March 19, 2025: ScopesStudying: Bryan and Darrow

[100 yearsago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the ButlerAct, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. Sothis week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famoustrial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks oneducators.]

On twoways to contextualize the Scopes trial’s (and one of America’s) most famousdebate.

Prominenttrials can frequently morph into something different from and more than theirexplicit legal focus, but I’m not sure any trial in American history did somore clearly than did the Scopes trial (certainly theOJ trial is a contender for that title as well). Given that Scopes was recruitedto stand trial as I discussed in yesterday’s post, perhaps the trial was alwaysdestined to become focused on much more than just this one teacher’s case oreven the Butler Act specifically. But it truly evolved thanks to the involvementof two of the nation’s most famous legal and political figures, on the trial’stwo respective sides: for the prosecution, “TheGreat Commoner” himself WilliamJennings Bryan; and for the defense, without question the nation’s most prominentlawyer in the period, just a year past hiscelebrated closing in the trial of Leopold & Loeb, Clarence Darrow. Thebattle between the two men and their respective positions on evolution,religion, and society became the story of the trial, and culminated in Darrow’stwo-hour questioning of Bryan on the courthouselawn (so a larger audience could hear it) on July 20, 1925.

Theexcellent pieces at those last two hyperlinks tell the story of that debate, andof the two men’s overall involvement in the trial, at length, and I encourageyou to read both of them to learn more about this famous, fraught, and fascinatingmoment in American legal and social history. Here I want to offer two differentbut interconnected ways to contextualize the Bryan-Darrow showdown. The moreobvious, and certainly not an inaccurate one, is that it exemplified a seriesof ongoing cultural and national clashes in early 20th centuryAmerica: between the 19th and 20th centuries, between amore traditional and more modern perspective, between rural and urban communities,between (most obviously of all I suppose) conservatism and progressivism. Thebreakdown of those categories is nowhere near as straightforward or simple as theymight suggest, not in 1925 and not at any other point—21st centuryconservatives have pegged WoodrowWilson as a progressive icon, for example; let’s just say Iwould strenuously disagree—but that doesn’t mean that there aren’tparticularly striking moments of overt conflict between them, and the Bryan-Darrowdebate definitely qualifies as such.

But Iwould add that the debate also reflected another defining duality, one that is atthe heart of my mostrecent book and likewise of many of my analysesof our current moment: the conflict between mythic and criticalpatriotisms. It might seem that it was the Bible on which that conflict betweenthe two men was focused: Bryan had delivered a famous speech in Tennessee notlong before the trial began entitled “Is the Bible True?”;and Darrow grilled him at length, and from the general consensus of the audienceto great success (as onecommentator put it, “As a man and as a legend, Bryan was destroyed by histestimony that day”), on many Biblical stories that could not possibly beliterally true. But I believe their respective perspectives also embody mythicand critical patriotism as I’ve tried to defined them over the last few years. Atone 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. WhereasDarrow’s probing and critical perspective, expressed throughout this debate andthe trial as a whole, reflects hisoverarching view that “True patriotism hates injustice in its own land morethan anywhere else.”

NextScopes context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?