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Before last year's controversial decision in Kansas, the most famous symbol of the struggle between religion and science was the 1925 John Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee. Heralded as the original "trial of the century," the case pitted conservative Christianity (in the person of William Jennings Bryan) against Darwinian evolution (represented by Clarence Darrow). For decades, the most compelling account of the event was Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's 1955 play, Inherit the Wind. The play "all but replaced the actual trial in the nation's memory," says Edward J. Larson, a historian of science and professor of law at the University of Georgia.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997), Larson cogently exposed the myths surrounding the trial and shed fresh light on long-obscured details about the case. Karl Giberson and Donald Yerxa recently spoke with Larson about Kansas, Scopes, and the perennial tension between science and faith in America.

What do you think of the Kansas decision to remove evolution and the Big Bang from the subjects on which students will be tested?

I think that students should learn about evolution, and they should learn about the Big Bang. I think that's part of a basic education. I understand it was a political compromise in that state. And I hope that most individual school districts will still be teaching those subjects, because I think students should learn them.

How would you advise a school board on how to handle this issue so that there wouldn't be the need for so much political turmoil?

I would look at the local school district and the local situation, and I would try to educate the teachers and the parents about the importance of having a comprehensive education. If there were considerable local opposition to evolution, I would try to do as much as I could to present it in a sensitive way that taught as much as one could teach within the parameters that you have there, but look for ways to work the subject in without closing minds. These are important ideas that every educated person in America should understand. They should be taught in a way that encourages inquisitiveness and helps people understand the scientific method and what science is claiming to know and claiming to teach. The starting point is a level of respect for human beings, respect for ideas, respect for the scientific process, and respect for religion.

Why did you write a book on the Scopes trial?

I knew the trial wasn't very well understood. During my dissertation research, I had looked into the event. And in my earlier book, Trial and Error, there are a couple of pages on the Scopes trial. In researching just that little snippet, I had discovered that there was a rich body of archival literature that no historian had ever used.

We now know that Inherit the Wind isn't the most historically accurate portrayal of the event.

There is now a better historical perspective in the sense that, when the earlier books were written, fundamentalism and anti-evolutionism were virtually invisible in America. Inherit the Wind and also Six Days or Forever?—Ray Ginger's scholarly book of the same period—were written in the shadow of McCarthyism and the threat to popular and individual liberty. They were consciously and explicitly written with McCarthy-era witch-hunts of communists and socialists in mind, and were looking back at the Scopes trial as an earlier episode of that.

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May 22 2000, Vol. 44, No. 6