The Scopes Trial and the Two Visions of US Democracy

There was another reason Bryan decided to make the Scopes trial what became his final stand. Part of his zeal to prosecute Scopes stemmed from his confused understanding of what evolutionists had discovered and believed. For Bryan, Darwinism was always social Darwinism: He feared that students who imbibed it as scientific truth would come to believe that human beings were nothing but animals who survived through violence and hatred and would have no reason to care for what he called “the weak and the helpless” among them. Bryan even blamed evolutionists for turning eugenics into a reputable solution to the “problem” of what the textbook Civic Biology called “immorality and feeble-mindedness.” On this Bryan was not entirely wrong, for it was that very textbook that Scopes had taught in his class at Dayton High.

Yet no matter what drew Bryan to the case, his prosecution of Scopes ultimately hinged on a set of religious arguments: He kept insisting on opposing scientific theories based on mere “guesses” against the rock of religion instead of pointing out the nefarious uses to which evolutionary science could be put. This misstep allowed Darrow and the other members of his team to shift the court’s attention away from questions of society and to instead focus on how the Butler Act erroneously assumed that a believer in evolution could not also be a devout Christian.

Dudley Field Malone—Darrow’s dapper co-counsel—gave a brilliant speech arguing for experts to be allowed to testify about the facts of evolution. The Bible is a wonderful book, he acknowledged, but it is not a work of science. “Keep it as your consolation,” he advised the jury, “keep it as your guide, but keep it where it belongs, in the world of your own conscience…in the world of the Protestant conscience that I heard so much about when I was a boy.”

When Malone finished speaking, the courtroom, packed with supporters of the prosecution, erupted in cheers. Bryan even walked up to congratulate Malone, who had served under him at the State Department, for delivering “the greatest speech I have ever heard.” But the judge refused to allow any scientists to take the stand. All that was at issue, he ruled, was whether Scopes had broken the law.

If the proceedings had ended there, it is unlikely that the trial would have resonated in memory for so long or been the subject of so much controversy. But the day after the judge shot down the chance for the jury to hear about evolution, the defense announced that it was calling Bryan to the stand as a reputed expert on the Bible. Bryan agreed, on the condition that he could later question Darrow as well.

Darrow’s rapid queries were so effective because they exposed how little his opponent had thought about the claims of the book to which he swore unqualified faith. For two hours, the defense attorney grilled Bryan about the trustworthiness of Scripture. “Do you believe a whale swallowed Jonah?” “Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still?” “Do you think the earth was made in six days?”

Bryan avoided giving an unqualified assent to any of these questions. He admitted that the whale could actually have been just “a large fish” that God had perhaps not told to ingest a man. Neither did he speculate about how the Lord had suspended the laws of physics long enough to stop the rotation of the earth. His answers came off as evasive and defensive. Bryan knew much of the Bible by heart, but he had not studied it as would a theologian eager to correct errors of logic or judgment. On the stump and on the page, he had moved people by describing how faith in Scripture could comfort humanity and the creation of a just and peaceful world. But unable or unwilling to debate the truth of either biology or the Bible, he was no match for a shrewd adversary who asked probing questions and would not let up.

“The purpose” of Darrow’s cross-examination “is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible,” Bryan wailed. No, shouted Darrow, “we have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it.” Scopes would be found guilty, but Bryan had lost the intellectual debate. Despite his reputation as a fierce defender of the faith, his performance on the stand under Darrow’s “interrogation,” as Wineapple writes, was “sad and ridiculous, operatic and futile.” The next day, the defense and the prosecution agreed to end the trial. Bryan would have no opportunity to cross-examine Darrow.

The duel in Dayton would be the last time either man commanded a sizable national audience. Bryan died in his sleep the Sunday after the trial ended. The timing ensured that he would always be remembered for the worst moment in a career he had begun as a populist congressman from Nebraska in the early 1890s. Still, he kept enough respect among Democrats that, in 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt lauded Bryan at an unveiling of his statue alongside the Potomac River.

Darrow’s last big trial occurred toward the end of the same year that Scopes was convicted. It was the trial of Ossian Sweet, a Black physician, and a group of his brothers and friends. One of them had killed a member of a white mob, numbering in the thousands, that had sought to violently drive the Sweet family out of their home in a Detroit neighborhood that had barred African Americans from living there before. Darrow’s ardent plea to the all-white jury to dispense “justice” to an “often maligned and down-trodden” race helped acquit his clients. When Darrow died, in 1938, The Chicago Defender, a leading Black newspaper, eulogized “his ability to regard all men as his brothers: a task and a responsibility which seems incapable of comprehension by those who profess to hold opposite religious views from those of himself.” The Defender added: “This should teach the white church a lesson.”

Today, religion is just as central to the struggle over the meaning of democracy in America as it was in that Tennessee country courthouse in 1925. But it now has a strongly partisan flavor. Republicans who claim to speak for the Christian majority applaud states that ban abortion and transgender surgery and remove books about LGBTQ people from school libraries. Teaching creationism, thankfully, is no longer high on the right wing’s cultural agenda. Democrats point to polls and election results that reveal that most voters favor a woman’s right to decide on her own healthcare and trust librarians to choose a range of books for children to read. Ironically, the most powerful official in each party professes to be a devout Christian: House Speaker Mike Johnson asserts that his “worldview” is the Bible, while President Biden attends Mass nearly every week.

Just as a century ago, neither side has any taste for compromise. For the broad, largely secular left, the good news is that white evangelicals—the solid base of the GOP—number only about 14 percent of the population; in Bryan’s day, they were probably close to a majority. But if Donald Trump wins this fall, religious conservatives will likely get their way on a variety of decisions by the executive branch concerning issues they hold dear.

Culture wars seldom end with a settlement that pleases both sets of belligerents, and until the left or the right wins a lasting victory, the United States will remain a society rent in two over the role of religion in our politics. But progressives used to appeal to large numbers of serious Christians, and the only practical approach to convincing, or neutralizing, any number of believers with whom one disagrees is to find a way to empathize with—or at the very least tolerate—their fears, while routinely defeating their favored candidates at the polls. “Tolerance,” Clarence Darrow explained at the end of the Scopes trial, “means a willingness to let other people do, think, act and live as we think is not right; the antithesis of this is intolerance and means we demand the right to make others live as we think is right, not as they think is right.” We have an excellent name for a system that allows ordinary people to make their own decisions about what a minority of others would force them to do. It’s called democracy.