The divide between urban modernists and rural traditionalists was not just economic. Modernists tended to view rural Americans as behind the times. Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, mocked small-town values. In one of his novels, he described the residents of a small Midwestern town as. The Scopes Trial illustrated a divide between: a. Modernism and fundamentalism b. Progressives and Democrats c. Feminism and traditionalism d. Cultural diversity and nativism. The Scopes trial of 1925: a. Involved a teacher who espoused Social Darwinism. Was a victory for fundamentalists. July 21, 1925: Scopes 'Monkey Trial' Ends With Guilty Verdict 1925: John Scopes, an unassuming high school biology teacher and part-time football coach, is found guilty of teaching evolution.
Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee, 1925. N March of 1925, the State Legislature of Tennessee passed the Butler Act, prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution in the public schools. Governor Austin Peay signed the bill, courting the support of rural legislators. He later alleged that he thought the law would be unenforceable and would. The Scopes trial illustrated a divide between. Modernism and fundamentalism. Herbert Hoover was. All: mining engineer, progressive Republican, in charge of food relief in Europe during World War I, well prepared to be president. The Great Depression was caused.
The Scopes Trial Illustrated A Divide Between:
Historians who know nothing else about Americanreligion often know one thing for sure: in July of 1925fundamentalists got their noses rubbed in the dirt at theRhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. That building,of course, housed the famous Monkey Trial, the place whererural traditionalism met and finally bowed to the forces ofurban secularism. This image, perpetuated by numerousjournalists, by the popular play and movie Inherit the Wind,and even by respected textbooks, contains some truth andconsiderable mistruth. The task is to get it all sortedout.
The energies that culminated at Dayton had been brewingfor more than a half century. From the 1870s, Southernevangelicals led the fight against evolutionary teaching(commonly and somewhat misleadingly called Darwinismfollowing the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's On theOrigin of Species). After the Civil War, conservativeProtestants in the North concerned themselves primarily with thedefense of the authority of the Bible. Although they occasionally mobilized against the teaching of evolution, they left that fight mostly to their Southern cobelligerents. (Why Southern rather than Northern conservatives decided to draw a line in the sand over thatissue remains unclear. Perhaps traditional assumptions remained so prevalent in Southern culture that Southern legislators believed they could translatethem into law without fear of reprisal.)
The 1920s cradled a lasting conflict. Between 1923 and1925 four Southern states (Oklahoma, Florida, NorthCarolina, and Texas) tried, with mixed success, to stop theteaching of evolution in the public schools. In the springof 1925 Tennessee joined the fray by passing the Butler Act,the strongest bill to that point. This law made it illegal'to teach any theory that denies the Story of DivineCreation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach insteadthat man has descended from a lower order of animal.' Evenso, many prominent Tennesseans found themselvesuncomfortable with the anti-evolution position. In earlyMay a Dayton mine manager and a local druggist (the latteralso part-time chairman of the schoolbook committee) metwith John Scopes, a young high school science teacher, todiscuss resistance. They knew that the American CivilLiberties Union had offered to support any Tennessee teacherwilling to defy the statute. They decided to take up thechallenge, with Scopes serving as the reluctant point man.
Scopes's friends arranged to have him arrested forteaching the forbidden doctrine. The ACLU quickly assembledits counsel, including the famous trial lawyer ClarenceDarrow, a religious agnostic known for defending politicaland labor radicals. William Jennings Bryan, an attorney, aprominent Presbyterian layman, and three-time Presidentialcandidate on the Democratic ticket, volunteered his servicesas counsel for the State. Though hardly a scholar, sincethe early 1920s Bryan had been waging a highly publicizedbattle against evolutionary thought, which he considered thenemesis of Christian civilization.
The days surrounding the trial found Dayton swampedwith hundreds of reporters, its streets bedecked, carnival-like, with concession stands, toy monkeys, and thebookstands and soapboxes for opportunists of all stripes. Pioneering radio broadcasters and photographers crowded thecourtroom. Cable relayed the events to Europe. HistorianGeorge M. Marsden sets the scene (Religion and AmericanCulture, 184-85).
This was at the height of the age of . . . media-generated national crazes, as well as controversiesover changing mores, jazz, new dances, styles of dressfor women, and sexually-suggestive Hollywood movies. Proponents of the new, more lenient culture werealready deeply antagonistic toward defenders of theold-style Victorian mores, and so made the most of adrama in which science could be pitted againstreligion, city against rural, and North against South.
The trial itself proved as eventful as the verdictuneventful. The arguments focused upon the state's right tospecify what was taught in public classrooms, not thescientific merits of evolution per se. In the course ofeight sweltering days of spirited debate, Bryan himself tookthe stand as an expert witness on the Bible. (How theBible, rather than John Scopes or the Butler Act, came to beon trial is an intriguing story in itself.) Some observersfelt that Bryan acquitted himself ably, while othersbelieved that he disgraced conservative ProtestantChristianity by his inability to answer some of Darrow'squestions about the Bible's consistency and accuracy. Atthe end, the jury found Scopes guilty and the judge finedhim $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court later reversed thejudgment against Scopes on a technicality, although itupheld the constitutionality of the Butler Act. Bryan diedof a heart attack five days after the trial while napping ina Dayton residence.
Guiding Student Discussion
If sketching the bare facts of the events leading up tothe trial is fairly easy, enabling students to grasp itslong-range sources and significance in American cultureproves more challenging. But also more interesting. Youmight begin by asking students why so many reasonableAmericans pitted themselves against a theory so stronglysupported by the professional scientific community. Theanswer lay in the assumptions that had informed the thinkingof many conservative Protestants (and for that matter manyconservative Catholics and Jews) from the mid-nineteenthcentury onward. Drawing upon Common Sense Realism, aphilosophy rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment, VictorianAmericans widely presumed that true science consisted ofunbiased observation of the plainly observable facts ofnature. Since the fossil evidence for partly evolved humanbeings remained sketchy at best, some conservativeChristians attacked evolution as scientifically unsupported. Moreover, since Holy Scripture had proved itself truthful inother respects, there was no reason to doubt the veracity ofthe Genesis account of human origins. The point was clear:the Bible had proved itself more, not less, scientific thanthe upstart science of Darwinism. Bryan spoke for millionswhen he snorted of Darwin's theory: 'It is millions ofguesses strung together.'
Students need to understand that resistance to Darwinism stemmed fromother, less tangible sources as well. The most salient,undoubtedly, was the sense that evolutionary teachingundermined the authority of the Bible in general. If theScriptural account of human beginnings had to be reinterpreted as merely symbolic, then what else would have to be reinterpreted as merely symbolic? The miracles ofJesus? The Resurrection? Students do not need to share theworld-view of conservative Protestantism in order toappreciate the apprehension that thoughtful (as well as not-so-thoughtful) adults felt when a fundamental source of authority was called into doubt.
A host of additional factors, which students canreadily grasp, fueled the flames. Fundamentalists tooknote, for example, of the social location where Darwinismarose: among agnostic intellectuals in Britain. And underthe guise of Nietzschean philosophy it seemed to serve as acovering rationale for the Might-Makes-Right ideology ofGerman aggression in the Great War. Fundamentalists alsonoticed that evolutionary assumptions flourished among upper-class academic elites, especially in the urban Northeast andMidwest. Resistance grew especially acute when suchconservatives saw their sons and daughters going off tocollege and, faced with teachings that contradicted theirparents' beliefs, seemed to lose their faith entirely.
Finally, students should view the events in Dayton notsimply as a response to outside threats but as a product ofconservative initiatives. Rather than assuming (as manyhistorians do) that conservative Protestants were backwoodsrubes fighting for their lives in the face of a modernjuggernaut, what would happen if we turned that scenarioaround and assumed that fundamentalists represented theaggressors? Nearly every day throughout the 1920sbarnstorming evangelist and healer Aimee Semple McPhersonappeared in somebody's daily newspaper. Billy Sunday's starshone almost as brightly. Within the evangelical subculturescores of personalities, such as evangelist Paul Rader andauthor William Bell Riley (mentor of Billy Graham), functionedwith unquestioned authority. One thing remained clear forsuch conservatives: the battle for the schools would serveas a battle for the historically Christian character ofAmerican civilization itself. Evolutionary teaching in theschools thus acquired powerful symbolic value, much asalcohol or immigrant Roman Catholics had in previousdecades. Fundamentalists, like almost everyone else, provedthat they were prepared to fight, and fight hard, for thedominance of their symbols.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of teaching thesematerials will be the question, who really won in Dayton? On one hand it is evident that conservatives suffered acrushing defeat in the minds of secular newspaper editorsand journalists like H. L. Mencken. They also fell intoeverlasting disrepute among academics, humanists, andscientists alike. To this day the term fundamentalistevokes images of bigotry and ignorance on secular and not-so-secular college campuses. On the other hand, theteaching of evolution effectively disappeared from thenation's public schools until the 1960s. And even then thefight went on. After World War II, the ranks of SouthernBaptists and Pentecostals, who resisted evolutionaryteachings privately if not always publicly, swelled by themillions. The rise of creation science in the 1980s, andthe continuing skirmishes in the courts over those mattersinto the late 1990s, lend credence to Gallup polls that showthat nearly half of adult Americans and one-fourth ofcollege graduates continue to doubt Darwinian explanationsof human origins. Far from being an aberration, the ScopesTrial represented one of the deepest and most persistentconflicts of modern American culture. The goal is to helpstudents see it as an integral though painful part ofdifferent Americans' attempts to come to terms withmodernity, and with each other.
Historians Debate![]()
The Scopes Trial Illustrated A Divide BetweenThe Scopes Trial Illustrated A Divide BetweenGrant Wacker holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and is currently Professor of the History of Religion in America at the Duke University Divinity School. He is the author of Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness (1985) and is coeditor, with Edith Blumhofer and Russell P. Spittler, of Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism (1999). He is working on two books: a monograph to be titled Heaven Below: Pentecostals and American Culture, 1900-1925, and a survey textbook of American religious history with Harry S. Stout and Randall Balmer. Comments are closed.
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