Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
By Edward J. Larson

The crime:

A media circus came to Dayton, Tennessee for a couple of weeks in July 1925 as high school teacher John T. Scopes was put on trial for teaching evolution in a state-funded school. William Jennings Bryan joined the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow served on the defence team. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, a verdict that was later overturned on a flimsy technicality so that there was no conviction to be appealed.

The book:

In my review of Blood & Ink I brought up the subject of a “trial of the century.” I don’t know if the Hall-Mills trial was ever referred to as such, but the author Joe Pompeo uses it as a chapter heading in that book. In any event, the Scopes Trial took place the year before and Edward Larson notes how calling it the trial of the century was already a “shopworn designation,” especially since Darrow’s previous case, the Leopold and Loeb trial that took place just the year before, had been widely referred to in the same terms.

Was the Leopold and Loeb trial the first trial of the century, or the first trial to be named as such in the media? I don’t know. But the Scopes Trial was a big deal and so probably belongs on a shortlist of contenders for that title. There is a strong counterargument to be made against its inclusion in such a list though. Just for starters, it was always meant to be a media event – a symbolic statute, a show trial – and very little was at stake. Technically it was a criminal misdemeanour case, though as the Chicago Tribune would sniff at the time, “It is not a criminal trial, as that term is ordinarily understood.” But then, they were saying that because they were broadcasting it live via radio and they wanted to allay concerns that this wasn’t in some way improper. Then, after the verdict, the media were quick to dismiss the whole show as a sort of nine days’ wonder. The New York Times would say that the abrupt end of the trial saved “the public from having its ears bethumped with millions more of irrelevant words.” This from the paper of record that, as Larson observes, had “used as many as five telegraph wires at a time to carry reports from Dayton.”

Another point against its century status is that it was unclear, even at the time, what the trial was actually about or what the different sides were trying to prove. For Bryan, the issue had to do with the principle of majority rule. “It is the easiest case to explain I have ever found,” he wrote to a fellow prosecutor at the start of the trial. “The right of the people speaking through the legislature, to control the schools which they create and support is the real issue as I see it” (emphases in the original). Darrow was playing for different stakes: “Nothing will satisfy us but broad victory, a knockout which will have an everlasting precedent to prove that America is founded on liberty and not on narrow, mean, intolerable and brainless prejudice of soulless religio-maniacs.”

Given these different agendas, both sides were able to claim victory: “The prosecution claimed a legal victory; the defense a moral one.” At the same time, neither side was satisfied: the defence complaining that nothing had been settled while supporters of the statute “could scarcely hail a ruling that all but directed prosecutors not to enforce the law.” Which makes you wonder to what extent a win-win is always a lose-lose.

A final point against calling it a trial of the century is that the verdict seems never to have been in doubt. This was evidenced by its immediacy:

The jury received the case shortly before noon and returned its verdict nine minutes later. They spent most of this time getting in and out of the crowded courtroom. “The jurors didn’t even sit down to think it over,” one observer noted, “but stood huddled together in the hallway of the courthouse for the brief interval.”

Nine minutes! I’m not sure, but that must be some kind of record, especially for a case this long.

Given the larger-than-life personalities of Bryan and Darrow the table was set for high drama, but the great debate between the two comes off, at least to my ear listening to it a century later, sounding scripted and pointless. Maybe it’s the effect of having Inherit the Wind playing in my head (a text that’s duly questioned here). But more than that, you really can’t defend the Bible as history or science. Religion doesn’t make any kind of sense if you look at it that way. So all the back-and-forth about when God created the world is silly, as I think most people understood at the time.

But, to advocate for the other side, you can still make an argument for its “trial of the century” status. But this is mainly because of its long cultural afterlife. “Dozens of prosecutions have received such a designation over the years,” Larson concludes, “but only the Scopes trial fully lives up to its billing by continuing to echo through the century.” That probably has more to do with political developments though, and in particular the rise of evangelicalism as a political force in the U.S., than with the trial itself. In the battle between modernists and fundamentalists that the Scopes trial represented it seemed at the time as though the fundamentalists had been thoroughly beaten. They would, however, rise again, gaining strength from a resurgent Southern pride and sense of regional identity.

Given its now “mythic” status, it’s nice to have something like an authoritative version of the events setting the record straight. That said, I can’t say I enjoyed Summer for the Gods very much. It’s not a great read and the characters are poorly drawn. Darrow comes off a bit worse for wear and Bryan a bit better. The secondary players are indistinguishable and the legal maneuvering difficult to follow. It did win the Pulitzer Prize for history and I’m guessing that was for its research.

Noted in passing:

I don’t think Bobby Franks is properly described as a “former schoolmate” of Leopold and Loeb. He lived across the street from Loeb, to whom he was related, and went to the same high school Leopold had attended, but he was quite a bit younger.

Takeaways:

Trying to establish the “truth” of a religion, whatever that might mean, is pointless. And even if that were your goal, a criminal trial wouldn’t be the place for it.

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