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On August 12, the day after the Kansas Board of Education voted to ban any mention of "macroevolution" from its recommended science curriculum (where the final decision lies with the state's 304 local boards) and its standardized tests (where the state board has the final authority), every newspaper in the country ran the story—a headline writer's dream—and the editorialists and columnists and designated experts began to weigh in. As I write, more than a month has passed since the Kansas decision, and the commentators are still going strong. "I don't think it's possible to be outraged enough by this ludicrous decree," wrote Charles Lane, editor of The New Republic (Sept. 13 and 20, 1999), stamping his foot for emphasis. By contrast, a New York Times editorial (Aug. 13) proclaimed that "deep sadness is the most sensible response."
Our job is to get behind the headlines and the dueling columnists and go deeper. Neither sadness nor outrage will take us very far. —JW
Anyone who has grown up in a Sinclair Lewis–style small town understands the significance of informal meeting places—barber shops, park benches, cafes. In Dayton, Tennessee—population 1,800—in the 1920s, the place to meet was the soda fountain in Fred Robinson's drugstore. The topic on May 4, 1925, was evolution in the public schools, an unusually weighty topic for Robinson's, although it had been in the news lately. William Jennings Bryan was leading a populist revolt against the theory of evolution, blaming its acceptance for a variety of evils, including German aggression in World War I. In a move that was repeated in several other Southern states, Tennessee had just passed a law forbidding the teaching of evolution in public schools, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was running an ad in the Chattanooga Times looking for a volunteer to test the law's constitutionality.
Some local businessmen, in a now historic meeting at Robinson's drugstore, decided that it would be great publicity for their town if the proposed contest over evolution was held in Dayton. Tourists and reporters would come, hotels would fill up, restaurants would be buzzing, and Fred Robinson would sell a lot of sodas. Dayton would be in the news.
The "drugstore conspirators" pitched the idea to John Scopes, a youthful science instructor and part-time football coach. Scopes was not completely sure he had taught evolution, but he had filled in once for the regular biology teacher and helped the students review from a text—Hunter's Civic Biology—that did contain the theory of evolution. That was enough; John Scopes had broken the law of the good state of Tennessee.
The local promoters got far more than they bargained for. The attention of an entire nation became fully focused on Dayton, Tennessee, for eight hot days in July 1925. It was the "Trial of the Century," a quintessentially American episode exposing powerful cultural tensions. It was a story to be told and re told, by historians, by participants with axes to grind, by playwrights with an eye for drama, and by Hollywood.
Three-quarters of a century after Scopes's conviction, the famous trial, which stands roughly at the midpoint between the appearance of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and today, continues to be the best starting point for an exploration of the tangled American debate over evolution. And there is no better guide to the Scopes trial than Edward Larson's Pulitzer Prize–winning Summer for the Gods. Larson, who has a Harvard law degree and a doctorate in the history of science, gives the Scopes trial the impartial historical and legal analysis that it deserves. With evenhandedness, impeccable historical research, and engaging prose, Larson recreates the drama of the trial without losing sight of its larger meaning.
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