Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion.

• Author: Herzog, Don

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. By Edward J. Larson. New York: Basic Books. 1997. Pp. 336. $25.

The Scopes trial will never be the same. I mean the trial immortalized in Inherit the Wind,(1) with its Southerners clutching in vain to their cozy scientific illiteracy and mechanically literal faith in the Bible, its idiotic intolerant Southerners destined to fall to the gale winds of modernity, liberalism, secularism, and skepticism embodied by a heroic ACLU and the inimitable Clarence Darrow. So what if Scopes got convicted? Surely the trial made a laughingstock of everything Tennessee stood for in banning the teaching of evolution from the public schools. And in a touch worthy of a gruesome morality play, William Jennings Bryan, a bloated buffoon skewered by Darrow on the stand, staggered off to die five days later. For a very long time now, we've been invited to think of the Scopes trial as a last gasp of illiberal stupidity before the inexorable march of civil liberties and modern science.

You don't have to know a great deal about the trial itself to surmise that something is misfiring badly in this triumphalist history. For one thing, the fundamentalists allegedly dispatched in those sleepy Tennessee hills seem to be doing rather nicely, thank you very much. Crusades against: teaching evolution in public schools -- and for teaching that curious creature, neither fish nor fowl, dubbed "creation science" -- seem to be sweeping the nation. The ACLU has fallen on hard times. Recall George Bush sneering, in his most majestically nasal manner, that Michael Dukakis had dared to confess -- to publicly confess! -- that he was "a cardcarrying member of the ACLU." And the enchanting likes of William Kunstler, Johnnie Cochran, and Alan Dershowitz make it hard to feel unconditionally fond of Darrow's public success. If liberalism and the rest are destined to triumph, they sure seem to be taking their sweet time about it. Could it be a case of the tortoise and the hare?

The real story of the Scopes trial, it turns out, is more interesting, more mischievous, and more perverse than the complacent received wisdom. A historian of science and a lawyer, Professor Larson(2) has written a devastatingly good book, Summer for the Gods. I found myself wishing only that his legal and political analysis were more sharply etched.

THE TRIAL'S BACKGROUND

Larson sets the stage for the farcical trial with a quick review of evolution's state of play in the scientific community at the time. The names come a bit fast and furious and some of the analytic points are slightly blurry. But careful readers will note the key distinction. There was in fact quite widespread agreement among scientists on the fact of evolution, understood as change in species over time. But there were heated disagreements on what causal mechanism best explained the fact. Natural selection, firmly installed only after the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1940s, was one contender among others, and the evidence for it was not overwhelming.(3)

Christian theologians, meanwhile, disagreed on what to make of the scientific findings. Some, who became known as fundamentalists, insisted on the literal truth of the Biblical account. Many found natural selection threatening not just because it seemed to undercut Genesis, but because it cast nature as cruel. Worse, it strongly suggested atheism: what benevolent God would leave his creation floundering helplessly in the clutches of such ruthlessly impersonal mechanisms? Others, however, worried that it discredited religion to insist on a six-day creation: the fossil record seemed to tell a different story. (Larson notes the impact of the discovery of Piltdown man in England; only hundreds of pages later does he remind the reader in passing that that was a hoax.(4)) Some of these so-called modernists were happy to interpret Scripture more creatively. Perhaps the days of creation were each vastly long periods of time. Or perhaps there was a gap in the account. Other theologians were willing to grant the evolution of all the lower animals but held out for the special divine creation of man.

Against this backdrop, William Jennings Bryan launched the fateful last campaign of a remarkable political life. The campaign would overshadow his runs for the Presidency and his stint as Wilson's Secretary of State, which ended when Bryan resigned rather than participate in the conduct of World War I.(5) Bryan wanted evolution out of the public schools. A fundamentalist himself, he was no political or legal dummy. His dominant argument, in keeping with the populist democracy he had always defended, was that surely the taxpayers of a state had a right to tell their employees, the public school teachers, what they could and could not teach. Claiming, perfectly plausibly, that a large majority of Americans opposed the teaching of evolution, Bryan insisted that they were entitled to have their legislatures pass the appropriate statutes.

It's glib, surely, to say that this rationale for keeping evolution out of the public schools is a mere pretext for forwarding an aggressively religious agenda. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. We don't routinely describe people who do want evolution taught in the public schools as "obviously" or "genuinely" motivated by crassly anticlerical sentiments; we don't mock their official commitments to teaching science as a fig leaf covering their illicit desire to smash organized religion.

Bryan, along with more ferocious fundamentalists such as Billy Sunday, assisted the people, lobbying the Tennessee legislature. Bryan, however, didn't want a genuine criminal statute passed; he seems to have thought that a law with no penalties attached would do the trick (p. 47). But this sorcerer's apprentice was not fully in control of the movement he helped summon. Moving quickly, the Tennessee legislature considered a proposal that it be "a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum fine of $500, for a public school teacher `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 had descended from a lower order of animal.'"(6) The act was passed and duly signed by the governor.

Some contemporary critics bemoaned, in triumphalist terms, the proposal the...