Evolution on Trial | Live and Let Live | 4

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0:21Imagine it's April 1926 in Oxford, Mississippi. The scent of stale pipe smoke greets you as you sit down in a small, wood-paneled office. You're a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, and you've traveled south in search of a high school teacher willing to participate in a test case to challenge a new Mississippi law that bans the teaching of evolution in public schools. The man you're here to meet, the Lafayette County Schools Superintendent, sits across from you behind his desk, a bemused expression on his face. Well, I am surprised. I didn't expect you to come all the way down here in person.

0:56Well, I had to. No one would respond to my letters and telegrams. The superintendent shrugs. Well, you'd be hard-pressed to find a teacher looking to be the new John Scopes. It's only been, what, nine months? Folks hadn't forgotten what happened in Dayton last summer. That was a circus. Well, that might be understandable, but you don't mean to say that you support a law that criminalizes the teaching of evolution here in Mississippi, do you? No, of course not. I'm a learned man, same as you. But it's not worth getting worked up about. They'll never enforce it. No, it's not about that. This is about a higher principle.

1:28We're trying to defend academic freedom and the individual liberties of teachers and students. Is that right? A higher principle? I thought it was about mocking the Bible and every man, woman, and child who believes in the Scripture. No, that was never our intention, I assure you. The ACLU is dedicated to protecting freedom of religion. And yet your organization hired that atheist Clarence Darrow. He sure put on a show, sneering and scoffing. He made it his mission to humiliate William Jennings Bryan. He practically killed the poor fellow. Now, I wouldn't say that. And besides, you lost last year, didn't you?

1:59Scopes was convicted. Who's to say Mississippi would be any different? Well, we planned about a new legal strategy. And you needn't worry, Darrow won't be involved this time. We really believe this is our chance to win a ruling on the law's constitutionality. To stop this movement before it does any more damage. I just need to find another teacher willing to help us. The superintendent shakes his head, running a hand through his slick back hair. You want a teacher who's willing to earn the hostility of his neighbors and the scorn of every pulpit in the state? That's a mighty big ask. And you're willing to let this law stand?

2:31Even though it silences teachers? Denies scientific fact? Our teachers and taxpayers are not interested in becoming the laughingstock of northern newspapers. You can travel to every county in the state, and they'll tell you the same thing. I believe you're wasting your time. With a curt nod, you stand and walk out of the superintendent's office. You hadn't expected an easy fight in Mississippi, but you did hope to find some sliver of resistance to these anti-evolution laws. Now, though, you fear that after last year's events in Dayton, your efforts to protect academic freedom in the South are doomed.

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5:09In March 1926, the Mississippi State Legislature passed a law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. Less than a year after the trial of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, the American Civil Liberties Union tried to sponsor another test case to challenge this law in court. But this time, they were unable to find a teacher willing to serve as the defendant. In the aftermath of the Scopes trial, anti-evolution efforts failed in the North but gathered widespread support in the South, highlighting a growing regional divide in attitudes towards science and religion. Here with me now to discuss the significance of the Scopes trial a hundred years later is Brenda Wineapple, author of the best-selling book Keeping the Faith, God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation.

5:56Brenda Wineapple, welcome to American History Tellers. Thanks for inviting me. So the Scopes trial took place in 1925, exactly 100 years ago. Why don't you put us in that era, this time in U.S. history? What were some of the big changes happening at the moment? The 1920s are usually thought of as the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age, and that seems a time of hilarity, good times for everyone. But not everyone was having a very good time. And not only were there assassinations, labor stoppages, economic disparity, not only did women get the vote, was there prohibition, but there was also a fear in the country, fear of otherness, fear of immigrants, fear of too much unemployment, fear of Bolsheviks, which we would know as communists.

6:48There was a massive rise in violence against black people. The Ku Klux Klan was enormously powerful at this particular time. So that's a very complicated time as well as an exciting one. And the reason I say exciting is in 1925 alone, you have The New Yorker founded, The Great Gatsby published. This is the time of the Harlem Renaissance. There's a lot that's going on. The cities are crowded. And as a result, people think that things are happening much too quickly. I should also mention that it was the end of a brutal slaughter known as World War I. And this decade, the 1920s, pretty much began with the red summer of 1919, certainly a fearful time.

7:39Explain what that was and how it might have influenced the context of the Scopes trial. Well, sure. In 1919 alone, there were bomb scares and actually bombs that were exploded. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, who is famous, comes down to us as the head of the so-called Palmer Raids. This was the time of the Red Scare, and people were afraid of Reds, namely communists. And as a result, there were numbers of socialists and communists and even pacifists who were rounded up and deported. That's something that's going on in the background of the Scopes trial. And in a sense, the Scopes trial is a funnel for all the fear, all the anxiety, all the changes, all in a sense, the kind of frenetic hilarity of the decade.

8:30The Scopes trial centered around a new act of legislation, the Butler Act, but it also centered around a new organization, the American Civil Liberties Union. Tell us a little about Roger Baldwin, one of its co-founders. Yeah, Roger Baldwin, very interesting man. He was Harvard educated, Boston bred. He had worked in social work. He was also a pacifist who helped pacifists in World War I. He was actually arrested and jailed for his pacifism. He didn't want the United States to partake in the European war. And so what happened was that he helped form something called the National Civil Liberties Bureau.

9:11And that morphed or turned into the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, in 1920. And that union then, as now, offered to help anyone who believed constitutional rights had been threatened or violated. So it was only five years old at the time of the Scopes trial. And what was the ACLU's goal in challenging the Butler Act? The ACLU at this particular time was looking for what they called test cases. And what a test case was, was a way to advertise their existence and also let people know that they would help protect civil liberties, whether it was free speech, freedom of the press and assembly, any First Amendment rights.

9:57And so they wanted to educate people, and they also wanted to protect people whose rights had been violated. And as I said, quite a number of people since the Red Summer, since 1919 and before the war, had been enduring violations of civil rights. So when a secretary saw the Butler Act, saw what was going on in Tennessee, she alerted Roger Baldwin and said this would probably make a very good test case. So let's turn our attention then to the Butler Act first. What was it about the Butler Act that the ACLU objected to? And what was going on in Tennessee that made the legislature there pass it in the first place?

10:37Well, in the simplest sense, the Butler Act, which prevents any public school, whether it's a high school, elementary school, college, that's supported by the state, any of those schools that teach evolution, which denies creation as taught in the Bible, that would be prohibited. When the ACLU saw this, they wanted the test case because in Tennessee, this legislation had passed in 1925, partly to placate evangelical members of the legislature. It was known as the Butler Act because someone named John Washington Butler, who was a farmer, he ran for office on this single issue of evolution or anti-evolution.

11:24The governor, a man named Pia, I think that's how you pronounce it, signed the act. But no one really thought that it would be enforced. So then as you see it, what was the trial really about then? Was it purely secularism versus religion? Well, yes and no. John Washington Butler didn't really understand what evolution was. And I would argue, and I think I'm right about this, that most people didn't understand what evolution was. They had some notion that it was bad for children. But in that sense, evolution becomes a proxy for other issues that we just talked about that are upsetting to people.

12:08The church itself was divided, really, about whether evolution was compatible with the Bible. Certainly, there were liberal clergy in the church, as well as fundamentalist clergy. So, the issue really isn't secularism versus religion per se, because nobody understood what evolution was, and religion really wasn't being attacked. I wonder if you could expand on how evolution, a scientific theory, presumably based on evidence and facts, could become a proxy for social issues. There was so much going on in the 1920s that evolution becomes a kind of lens through which other issues are discussed and debated in a court of law.

12:58And as we mentioned, constitutional issues having to do with academic freedom. Who's going to teach the children? Is it going to be experts? Is it going to be religious figures? Who decides what goes on in the classroom? Who decides what goes on to textbooks? And in that particular sense, the issue of religion or evolution becomes a wider contest about control, just as prohibition was a wider contest about control. How are you going to legislate what people think, feel, do, who they love, what they read? So you can see that the issues around freedom, censorship, school, the rights of the individual, all become wrapped up in a discussion about science and expertise.

13:58Now, the epicenter of the Scopes trial was Dayton, Tennessee, and hundreds and hundreds of people descended on this town. The prosecution, defense teams, evangelicals and scientists, the press, merchants even selling Bibles and monkey-themed souvenirs. It was an absolute circus. But I wonder, is this what Dayton wanted? Well, in a way, it is what Dayton wanted. They didn't want a circus per se, but they were really glad to have so much controversy coming to their city because, in a sense, it sells. This is America, after all, and this is an opportunity for the Chamber of Commerce to bring attention to Dayton, Tennessee.

14:39It had previously, or was, the strawberry capital of the world, a very small town. And the presiding judge of the trial said that he would be happy to have the trial in a stadium. So the people of Dayton, Tennessee, were happy to have all of this commotion. It got a little excessive, and in terms of the way the press handled it, the press handled the hubbub or excitement in Tennessee as if it were a carnival and as if it were a freak show, really, in many ways. But the people themselves said that they were excited. There were two great orators coming to town, two well-known figures, superstars, and they also thought that they would get an education for nothing.

15:27Leaping ahead, I'm curious about the long-lasting effects of this trial on Dayton. Certainly, it's not a very ordinary way of promoting a small town. No, it really isn't an ordinary way of promoting a small town. But I'm not sure that there were lasting effects. Once the trial was over, the trial barely lasted a week. Everybody left. So in some sense, Dayton comes down to us as the center of a kind of circus. I'm not sure that that did the town much good. but on the other hand, it didn't really matter because things went back to the way they had always been.

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17:16Let's turn to William Jennings Bryan, lead prosecutor in the trial and a famous politician in order. He was a Democrat, a progressive, a populist, but he was also a fundamentalist who believed in the literal word of the Bible. What else was he? William Jennings Bryan was a three-time presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket. He was part of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He, in fact, served in Woodrow Wilson's cabinet when Wilson was president. And when Wilson was president and World War I began, Jennings Bryan resigned from the cabinet because he felt that Wilson wasn't acting neutral enough.

18:00At the same time, he was an ardent prohibitionist. He believed that government could and should legislate morality. He felt that he knew what was right. He was a populist in the sense that we understand populism today. He was a newspaper man. He had a newspaper called The Commoner. He was called The Commoner because he seemed to speak for the people. And as you said, he was definitely a fundamentalist. And when I say fundamentalist, the simplest way of understanding that is that he understood that the Bible was the Word of God, that the Bible was to be read literally. So whatever the Bible said was absolutely true.

18:49And that's very important. How was that important for Brian and his view of Darwinism? Well, the interesting thing about Bryan with his very storied career, by 1925, he's in his 60s. He probably isn't going to run for president again, although with Bryan you could never tell. And Bryan understood Darwinism as social Darwinism. And really, that was a gross misunderstanding. He really thought social Darwinism was responsible in many ways for all the ills that the country was facing at the time. And most specifically, he held it responsible for the slaughter in World War I. He felt Darwinism, or what he understood as social Darwinism, had allowed people, because of their views of technology or their use of technology, had allowed them to create basically such terrible weapons as mustard gas, as aerial bombing.

19:54And he also believed that Darwinism, which was really social Darwinism for him, was at the base of a kind of laissez-faire capitalism and therefore immorality. because to him, social Darwinism, and to many people, meant only the survival of the fittest. And the survival of the fittest was a point of view that said, only the best, only the most knowledgeable, only the creme de la creme should be in power. And as the commoner, as a man of the people, Brian thought this was deeply offensive. So in that sense, that is why he went around the country and was adamant about getting Darwinism or the theory of evolution out of the schools.

20:46Now, evolution and Darwinism also was contentious within the church, of course, especially the Presbyterian church. Tell us about the split in the Presbyterian church, And how did Bryan position himself in this fight? To Bryan, the liberal clergy, men like Henry Emerson Fosdick in New York City and many others, the liberal clergy who said there was no incompatibility, no difficulty in reconciling science and religion. To Bryan, these kinds of clergy were actually heretics. And they threatened the fabric of morality and the nation even more than so-called atheist, which he didn't like either. But liberal clergy themselves felt Brian didn't understand what science was, that a theory, perhaps even the theory of gravity, is not guesswork or fiction, but it's a hypothesis that exists in science, backed up, as you mentioned before, by careful facts and experimentation.

21:48and in the case of evolution had been around already for almost 75 years and had not been proved wrong. But Brian felt that not only was social Darwinism, i.e. Darwin, terrible, but people in the liberal clergy were also risking the church. When he went to Dayton, for example, he said that he was fighting a duel to the death on behalf of Christianity. So he really felt that he was a crusader. Do you think that Brian was ideologically pure in this, or was he also a political opportunist? He was both. One can be both, actually, and that's what's so interesting about Brian. He was definitely a political opportunist.

22:35Preaching against evolution was definitely a way to garner votes. He had moved from the Midwest to the South. He was in Florida. He was pandering to the segregationists and white supremacists of Florida as a way to retaining his significant power and perhaps get back into the Senate. He was adamant about saying the white race was more advanced than African Americans, that he was glad to be a Caucasian that was the best of all possible worlds. And in this particular sense, he was also comfortable with the Ku Klux Klan. He was never a member, which is important to point out. But when the Klan had a kind of hold on the Democratic Party, and Southern Democrats in particular, Bryan actually defended them at the Democratic National Convention in 1924.

23:37When people wanted to censure and denounce the Klan, and this became a political issue right then, he said, no, no, you don't want to give them more credibility. They're just misguided, which is kind of astonishing in 1924. It's as astonishing then as it is now. So what did he think was at stake in the Scopes trial? In summary, I guess. Well, Brian came to Dayton, Tennessee. He had been asked to prosecute scopes by the World Christian Fundamentalist Association. For him, there was no doubt that the issues at stake were God and faith. He felt that the universities, the schools were grooming children to become atheists.

24:28Atheism was going to destroy America. And he was there to prevent the corruption of young minds, almost in the same way he wanted to prevent the sale and distribution of alcohol. Now, in addition to William Jennings Bryan, there were other very charismatic and influential evangelical speakers, especially on the national scene at the time. People like Amy Semple McPherson and Billy Sunday, who each reached huge numbers of people. Give us an overview of who these people were and how their views aligned with Bryan's or perhaps didn't. Well, there were two very famous, besides Bryan, fundamentalist preachers in the 1920s.

25:10Amy Semple McPherson was a very unusual woman. She had a church in Los Angeles. She was a self-made evangelical healer. She got a car that she called the gospel car, and she went coast to coast. She spoke to audiences of thousands, and she was very well suited to early radio. She actually had her own radio station. She put on remarkable shows. She would have spectacles, almost as if they were operatic. She was not a supremacist. She welcomed everyone into the church, but she was adamantly against devolution. She definitely backed William Jennings Bryan, and she had her entire congregation, she said, pray for the outcome of the Scopes trial, that he would be victorious, as she felt he should be.

26:09And what about Billy Sunday? Billy Sunday was very different from Amy Semple McPherson. He'd been a pro baseball player, but he became an evangelist. People flocked to hear his fire and brimstone sermons where he would get up on stage and he would actually have a fist fight with the devil. So he was another showman. He despised evolution. I'm not sure he understood it either, but it sold tickets. He called it a godforsaken, hell-born bastard theory. And Darwin, a rotten old infidel, he spoke in the kind of down-home slang. People absolutely loved him. So he was another very unusual person. He actually tried to run for president in 1920.

26:58There was no way that was going to happen. But you get a sort of lay of the evangelical land with Amy Semple McPherson, Billy Sunday, and then, of course, you have William Jennings Bryan. So that gives us a sense of the evangelical star power aligned with William Jennings Bryan against the teaching of evolution. Now, on the defense team in the Scopes trial was another famous lawyer, but an agnostic, Clarence Darrow. He agreed to defend John Scopes. Tell us more about him and what got him to Dayton. Clarence Darrow is another very unusual figure. And just the fact of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan showing up in Dayton is part of the reason that you had almost 200 journalists and camera people and spectators come to Dayton because people just wanted to see these two men duke it out.

27:47They were both so enormously famous. And Darrow was also controversially famous. He had been a labor lawyer for many, many years, and he had defended bomb throws, actually. He defended pacifists, and most recently in 1924, he defended two young men, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in Chicago, just for the thrill of it, killed teenager Bobby Franks in a trial itself that riveted the nation because they themselves, Leopold and Loeb, admitted to what they had done and had no remorse about it. As far as Darrow was concerned, though, he knew they were guilty. He thought they were pathological specimens, but he so hated capital punishment that he took on the case not to acquit them, but to make sure that they didn't get the death penalty, which they didn't, which is rather remarkable.

28:50He was often characterized as an atheist, but as you say, he was an agnostic, which meant he was happy that people believed in God. He would believe in God if he could or if evidence showed him that there was such a thing. He was called by the journalist Lincoln Steffensen, attorney for the damned, because he was always fighting for the underdog, for civil rights, for human liberty. One of the things I like about Darrow is he would come to the courtroom every day, and on his lapel, he wore a very interesting pin. It said, L-L-L. He was asked, what does that mean? And he looked up and he said, live and let live.

29:31Well, as Clarence Darrow saw it, what was the Scopes trial about? For him, it was not about religion. It was about democracy. It was about the Constitution. It was about freedom. It was about academic freedom. It was about the freedom to worship, the freedom not to worship. He wanted to take on this trial, which he felt was enormously important for the sake of American democracy. And because he thought Brian was a fanatic and fanaticism in America, he thought was enormously dangerous. But Darrow was not the only defense attorney working for Scopes. He had two others. Why do you think Arthur Garfield Hayes and Dudley Field Malone are also interesting?