Edward J. Larson. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's
Continuing Debate over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
X + 318 pages. A number of events have competed for the designation "trial of the century":
Leopold-Loeb, Sacco and Vanzetti, and, more recently, O. J. Simpson. If
Edward J. Larson is correct, however, that designation properly belongs to
the Scopes trial, which took place in the steamy courtroom of the Rhea
County courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. "Indeed," Larson concludes, "the
issues raised by the Scopes trial and legend endure precisely because they
embody the characteristically American struggle between individual liberty
and majoritarian democracy, and cast it in the timeless debate over science
and religion" (265).
The author opens with a pivotal
" Summer for the Gods goes a long way toward restoring historical perspective on the Scopes
trial. "
vignette from the July 1925 trial, which
pitted two of the nation's best lawyers against one another--William Jennings
Bryan, icon of the Progressive Era and three-time Democratic candidate for
president, versus Clarence Darrow, the liberal and agnostic attorney working
on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union and the nominal defendant, a
diffident schoolteacher named John T. Scopes. From that initial vignette
Larson proceeds, in effect, to deconstruct the Scopes trial, to separate
myth from history in one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented cases
in the twentieth century.
Larson shows, for example, how Scopes was merely a pawn in the ideological
struggle between what the author calls Bryan's majoritarian beliefs that
citizens had the right to dictate what their children should be taught in
schools and the long-festering resentments of the Left, which believed that
individual liberties had been trampled by such measures as the Espionage Act
and compulsory military service during World War I. Civic boosters in
Dayton, upon hearing that the American Civil Liberties Union wanted to test
the constitutionality of Tennessee's Butler Act, which forbade the teaching
of evolution in public schools, summoned Scopes to Fred E. Robinson's
drugstore. They asked the unsuspecting teacher leading questions to
determine whether or not he had actually taught evolution while filling in
for the school's regular biology teacher. Scopes, whose teaching
responsibilities included physics, math, and football, not biology, agreed
to be prosecuted and then left the drugstore for a game of tennis. One of
the boosters triumphantly declared, "Something has happened that's going to
put Dayton on the map!" (91).
Scopes himself remained a cipher throughout the trial, ceding the stage to
much larger personalities: Darrow, Bryan, and the irascible H. L. Mencken,
who covered the trial for the Baltimore Sun. Larson offers a complete
account of the trial itself, drawing on court documents as well as newspaper
stories, but his most important contribution to our understanding of the
Scopes trial comes in Part III, which examines the various ways that the
Scopes trial has been interpreted since 1925.
Although Bryan has generally been regarded as the loser in Dayton, a
hopeless throwback to the fundamentalist, antediluvian past, not all
contemporaries saw it that way. "At the time," Larson says, "in sharp
contrast with later legends about the Scopes trial, no one saw the episode
as a decisive triumph for the defense" (206). Only later, beginning with
the 1931 publication of Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties, did the Scopes trial begin to succumb to
caricature, a caricature that was shamelessly perpetuated by Richard
Hofstader in The American Political Tradition (1948) and
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963). The main culprit, however,
was the play Inherit the Wind, which appeared in 1960 and which, as Larson
demonstrates, was intended not so much as a representation of the trial but
as a morality tale about McCarthyism.
Summer for the Gods goes a long way toward restoring historical perspective
on the Scopes trial. As Garry Wills has shown in his brilliant essay on
Bryan and the Scopes trial, Bryan was no mere fundamentalist-creationist
reactionary; his concerns were deep, principled, and entirely in keeping
with his Progressivism. "The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching
his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate," Bryan said,
"the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak"
(39).
Larson may not extend this analysis as far as he might, and he slights
somewhat the pivotal role that the acerbic Mencken, utterly blinded by his
loathing for Bryan, played in (mis)interpreting the Scopes trial. These
cavils notwithstanding, Summer for the Gods is a superb book, thoroughly
researched and well written. It will stand for many years as the definitive
work on the trial of the twentieth century.
Randall Balmer, Barnard College, Columbia University
