American History Too!

In the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, the morning of Friday July 10, 1925 was blisteringly hot. Outside the country courtroom, a crowd of around 1000 people had gathered. Squeezing through the throng came a young schoolteacher and athletics coach, John Scopes. Scopes was accompanied by Clarence Darrow, one of the most famous lawyers in the United States. But when a cheer went up from the assembled mass, it was not for Scopes or Darrow, but for the elderly, burly figure of Williams Jennings Bryan. Lawyer, moralist, three times Presidential candidate, religious authority, and key figure in the Populist movement of the 1890s. These two legal titans were here to defend and prosecute John Scopes. His crime was admitting to teaching Darwinian evolution in defiance of a state law banning the promulgation of evolutionary theory. 

The Scopes Trial has entered popular myth and legend, claimed as a victory by both sides, misrepresented and misunderstood in film and literature. So, in Episode 17 of American History Too! we’re going to look at the 1925 Scopes Trial and try to get to the heart of what was actually going on.

Reading List

Barry Hankins, Jesus and Gin:  Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today’s Culture Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (Harvard University Press, 1998)

Michael Lienisch, In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2007)

Jeffrey P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History With Documents (Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002)

Ronald Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Harvard University Press, 1998)

Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (Anchor Books, 2012)

Adam Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2014)