Summer For The Gods: The Scopes Trial And America's Continuing Debate Over Science And Religion

Terrific book on the Scopes monkey trial and the continuing (evolving?) debate between science and religion in the public sphere in America. The book is divided into thirds, a "before", "during" and "after" trial section. What makes the book special is its emphasis on the currents and trends

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leading up to and away from the trial. In addition, Larson clears away a lot of the cobwebs and hoary cliches that have come to be associated with the trial itself, presenting the actual proceedings concisely and lucidly. Unexpected and involving bonuses include passages on the inception of the ACLU, and sections on court arguments and societal impact post-Scopes. The ability to contextualize these "ripples" of influence both forward and backward in time from that seminal moment makes this much more than just a recap of that hot summer in Tennessee.

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For anyone who buys into the "Inherit the Wind" view of the Scopes Monkey Trial, this book will set you straight..

This is an excellent and well-researched account of the Scopes Monkey Trial and the author skillfully dismantles much of the mythology surrounding the event. Recommended for anyone on either side of the evolution debate.

Excellent account of Scopes trial: background, trial, aftermath, legacy.

By the late nineteenth century, Darwin's evolutionary theories had been widely accepted by Christian fundamentalists.. The had adopted a form of Lamarckian explanation for changes in form. In fact, James Orr, well-known theologian, wrote in The Fundamentals, " Assume God – as many devout

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evolutionists do– to be immanent in the evolutionary process, and His intelligence and purpose to be expressed in it; then evolution, so far from conflicting with theism, may become a new and heightened form of theistic argument. What raised their ire was his theory of natural selection with its implicit unguided randomness. Edward J. Larson is the author of an excellent history of the Scopes trial. He reports the history of the debate that led to events in Tennessee. Natural selection had been pretty much ignored until genetics began to supply some evidence for it in the early twentieth century. Genetics provided further evidence that change was due to random variation. This the fundamentalists could not abide. Soon evolution came under attack, natural selection becoming fully identified with all of Darwin. The very nature of science– that is, continual debate– provided ammunition to the forces of darkness although debate and difference of opinion on this subject were not limited to science. Surely religion has been subject to more difference of opinion than perhaps and other theoretical field being as speculative as it is. William Jennings Bryan, the more vocal of opponents to evolution, had his fear fueled by the development of eugenics, a natural outgrowth of the popularization of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Some thirty-five states eventually passed legislation compelling the sexual segregation and sterilization of unfortunates that society chose to label as misfits. Soon eugenics became identified with evolutionary theory and more fat was added to the fire. Bryan was an interesting mix of contradictions. A pacifist and anti-Republican he had resigned from Wilson's Cabinet was war fever erupted. He was a fervent admirer of hard currency yet made millions from land speculation in Florida. Bryan's anti-evolutionist views originated from his view that "the Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection [!] by the operation of the law of hate– the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak." He blamed belief in evolution for WW I and the apparent decline in religious faith. He was not – contrary to the Inherit the Wind version – opposed to an extended geologic time frame, but he resisted vehemently the notion that humans were not created supernaturally. Bryan's majoritarian stance – the majority rules and schools should teach what the majority believes – was a major reason for the entry of the ACLU into the case. The NCLU– forerunner to the ACLU– had been founded by the Quakers to help provide support and defense for their anti-war activities and pacifist members who refused to serve in Wilson's war. The president's statements against disloyalty and his support for legislation against any kind of opposition to the war created a climate that fueled majoritarian thinking. The government had already used the postal service to help suppress any kind of minority point-of-view and the ACLU – originally quite cooperative with the Wilson government – soon became disillusioned. Samuel Walker, ACLU historian, wrote "largely oblivious to civil liberties considerations before the war, the wartime crisis forced them [the ACLU] to abandon their faith in the inevitability of social progress and their majoritarian view of democracy. They now began to see that majority rule and liberty were not necessarily synonymous and thus discovered the First Amendment as a new principle for advancing human freedom." Clarence Darrow's "appropriation" of the defense was not appreciated by the ACLU which wanted to concentrate on the issue of free speech. Darrow just wanted to lampoon the Christian Fundamentalists, a pathetically easy task – it was the only time he volunteered his services. Darrow delighted in challenging the traditional concepts of religion and morality. He hated "do-gooders" and regarded Christianity as a "slave religion that encouraged acquiescence in injustice, a willingness to make do with the mediocre, and complacency in the face of the intolerable." The biblical concept of original sin was to Darrow, "a very dangerous doctrine – silly, impossible and wicked." Yet he had voted for William Jennings Bryan in 1896 As the Democratic candidate for Congress. Many traditional institutions were undergoing radical change at the turn of the century. The university, heretofore, an arm of a church sect, offered little chance for teachers to stray from the party line. The rise of pragmatism led by the French philosopher Auguste Comte, offered a path away from a paradigm of obedience to a central authority and toward "a positive stage ion which empirical investigation would be accepted as the only reliable road to truth." Empiricism soon dominated both sciences and humanities in academic research. The newly formed American Association of University Professors wanted to join in Scopes's defense. They wanted to emphasize the deleterious effects of a popularly orchestrated curriculum. "It is, we believe, a principle to be rigidly adhered to that the decision as to what is taught would be determined not by a popular vote. . . but by teachers and investigators in their respective fields." The lawyer who represented them, John Neal, had been fired by the University of Tennessee in violation of newly created AAUP procedures. (Neal was perhaps not the best choice. A brilliant lawyer and teacher, he was usually late for class, often never appearing, rarely lecturing on the topic at hand, preferring political discourses and giving his students grades of 95 without reading their exams.) Following passage of the law forbidding the teaching of evolution that contradicted the biblical teaching (this odd phraseology was to provide the opening that Darrow needed) the ACLU began looking for a test case site. Most school superintendents wanted nothing to do with the case simply declaring they did not teach Darwinism. The Knoxville superintendent even declared that, "Our teachers have a hard enough time teaching the children how to distinguish between plant and animal life." One suspects he was part vegetable himself. The civic boosters in Dayton lusted at the idea of all the publicity. They were perhaps atypical. A relatively new little town, it was a Republican enclave in a predominantly Democratic south. Even H. L. Mencken was pleasantly surprised. "I expected to find a squalid Southern village, with darkies snoozing on the houseblocks, pigs rooting under the houses, and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I found was a country town full of charm and even beauty . . . . Nor is there any evidence in the town of that poisonous spirit which usually shows itself where Christian men gather to defend the great doctrines of their faith." It was not really a fight against evolution for the Daytonites, but rather an attempt to overcome obscurity. It eventually blew up in their faces, as Dayton became the laughingstock of the country. "Powerful social forces converged on Dayton that summer: populist majoritarianism and traditional evangelical faith versus scientific secularianism and modern concepts of individual liberty." "If the anti-evolutionists in Tennessee were aware of the existence of any other religions than their own, they might realize that it is the very genius of religion itself to evolve from primary forms to higher forms. The author of the anti-evolution bill is obviously nearer in mental development to the nomads of early biblical times than he is to the intelligence of the young man [Scopes] who is under trial." Charles Francis Potte

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Few courtroom dramas have captured the nation's attention so fully as that played out in 1925 when Tennessee prosecuted John Scopes for teaching evolutionary science in the classroom. Seventy years later, Larson gives us the drama again, tense and gripping: the populist rhetoric of Scopes' chief

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accuser, William Jennings Bryan; the mordant wit of his defender, Clarence Darrow; the caustic satire of the trial's most prominent chronicler, H. L. Mencken. But as a legal and historical scholar, Larson moves beyond the titanic personalities to limn the national and cultural forces that collided in that Dayton courtroom: agnosticism versus faith; North versus South; liberalism versus conservatism; cosmopolitanism versus localism. Careful and evenhanded analysis dispels the mythologies and caricatures in film and stage versions of the trial, leaving us with a far clearer picture of the cultural warfare that still periodically erupts in our classes and courts.

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When I started reading “Summer for the gods: the Scopes trial and America’s continuing debate over science and religion” I thought that I knew something about the Scopes trial. As the author points out, most Americans feel that way. Edward J Larson, the author, is a professor at Pepperdine

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University. He has both a PhD in history and a law degree which should make him very qualified to write this book. For me the most important part of of the book was the “before” and “after” sections, the actual events of the trial turn out to be less surprising, and less important, than why it happened and what the results were.
The events prior to the trial was most surprising to me. Religious fundamentalists writing for social justice? That surprised me even considering that the society they wanted justice for was lily white and strictly Christian. Evolution was, by the 1920s, a settled issue with most churches. The modern leaning churches accepting science and the pentecostal churches, those that came into being during the First Great Awakening when Europeans and Africans worshiped together as bondsmen to the wealthy English planters, rejecting science as an evil influence that would destroy morality. Outlawing the teaching of evolution was a dead idea until William Jennings Bryan began to advocate for it. As an experienced politician he was quickly successful in attracting conservative fundamentalists to the cause.
The trial was instigated by the American Civil Liberties Union in an attempt to protect teachers freedom of speech and freedom from government sponsored religious influence in the classroom. Unfortunately they soon lost control of the trial when Bryan and Clarence Darrow, two of the era's biggest headline makers, were recruited to argue the case. The prosecution and the ACLU wanted to focus on the law itself, Bryan and Darrow both wanted religion introduced into their arguments. As we all know Bryan and Darrow prevailed.
Scopes was convicted, giving the ACLU a chance to appeal to the state supreme court. This was partially botched by a local attorney who had latched on to the trial as a chance redeem his reputation. Since the appeal was on a very limited point the ACLU expected to lose in Tennessee State Supreme Court and was planning strategy for an appeal to the US Supreme Court when Tennessee pulled the rug out from under them by overturning the conviction on a point they had not been asked to look at. With no conviction there was nothing to appeal effectively ending the legal battle.
After the trial both sides felt they had won. The anti-evolution forces managed to get laws passed in more states, southern and western states but failed in the north and midwest. The ACLU was unable to recruit any teachers to serve as another test case. But when the anti-evolution forces stopped trying to pass laws outside their areas it appeared to many that the fundamentalists had accepted defeat. As we know from current events they only turned inward to regroup. Bryan’s legacy suffered from his association with the trial. To his liberal friends it appeared that he had suffered from bad judgement in his later years and deserted them. To the anti-evolutionists he went from a hero leading their cause to a traitor for his testimony that perhaps Genesis described eras not 24 hour days.
Larson is a good writer, he is intelligent enough to dispense with polysyllabic words meant to impress rather than inform and he did the work to explain the era that colored the trial and how the trial colored the era that followed. His book provides a window to help us understand current events.

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The Scope Trial (occasionally referred to with both contempt and fondness as “The Monkey Trial”) has a life of its own, and much of that life has little or nothing to do with what actually occurred in Dayton, Tennessee during the summer of 1925 when William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow

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met to defend the merits of the case. Lawrence and Lee’s 1955 play “Inherit the Wind” and the film based off it five years later form much of the basis for popular (but ultimately false) ideas about the trial. And of course it doesn’t help matters that the topics of science and religious have been held to be, at least in the popular imagination, mortal enemies.

In “Summer for the Gods,” Edward J, Larson retells the story of the trial stripped of all the mythology, without compromising readability or interest for the layperson. Larson is both a law and history professor, so he’s in a unique position to clarify the historical content and the legal matters. He does a stupendous job of doing both.

Not that the idea of media sensationalism is anything new, but one of the things I liked most about this book was that it shows exactly how the trial was, in many ways, a Potemkin village. As soon as the Butler Act (the statute which prevented the teaching of evolutionary theory in science classrooms in the state of Tennessee) was passed, the newly founded ACLU offered to defend anyone prosecuted by the state for breaking the law. Their plan – for the case to work its way up through the courts and eventually find itself in the Supreme Court docket – didn’t go exactly as planned.

The trial ended up bringing names that spelled the worst kind of boosterism for the beleaguered small-town residents of Dayton who had probably never seen the likes of the media circus they witnessed for those several days – two of the country’s best-known attorneys, Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan heading up the prosecution. Darrow was fresh out of defending accused murders Leopold and Loeb, whose trial had only a year before also been breathlessly called in the media “the trial of the century”; Bryan was a decade out of his two-year stint as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, from which he resigned due to the international buildup of the First World War. He was a staunch progressive – back when “progressive” meant, among other things, supporting prohibition and belief in Biblical literalism. How times change.

The issues on the table? Well, they weren’t anything resembling what recent similar cases – say Dover v. Kitzmiller – argued. Bryan’s legal arguments really had very little to do with the merits of science or evolutionary theory. Instead, he argued on majoritarian grounds that if a state law is passed, it was obviously the will of the people and, having gained the appropriate number of votes in the legislature and being signed by the governor, it was constitutionally legitimate. It was much more of a states’ rights, or even a people’s rights, approach than the imagined epic battle between science and religion. The lynchpin of the defense was to get Bryan to testify and ultimately push him into a corner about the proclaimed literal truth of Genesis. A little spoiler alert: despite Darrow’s attempt to utterly embarrass and confound Bryan by getting him on the witness stand and grilling him on the timeline of the events in Old Testament (probably the most historically accurate part of the trial that people would remember) the trial ends in a way that most people who don’t know much about it wouldn’t anticipate. The presiding judge dismisses Bryan’s testimony as irrelevant, and Scopes loses. And since the Bryan’s purpose isn’t to shame Scopes or even make him a personal target, he magnanimously offered to pay the $100 fine for Scope’s conviction, which never had to be paid anyway, since the fine was overturned by a higher court.

Being one of the many whose sole knowledge of the Scopes Trial was based mostly on the play and what was casually bandied about in high school science books, I appreciated Larson’s approach, as full of it is of equanimity and balance. Larson says a few things that make it rather obvious where he falls in the “debate” insofar as there is one (and among professional biologists, there really isn’t): he can look down condescendingly on Bryan on the witness stand trying to defend his ultra-literal view of Genesis, but those of us who credit science where it is due have a hard time not having a little fun at Bryan’s expense. Go read, then watch “Inherit The Wind.” Then as a good counterbalance, and some reliable history, read this. It’s one of the best books on science and religion I’ve had the pleasure of reading in a while.

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Well written, extensively researched, and with a new Afterword that shows the continued relevance of the Scopes trial today.

The author revisits the Scopes trial in an attempt to place it within the modern clash between science and religion. He does a good job of detailing the facts of the trial, the personalities involved, and the legend making that changed the way the trial was perceived over a thirty year period. The

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writing is interesting, and moves well; the author knows how to tell a story. The main problem I have is that the author spends way too much time protesting that religion and science are compatible, using the same old argument that some scientists are religious. He evidently approves of the attempts to demonstrate at the trial that evolution does not violate Scripture, but also seems to realize that this could not work. He is unable to resist sniping at Darrow, calling him mean spirited, while exposing an obvious soft spot for Bryan, and trying to rescue him from the dustbin of history. A noble effort, but flawed by the constant accomodationism that his own words often demonstrate to be unworkable, a fact of which he seems to be unaware. Worth reading, and a valuable addition to anybody's history of evolution library.

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A look at the Scopes trial of 1925, the history of and the outcome. Interestingly enough it is battle that did not end in 1925 and is still with us today. It was a trial that captured the nation and the world.

In Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, Edward J. Larson writes, “During the first quarter of the twentieth century, scientists in western Europe and the United States accumulated an increasingly persuasive body of evidence supporting

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a Darwinian view of human origins, and the American people began to take notice. These scientific developments helped set the stage in the early 1920s for a massive crusade by fundamentalists against teaching evolution in public schools, which culminated in the 1925 trial of John Scopes” (pg. 14). Of the ACLU involvement, Larson writes, “Already the three main tactics for attacking the antievolution measure had emerged: the defense of individual freedom, an appeal to scientific authority, and a mocking ridicule of fundamentalists and biblical literalism; later, they became the three prongs of the Scopes defense” (pg. 53).
Discussing the Tennessee law and the anticipated media circus, Larson writes, “Those proud of their state’s antievolution statute feared that the upcoming trial would discredit it and Tennessee; those embarrassed by it feared that the upcoming trial would heap further ridicule on their state” (pg. 94). Further, “In a stroke, the ACLU lost control of what it initially conceived as a narrow constitutional test of the statute. With Bryan on hand, evolution would be on trial at Dayton, and pleas for individual liberty would run headlong into calls for majority rule” (pg. 100). Discussing race, Larson writes, “Relatively little comment about the trial survives from African Americans…In any event, the outcome would not affect African Americans, because Tennessee public schools enforced strict racial segregation and offered little to black students beyond elementary instruction” (pg. 122). In terms of legal strategy, Larson writes, “The prosecution maintained that the statute outlawed any teaching about human evolution regardless of what evolution meant of whether it conflicted with the Bible. This position rendered evidence on those questions irrelevant. The defense countered that the law only barred instruction in evolution that denied the biblical account of creation, and therefore such evidence was irrelevant. Indeed, it constituted the defense’s entire case” (pg. 172).
Of the fallout, Larson writes, “In a clever maneuver, the Tennessee Supreme Court managed to end the embarrassing case without overturning the locally popular law. The antievolution statute only applied to public employees acting in their official capacity, and therefore did not infringe on individual liberty, the court ruled” (pg. 220). He continues, “Partly as a result of the Scopes trial, the law came to symbolize different things to different people; it became a symbol of pride and regional identity for some Southerners” (pg. 221). According to Larson, “At the same time, the tendency of northern evolutionists to blame Southerners for the Scopes trial may have weakened antievolutionism in the North” (pg. 222). Finally, “Several of the defense expert witnesses wrote semipopular books or articles expanding on their trial affidavits. Such accounts leave the distinct impression that Scopes won the case in all but the verdict, which ‘hillbilly’ jurors withheld” (pg. 222). In terms of modern curriculum that offer evolutionary theory alongside intelligent design, Larson writes, “Defense counsel at Dayton did not endorse the idea of teaching both evolution and creationism in science courses. Darrow consistently debunked fundamentalist beliefs and never supported their inclusion in the curriculum. Hays and the ACLU argued for academic freedom to teach Darwinism but most likely did not consider the possibility that some teachers might want to cover creationism” (pg. 257).

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This book won the Pulitzer in 1998, for history, and covers the Scopes trial. I read it for more background about the conflict between Religion and Science in the US, it seems very relevant now. It's a well written and researched book, I learned a lot. I hadn't realized how much of the Scopes trial

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was about show, and bringing attention and business to Dayton, Tennessee. I was also interested to realize how much of the fight against teaching evolution focused on high school, and high school text books.

Also interesting, and somewhat frightening to learn, that the percentage of people in the US who believe literally in the bible creation story has not changed a lot in the years since the Scopes trial. In 2019, a Gallup poll found that 40% of the US believed in Creationism.,

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