In the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, the morning of Friday
July 10, 1925 was blisteringly hot. Outside the country courtroom, a crowd of
around 1000 people had gathered. Squeezing through the throng came a young
schoolteacher and athletics coach, John Scopes. Scopes was accompanied by Clarence
Darrow, one of the most famous lawyers in the United States. But when a cheer
went up from the assembled mass, it was not for Scopes or Darrow, but for the
elderly, burly figure of Williams Jennings Bryan. Lawyer, moralist, three times
Presidential candidate, religious authority, and key figure in the Populist
movement of the 1890s. These two legal titans were here to defend and prosecute
John Scopes. His crime was admitting to teaching Darwinian evolution in
defiance of a state law banning the promulgation of evolutionary theory.
The
Scopes Trial has entered popular myth and legend, claimed as a victory by both
sides, misrepresented and misunderstood in film and literature. So, in Episode
17 of American History Too! we’re going to look at the 1925
Scopes Trial and try to get to the heart of what was actually going on.
Reading List
Barry Hankins, Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the
Roaring Twenties and Today’s Culture Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial
and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (Harvard
University Press, 1998)
Michael Lienisch, In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the
Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement (University of
North Carolina Press, 2007)
Jeffrey P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History With
Documents (Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002)
Ronald Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Harvard
University Press, 1998)
Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford University
Press, 2007)
Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith:
Religion in American War and Diplomacy (Anchor Books, 2012)
Adam Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks,
and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (University of Chicago
Press, 2014)
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