July, 1925

Greetings, gentle readers. If you're wondering where I am, and why I have not posted for several days, let me assure that I have not disappeared or spontaneously combusted. I have only been working and reading and thinking, letting things boil around in my brain for a while.

For instance, I am currently reading Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward J. Larson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1998 for this book. It is a fascinating tale, this circus of a trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925. I've always thought it was interesting, from the day I first learned of it in my advanced placement U.S. History class. (I can still see my teacher's handwriting on the board, the words "Scopes Monkey Trial." What a catchy name for a trial!)

A whole host of issues coalesced in the Scopes trial: individual rights versus majority rule; academic freedom versus education as indoctrination; legitimate and illegitimate uses of the judicial system; ideological content versus media "events"; and, of course, science versus religion. This makes the Scopes trial one of those points of perennial fascination in U.S. history, not unlike the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 in its popularity, its sordid human conflict, and its simple staging that translates well into linear narrative. (Consider the two famous plays The Crucible by Arthur Miller and Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the former based on the Salem trials and the latter inspired by the Dayton trial.) Many of the recurring themes in American history can be encapsulated in these two events. (Most of the rest of them crop up in the Civil War.)

Americans of all stripes would do well to revisit the Dayton, Tennessee of July, 1925, the complex characters who converged there, and the conflicting ideologies that clashed swords there. There is something telling in the "Scopes Monkey Trial," not just in its explicit content and what is recorded in the transcript, but in the way that the trial was arguably a manufactured publicity stunt--manufactured by all participants, from the ACLU that sought a "test case" for the antievolution Tennessee law to the Daytonians looking to put their town on the map to William Jennings Bryan and his post-Great War paranoia of a Darwinian-Nietzschean alliance to the bombastic Clarence Darrow who volunteered for the case only after he discovered that Bryan was involved. All this after the enactment of a law that no one really expected would be enforced. The clamor of the public regarding this trial indicates, at least to me, that Americans needed a stage upon which to enact their inner struggles over the ideological direction of their nation. Dayton was willing to be that stage and Scopes, Bryan, and Darrow were willing to be the players. Publicity stunt though it may have been, it was a cathartic one that gave new direction both to the evolutionists and to the antievolution fundamentalists, setting the tone for their conflict up to the present day. (It is surprising how many of the same arguments are still around, 79 years later.) It was as though the participants, under the guise of a publicity stunt, were creating a myth--a myth to put Dayton on the map, to destroy evolution, to ridicule fundamentalism.

History is filled with interesting stories and events that ought to make us pause and reflect. Rather than speeding us along toward some imagined, predicted future, they should caution us always to consider what has already been said and done. Daniel Boorstin once wrote that

When we become historians, we are seduced by the prophet's temptations--to pretend to be wiser than we really are, and to underestimate the probability of the unexpected. But History should be our Cautionary Science. Our past is only a little less uncertain than our future, and, like the future, it is always changing, always revealing and concealing.

What happened in Dayton in 1925 was not the beginning of a conflict, nor the end of one, but a conveniently dramatic emergence of an emblematic representation of arguments that have almost always been with us. The United States has always been a land of conflict and turmoil and that has usually been a sign of our health. That is one of the reasons I so often delve into controversy with this blog. Even if an argument changes no minds, it has the sneaky effect of exposing both sides to each other's existence, and that is perhaps more valuable than changing minds anyway.