America’s Rise to Greatness Under God’s Covenant

The Scopes Monkey Trial, Dayton, Tennessee—1925. But undoubtedly the most dramatic confrontation of the decade between the two cultures occurred over the issue of the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the public schools.

In 1925 the two sides, liberal urban America and conservative rural America met for something of a showdown in Dayton, Tennessee, over the question of teaching Darwinism in Tennessee’s public schools. The battle was over the fundamental question: was man descended, as Darwin stated, through the evolutionary process of natural selection ("survival of the fittest") from some early version of a primate (something of an early “monkey” specie)—or was he, as the Bible states, created fully as a man by God in a single event?

The confrontation came to pass when in May of 1925, a group of Dayton civic leaders met at F.E. Robinson’s Drugstore and decided to challenge Tennessee’s new statute forbidding the teaching of Darwinist evolution. One motivation for holding the trial in Dayton was to revive the town’s flagging economy. They knew that this would somehow put Dayton on everyone’s map (and indeed it did!).

The mastermind behind this event was George Washington Rappleyea, an engineer and geologist who managed the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company. Rappleyea was widely credited with suggesting that Dayton challenge the new anti-evolution statute. Cooperating in this venture was the twenty-four-year-old John Thomas Scopes. He was teaching at the local high school, his first job after graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1924. He taught algebra and physics, served as athletic coach, and occasionally substituted in biology classes at the Rhea County High School. The idea was that he would teach Darwinist biology—at least once—in violation of the state’s law prohibiting the teaching of Darwinism. This act would then set up the opportunity for the legal world in Tennessee to decide whether such a law was indeed constitutional.

During the extremely hot summer of 1925 the “Scopes Monkey Trial” riveted the attention of the nation as newspapermen from all around the country crowded into the steaming courthouse to follow the trial.

The old political warhorse, William Jennings Bryan, represented WASPish America, with its fervent dislike of Darwinism. Representing the Darwinists was Clarence Darrow, the celebrity New York lawyer who had dazzled the nation with his clever defense of two society boys who had killed a young fourteen-year-old neighbor in order to see what it would be like to commit the ultimate crime and to prove their Darwinian superiority (Darrow blamed their actions on the extravagantly wealthy socio-economic circumstances that had distorted their moral sensitivities). Darrow also represented the fast-rising urban, secular culture which ridiculed the superstition of the traditional Christian culture. Backing up Darrow was the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was to become the leading voice behind a movement to replace WASPish Christianity with Secular-Humanism as America’s cultural-religious underpinning.

Which side actually won the 1925 contest depended on the natural sympathies of the person giving answer to the question. From pulpits, anti-Darwinism seemed vindicated by the fact that the judge decided to support the law prohibiting the teaching of Darwinism in the Tennessee public schools. But the up-East urban newspapers celebrated the quite obvious (obvious to them anyway) intellectual victory of the scientific Darwinists over the superstitious, backwoods fantasies of the anti- Darwinists.

Closing arguments were not allowed (defense attorney Darrow refused and thus prosecuting attorney Bryan was not permitted to do so either) and the sentence of guilty was quickly decided in matters of only minutes on July 21. But Bryan published his proposed closing argument subsequently. It is well worth the read because it is actually prophetic:

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo. In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane, the earth’s surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times as bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so [brutal] that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future. If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world

Five days after the verdict, Bryan—back on the speaking tour—died quietly in his sleep. Ultimately the case itself decided nothing. But it considerably clarified the WASPish and anti-WASPish split in American culture.