A Telling of the Scopes Monkey Trial Where Evolution Is Not the Point

KEEPING THE FAITH: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, by Brenda Wineapple

The schools were banning books. White supremacists were marching in the streets. The donor class was waging a war on democracy. Immigrants, wayward women, bad music and a godless elite were blamed for, well, everything. There’s a lot about the 1920s that feels familiar today. How are we to make sense of the last time America came this close to fascism?

The critic and historian Brenda Wineapple points to an answer in “Keeping the Faith,” her surprisingly timely new book about a trial that happened a century ago. On a spring day in 1925, a substitute high school biology teacher, John T. Scopes, broke Tennessee law when he read aloud pages from a textbook that had a section on the theory of evolution. Few doubted that a Tennessee jury would find him guilty, but a great many people figured that the law was as unconstitutional as it was idiotic.

The Scopes trial of 1925 — the “monkey trial,” as the irascible journalist H.L. Mencken branded it — was one of those only-in-America events that periodically fill the newspapers of a nation that is always asking questions about itself, and it howls back to life again in this captivating history.

This tale is usually told as an epic confrontation between faith and science, with the past on one side and the future on the other. Wineapple frames it much more interestingly as a conflict between political visions that remain very much alive in the present. The “trial of the century” of 1925 was much more about political theater than points of law or scientific theories, she makes clear, and everyone knew who the two stars of the show were.

Entering stage right was William Jennings Bryan, a.k.a. the Great Commoner, an aging lion determined to rescue real Americans from an insidious “oligarchy of the professors,” jazz music, socialists and German philosophy. A three-time Democratic Party nominee for president, Bryan rose to fame by standing up for the little guy, the small farmer, the small-business owner, the craftsman and all the other people left behind in the mad dash for cash known as the Gilded Age — as long as they were white.

He gathered up their collective grievances and invested the rage in policy ideas high on righteous symbolism but rather low in efficacy: a strange monetary plan (go silver!); a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol (no rum!); and, finally, the prosecution of the culture wars of the period. The Scopes trial, he inveighed, was about stopping what he once called “apeism,” a (supposedly) Darwinian doctrine about the (supposedly) un-biblical origins of humanity that would destroy everything that made America great.