34 pages • 1-hour read
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
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Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “…And After”
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “The End of an Era”
Bryan and Darrow’s debate continued after the trial ended. Bryan fully intended to continue the antievolution crusade and reframe the trial in a different light. He revised his closing argument and planned to deliver this speech to audiences in the coming months. However, Bryan died in his sleep five days after the trial ended. His death was mourned nationwide, and he was celebrated for his integrity and devotion to his various causes and beliefs by friend and foe alike.
After the trial, the ACLU and Neal worked on an appeal, attempting to exclude Darrow, until he caught wind of the conspiracy to oust him. The ACLU could not dismiss him without offending his supporters, so Darrow stayed in place. Though he was chief counsel of record, Neal lacked the aptitude to move forward—he missed the deadline for to file the bill of exceptions with the Tennessee Supreme Court. This oversight dealt a massive blow to the defense, as it disallowed the team from appealing anything other than the validity of the Butler Act. The appeal was made more difficult by the lack of funding and organization. The prosecution also suffered from setbacks due to internal conflicts. The appeal would normally fall to the state attorney general, Frank Thompson. However, Governor Peay wanted to be involved, despite his illness. Both Thompson and Peay were chronically ill, so the Nashville attorney Ed T. Seay was appointed special counsel for the state to assist with the appeal.
Oral arguments finally began on May 31, 1926, and lasted for two days. The defense’s arguments were the same as they were in Dayton—that the Butler Act violated Scopes’s constitutional right to free speech and “unreasonably restrained the individual liberty of teachers and students” (213) by establishing a preference for a specific religious belief in public schools, thus violating the provisions in the Tennessee Constitution that prohibited the establishment of a state religion. The state rebutted, saying that the law did not promote religion, but rather, it was the “deliberate, thoughtful enactment of a sovereign people, which was designed to protect their children in their own public schools in their beliefs” (217) in creationism. Darrow’s closing made a final appeal for academic freedom.
The court issued its decision seven months later, upholding the statute but overturning Scopes’s conviction on a technicality. The court determined that the jury should have decided on the fine, not the judge. In its ruling, the court also asked the attorney general to dismiss the prosecution, as “we see nothing to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case” (221). The attorney general did just that, and the Scopes trial finally came to an end. The antievolution crusade continued after the case ended, with both sides disputing the legacy of the trial.
Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “Retelling the Tale”
In this chapter, Larson discusses two works that shaped how the Scopes trial is seen today. Harper’s Magazine editor Frederick Lewis Allen published the first of these works, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties, in 1931. Only Yesterday took a reductionist view of the trial, presenting it as a battle between Darrow and Bryan, fundamentalism and “twentieth-century skepticism (assisted by Modernism)” (226), in which science triumphed over blind faith. He also altered and dramatized some of the events surrounding the trial and the trial itself, such as the trial’s origins and Bryan’s cross examination. Co-counsel for both the prosecution and the defense faded into obscurity. Allen’s book became a best seller and was widely used as a college history textbook for many years. It also served as a resource for books written about the trial and the early 20th century in the years that followed, thus perpetuating his version of the events.
Contrary to how it was presented in Only Yesterday, fundamentalism had not lost and did not fade away. According to Larson, antievolution activity decreased largely because many states passed legislation restricting how evolution was taught. These restrictions influenced textbook content, as textbook writers were concerned about textbook sales. After the Scopes trial, many biology textbooks were revised and republished to present evolution as a theory as opposed to fact. Fundamentalism itself, Larson claims, did not disappear. Rather, fundamentalists withdrew from American society and “set about constructing a separate subculture with independent religious, education, and social institutions” (233) that remain to this day. These institutions provided a parallel source of information and instruction to modern science.
The second work that influenced the way the Scopes trial is viewed today is the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Inherit the Wind, which Larson describes as “the single most influential retelling of the tale” (239). It presents a fictionalized version of the trial set at a time “not too long ago” (240) and uses the Scopes trial as a vehicle to discuss McCarthyism and the Red Scare. The play takes creative license with the events of the Scopes trial and caricaturizes Bryan and Darrow (via the characters of Brady and Drummond). When the play and screen adaptations were first released, they were roundly criticized by reviewers as being inaccurate and unfair. However, Inherit the Wind remains a constant in film and theater in the years since it was introduced. It has been remade several times, both in film and on Broadway, and is popular in community and school theaters. It is also a popular instructional tool in social studies classrooms.
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary: “Distant Echoes”
In the decades following the Scopes trial, the political landscape changed in such a way that the antievolution legislation seemed “virtually un-American” by the 1960s (247), and it paved the way for the statutes to be overturned. In the intervening years, there were many changes in American civil liberties law that essentially rendered the old laws unconstitutional. In addition to the legal changes, there were also changes in the role of science in American education, fueled by the Cold War and fears that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in technological research and development. Congress passed the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which funneled money into science education. As a result, textbooks were being updated and rewritten to reflect the latest in scientific findings. This meant that the new biology texts “stressed evolutionary concepts” (249).
These new textbooks brought about two cases that played critical roles in overturning the antievolution statutes. One case saw the Tennessee antievolution law challenged again when Gary L. Scott threatened to sue because he lost his teaching post for “reportedly telling his students that the Bible was ‘a bunch of fairy tales’” (250). The Tennessee Senate voted to repeal the law after Scott filed his challenge to the Butler Act in federal court. The other case took place in Arkansas, where the state teachers’ association sought to test the constitutionality of the state’s antievolution law with the assistance of a local biology teacher, Susan Epperson. The statute had been adopted by popular referendum after the Scopes trial, but as with the Butler Act in Tennessee, local prosecutors never enforced this law.
During trial, the judge overturned the statute on federal constitutional grounds. However, the Arkansas Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling and upheld the antievolution statute on the grounds that it was a “valid exercise of the state’s power to specify the curriculum in its public schools” (253). This allowed Epperson to appeal the decision to the United States Supreme Court. Naturally, the ACLU lent its knowledge and expertise to the case. In 1968, the Supreme Court found the Arkansas law to be unconstitutional because it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. The ACLU went on to fight (and win) statutes that mandated creationist instruction in public schools in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
Despite the defeat of antievolution laws, Larson asserts that fundamentalism has far from faded in the United States. In fact, their defeat has encouraged fundamentalist Christians to self-segregate and educate their children within Christian schools or by home schooling. The legacy of the Scopes trial lingers, as it symbolizes “the characteristically American struggle between individual liberty and majoritarian democracy, and cast it in the timeless debate over science and religion” (265).
Part 3 Analysis
In the last three chapters of the book, Larson describes how the effects of the trial reverberate to the current day. When the Scopes trial ended, both sides claimed it as a victory, and “the antievolution crusade raged on” (223). However, over the next few decades, the political landscape changed: Accelerated by Cold War paranoia and the Red Scare, antievolution legislation was soon overturned. The Scopes trial was seen as the triumph of reason over blind faith, and as described in Only Yesterday, antievolution activity faded soon after. However, Larson argues that Christian fundamentalism never disappeared—rather, fundamentalists self-segregated from mainstream American society and culture and created their own subculture, with their own institutions. Fundamentalism is thriving, as seen in the strong influence of Christian conservatives in United States politics today. The author describes a renewed effort to restrict the teaching of evolution in public schools in Tennessee, Kansas, and Georgia as recently as the 1990s and early 2000s. While the proposed legislation in Tennessee was eventually voted down, and the restrictions in Kansas and Georgia were struck down in federal court, such efforts show the continued controversy over teaching evolution and the lingering effects of the Scopes trial.
Larson’s account differs from previous accounts that have been written about the trial. For decades, Allen’s Only Yesterday served as an authoritative resource. Allen has misinterpreted and altered parts of the trial to fit his narrative. Later authors accepted his version of events without question and perpetuated Allen’s view that the trial was a resounding victory for the defense, a “triumph of reason over revelation and science over superstition in modern America” (227). Richard Hofstadter was another influential historian who adopted this view of the Scopes trial. He was also one of the political historians who could not reconcile the Bryan of the 1890s, who led the populist revolt, with the Bryan of the 1920s, describing the elderly Bryan as one who “at sixty-five had long outlived his time” (235).
These reductive versions of Bryan and the Scopes trial were later fictionalized in the play Inherit the Wind. The writers of the play saw the dangers of McCarthyism on intellectual discourse and academic freedom and sought to draw parallels between McCarthyism and the Scopes trial. Unintentionally, the play has become a tool used in history classrooms to teach the Scopes trial and the American 1920s. It remains a mainstay in popular culture, in both theater and film.
Unlike Allen and Hofstadter, Larson focuses on the historical facts and details the nuances of each side’s arguments without attempts at exaggeration. His narrative meticulously documents the historical, religious, and scientific contexts that the Scopes trial is set in and details its effects in the decades following the trial.
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