Inherit the Baloney: creationists try to settle a score with Darwin.

• Author: Lehmann, Chris
• Position: Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial - Book Review

Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial, by Marvin Olasky and John Perry, Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 344 pages, $24.99

IN 1925, John Scopes of Dayton, Tennessee, was charged with violating the Butler Act, a new state law that forbade teaching evolution in state schools. Both the arrest and the famous trial that followed were more a piece of dramaturgy than a legal proceeding.

Although he did teach some science and math, Scopes' principal duties at Central High School were those of an athletic coach; on the fateful day when local engineer George Rappleyea saw an American Civil Liberties Union ad soliciting a case to test the law and persuaded the Dayton town fathers to go looking for someone to serve as a defendant, he had to send a high school kid to pull Scopes off the tennis court. Scopes was not at all sine he had taught any thing resembling Darwin's theory of natural selection in his rounds as a back-up science instructor. But he had used a general biology textbook, Hunter's Civic Biology--then standard in the Dayton schools and much of the rest of Tennessee--that mentioned Darwin approvingly.

That was enough for the Dayton boosters, who hoped a trial might put their city on the map. As for Scopes, he was happy to have an excuse to hang around town that summer, since he had his eye on a fetching blonde who had recently matriculated at Central High.

The trio of eminences who gave the trial its star power--Clarence Darrow for the defense, William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, and Baltimore Evening Sun correspondent H.L. Mencken for the general excoriation of the backwoods booboisie--were likewise on hand for reasons ulterior to the strict interpretation of the Butler Act. As a simple question of law, the Scopes case was open and shut, so the trial largely reversed the ways the legal system is supposed to work. Scopes was deliberately selected to serve as a guilty defendant; the theatrics of the court served mainly to create a documentary record for later appeals; and the jury was absent for all but three hours of the "trial of the century" while counsel on both sides fought over the admission of expert testimony and speechified for the historical record. The verdict--returned in nine minutes, after Darrow announced he was content to see his client convicted--is the least remembered detail of the whole spectacle, because it was never the point.

The point was to stage-manage American public opinion on the evolution controversy, and for that reason the Scopes trial was a Pyrrhic victory for the forces of biblical fundamentalism. It furnished a foundation myth of the culture wars that has stayed firmly in place for eight decades: that biblical literalism is a cancer on the nation's learning, and that free thought and skeptical inquiry are its mortal enemies. That lesson was codified in influential accounts of the trial by historians Frederick Lewis Allen, Richard Hofstadter, and Ray Ginger, and it was elevated to a whole new level of myth with the 1955 Broadway play Inherit the Wind, released as an overwrought Stanley Kramer message movie in 1960.

In Monkey Business, Christian journalists Marvin Olasky and John Perry--the former is...