You may know the story of The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, the subject of Brenda Wineapple’s new book, Keeping the Faith. In the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial,” as it’s better known, Tennessee prosecuted a high school teacher under the Butler Act, which criminalized the teaching of human evolution in the state’s public schools.
With the renowned Christian populist politician William Jennings Bryan representing the state and celebrity attorney Clarence Darrow representing Scopes, the trial became a sensational clash between fundamentalism and modernism, bringing an eight-day media frenzy upon the town of Dayton, Tennessee—and, per Wineapple’s subtitle, riveting the nation. Though the jury passed down a guilty verdict, the court of public opinion ruled overwhelmingly for Scopes, science, and academic freedom.
Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
By Brenda Wineapple
Random House, 544 pages
Release date: August 13, 2024
Wineapple’s new book takes some time getting to the event around which it’s centered; before recounting the trial, the author spends just under 200 pages relating major developments in U.S. politics and culture in the years leading up to it, as told through the biographies of Bryan, Darrow, and, to a lesser extent, others who would go on to play significant roles in Dayton—like Dudley Malone of the defense team and Baltimore Sun reporter H.L. Mencken.
At times during these first several sweeping chapters (which cover late nineteenth-century labor struggles, the women’s suffrage movement, World War I, the first Red Scare, the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, the development of the fundamentalist movement, and more), some readers may feel the narrative strays too far afield.
But situating the trial and surrounding spectacle in such ample context not only clarifies what brought Darrow, Bryan, and other key players to Dayton, but also shows that the affair was the culmination of deep and long-mounting tensions. The account of the trial—the defense’s uphill battle against a biased court, heated exchanges between the legal teams, and, of course, Darrow’s climactic decision to call Bryan to the stand as a Bible expert, where he and his Biblical literalism were backed onto the ropes—make for a gripping courtroom drama.
Wineapple’s history also helps clarify our public memory of the Scopes trial, which has been clouded in no small part by the influence of Mencken’s jaundiced reporting for the Sun, and the fictionalized portrayal of the story in the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, later made into the 1960 film. For example, we tend to give William Jennings Bryan short shrift. As historian William B. Hesseltine lamented in The Progressive on the twentieth anniversary of Bryan's death, the trial “fixed” a two-dimensional caricature of Scopes’s prosecuting attorney “in the American mind.”
Keeping the Faith treats Bryan as a serious and complex subject—showing, for instance, that while his anti-evolution crusade was driven mainly by obdurate religious prejudice, it was also part and parcel of the populist beliefs that earned him the monikers “The Great Commoner” and “Prince of Peace.” The 1920s, after all, saw Darwinism widely perverted to justify laissez-faire capitalism, imperialist conquest, and the eugenics movement (which both Bryan and Darrow detested) as examples of “survival of the fittest” running its course.
Penguin Random House
Wineapple writes that “Bryan mistook biological evolution for social Darwinism so imagined that Scopes the teacher was approving a dog-eat-dog way of life where the strong crowd out or kill off the weak” and “confused the sham science of eugenics with the theory of evolution.” He can be somewhat forgiven for this; even the textbook at the heart of the Scopes affair proposed measures to prevent “the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race,” combining, Wineapple writes, “eugenics and evolution with the social Darwinism that so deeply offended Bryan.”
The portrait painted of Bryan in Keeping the Faith is more fair than the caricature we’re used to. It is also, nonetheless, one of a complicated and deeply reactionary figure.
Along with his religious bigotry and support for a majority’s right to trammel free thought—not “so different from the idea that might makes right” he so despised, Wineapple notes—Keeping the Faith repeatedly highlights Bryan’s white supremacy, which can be detected even in his aversion to evolution as he conflated it with naturalized violence and war. “How many more wars will it take for the white race to kill itself off . . . leaving the world to the darker races until they imitate the white races?” Bryan sermonized before a Dayton crowd.
Though Darrow’s views on race and civil rights are more digestible to us today than Bryan’s, Keeping the Faith portrays Darrow, too, as a complex man—a humanist champion of civil liberties, free thought, and the oppressed, but also human: at times hypocritical, corner-cutting, and opportunistic. Others on whom Wineapple spends less ink, like Malone and Mencken, also receive nuanced treatments.
In one of the few moments in Keeping the Faith where Wineapple explicitly mentions the present, she writes, “Democracy was on trial in Dayton. As it would be again in our time”—referring, among other things, to “teachers being told what or how to teach” and “books [being] tossed out of schools and libraries.”
Indeed, readers with an eye on today’s classroom culture wars may note parallels between the anti-evolution fervor that generated the Butler Act (and similar legislation across the country) and efforts to remove lessons on race, gender, and other so-called “divisive concepts” from public school curricula in recent years.
In the same way the moral panic over Darwinism came to encompass various reactionary grievances about radicalism and atheism, the much-flogged term “Critical Race Theory” has been similarly stretched by reactionaries today. The Scopes defense team’s point that the Butler Act was overly vague also recalls how recent “educational gag orders” use nebulous language to cast a broad chill on academic freedom, and their argument that the law “gave preference to the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible,” too, recalls how some contemporary efforts to ban material from school rooms have been accompanied by those to introduce troubling content the censors deem more savory.
In some ways, Bryan could be considered an intellectual ancestor of today’s so-called parents’ rights movement. Much of his rhetoric—for instance, “Tell me the parents of this day have not any right to declare that children are not to be taught this doctrine”—would fit well on that side of the modern education culture wars. Notably, though, while Bryan credibly claimed in Dayton to serve the will of a majority—overbearing and reactionary as it was—today’s parents’ rights advocates, as Jamelle Bouie writes in The New York Times, “empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community.”
And, while Thomas Jefferson’s wall of separation between church and state is more fortified today than it was in 1925, it has faced some severe assaults in recent months, most notably in efforts to push Christianity into Louisiana and Oklahoma public schools.
Beyond its echoes in today’s curricular battles, the Scopes trial remains strikingly relevant ninety-nine years down the line because it stirred up enduring questions about democracy and religion. As Wineapple writes, Bryan and Darrow’s face-off in Dayton “raised issues that have perplexed America since its founding and still do today.” Even nearly a century after this “trial of the century,” it’s worth revisiting—with our historical memory corrected and refreshed.