564 THE SCOPES TRIAL 1925, Jul
vests in the next generation. Now more self-aware than ever before, Ba • • itt says day, John Scopes had unwittingly violated a statute the legislature had passed just
to his son: "I've never done a single thing I've wanted in my whole life . But I do
get a kind of sneaking pleasure out of the fact that you knew what ou wanted to
do and did it.. Go ahead, old man! The world is yours!" At this oment, Babbitt
finds his misplaced manhood. The novel ends with him and s son arm in arm, a
picture of virile fraternity, going to face bravely the disa, •roving women of the
family.
Notwithstanding its bracing invocation of authe icity, this conclusion might
seem a little less than appetizing to contemporary - aders. The heartwarming im-
age of the resurrected protagonist joined with s son depends directly on an op-
position to the qualities and preferences of • men, who presumably suffer from
the bane of conformity even more than . Although Babbitt's newfound mas-
culinity stands against the bare-cheste% and womanizing versions of manhood
that he wishfully entertains at the b. • inning of the novel, it improves on these
only incrementally. And even more an the specific content of Lewis's moral, the
very descent into moralism itsel ay well spoil Babbitt for some readers. On this
score, the author's fun-pokin , toward his main character might reveal a sense of
moral superiority not so dif -rent from that of the Rotarians he despised. In writ-
ing Babbitt, Lewis implici y claimed a superior, perhaps even intimate knowledge
of the small-minded erican. In doing so, he leaves us to wonder whether it re••
ally does take one to ow one. Do we really achieve distance from Bahbittry by
laughing along wi Lewis? Or does his classic novel succeed more in rendering
fascinating an a . ect ofAmerican identity that remains powerful because we can-
not wash it a =y? Does Babbitt truly undermine the values of its main character?
Or by nami 'g them so well and marking them so indelibly, does it preserve them
by imhui : them with an odd and unavoidable attraction?
Bi' nography: Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York, 1922). Richard Lingeman, Sinclair Lewis:
Rebel or Main Street (New York, 2002). Edward A. Martin, II. L. Mencken and the Debunkers
(A ens, GA, 1984). Michael Seidel, Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton, NJ, ' 979).
ark Schorer, StnclairLewis (Minneapolis, 1963). Gore Vidal, "The Romance of Sinclair Lewis,"
eta York Review ofBooks, October 18,1992,14,16-2o.
JEFFREY FERGUSON
1925, July
"I do not think about things I don't think about"
THE SCOPES TRIAL
For a reputed "trial of the century," State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scoper
lacked nearly all the elements of a classic courtroom drama. Both the defense —
led by Clarence Darrow—and the prosecution —whose most prominent figure
was William Jennings Bryan —agreed that the defendant was guilty as charged.
While substituting for the regular biology instructor at Dayton high School one
1925, July THE SCOPES TRIAL 585
six months earlier. It banned the teaching in public schools of "any theory that
denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, to teach in-
stead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." Knowing little
about the subject, the twenty-four-year-old instructor did not even take the stand
in his own defense. Although convicted of the misdemeanor, he suffered in no
way for his crime. In fact, Scopes, who had been hired more to coach the Dayton
High football team than to teach science, basked in the renown of the case for
the rest of his life.
Yet his trial, which opened on July 10, x925, and ended on July 2r, drew almost
two hundred reporters from the US. and abroad and a national radio audience,
and became a symbolic marker for a debate between the truth claims of science
and of the Bible that continues to rage. As Bryan commented at the end of the
eight-day event, "Here has been fought out a little case of little consequence as a
case, but the world is interested because it raises an issue and that issue will some
day be settled right, whether it is settled on our side or the other side."
The issue in what came to be known as "the monkey trial" was not simply
whether one could reconcile the Bible with the writings of Charles Darwin. The
Tennessee law also raised the question of whether a teacher in a public school was
free to teach the truth as he saw it or "whether the people. . . have the right to
control the educational system which they have created and which they tax them-
selves to support.," as Bryan wrote to local supporters. Clarence I)arrow agreed to
head Scopes's defense only after learning that Bryan was joining the other side.
Once a close ally of the politician, a three-time Democratic nominee for presi-
dent, the great attorney now reviled him as a foe of intellectual liberty and a sym-
bol of "despair and bigotry." The six-year-old American Civil Liberties Union fi-
nanced the defense to protect free speech, not to pit science against Christianity.
In fact, of the four lawyers who represented John Scopes, only Darrow, a proud
agnostic, was willing to mock the authority of Scripture.
The spectacle of a divided nation stirred the popular imagination. H. L.
Mencken—hero to skeptical modernists —regaled his big-city, Northern readers
with descriptions of Bryan's "peculiar imbecilities" and "theologic bilge." Darrow
later called Bryan "the idol of all Morondom." But to millions of evangelical
Christians, the popularity of such figures as Mencken and Darrow, and the rise of
the pluralistic urban culture that had spawned them, only increased the urgency
of standing by the one text that would never fail them. In the smirking Darrow
and his admirers in the press, they saw proof of Bryan's warnings about the perils
of amoral education.
l'he climax of the seven-day trial, and its literary touchstone, was an unusual
cross-examination. On July 20, Darrow called Bryan to the stand as an expert on
the Bible. Bryan agreed, on the condition that he would also have a chance to grill
one of the defense attorneys. That day, the proceedings took place on a lawn out-
side the courthouse, before as many as 3,000 spectators. The judge, John T. Raul-
ston, feared the floor inside might collapse under the weight of all who wanted to
witness the confrontation.
"You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven't you, Mr. Bryan?" "Yes,
511 THE SCOPES TRIAL 1925, July
sir, I have tried to," was how it began. For the next two hours, the celebrated at-
torney kept his foe on edge with a cascade of short queries about the trustworthi_
ness of Scripture: "Do you believe a whale swallowed Jonah>" "Do you believe
Joshua made the sun stand still?" Do you take "the story of the flood to be a literal
interpretation?" "Do you think the earth was made in six days?"
Bryan avoided giving an unqualified yes to any of Darrow's questions. The
whale, he supposed, was only "a large fish" and perhaps Cod had not specifically
directed it to ingest a man. Neither did Bryan speculate about how the Lord had
suspended the laws ofphysics long enough to stop the rotation ofthe earth. And
he flatly rejected the notion that each day of creation mentioned in Genesis re-
ferred to a period of twenty-four hours. Like many pious critics ofDarwin, Bryan
had long assumed that a biblical "day" referred to an eon of time. An exponent of
common sense in worldly affairs, he could not easily abandon it when discussing
the loftiest text of all.
But this attitude forced him to evade direct questions with answers that
seemed merely thoughtless and dogmatic. When Darrow asked fur the date of
the Flood, Bryan responded that he'd "never made a calculation." The skeptic
pressed on, "What do you think?" Bryan bristled, "I do not think about things I
don'tthink about."The door to ridicule was wide open: "Q— Do you think about
things you do think about> A— Well, sometimes." "Laughter in the courtyard,"
noted the court reporter, in the laconic custom of his trade.
The next morning, the judge ordered Bryan's testimony expunged from the
official record. It could, he argued, "shed no light upon any issues that will be
pending hefore the higher courts."This spared Bryan further embarrassment, but
it also prevented him from cross-examining any defense attorney. Then Darrow
made sure that the last meaningful words uttered in the trial would be his. He
quickly asked the judge to instruct the jury to bring in a guilty verdict, making
any closing arguments unnecessary. After huddling briefly in the hall, the twelve
stalwarts of Rhea County, Tennessee, did their duty Judge Raulston fused Scopes
8100, which Mencken's paper, the Baltimore Evening ,Sun, immediately agreed
to pay
Bryan's clumsy performance embarrassed his anti-Darwinist supporters and
probably helped defeat their attempts to pass laws in other states similar to the
one Scopes had violated. Of course, millions ofAmericans continued to believe in
Genesis rather than The Origin of Species, but they were increasingly thrown on
the defensive in a nation whose citizens viewed scientists as value-free wizards
whose magic resulted in better products, faster transportation, and longer life
spans. Moreover, by the 19205 American culture was shaped as much by white
Catholics, Jews, and African Americans in big cities as by people in towns like
Dayton,Tennessee, seat ofa rural county in whichnearly every residentwas white
and Protestant. In this environment, the strict separation between church and
state that the ACLU championed seemed the only rational solution to the divi-
sive hectoring of"fundamentalists"who defended Bryan.
Thus, for about half a century after the Scopes trial, most writers echoed Dar-
row's arguments. In 1931, the journalist Frederick Lewis Mien in Only Yesterday his
best-selling saga of the twenties, breezily depicted a battle between ignorant pi-
1925, July THE SCOPES TRIAL Si?
etists and clever modernists that the latter were destined to win. The views that
Bryan espoused would, be was certain, gradually fade away Indeed, by 1955 the
historian Richard Hufstadter could remark that, at least to his fellow intellectu-
als, "The evolution controversy seems as remote as the Homeric era."
That same year, the play Inhn'it the written byJacob Lawrence and Rob-
end,
ert E. Lee, opened on Broadway. A fictionalized version of the trial and the con-
troversy that swirled around it, the production ran for more than eight hundred
performances. In 1960, it was adapted into an equally successful film, starring
Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond (Darrow) and Frederic March as Matthew
Harrison Brady (Bryan). To cast Tracy, one of the most adored leading men of his
day, in that role guaranteed that audiences would be on Darrow'sside, even if the
script itself didn't lead them there.
The liberal playwrights were no more concerned than Hofstadter had been
about a creationist threat to the teaching of science. They had chosen the trial as
a metaphor for the repression of free thinking and First Amendment rights they
associaecdwith McCarthyism. Still, they relied on one of the defense attorneys in
the Scopes trial, Arthur Garfield Hays, to convey "much of the unwritten vivid-
ness of the Dayton adventure." They also mace their historical sympathies clear
by portraying Brady as a grim-faced dogmatist eager to see the young defendant
imprisoned. In fact, Bryan was a famously witty orator and was rather fond of
Scopes (they had attended the same Illinois high school, and Bryan was the com-
mencement speaker at the young man's graduation in 5919). He had even offered
to pay the teacher's fine.
Whatever its merits as history, Inherit the Wind is a tautly crafted, provocative
drama. Revivals of it continue to be performed around the country and on televi-
sion. By the 1950s, most biblical literalists were avoiding public debates about
evolution, so there was no one in the wider culture to challenge the hostility to-
ward them expressed in the play and movie. Only at the end of Inherit the Wrin4
when Drummond "thoughtfully" balances the ICing James Bible in one hand and
a biology text in the other were audiences reminded that the scriptwriters' main
point was to defend free speech, not to impugn religious convictions.
However, conservative evangelicals did not intend to stay silent forever, and
their forceful return to the public square in the late 19705 helped revive debate
about creationism—and about the famous trial half a century in the past. At the
time, opinion pollsters reported that about as many Americans swore by the ac-
count in Genesis as in some version of evolution. In 1986 the Supreme Court
ruled against new state laws that called for biology teachers to offer "a balanced
treatment" of "creation science." But in a vigoruus dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia
argued that"the people. . . including those who are fundamentalists, are quite en-
evolution pre-
titled . . . to have whatever scientific evidence there may be against
scien-
sented in their schools, just as Mr. Scopes was entitled to present whatever
tific evidence there was for it."
design theo-
By the early twenty-first century, the development of intelligent
of
ries by certain scientisrs who happened to be devout Christians had given foes
Darwinism a new, more suphisticated way to fight for equal time in biology
classes. In 2005, awidely covered trial inDover, Pennsylvania, turned on precisely
588 GIRLS WHO WEAR GLASSES 1925, August 16
this issue. The judge in the case ruled that intelligent design is not scientifically
valid and "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, anteced-
ents." But the battle in other school districts continued.
Meanwhile, scholars and writers who are not biblical literalists began to voice
a more nuanced set of views about the meaning of what occurred in Dayton in the
summer of 1925. Some separated Bryan's motives for mistrusting Darwinism from
his clumsy behavior at the trial during that hot week in July. The recognition that
most evolutionists in the 19205 were dedicated to "improving" the human race
through eugenics made Bryan seem more sympathetic, even to a secular Darwin-
ist like Stephen Jay Gould. Gould pointed out that A Civic Biology, the textbook
by George William Hunter that Scopes was prosecuted for using, had described
two particular families that were plagued for generations by "immorality and
feeble-mindedness." People like these, wrote Hunter, "are true parasites . . . if
such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them
from spreading." Alas, sighed Hunter, forced sterilization was the only legal rem-
edy. The fact that the Nazis both preached and practiced eugenics also made Bry-
an's concerns seem less irrational. Darwinism, observed lawyer and author Man
Dershowitz in America on Trial in 2004, was often "misused. . . by racists, milita-
rists, and nationalists to push some pretty horrible programs." In 1998, Edward J.
Larson's careful history of the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods, which refrains
from bestowing praise or criticism on either side, won the Pulitzer Prize for
History.
So, more than eighty years after it occurred, the Scopes trial thrives in Ameri-
can culture —as a dramatic narrative and a powerful symbolic marker in the argu-
ment between religious orthodoxy and the scientific consensus. Since we arc un-
likely to lose our zeal for either of these matters, the final settlement Bryan
expected may never come to pass.
Bibliography.• Stephen Jay Gould, "William Jennings Bryan's Last Campaign," Nebraska His-
tory 77 (Fall/Winter 1991): 177-183, originally published in Natural History, November 1987. Mi-
chael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York, 2006). Edward J. Lar-
son, Summerfor the Gods The Scopes TrialandAntericai Continuing Debate over Science and Evolution
(Cambridge, MA, 1997). Jacob Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Inherit the Wind (New York, 1955).
Jeffrey Moran, The Scopes Trial.A BriefHistory with Documents (Boston, 2002).
MICHAEL KAZIN
1925, August 16
The New York World runs Dorothy Parker's two-line poem
"News Item": "Men seldom make passes at . . ."
GIRLS WHO WEAR GLASSES
In a 1933 story called' t e Hours," Dorothy Parker pretended to resign
herself to obsc = . " y name will never be writ large on the roster of Those
1925, August 16 GIRLS WHO WEAR GLASSES 589
Who i)o Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my
nails, but I don't even do that anymore." In 1925, critical pens busily r: orded
names on the roster of Those Who Do Things, or at least Those " o Write
Things. E Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby; Ernest H: ngway, In
Our Time; Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues. That same year, P. er published
"News Item." This accident of historical timing juxtaposes the great American
Novel with the feminine aside. Women wits of the 1920s, s h as Parker, Edna
St. Vincent Millay, and Anita Loos, scribbled in the margins .f literary history. In
Millay's poem "The SingingWoman from the Wood's E : ge," a girl learns from
her mother, a leprechaun, to rewrite the solemn mess. • es of her father, a priest,
through "some funny little saying / that would meant opposite of all that he was
praying!" Humor and irony allowed these women t• oice opposition couched in
a funny little saying.
The 19205 saw a boom in magazines than . to the growth of the advertis-
ing industry, and Jazz Age insouciance offere a hospitable zeitgeist for humor
magazines. During the late r910S and 19205 any young women, and the writers
among them, migrated to cities and enter:. the workforce. The urbanite Parker
lamented that she was not technically a ew York City native, since she was born
in New Jersey while her family was summer vacation. Maine-born Millay
moved to Greenwich Village upon : aduating from Vassar in 1917, and Loos, a
Californian, relocated to NewYork ' 1919. Loos wrote scripts for Hollywood and
Broadway, and Millay published . • etry and prose in Vanity Fair. In these popular
forms and the arena of humor, omen writers cleared a professional space for
themselves. Parker defended t 's territory in "Fighting Words," inviting any kind
of insult with equanimity ex ept a literary one: "Say my verses do not scan /And
I'll get me another man!"
Parker was one of thi only female members of the Algonquin Round Table,
the group of journalist , playwrights, and humorists who gathered and traded
quips at the famous - dtown hotel. In Anita Loos's 1928 sequel to Gentlemen Pre-
fer Blondes, titled Bu Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, Lorclei Lee observes (with her
characteristically. irky spelling) that she "soon found out that the most literary
envirament in N- York is the Algonquin I-lotel, where all the literary geniuses
cat their lunche ,. n. Because every genius who eats his luncheon at the Algonquin
Hotel is alway• writing that that is the place where all the great literary geniuses
eat their lun eon." These self-promoting great literary geniuses founded the
New Yorker ' 1925, and Parker's name was on the list of editors.
Being professional female writer meant using certain shibboleths —puns,
allusion, rony, self-deprecation —to open the door to the boys-only clubhouse.
In a 19 . book review, "Home Is the Sailor," Parker pretends modesty in the face
of m. - intellectualism: "Reading, according to Bacon —and you will tell me if it
isn't :aeon, won't you you big stiffs?—reading makes a full man; but to achieve
the same end, I know a trick worth two of it." Pretending to defer to "big stiffs,"
s' e mocks their pedantry and flirts. Socializing with men in a professional set-
ing was part of the job and required a worldly, urbane attitude. In a 1957 Paris
Review interview, Parker joked about sharing a small office with her friend and