Summer for the Gods

Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion, New York: Basic Books, 1997. 318 pages

 

I have always prided myself on my knowledge of history. I always knew better than to derive my historical conclusions from movies or plays…or so I thought. So I was rather shocked to discover that my view of the 1925 Dayton, Tennessee Scopes trial featuring Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan was very much in error. Apparently, I had formed my ideas about this trial and this topic from the movie “Inherit The Wind”. I felt a little better about this when I read that even the historian Hofstadter had it quite wrong. 

 This book is important as the conflict between antievolutionists (now called Intelligent Design) and Evolution is again recurring. Accurate knowledge of this 1925 conflict and how antievolutionist think is necessary to form an intelligent defense in the present. This book provides the much needed accurate historical record. 

 Background: In the spring of 1924, the Tennessee legislature put together a bill designed to prohibit the teaching of human evolution in the state's public schools. The author of the bill had heard a preacher tell of a girl who had gone to college, learned about evolution, and lost her faith. The substance of the inspired statute read that "it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." The bill passed through the state legislature overwhelmingly in 1925. Larson spends less time on the actual trial than he does with its background, preliminaries, and aftermath. He puts the main actors into context and shows their relationships to one another. Consequently, he produces not only a history of American religious and scientific thought but a history of the American Civil Liberties Union, the organization that abruptly challenged Tennessee's statute, paving the way for what may very well be the "trial of the century." Larson details the legal strategies of both sides—from the prosecution's early solicitation of expert witnesses and their later attempts to bar them from the court, to the divergent opinions regarding God and evolution on the defense. 

One of the more interesting facts following the trial is how the Appeals court kept the Scopes conviction from reaching the Supreme Court. They reversed Scope’s conviction on the technicality that the trial judge, rather than the jury, fixed the amount of the imposed $100 fine (which was the minimum fine allowed and the jury had not availed themselves of the opportunity to raise it). So there was now no case to appeal!! So the antievolution law of Tennessee and many other southern states remained on the books. For instance, a 1935 proposal to repeal the Tennessee law was defeated 67-20. A similar proposal was defeated in 1951; however, in 1967 Tennessee finally repealed this statute. 

 Also, the pace of antievolution activism actually picked up after the trial (especially in the South), but it encountered increased popular resistance everywhere. Arkansas and Mississippi followed Tennessee in outlawing the teaching of human evolution, for example, but similar legislation lost in many other states, particularly in the North and the West. Yet, all textbooks were impacted and references to evolution were implied to be more a theory than a fact throughout the country. I do not remember the topic even being discussed in my 1950’s high school biology class. 

My Notes: 

Pg. 24: Relatively few American teenagers attended high school during the nineteenth century, and nearly none in the rural South, where such schools rarely existed and local authorities did not compel student attendance. The situation changed dramatically after the turn of the century. Census figures tell the story. The number of pupils enrolled in American high schools leapt from about 200,000 in 1890 to nearly two million in 1920. Tennessee followed this national trend, with its high school population rising from less than 10,000 in 1910 to more than 50,000 at the time of the Scopes trial in 1925. 

 Pg. 98: Bryan’s three main points for antievolution laws: (1) evolution theory lacked scientific proof, (2) teaching it to school students undermined their religious faith and social values; (3) that the ‘Bible-believing’ majority should control the content of public school instruction.

 Pg. 247: The political landscape had changed.  By the late twentieth century, Americans had come to accept many of the basic notions of individual liberty championed by the ACLU during its early years. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the U.S. Supreme Court grafted the ACLU view of free speech, due process, and equal protection onto the Constitution. These legal developments made antievolution statutes seem virtually un-American by the 1960s and led fundamentalists to seek other avenues of recourse against Darwinian teaching. Equal protection for their ideas appeared more appropriate to some fundamentalists than censoring their opponents. 

 Pg. 249: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1925 that the ‘liberty’ protected from state infringement by the due process clause incorporated the First Amendment right of free speech. It took more than twenty years before the High Court added the establishment clause to the rights incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment. Once it did, the Court quickly began purging well-entrenched religious practices and influences from state-supported schools. In 1948 Justice Hugo Black wrote the initial decision barring religious instruction in public schools. Fourteen years later, he added the landmark opinion outlawing school prayer. In 1963, he joined in barring compulsory Bible reading from the classroom. The role of Science in American education also changed during this period when Russia put Sputnik in orbit. 

 Pg. 271: The U.S. Supreme Court in a 1987, Edwards v. Aguillard, struck down Louisiana’s Balanced Treatment Act as Creation science was nothing but religion dressed up as science and therefore was barred by the Establishment Clause from public school classrooms along with other forms of religious instruction. 

 Pg. 275: The fight goes on. In Kansas during 1999, for example, creationists on the state school board temporarily succeeded in deleting the big bang theory and what they called ‘macro-evolution’ from the list of topics mandated for coverage in public school science classrooms. Six years later, they took the further step of adding an Intelligent Design friendly definition of science to their educational standards. In 2004, the school board of suburban Cobb County, Georgia, decreed that biology textbooks should carry a disclaimer stating that evolution is just a theory. A year later, the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board mandated not only an oral disclaimer akin to Cobb County’s written one but also recommended intelligent design as an alternative explanation of biological origins. Federal district courts struck down the Cobb County and Dover restrictions.