The Scopes Monkey Trial

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Another reason that teaching of evolution became a front-burner issue in the 1920s was that it was then that universal publicly funded high-school education was just becoming standard across the country; the question of just what the new high schools should teach was then very much on the minds of activists, newspaper editors, and politicians. When public attention began to focus on the science versus religion aspect of Darwin's theory, some employed the opening for thoughtful debate, and others to promote an explicitly Christian agenda, instilling into the subject a danger that remains today, the use of what is ostensibly scientific arguments as a cover for promotion of a specific religion. (

a chapter about the evolution debate in the 1920s from University of Georgia historian Edward Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Summer for the Gods.")

But there was a public-spirited motive for the 1920s shift to fear of evolutionary thought. Many members of the clergy had grown terrified of the then-fashionable "Social Darwinism," which held that that "survival of the fittest" should be applied to human society. Social Darwinism maintained that the poor, the disabled, and the troubled--religion's historical first concern--should be weeded out for genetic reasons, and this idea was being openly praised by respectable figures. Darwin's cousin Francis Galton had published a book arguing for the selective breeding of human beings, dubbing his idea "eugenics." Norman Thomas, the most important American socialist of the early century, and himself a former minister, had announced that childbearing should be restricted among "inferior stock." And of course at the time in Germany, the incipient Nazi Party was beginning to speak of Social Darwinism as a philosophy of government. Owing in no small part to religious fears of Social Darwinism, a move to ban the teaching of evolution began.

In his 1990 book "Under God: Religion and American Politics," the historian Garry Wills wrote that prior to the Scopes trial, Bryan had been on a revival tour of Germany and had been horrified by the signs of incipient Nazism. Before this point, Bryan had been a moderate in the evolution debate; for instance, he had lobbied the Florida legislature not to ban the teaching of Darwin, only to specify that evolution must be taught as a theory rather than a fact. But after hearing the National Socialists talk about the elimination of genetic inferiority, Wills wrote, Bryan came to feel that evolutionary ideas had become dangerous; he began both to oppose and to lampoon them. Banning the teaching of evolution is plainly the wrong approach, but once the subtext of the period is taken into account--fears of Nazism and eugenics--the Scopes trial takes on a dramatically different flavor.

Many fallacies about the trial itself exist owing to the popularity of the play and movie "Inherit the Wind," which has been received by audiences as historically accurate but which alters numerous key facts in the case. (Compare the actual Scopes trial to "Inherit the Wind.") Other fallacies about the Scopes trial have arisen through cultural assumptions and journalistic shorthand.

For instance, "creationism" was not discussed at the Scopes trial; the word never appears in the court transcript. Bryan argued that human beings could not be naturally descended from primates, because only God could create a soul. "Creationism" as the word is heard today--meaning the idea of the "young earth, that the planet was formed only a short time ago and formed with its fossils already in place to present the illusion of age--did not come into common usage until the 1960s, a full generation after Scopes. At the trial, when Darrow tried to bait Bryan into endorsing the Irish bishop James Ussher, who in 1636 famously declared that the genesis occurred in exactly 4004 B.C.E., Bryan replied, "I think it [the earth] is much older than that." Later Bryan said that it is unimportant whether God formed the universe in "six days or in six years or in six million years or in 600 million years." These are not closed-minded views.

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