[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on educators.]
On two
ways to contextualize the Scopes trial’s (and one of America’s) most famous
debate.
Prominent
trials can frequently morph into something different from and more than their
explicit legal focus, but I’m not sure any trial in American history did so
more clearly than did the Scopes trial (certainly the
OJ trial is a contender for that title as well). Given that Scopes was recruited
to stand trial as I discussed in yesterday’s post, perhaps the trial was always
destined to become focused on much more than just this one teacher’s case or
even the Butler Act specifically. But it truly evolved thanks to the involvement
of two of the nation’s most famous legal and political figures, on the trial’s
two respective sides: for the prosecution, “The
Great Commoner” himself William
Jennings Bryan; and for the defense, without question the nation’s most prominent
lawyer in the period, just a year past his
celebrated closing in the trial of Leopold & Loeb, Clarence Darrow. The
battle between the two men and their respective positions on evolution,
religion, and society became the story of the trial, and culminated in Darrow’s
two-hour questioning of Bryan on the courthouse
lawn (so a larger audience could hear it) on July 20, 1925.
The
excellent pieces at those last two hyperlinks tell the story of that debate, and
of the two men’s overall involvement in the trial, at length, and I encourage
you to read both of them to learn more about this famous, fraught, and fascinating
moment in American legal and social history. Here I want to offer two different
but interconnected ways to contextualize the Bryan-Darrow showdown. The more
obvious, and certainly not an inaccurate one, is that it exemplified a series
of ongoing cultural and national clashes in early 20th century
America: between the 19th and 20th centuries, between a
more traditional and more modern perspective, between rural and urban communities,
between (most obviously of all I suppose) conservatism and progressivism. The
breakdown of those categories is nowhere near as straightforward or simple as they
might suggest, not in 1925 and not at any other point—21st century
conservatives have pegged Woodrow
Wilson as a progressive icon, for example; let’s just say I
would strenuously disagree—but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t
particularly striking moments of overt conflict between them, and the Bryan-Darrow
debate definitely qualifies as such.
But I
would add that the debate also reflected another defining duality, one that is at
the heart of my most
recent book and likewise of many of my analyses
of our current moment: the conflict between mythic and critical
patriotisms. It might seem that it was the Bible on which that conflict between
the two men was focused: Bryan had delivered a famous speech in Tennessee not
long before the trial began entitled “Is the Bible True?”;
and Darrow grilled him at length, and from the general consensus of the audience
to great success (as one
commentator put it, “As a man and as a legend, Bryan was destroyed by his
testimony that day”), on many Biblical stories that could not possibly be
literally true. But I believe their respective perspectives also embody mythic
and critical patriotism as I’ve tried to defined them over the last few years. At
one point Bryan answered Darrow, “I do not think about things I don’t think about,”
which sure captures mythic patriotism’s narrow and exclusionary focus. Whereas
Darrow’s probing and critical perspective, expressed throughout this debate and
the trial as a whole, reflects his
overarching view that “True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more
than anywhere else.”
Next
Scopes context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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