The oft-told tale of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey”
trial, the creation myth of 20th century fundamentalism, is usually taken as the last stand of a know-nothing faith from a vanished
America. It’s true that a few old Bible thumpers retreated to their prayer
closets never to re-emerge, that the death knell of prohibition was rung eight
years before the fact when the judge in Dayton, Tennessee banged his gavel on
the close of this case of antique epistemology, that the charms of mass media
would thereafter seduce nearly every American, fundamentalists included. But
these were not fatal wounds for fundamentalism. The faith healed quickly and grew
stronger after Scopes, remaking itself not along the old lines of moral
propriety but those of a social movement, a cultural wave, the third Great
Awakening of America—a revival so vast and enduring that we are living in it
still. That secular America did not see it at the time—that secularism cannot
see it now—has much to with the post-Scopes split of American fundamentalism into two,
parallel movements, one quiet and elite, the other popular and steadily
increasing in volume with the decades.
In
1925, the newly-formed American Civil Liberties Union, seeking a test case with
which to overthrow Tennessee’s anti-evolution law before it spread to other
states, persuaded a small town school teacher named John Scopes—a robust
“parlor socialist” who took the cause on for a lark as much as for politics—to
break the law by teaching evolution. The stage was set, and on it strutted two
of the greatest public speakers of the times. For the prosecution, William
Jennings Bryan, a bow-tied balloon of a man with the lungs of a whale and a
monkish fringe of grey hair on his giant black-browed dome. For the defense, Clarence
Darrow, a stony-faced courtroom killer with a wit so quick he had talked his
way into the national life of the country with the kind of radical views that
got less-glib men sent to jail for “subversion.”
The
tiny courthouse of Dayton, Tennessee could hardly hold all the locals who
crowded in for the fight, much less the massive clot of reporters eager to file
dispatches from the battle between “science” and “religion.” So the court
borrowed a get-up used by traveling revivalists and convened on the most
crowded days out on the front lawn, beneath a blister-hot Tennessee sun that
set the big man Bryan to sweating as lean Clarence Darrow danced around him.
But
neither Darrow nor Bryan was as nimble as the famously acid H.L. Mencken,
writing for The Baltimore Evening Sun. Mencken, who called
Tennesseans “yokels” and much of the rest of the American public “boobs,” and
who had five years previous defined Puritanism—by which he meant Christianity
in general—as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” hardly
represented conventional wisdom. But his commentaries on backwoods behavior
were so funny and ferocious that they tended to set the tone for reporters of
lesser abilities. “Poor half wits,” he called Dayton’s local Christians. That
was Mencken being sweet. Of a holiness camp meeting, he wrote that it achieved
such heights of barbaric grotesquerie that it
was hard to believe it real…. The leader kneeled, facing us, his head
alternately thrown back dramatically or buried in his hands. Words spouted from
his lips like bullets from a machine gun…. Suddenly he rose to his feet, threw
back his head and began to speak in tongues—blub-blub-blub,
gurgle-gurgle-gurgle. His voice rose to a higher register. The climax was a shrill,
inarticulate squawk, like that of a man throttled.[i]
A
“squawk”—that was the sound of fundamentalism to secular America, and Mencken’s
rendition of it, slightly diluted, was the only story that came out of Dayton,
the last gurgle-gurgle of a religion no longer relevant to a nation enraptured
by the “New Nakedness,” the Jazz Age fashions of that year. Summoned to
the stand as an expert witness on the Bible, Bryan, decades past the heyday of
his oratorical powers, could give no better account of his faith than could
Mencken’s preacher speaking in tongues. It was Darrow who shot words like
bullets. Instead of asking Bryan about evolution, he demanded that the old man
explain the literal truth of the Book of Joshua, in which God is reported to
have made the sun stand still.
Bryan
had no good answers, and the questions kept coming. Darrow was killing the old
man. Bryan’s ideas were old, his mind was slow, his words lacked strength. By
the end of Darrow’s attack even Bryan’s supporters guffawed at him. Five days
later, Bryan died in his sleep. “Well,” Mencken remarked on hearing the news,
“we killed the old son-of-a-bitch.”
The
Scopes Trial was the moment at which reason put old-timey religion in its
grave—or so goes the official story. That myth has been burnished for decades,
in the press of 1925 and in movies and plays and novels and even now, in the
pages of thoughtful magazines that reprise the wholly fictional 1955
drama Inherit the Wind as if it was history. A
myth’s power lies not in its details but in its meaning, and the essence of
this story was so immediately plain that even fundamentalists conceded its
central claim: Something had indeed been lost in Dayton, even as their
champion, Bryan won the trial (a detail often forgotten).
Maybe it was
Bryan himself who had been lost. Victorious judgment in hand, he stood alone in
the minutes after the gavel sounded, as the crowd—his crowd, rural
folk, believers—flocked around Darrow. Bryan had won the trial but Darrow had
won the war, tricked Bryan into stumbling over his own doctrine, into revealing
his faith for what it was: the confused ranting of an old fool, his
once-beautiful trombone of a voice honking and sputtering, unable to answer
simple questions.
Then he
died. Silly supernaturalism breathing its last, announced the press, pleased
with the tidy ending. But Bryan’s death didn’t mean the end of fundamentalism.
It was Bryan’s faith that expired. “The Great Commoner,” the man who as the
Democratic nominee for president in 1896 ran the most radical major party
campaign in history, declaring miners and farmers and factory workers the real
“business men” of America and decrying capitalism’s “cross of gold” on which,
he roared, honest laborers were crucified: Bryan was the last champion of
fundamentalism’s now-forgotten justice tradition. He hated evolution not
because he feared science but because he feared its applications; particularly
its political ones. The high school textbook that provoked the trial, George
William Hunter’s Civic Biology, taught eugenics as evolution’s logical
extension and offered a cure for criminality, mental retardation, and even
epilepsy: “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off
to prevent them from spreading.”[ii] Bryan saw in
such prescriptions not a foreshadowing of Hitler—who could have known?—but a
cheapening of life. In our times fundamentalists restrict the term “life” to
fetal concerns, but to Bryan life meant the right to earn a living, and “a
living” was not simply a wage and a store to spend it in but an equal standing
before God and mammon for
both the weak and the strong.
The second
half of that ambition faded from fundamentalism after 1925. The movement split
in two, one visible and seemingly weak, the other invisible and strong. One
fundamentalism—the movement of the masses, the revivalists, the
“yokels”—retreated, backed up into the hills, and in the safety of its own
enclaves began rebuilding. The other fundamentalism—the key men, the educated
men, the rich men—stepped over Bryan’s body and moved on, quietly, free of his
concerns. The Monkey Trial was like a rock in the river, the point at which the
movement divided. The elite tradition and the populist tradition went off on
different courses. Both flowed rightwards.
[i] H.L. Mencken,
“Mencken Likens Trial a Religious Orgy, With Defendant a Beelzebub,” The
Baltimore Evening Sun, July 11, 1925.
[ii] Quoted in Larson,
Edward L. Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing
Debate Over Science and Religion (Harvard University Press, 1997), p.
27. Larson’s book is the most accessible and thorough account of the trial. A
more nuanced and provocative reading of Scopes, however, is found in
anthropologist Susan Friend Harding’s examination of the narrative strategies
at work around the trial in The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist
Language and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2001), a brilliant
and lively study of how fundamentalism constructs meaning. Extensive selections
from the trial transcripts and the press coverage of the period are also
available online, allowing almost anyone to interpret the case to their own
satisfaction – an outcome of which I imagine Bryan would approve.
