Summer For The Gods: The Scopes Trial & America's Continuing Debate Over Science & Religion (1998) - Plot & Excerpts
It seemed a propitious time to read Edward Larson’s Summer for the Gods. This past February, Bill Nye made the (unfortunate, lose-lose) decision to debate young earth creationist Ken Ham at the Creationist Museum . Four months earlier, Texas – which has enormous sway in the textbook industry – once again began working on legislation to “teach the controversy,” a euphemistic way of saying “teach creationism” alongside evolution. This is all well and good, because there is literally nothing else going on in the world that demands our attention. The evolution controversy (manufactured and for-profit) is not a new phenomena. It has been brewing ever since Charles Darwin wrote his impenetrable classic, On the Origin of Species, which sits unread on my bookshelf, right next to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. One of the first– and undoubtedly most famous – salvos in this ongoing (and thoroughly ridiculous battle) was the 1925 case of State of Tennessee vs. John T. Scope, more familiarly known as the Scopes (or Scopes Monkey) Trial. Undoubtedly you’ve heard of the case. Perhaps, like me, you sometimes drink wine and watch Turner Classic Movies and saw part of Inherit the Wind before passing out one night. Summer of the Gods is the brisk (266 pages of text), readable, Pulitzer Prize winning story of this seminal case. And if you’re like me, and your knowledge about this event is restricted to imbibing Yellow Tail chardonnay and watching Spencer Tracey spar with Frederic March, you will be surprised by what you learn. Most surprisingly, perhaps, is that the Scopes Trial began as a publicity stunt. Whenever a controversial law is passed, opponents of that law will look for a test case to challenge the law’s constitutionality. Tennessee’s law, the Butler Act, forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools. (The Butler Act made teaching evolution a jail-able offense, a fact that made even supporters of the law uncomfortable. Marinate on that, for a second. A law that would put teachers in jail for teaching a subject. In America. Jailed in America for teaching. It boggles the mind.) The American Civil Liberties Union offered to provide the defense of anyone charged with violating the Butler Act. This would allow them to get the case before the State – and ultimately – United States Supreme Court, where they hoped it would be struck down as a violation of the First Amendment. In Robinson’s Drugstore in Dayton, Tennessee, an entrepreneurial coal company manufacturer and several other conspirators – including the school superintendent – decided that a trial on the law would be great for tourism. With that in mind, and with all parties colluding, including the prosecutors and local judges, a teacher named John Scopes (with minimal local ties, for obvious reasons) was recruited to serve as the defendant. He was indicted, went before the judge, and was released without bond pending trial. (It is unclear that Scopes ever actually violated the law. In later years he denied teaching evolution subsequent to the Butler Act. At his trial, the students called to testify against him – with Scopes’ blessing – were vague in the extreme. If Scopes ever taught them evolution, he didn't teach it very well). The run-up to the trial promised everything the Dayton chamber of commerce could’ve hoped for. The prosecutors brought in William Jennings Bryan, a former secretary of state, presidential nominee, and ardent creationist. The defense countered with a controversial choice (even among other defense attorneys): Clarence Darrow, a latter day cross between Richard Dawkins and Barry Scheck. The defense eventually settled on a strategy of arguing that evolution and the Bible were compatible. After the prosecution staged its case-in-chief, showing that Scopes taught evolution in violation of the law, Judge John Raulston suddenly tired of the spectacle. He ruled that the defense’s proposed experts were irrelevant to the narrow question of whether or not Scopes taught evolution. To preserve a record for appeal, the defense made an offer of proof outside the presence of the jury. Darrow also shocked everyone by calling Bryan to the stand (and Bryan shocked everyone by taking the stand). The Darrow-Bryan examination is the most famous aspect of the Scopes trial, the part you’ve heard of even if you don’t know anything else about the case. Interestingly, Judge Raulston eventually determined Bryan’s testimony irrelevant and had it expunged from the record. With its strategy thwarted, the defense conceded Scope’s conviction. Scopes was fined $100 and the defense appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court. The high court upheld the conviction, but overturned the sentence (the fine) on a technicality. Then, in an extremely unusual bit of dicta, they recommended that the prosecution not retry the case. The purpose of this suggestion was to keep the defense from appealing to the United States Supreme Court. Larson tracks these many twists and turns in clear and transparent prose. He is a law professor, but writes for laypeople. He is good at explaining the different legal strategies and nuances of a fairly convoluted proceeding. The tone of Summer for the Gods is restrained. This is not by any means a polemic. Larson does not have an axe to grind. Of course, I’m sure there are certain readers who will find Larson’s lack of bias to be a bias in and of itself. (It might also have made the book a bit more lively. Objectivity is fine; subjectivity is more fun). If there is a bias, it is the bias of fact and history. Neither Darrow or Bryan come out looking very good. Darrow is portrayed as something of a jerk, gravely disliked by his putative colleagues (the ACLU tried its best to get him off the case). Bryan simply looks like a fool. Darrow’s decision to call Bryan was a sublime strategic move. Even though it did not change the trial, it hurt the creationist cause. Bryan’s steadfast reliance on a Biblical interpretation led him to deny natural realities. When you read the transcript of his examination, Bryan seems an ignorant buffoon. (Bryan died in his sleep shortly after the trial. Darrow stated he “died of a busted belly.” H.L. Mencken allegedly remarked, “We killed the son-of-a-bitch!”). Maybe the most stunning thing about Summer for the Gods is that it was written in 1997. It feels like it came out yesterday. It is disheartening, to say the least, that this issue is still alive in 2014, and that we’ve walked in a large circle since 1925, ending right back in Dayton where we started. Due in part to Supreme Court rulings on the First Amendment, the nature of the debate has changed. It is no longer about keeping evolution out, but of allowing alternate explanations in. The “competing theories” movement is far more subtle and nuanced than anything propounded by William Jennings Bryan. That’s what makes it so perfidious. I don’t pretend to know with any certainty how the world began. On most days, I don’t even care. But I do know that in science, “theory” does not mean something scribbled on a napkin during happy hours at Applebee’s. It is an idea that gets put through the scientific method, that is verified through observations and experiments. Evolution rightly belongs in public school science classes. Creationism does not.I went to Catholic schools from fifth grade all the way through law school. I learned a couple things from that. First, Catholic schools are expensive. Second, that the separation of church and state works, even within a parochial school. The math classes I went to taught math. The science classes taught science. The theology classes taught theology. It worked. My experience does not point the way to an answer. It’s obvious that the solution it to maintain separation, to have different spheres for science and faith. It’s equally obvious, as Larson notes, that huge numbers of people view the Bible as authoritative on matters of science (and on every other aspect of life). For certain church leaders, the controversy is the giving tree, inspiring activism and donations and publicity. Larson is probably correct in noting that the Scopes Trial is not the trial of the century, but more aptly the trial of the centuries. A verdict is not expected any time soon.
Summer for the Gods is phenomenal. The book tells a riveting story well, but it elevates itself over other histories by critically examining the public's later interpretation of the events, and showing all the effects of such interpretation (also probably why it got the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History). “Before” “During” and “And After” are its three parts, covering the build-up to the prosecution, the trial itself, and the public’s reaction to and later interpretation of the events. The book details the 1925 "Scopes monkey trial", but first situates the prosecution. Early 20th century Americans were religious. Religion and education hadn't really done battle because public high school was not yet widespread, but that changed quickly: Tennessee's high school population was 10,000 in 1910, then grew to more than 50,000 by 1925. (24) The mass public education of children raised the question of what to teach them. Two organizations destined to battle over such topic emerged at about the same time. In 1919 the World's Christian Fundamentals Association was founded (leading to the term “fundamentalist” to describe its adherents) to fight the slide towards modernism. (36) The ACLU began in 1920. (82) Shortly thereafter, it started a committee on academic freedom, and while looking for a test case, discovered Tennessee's new anti-evolution law, which fined public school teachers who espoused the doctrine; the ACLU took out an advertisement in a Tennessee newspaper, offering free legal representation, and a Dayton teacher took the bait. (82-83) The ACLU wanted to defend academic freedom, here, the right of the teacher to teach biology how he wanted, but when populist politician William Jennings Bryan offered to help the prosecution, Clarence Darrow publicly offered his services (the defendant accepted) and the case (or at least the defense's case) became about religion --Darrow's agnosticism being nationally known. (100) Contrary to later portrayals, Larson's description of the prosecution, and especially Bryan, suggest sincere belief and eminently reasonable principles (at least in theory, not necessarily as applied to this statute), for example, Bryan frames the case as broadly about "the right of the people speaking through the legislature, to control the schools which they create and support" or more narrowly about how "Mr. Scopes demands pay for teaching what the state does not want taught and demands that the state furnish him with an audience of children to which he can talk and say things contrary to law." (128, 129) In essence, the anti-evolution statute represented the people's ability to exercise control over their public schools.The prosecution was cut and dried, an easy factual case (and one that got a conviction after only a few minutes of jury deliberations, as the defense admitted he taught evolution) but the defense wanted to put on experts as part of its case. After the prosecution rested, and the judge denied the defense’s attempt to introduce expert witnesses, he (the judge) allowed them to make an offer of proof -- essentially, showing a later-reviewing appellate court what its experts would have said. But in addition to its listed experts, the defense (specifically, Darrow) had a trick up its sleeve. Darrow's method to get Bryan on the witness stand was formalistic--he presented Bryan as an "expert" witness on the Bible -- as part of the defense's case, they asserted the prosecution needed to show that teaching evolution was contrary to the Bible's teachings, because technically it prohibited only "teach[ing] any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and [teaching] instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals" -- and was able to grill him about biblical "facts", providing the grist for later science-makes-religion-look-stupid articles about the trial. In some sense, the prosecution itself ended in a draw: although Scopes was convicted, it was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court, which used a procedural formality (involving the imposition of the sentence) to vacate the conviction while sustaining the law’s constitutionality. (221)The telling of the story of the trial is excellent, but the last third is where Larson’s book moves from very good to excellent: in it, he documents and critiques (the evolution of) later perceptions of the event. Both during and after trial, elite opinion sided with the defense, and was successful in focusing portrayals on Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan, and in painting the prosecution as out for blood, when in fact the maximum punishment for the misdemeanor was a fine, and Bryan had told Scopes that he would pay it for him. The defense’s arguments about individual liberty were fondly recalled, while the prosecution’s articulation of majority power was forgotten. Larson surveys later textbooks and popular historical accounts of the time, one of the first of which was poorly researched (at least regarding the Scopes trial) yet immensely popular and influential, with subsequent works using it as a quasi-primary source, as it was written in 1931. (225) Thinking that the Scopes trial represented a simple good v. evil or smart v. dumb, and that the good guys humiliated the bad ones, had a couple interesting effects. Because that perception of the trial became so widespread in subsequent years, it drove fundamentalists essentially underground -- their views rejected, yet still disgusted with materialistic evolution as a worldview, they decided to stop trying to convince others, and formed their own private schools and society. (236) The Supreme Court helped further this perception, announcing a significant shift in its First Amendment doctrine in a 1968 case striking down an Arkansas law similar to the one that Scopes violated (and enacted around the same time). In Epperson, the Court mentioned the Scopes case, using it as evidence of the legislature’s purported purpose to ensure teaching of a particular religion in the school; the Court disapproved, and announced that to pass muster under the Establishment Clause, a statute must have a “secular purpose.” (260) Now, such statutes were unconstitutional. Finally, the idea that science won made scientists complacent. They didn’t need to convince the public to accept evolution, because (especially post-1968) the public appeared powerless to stop them. But the public hasn’t (yet) really accepted evolution, and they have devised creative ways to circumvent Epperson’s requirement. Almost sixty years post-Scopes, in 1982, Americans were divided 50/50 between believing in a biblical account of creation and those believing in evolution (those believing in God-influenced evolution are lumped in with those believing in evolution without God). And more than 80% wanted to include creationist theories in public school curriculum. (258) That matters because there are ways to undermine evolution without banning the teaching of it, e.g. presenting creationism and evolution as two competing (presumably, to a student, at least initially equally valid) “theories,” preying on the difference between the scientific use of the term and the general one. (This book was published in 1997; based on more recent data it looks like scientists have had some success in convincing the public, albeit of the slow-and-steady variety:Gallup’s 1999 poll pegged the creationist-inclusion number at 68%, with the former 50/50 split remaining in place; in 2005 only 54% of Americans wanted creationism taught in public schools .)This book should move to the top of your list if you’re interested in learning the context of and complexities involved with a famous trial, or in developing some measure of nuance when discussing the issue of sincere religious beliefs conflicting with science, especially in the realm of publicly-funded schools. The fact that I would recommend this book equally to both a fervent believer and ardent atheist speaks to Larson’s thoroughness and even-handedness in canvassing a brutally contested terrain.
What do You think about Summer For The Gods: The Scopes Trial & America's Continuing Debate Over Science & Religion (1998)?
I've been meaning to read this book for 15 years. Ever since the first day of law school, when Professor Larson was introduced as a Pulitzer winning author. As an aside I have two strong memories of him as a Property Law Prof: 1) he reprimanded a student for pulling her hair back into a ponytail while he was lecturing, and 2) he liked to use the word "tony." I could hear his irregularly modulated voice and high pitched tones of excitement as I read this book. This is a thorough recounting, not only of this trial and the surrounding hooplah, but also of its historical significance. The most striking takeaway from this book is that it feels very much like it could have been written about the same debate today, except that maybe more than NONE of the participants would be non-white or male.This is a stale and stagnant state of affairs- fundamentalist, rural, Southern as synonyms vs. sophisticated, urban & Northern. The elitists ridicule the believers and the believers distrust the meddling progressives.I didn't get a real sense for the dynamism of the two main players, Darrow and Bryan- though it is repeatedly stated that they were charismatic beyond compare. I just didn't get to see it in the narrative. I'd like to see if I can find a transcript of the cross-examination of Bryan by Darrow. A friend says it is word-for-word in Inherit the Wind, so I'll check it out.The second most striking think in this book- there's a boy named Sue in it! (well, a man)
—Roxanne Russell
This was an absolutely wonderful book ... the only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is because my personal rating system only gives 5 to books I will re-read and re-read. I might need to revise my rating system. Anyway, this book was about the trial in Tennessee in 1925 over whether evolution could be taught in the schools. The issue was not really set before the court, nor did they decide on it ... but Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan had a terrific argument over whether God created man or we evolved from lower species. It turned into a huge media circus ... I have written a 10 page review on this book for my constitution class. The book is very well written, nicely organized, with lots of great insight into the characters in the "play", the issues in society at the time that prompted the controversy, and the events of the trial itself, as well as perspective on how this trial and its repercussions have been felt for decades since, and probably well into the future. It was actually quite a good book!
—Joy Gerbode
Larson does an excellent job of presenting a clean view of the actual case and properly contextualizing it and then proceeding to dismantle the mythology and falsehoods that media portrayals have attributed to all facets of the trial. His analysis of various accounts of the trial, such as "Only Yesterday" and the play (and eventual film) "Inherit the Wind", reflect that the creators of these accounts took huge liberties with the details of the trial (in the case of "Inherit the Wind", this was directly stated by the playwrights) and that these factual inaccuracies have irreparably warped public knowledge of the trial. The inhabitants of Dayton, TN's efforts to play host to the test case in an effort to generate publicity for their small town were unexpected and hilarious!
—Britlyn Husmann
