution law. The following day, a front-page article appeared in the Banner: “J. T. Scopes, a substitute teacher in the Rhea County High School, was arrested yesterday and charged with violating the Butler Act, which forbids the teaching in public schools of any theory that denies the story of Divine creation as taught in the Bible and teaches instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The Associated Press immediately picked up on the story and sent it out to every major newspaper in the country. Dayton was now “on the map”!
The Key Players.
Hoping to attract maximum media coverage, Rappleyea then wrote to the British novelist H. G. Wells, an ardent evolutionist, and invited him to join the defense team. Wells, however, declined as he had no legal training and was unfamiliar with the American judicial system. Meanwhile, Tennessee’s Attorney General, A. T. (Tom) Stewart, was appointed to prosecute the case along with two local attorneys, the brothers Herbert and Sue Hicks. Of the three, only Stewart had the requisite legal expertise and experience. In addition, William Bell Riley, a prominent Baptist pastor, seized the opportunity to recruit William Jennings Bryan to assist the prosecution. Riley was the founder of the World Christian Fundamental Association and an outspoken Young Earth Creationist who had gained considerable media attention in the past for referring to evolutionary theory as “an international Jewish-Bolshevik-Darwinist conspiracy.”
At the time, William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) was one of America’s foremost celebrities. A former three-time candidate for President – twice as the Democratic Party’s nominee and once as the nominee of the Populist Party – Bryan had also served as Secretary of State in the Woodrow Wilson administration. After World War I he devoted much of his time to political reforms and moral and religious issues, focusing on the increasing secularization of American culture. Bryan was particularly troubled by the secular trends in public education that he believed were marginalizing or outright excluding God. He regarded Darwinian evolutionary theory as a significant driving force in these trends, and he warned that if naturalistic evolution became generally accepted it would eventually erode belief in God and traditional morality. In his words, “Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproved hypotheses rob [mankind of its moral] compass” and thereby pose a threat to human welfare.
Beginning in 1921, Bryan began publicly campaigning against evolution theory. No defender of academic freedom, he was both a capital ‘D’ Democrat and a lower-case ‘d’ democrat who believed in majoritarian rule. He argued that in a democracy, if the majority of citizens in a community opposed evolution, their tax dollars should not go to teaching it in public schools and universities. In his words, “Taxpayers have a right to say what shall be taught…. The hand that writes the paycheck rules the school, and a teacher has no right to teach that which his employers object to.”
Always the consummate showman, Bryan toured the country denouncing and ridiculing evolution, offering $100 to anyone who would admit to being descended from a monkey. He sometimes added: “While you may trace your ancestry back to the monkey if you find pleasure or pride in doing so, you shall not connect me with your family tree!” At the invitation of William Bell Riley, Bryan agreed to come to Dayton and serve on a pro bono basis although in fact he had not tried a case in 36 years. His celebrity status and his presence assured that the trial would generate considerable media coverage, and once word got out that Bryan was involved, numerous lawyers offered to defend Scopes.
Over the next few weeks a defense team formed that included Dudley Field Malone, Arthur Garfield Hays, and Clarence Darrow. Of the three, Malone was most aligned with the ACLU’s agenda. In his book, Summer of the Gods, Edward Larson describes Malone as a “pompous” and “swank New York city slicker” with “a passion for radical causes.” He was, however, an articulate courtroom orator, and as a professing Christian who supported theistic evolution, he added credibility to the defense’s case – at least in the minds of many observers. Arthur Garfield Hays, named by his father in honor of three 19th-century Republican presidents, is described as “a left-wing Park Avenue attorney” who “grew rich representing major corporations and famous entertainers,” although he claimed that his real passion was defending the poor, persecuted, and defenseless dissenters in society. Regarding the issues related to the Scopes Trial, Hays opposed all government restrictions on the free speech of teachers and professors.
Clarence Darrow was probably the most famous – or infamous – trial lawyer in America at the time and the nation’s premier legal defender of high-profile leftists such as the five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs and “Big Bill” Haywood of the radical IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). Based in Chicago, Darrow’s reputation was that of a flamboyant self-promoter whose abrasive personality was so toxic that even the ACLU regarded him as too radical. Many suspected that he would attempt to transform the trial from an emphasis on academic freedom to a general assault on the Bible and Christianity. However, once he learned that Bryan would be joining the prosecution, Darrow refused to be sidelined. This was the opportunity of a lifetime, and he used his national notoriety to force his way onto the defense them. As many feared, he immediately dominated the defense team and its agenda.
While often described as an agnostic, Darrow was in fact a militant atheist whose intellectual mentor was the bombastic 19th century orator and infidel, Robert Ingersoll. Darrow proudly defied traditional social and moral values, and he publicly characterized Christianity as a “slave religion” that attracted mostly “soulless religio-maniacs” and anti-intellectual ignoramuses. His involvement in the Scopes trial was the only pro bono case he ever worked on in his career, and his apparent motive was to destroy the credibility of the Bible. He also held a personal grudge against the “religious fanatic” William Jennings Bryan.
The ACLU defense was based on three arguments:
(1) Evolution theory is a scientific fact. Most scientists and philosophers of science accepted Darwinian evolutionary theory as “settled science” (to use the current term) as it relates to the origins of all life forms including human beings.
(2) Separation of church and state. The biblical account of special divine creation is a religious doctrine, not a scientific one, and should not preclude the teaching of real science.
(3) Academic freedom. Since its founding a few years earlier in 1920, academic freedom was a top priority for the ACLU – particularly on behalf of socialists, communists and social nonconformists. The organization’s position was that academic freedom is essential to healthy education and the spirit of democracy, and neither the state nor religious authorities nor majoritarian opinion have the right to control what is taught in public schools. Prior to the Scopes Trial, John Neal, a former law professor at the University of Tennessee, had emphasized this issue by declaring that “The question is not whether evolution is true or untrue, but involves the freedom of teaching, or more important, the freedom of learning.” In his detailed book on the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods, Edward Larson comments that “the issues raised by the Scopes trial and legend endure precisely because they embody the characteristically American struggle between individual liberty and majoritarian democracy, and cast it in the timeless debate over science and religion.” [Summer for the Gods, p. 265.]
This was apparently the context for the most famous statement later associated with the trial: “It is bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origins.” This oft-repeated “quote” is usually (but probably erroneously) attributed to Clarence Darrow, but more likely the source was Dudley Field Malone.[1] Such a sentiment runs contrary to everything Darrow stood for given his ardent atheism and his contempt for the Bible and Christianity. Ironically, however, Bryan would have agreed with the statement if only for practical and tactical reasons. As Edward Larson explains, many anti-evolutionists in the 1920s would undoubtedly have preferred to have only biblical special creationism taught in public schools, but Bryan argued for the state to bar the teaching of evolution based on the reality that public schools throughout the country already prohibited the teaching of special creationism. Therefore, “by thus casting his argument as one for neutrality in education on the controversial topic of human origins, Bryan was able to gain support for anti-evolution laws from non-fundamentalists.” [Ibid., p. 257.]
As noted previously, Bryan also made his argument on the basis of his democratic orientation, arguing that “The real issue is not what can be taught in public schools, but who shall control the education system…. If the people [i.e., the majority] are not to control the schools, who shall control them?… The disgrace is not the Tennessee law; the disgrace is that teachers… should betray the truth imposed on them by the taxpayers” by violating the law.”
[Note: Bryan’s position on democratic/majoritarian rule and the ACLU’s position on academic freedom both miss the mark: what matters is Truth based on verifiable facts and sound reason.]
Six weeks prior to the trial, Judge John Raulston scheduled a grand jury inquiry that indicted Scopes on the word of three students who testified that he had read passages about human evolution from Hunter’s Civic Biology textbook. The entire session, including the indictment, took only about an hour, after which the trial was scheduled to begin on July 10.
A Media Circus.
From the outset, a carnival atmosphere surrounded the Scopes Trial. Dayton’s civic leaders formed a Scopes Trial Entertainment Committee, and as Edward Larson notes in Summer of the Gods, “City officials roped off six blocks of the town’s main street as a pedestrian mall, which quickly filled with hucksters and proselytizers. The state sent a mobile chlorination unit to provide an adequate supply of safe drinking water and a sanitary engineer to oversee waste disposal.” Banners strewn across the street included everything from advertisements by local merchants to evangelistic Bible verses and signs with messages such as “Read Your Bible.” An estimated two hundred reporters, along with an eclectic horde of publicity hounds, curiosity seekers, fundamentalist evangelists, militant atheists and East Coast elites descended upon Dayton while vendors hawked hot dogs, lemonade, and souvenirs. One billboard featured a chimpanzee drinking a soda, and merchants decorated their shops with images of primates advertising various items such as monkey dolls and lapel pins that read, “Your old man’s a monkey.” The constable’s motorcycle even carried a sign reading “Monkeyville Police.”
As the trial began in the Rhea County Courthouse, motion-picture cameramen and press photographers stood on tables and chairs to film and photograph the major participants as if it were a championship boxing match. An estimated two hundred reporters covered the trial for newspapers across America and even as far away as London. The Scopes Trial was also the first public event to be broadcast “live” on the radio, and loudspeakers positioned in the city square kept the overflow crowd informed of the proceedings inside the courtroom. To generate widespread interest, the media portrayed it as “the trial of the century” and a “battle royale” between “religion and science” – i.e., the followers of Christian fundamentalism (or “Old-Time Religion”) versus the informed advocates of modern science.
Arriving in Dayton, Bryan immediately added fuel to the fire, calling the event “a gigantic conspiracy of atheists and agnostics against the Christian religion.” The mainstream media thought otherwise. For example, an editorial in the Nashville Banner referred to Bryan as “something of a storm center,” implying that his crusade was little more than an ego trip. H. L. Mencken of the Baltimore Evening Sun took the opportunity to depict fundamentalists as bigoted, uneducated and narrow-minded fools. It was also Mencken who first characterized the proceedings as a “Monkey Trial.” And of course, the great American humorist and social satirist, Will Rogers, had to weigh in, declining an invitation to come to Dayton with the comment, “Bryan is due back here in the New York Zoo in July.”
The Trial
The Real Issue.
In retrospect, the Scopes Trial dramatized the key issues in the intense fundamentalist/modernist controversy that were fracturing all of America’s mainline Protestant denominations at the time. The issues were (1) biblical authority in general; and (2) biblical hermeneutics and authority as it applied specifically to the interpretation of not only the Genesis account of creation but the entire first eleven chapters of Genesis. In other words, how authoritative was Genesis – or the Bible in general – historically and scientifically?
The presiding judge, John Raulston, was a conservative Methodist and a lay minister who showed up for the trial each morning carrying his Bible. He was also overtly prejudiced in favor of the state’s case, and the outcome was a foregone conclusion even before the trial began. Reportedly, eleven of the twelve jurors were regular churchgoers, and none had ever read a book on evolution.
The trial began on July 10 as the courtroom was jam-packed with a thousand spectators including journalists, film crews, local citizens and curiosity seekers from all over Tennessee and beyond. Sparks flew immediately when Judge Raulston ordered an invocation. Darrow vehemently objected – it would prejudice the jury, he complained – but his objection was denied. Jury selection took several hours, after which Judge Raulston read the Genesis account of creation. As in the grand jury session several weeks earlier, the prosecution called three witnesses who testified that Scopes had indeed read the offending passage from the science book, then rested its case.
The defense responded by attempting to call several “expert” witnesses, mostly professing Christian scientists and theologians who believed in Darwinian evolution, but Judge Raulston ruled that such testimony would “shed no light” on the case. For their part, the prosecution had no success in recruiting scientific “experts” to bolster their case. Few notable scientists opposed the theory of evolution, and those who did believe in special creation were either unavailable or otherwise disinterested in testifying. But all of this was irrelevant. After all, this trial was not about biblical authority or whether evolution was true, but whether John Scopes had broken the state law. Nonetheless, and in the midst of the sweltering, humid temperatures, the trial droned on for several days as the prosecution and defense argued legal technicalities. Scopes himself was little more than a passive bystander, and Bryan, as an advisor to the prosecution, contributed relatively little to the proceedings. For the most part he sat sweating and fanning himself in the stifling July heat. Public and media interest soon began to wane as expectations turned to boredom.
A few days into the trial, Arthur Garfield Hays challenged the “unreasonableness” of the state law, comparing those who opposed Darwinian evolution to 16th century troglodytes who opposed the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus. In his words, “Evolution is as much a scientific fact as the Copernican [heliocentric] theory,” and he argued that scientific expertise rather than conventional thinking should set the standard for science education. Clarence Darrow followed with a two-hour monologue in which he reminded the jury (and the media) that the Tennessee state constitution recognized religious freedom – “All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience” – but the recent anti-evolution statute established a particular religious viewpoint in the public schools. Darrow asserted that the Bible “is not a book on biology,” and its authors knew nothing about modern science. Furthermore, he added that most intelligent modern Christians accept evolution as a scientific fact. The media was duly impressed. The Chicago Tribune hailed Darrow’s speech as “one of the greatest speeches of his career,” and numerous other newspapers reprinted the speech in detail. For his part, Bryan reminded his followers that this case was simply “a concerted attack upon revealed religion… by a minority made up of atheists, agnostics, and unbelievers.”
On Wednesday, July 16, Dudley Field Malone addressed the court: “We will show by the testimony of men learned in science and theology that there are millions of people who believe in evolution and in the story of creation as set forth in the Bible and who find no conflict between the two.” Speaking strictly for himself, he continued: “While the defense thinks there is a conflict between evolution and the Old Testament, we believe there is no conflict between evolution and Christianity.” Arousing fears of a new “inquisition,” he argued that the Bible could be regarded as an authoritative source for theology and morality, but certainly not for science. Turning to Bryan, Malone stated: “There might be a conflict between evolution and the peculiar ideas of Christianity which are held by Mr. Bryan as the evangelical leader of the prosecution, but we deny that [he] is the authorized spokesman for the Christians of the United States.”
The following day, Bryan opened with an hour-long critique of evolution using familiar arguments from many of the stump speeches he had delivered over the previous three years. Malone responded with a half-hour rebuttal in which he declared that Bryan’s self-described “duel to the death” against evolution was fallacious because “[T]here is never a duel with the truth. The truth always wins, [and] The truth does not need the forces of government.” He concluded with the memorable words: We feel we stand with progress. We feel we stand with science. We feel we stand with intelligence. We feel we stand with fundamental freedom in America. We are not afraid. Where is the fear? We defy it!” Once he finished, spectators on both sides, including the assembled press, erupted in spontaneous applause. J. W. Butler, the legislator who had proposed the Tennessee anti-evolution law, later called it “the finest speech of the century.” According to the New York Times, this was “the greatest debate on science and religion in recent years.” Reportedly, even the affable Bryan congratulated Malone for his stirring eloquence (if not his content).
The Climax.
On Monday afternoon, July 21, the much-anticipated confrontation between Bryan and Darrow finally occurred. This was not, however, a scheduled debate: it was in fact a courtroom interrogation on an irrelevant issue. To the surprise of almost everyone except the defense team, Darrow called Bryan to the stand as an “expert witness” on the Bible, presumably to discredit the state’s case by exposing Bryan’s ignorance of scientific matters. Although surprised and unprepared, Bryan agreed to testify with the assumption that he would later be allowed to cross-examine Darrow, Malone and Hays. Bryan also saw this as an opportunity to defend biblical faith and traditional morality by undermining the veracity of Darwinian evolution.
The day was unusually hot, and the courtroom was so packed that Judge Raulston ordered the proceedings to adjourn to the courthouse lawn, beneath a large tree. For the next two hours some 3,000 spectators stood fanning themselves in the sweltering heat. Bryan confidently took the witness stand, and Darrow began the interrogation. As the Nashville Banner later reported, “Then began an examination which has few, if any, parallels in court history. In reality, it was a debate between Darrow and Bryan on Biblical history, on agnosticism and belief in revealed religion.” When asked if he took everything in the Bible “literally” [meaning literalistically], Bryan replied: “I believe the Bible absolutely. I believe it was inspired by the Almighty, [although] He may have used language that could be understood at that time…. Some of the Bible is given illustratively [symbolically or metaphorically], for instance: “Ye are the salt of the earth.”
Bryan also affirmed his belief in biblical miracles. When asked if he believed Jonah was swallowed by a whale, he replied yes, but noted that the Bible calls it a “great fish.” When Darrow expressed incredulity, Bryan asserted that “One miracle is just as easy to believe as another” – to which Darrow replied sardonically: “It is for me!” Under further questioning, Bryan stated his belief that God temporarily stopped the sun during a battle fought by Joshua and the Israelite army against a coalition of Canaanites as recorded in Joshua 10:13. Bryan also reiterated his belief in a literal worldwide flood, that all languages dated from the Tower of Babel, and that Adam and Eve were created as the first human beings. When challenged on such matters, his standard reply was, “The Bible states it. It must be so.”
Darrow asked where Cain got his wife, to which Bryan replied that he didn’t know – adding, “I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.” When questioned if he ever thought about how long mankind had inhabited the earth, Bryan admitted that no, he never thought about it. When pressed by Darrow, he answered, “I never think about things I don’t think about!”
On the age of the Earth, Bryan conceded that the “six days of creation” could be symbolic language for six vast periods of time – even millions of years. [Note: Even the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, a favorite among Fundamentalists (and in later years, many Evangelicals), noted that the word “day” (Hebrew: yom) can refer to an unspecified “period of time” as in the “gap theory” or the “day/age theory.”]
As Darrow’s questioning intensified, Bryan became more exhausted and exasperated. Turning to Judge Raulston, he declared that “The defense did not come here to try this case. They came to try revealed religion. I am here to defend it.” In response, Darrow retorted, “You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion.” When Judge Raulston asked Darrow what the purpose of this examination was, he replied that the defense wanted to prevent “bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States.” Significantly, Darrow never asked about human evolution or the special creation of human beings in the image of God. He knew that Bryan would counter by pointing out that no verifiable “missing links” exist in the human fossil record. Darrow also avoided the issue of the impact of naturalistic evolutionary theory on private and public morality.
Finally, Bryan’s demeanor began to crack. Turning to the judge, he said, “Your honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible….” Then, in a dramatic gesture, Bryan stood and addressed the crowd, accusing Darrow of slurring “at the Bible.” Darrow reacted angrily, shouting at Bryan and shaking his fist at him. The spectators sprang to their feet, and pandemonium broke out. With Bryan and Darrow glaring and shaking their fists in each other’s faces, the judge, fearing a riot, pounded the gavel and adjourned the court.
As the crowd dispersed, Darrow was mobbed by sympathetic reporters and spectators, shaking his hand, patting him on the back and congratulating him. Bryan, on the other hand, sat mostly alone, slumped in his chair, mopping his brow and muttering, “Slurring the Bible… slurring the Bible….” Meanwhile, many of his fundamentalist supporters were disappointed, feeling betrayed by the mild concessions he made on the issue of biblical literalism and, especially, the age of the earth.
Although the general assessment of most of the press was that Darrow had truly made Bryan look like a monkey, the cross-examination had been anything but a slam dunk. Nevertheless, Darrow was exuberant. He promptly telegrammed H. L. Mencken, who had returned to Baltimore a couple of days earlier, with the good news: “I made up my mind to show the country what an ignoramus he was and I succeeded.”
The Verdict.
Under pressure from state authorities who considered the trial an embarrassment, Judge Raulston abruptly ended the trial. He ordered Bryan’s testimony from the previous day stricken from the record, and suspended all closing arguments. “I think to save time we will ask the court to bring in the jury and instruct the jury to find the defendant guilty.”
Bryan was shocked – he had written an elaborate closing statement and planned to put Darrow on the witness stand and expose him as skeptic and an infidel. In particular, he planned to challenge Darrow on the absence of “missing links” in the fossil record between humans and other primates.
The end came abruptly. The jury deliberated for nine minutes before returning its verdict: “Guilty!” John Scopes was convicted and fined $100. For the first time, Scopes addressed the judge, the jury and both sets of attorneys. He referred to the state law as unjust and a violation of academic freedom, and he pledged to continue the fight.
Bryan, Darrow and their respective allies spoke briefly. Predictably, Darrow had the last jab: “I think this case will be remembered because it is the first case of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft” – a reference to the infamous Salem Witchcraft Trials more than two hundred years earlier. And with that, a local minister delivered a benediction and the judge adjourned the court.
The Aftermath.
The ACLU appealed the case, but the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the verdict while dismissing the $100 fine on a legal technicality. No longer comfortable in Dayton, John Scopes felt he needed to move on in life. He applied and was accepted into the graduate program at the University of Chicago to study geology, after which he became a petroleum engineer. To his credit, he did not seek to capitalize on his fame on the lecture circuit, nor did he make cameo appearances in movies. He also showed no interest when his case was eventually reviewed on appeal by the Tennessee Supreme Court.
Prior to the Scopes Trial, in typical hyperbole, Bryan had referred to the case as “a duel to the death.” In a sense, he was right: Five days after the trial ended, Bryan, who had suffered from diabetes for years and whose energy was drained by the sweltering July heat the past week, died while taking a nap after attending the morning worship service in the southern Methodist church in Dayton. The previous day he had reportedly told a journalist, “If I should die tomorrow, I believe that on the basis of the accomplishments of the last few weeks I could truthfully say, ‘Well done.’”
Following Bryan’s death, Tennessee Governor Austin Peay issued a proclamation declaring him a “martyr” who died for “the faith of our fathers.” Many thousands came out to show their respect as his body was transported by rail to Arlington National Cemetery, where he was buried with honors.
He was commemorated in several country and folk music ballads, including “William Jennings Bryan’s Last Fight” by Vernon Dalhart, “The John T. Scopes Trial” by Carlos B. McAfee, and perhaps most notably in “The Death of William Jennings Bryan” by Charlie Oaks in which he was honored for his lifelong social and political activism on behalf of the common man and his stand against the “infidels and fools” who promoted the theory of godless evolution.
Five years after his death, fundamentalists founded Bryan College in Dayton to provide an institution of higher education based on a Christian worldview.
The Legacy
Revisionist Mythology.
According to popular revisionist mythology, Bryan died a broken man, disgraced and humiliated by the drubbing he took from Darrow. This assessment doesn’t seem to correlate with reality, but it fits well with the way the story was sensationalized and marketed in the popular media.
A few years after Bryan died, Frederick Lewis Allen wrote Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, claiming that Bryan was disgraced and “covered with humiliation” as a result of Darrow’s withering interrogation. “The sort of religious faith which he represented could not take the witness stand and face reason as a prosecutor…. Theoretically, Fundamentalism had won, for the law stood. Yet really Fundamentalism had lost… and the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.” Allen’s distorted account of the trial even claimed that Bryan had espoused Young Earth Creationism while on the witness stand. Nevertheless, the book became a bestseller, selling over a million copies. Even worse, it influenced a whole generation of historians and college students over the next several decades. [Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (Harper & Brothers, 1931), p. 205]
Sixty years later, Barrington Boardman, the author of Flappers, Bootleggers, “Typhoid Mary” and the Bomb: An Anecdotal History of the U.S. from 1923-1945, repeated the myth that Darrow’s grilling of Bryan “resulted in Bryan’s total humiliation and, in the opinion of many, his death.” He notes that Darrow, when informed of Bryan’s death five days later, reacted with characteristic sarcasm, calling him “Goddamned fool.” Edward Larson quotes Darrow boasting to friends, “We killed the son-of-a-bitch!” [Flappers, Bootleggers, “Typhoid Mary” and the Bomb: An Anecdotal History of the U.S. from 1923-1945 (HarperCollins, 1989), pp. 38, 39. Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods, p. 100.]
In fact, Bryan apparently felt that he had done a credible job upholding the integrity of the Bible and was in relatively good spirits after the trial. For the next two days he remained in Dayton, revising the closing arguments that he had not been able to give at the trial but which he now planned to deliver to audiences all across America in the coming months.
For the record, Tennessee’s anti-evolution law was finally repealed in 1968.
A Pyrrhic Victory.
In retrospect – and in reality – the Scopes Trial was a “Pyrrhic Victory” in that it dealt a severe blow to the credibility of traditional biblical Christianity. The Darwinists, with the overwhelming support of the media and mainstream academia, decisively won the P.R. battle as the trial was misrepresented from the outset as a contest between “science” (i.e., Darwinian evolutionary theory) and “religion” (in particular, Young Earth Creationism). For many Americans, the trial exposed Fundamentalist “old-time religion” as out-of-date and a relic of the past. As the historian William Leuchtenburg interpreted the outcome, “The anti-evolutionists won the Scopes trial; yet in a more important sense, they were defeated, overwhelmed by the tide of cosmopolitanism.” [The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-32 (University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 217-23. Quoted in Ronald L. Numbers, Galileo Goes To Jail… and Other Myths About Science and Religion (Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 178.]
Thomas Bailey concurred. In his view, “The Fundamentalists at best had won only a hollow victory, for the absurdities of the trial cast ridicule on their cause. Increasing numbers of Christians found it impossible to reconcile the realities of religion with the findings of modern science.” [The American Pageant: A History of the Republic. Second Edition (1961), p. 795.]
Conservative Christians were depicted as shallow, anti-intellectual, anti-science, and culturally irrelevant. According to Samuel Eliot Morison: “Within a few days after his ordeal, Bryan was dead, and with him died much of the older America…. The fundamentalist crusade, although it now had a martyr, no longer had the same force.” [Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William Leuchtenburg, History of the American Republic, Volume 2. Sixth Edition (1969), p. 436.]
In his generally positive biography of Bryan, Louis Koenig provided an in-depth and lamentable assessment:
Despite Bryan’s own self-assessment of the trial, in the world’s eyes Darrow had subjected him to humiliation on a scale rarely suffered by a major American politician. His stumbling under Darrow’s questions ill-served his cause. He brought upon himself a heap of ridicule and derision, and even to this day he remains buried under it.
Yet the brawling, circus aspects of the trial which worked so much to Bryan’s disadvantage have obscured its other affects. If Bryan failed to meet the challenge of science, Darrow failed equally, although not so obviously, to meet the challenge presented by traditional religion to modern philosophy….
But the worst failure at Dayton was Bryan’s, and it was a failure in his responses to Darrow’s prickly, tricky, but entirely foreseeable questions, to demonstrate the connection between Fundamentalist religion and morality, or the relevance of Fundamentalism to modern-day problems. Ironically, on the basis of his own public record, of his years of struggle for social causes, there was no one better qualified than Bryan to explain these connections. His own life was an eloquent refutation of Darrow. Driven by faith in God’s word and purpose, he had worked for decades, courageously and against crushing odds, to overcome America’s social injustices and the murderous strife of war….
His worst lapse at Dayton was to permit the wily Darrow, posing as the champion of truth, to slide past that record without acknowledging it and create a false image of himself that has endured in posterity. The portrayal of Bryan that is cemented in the stage drama and the motion picture Inherit the Wind (1960) is the gross distortion that Darrow contrived at Dayton. It is that of a bigoted, ill-informed, hopelessly outdated old man. Darrow and the dramatists who have taken their cues from him have cheated posterity of knowledge of the whole man, of the better man, the resolute champion of social justice, who for decades prior to the Monkey Trial made religion and the Bible the foundation of an earthly kingdom of social justice and brotherhood among men and nations. [Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan, p. 654ff.]
[Note: In the Hollywood movie version of Inherit the Wind, Bryan, having been disgraced and deprived of a closing argument, launches into a hysterical, impromptu speech as the courtroom empties. It is a pathetic and futile effort, and he actually suffers a heart attack and drops dead in the process – an indefensible mix of Hollywoodish “artistic license” and radical historical revisionism (or more accurately, historical deconstructionism).]
Perhaps the historian Joseph R. Conlin provided the most succinct and accurate assessment of the Scopes Trial in his words, “In fact, the only winners in the Monkey Trial were Dayton’s businessmen… masters of ballyhoo… who raked in outside dollars for almost a month.” [The American Past: A Survey of American History. 6th Edition, p. 780.]
A Lesson to be Learned
Apologetics Matters.
The Scopes Trial was one of the most significant events in the past hundred years of American history. In retrospect, it dramatized in microcosm the core issue that would define America’s emerging culture war: the tidal wave of secular humanism that was already beginning to inundate every area of America’s social, cultural, and even religious landscape. From that time to the present, there would be an open and unrelenting assault on, and a steady erosion of, the Christian influences that had made America a unique nation in all of world history. The Scopes Trial also exemplified in dramatic fashion the reality that apologetics matters. Christian apologetics – which sets forth the rational and the factual case for the truth and the reliability of the Christian faith – should be thoroughly integrated into the life and ministry of the local church. If we desire to be effective witnesses for Christ, we must be prepared to clearly explain and defend why we believe the Christian faith is the Truth in keeping with I Peter 3:15 – “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for [what you believe and] the hope that you have.” As Christians who take seriously our calling to be a source of Light, Love, Hope and Truth, it is imperative that we be prepared to support and defend the factual and the rational reasons why we believe in the authority of Scripture and in the salvific mission of Jesus Christ.
To quote the esteemed Yale church historian, Jaroslav Pelikan: “The church should always be more than a school (i.e., more than a center of Christian education); but the church should never be less than a school.” Unfortunately, most churches fail miserably in this calling. Quality apologetics education should be a priority – and particularly for high school and college-age students. As I emphasized in my book, The Case for Christian Apologetics:
The Bible sets forth a rational philosophical and theological explanation of reality in the context of a theistic worldview that is coherent, consistent, and comprehensive….
Philosophy teaches us how to think logically and clearly; theology teaches us what to think about God and life as revealed in the Bible; and apologetics teaches us why it is reasonable to trust the principles and the doctrinal and moral truths of Scripture.
Ultimately, there is only one reason why anyone should want to be a Christian: because it is True – i.e., because it is based on Reality….
We often are told, “You can’t argue someone into the Kingdom of God.” True enough, but we also can’t love someone into the Kingdom, either…. No one comes to faith unless the power of the Holy Spirit is at work in his heart, drawing them to Christ. But what apologetics can do is to break down barriers to faith by exposing and dissolving erroneous arguments and irrational prejudices against belief in Christ, and by defending the historical and philosophical integrity of the Christian faith and worldview….
As Christians, we are called to be apologists – defenders of the faith – just as we are called to be evangelists (or witnesses) for Christ. In fact, in our multicultural and pluralistic society today, evangelism without apologetics is oftentimes an exercise in futility.
Would you like to broaden and deepen your understanding of the Christian faith so as to more clearly and effectively explain and defend what you believe to both Christians and non-Christians? Very simply, that is the purpose and the value of apologetics….
Of all people, Christians should be the most thoughtful, the most inquisitive, and the most creative as we strive to fulfill our calling to love and honor God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind.
And that is why Christians should study apologetics.
[Jefrey D. Breshears, The Case for Christian Apologetics, pp. 17, 18, 24, 25-26, 12, 30, 31.
- In Summer of the Gods, Edward Larson notes that this quote, attributed to Clarence Darrow, apparently first appeared in the introduction to Wendell R. Bird’s article, “Creation-Science and Evolution-Science in Public Schools: A Constitutional Defense in Public Schools,” in a 1982 edition of Northern Kentucky Law Review. [Ref. Summer of the Gods, pp. 258 and 316.]On its website, the National Center for Science Education asserts that “Darrow did not say any such thing during the trial – at least not according to the quasi-official, unedited, published transcript of the entire proceedings, the 1925 book The World’s Most Famous Court Trial (National Book Company).” [Ref. https://ncse.ngo/creationist-misquotation-darrow.]The general consensus seems to be that “the quote was actually spoken by Darrow’s co-attorney, Dudley Field Malone, who often paid lip service to the value of tolerance.” But liberals and leftists have always used this tactic when in the minority on a particular issue, only to turn the table on the opposition once they gain power. So while it is true that Malone argued on one occasion, “For God’s sake, let the children have their minds kept open – close no doors to their knowledge” – this came only after he previously had shouted at prosecutors, “Keep your Bible in the world of theology where it belongs and do not try to… put [it] into a course on science!” [Ref. https://ncse.ngo/creationist-misquotation-darrow, Summer of the Gods, p. 257.] ↑
