Why Is the Scopes Trial Still Relevant?

“No subject possesses the minds of men like religious bigotry and hate, and these fires are being lighted today in America,” said attorney Clarence Darrow in 1925, as hundreds of people descended on the town of Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial of a schoolteacher named John T. Scopes, who was charged with breaking the law by teaching evolution to his biology class in a public school.

Brenda Wineapple, an adjunct professor in the Writing Program at School of the Arts, explores how and why the Scopes trial quickly seemed a circus-like media sensation, drawing massive crowds and worldwide attention, in her book Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation.

Darrow, in his defense of Scopes, said that people should be free to think, worship, and learn. William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic nominee for president, argued for the prosecution that evolution undermined the fundamental, literal truth of the Bible, and created a society without morals, meaning, or hope.

Wineapple examines the early years of the 20th century—a time of racism, intolerance, and world war—to illuminate, through this pivotal legal showdown, a seismic period in American history. At its heart, the Scopes trial dramatized conflicts over many of the essential values that define America—and continue to divide Americans today.

Columbia News caught up with Wineapple to discuss the book, along with what she’s reading, teaching, and working on now.

Why did you write this book?

For me, the Scopes trial, like the trial to impeach and convict President Andrew Johnson, the subject of my last book—The Impeachers—dramatizes real, burning questions, which reflect something fundamental about what it means to be an American and to live in a democracy. That’s what attracted me. Keeping the Faith, then, centers on a single momentous event in American history, a trial momentous in its own time, important in ours, but—again, like the impeachment of Andrew Johnson—largely unknown, forgotten, or belittled.

In the case of Scopes, the issues raised at the trial raised questions about freedom: The freedom to worship, or not to worship; what it is that we worship, and who, anyway, decides what we should believe or even what we read and what we may learn. These were not arcane questions. They asked whether we can really separate reason, faith, and religion from politics.     

Are there any lessons from the Scopes trial that can be applied to what is now going on in this country in terms of division and conflicts over fundamental values?

Yes, shades of the Scopes trial can be seen in today's so-called culture wars and the ways they are being fought, or legislated: To name some of the most obvious examples—the wholesale banning of books in public schools and libraries; the excision of passages from other books and the notion of cancel culture; the way in which religion and science are used to fight against and for women's health and reproductive rights, and even against immunization and vaccinations; the religious and racial bigotry that result in hate crimes, violence, xenophobia; and the fear that one's neighbor may not look like or worship like oneself. In fact, there is the fear—with AI, with global warming—that science may soon make life as we know it unrecognizable.

Any books you've read lately that you would recommend, and if so, why?

Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for its creation of time, place, and character, and its meditation on the meaning and writing of history.

What's next on your reading list?

Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos.

What are you teaching in the fall semester?

A nonfiction thesis workshop.

Beyond promoting Keeping the Faith, what are you working on now?

A short biography of Fiorello La Guardia for Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series.

Which three writers, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party, and why?

This is a tough one. How about William James, Clarence Darrow, Gertrude Stein, and W.E.B. Du Bois?  I know, that’s four, but still….