The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial: At Its Heart the Trial Was about Racism

By Jerry Bergman

The enormous amount of literature on the Scopes Trial focuses on the religious elements of the trial. It almost totally ignored the importance of racism as taught in the text that Scopes used to teach biology. Bryan was not concerned about evolution in general, but specifically human evolution. He believed that Darwin's theory, as applied to humans, encouraged the oppression of certain oppressed groups. Taking evolution's philosophy to its logical conclusion meant justifying "survival of the fittest" in social matters. This philosophy he learned from his extensive reading about WWI was a major factor influencing the Germans to fight in the first World War. Furthermore, Bryan believed the citizens of Tennessee had a right to determine what their children were taught in the public schools.
Another fact that is rarely mentioned is the main fossil evidence cited in the trial documents, and the press, in support of human evolution has been discredited by evolutionists including Neanderthal man, Piltdown man, Java man, and Nebraska man. Scopes was not a biology teacher, but rather taught math. His college degree was not in biology, but law. He was not put on the stand to testify in his trial, probably because he never taught evolution and could not honestly answer questions about teaching it. This book covers the so-called trial of the century, telling the real story of a sham brought on by the ACLU to further their political and anti-Christian goals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Oct 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798385200900

Jerry Bergman

Dr. Jerry Bergman is a multi-award winning teacher and author. His over 1,800 publications are in both scholarly and popular science journals. Dr. Bergman's work has been translated into 13 languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Polish, Czech, Chinese, Arabic and Swedish. His books, and books that include chapters that he authored, are in over 2,400 college libraries in 65 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 60 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. Bergman has spoken over 2,000 times to college, university and church groups in America, Canada, Europe, the South Sea Islands, and Africa.

Book preview

1

One of the Most Distorted Events of American History

The Scopes Trial, often called the trial of the century, is one of the most distorted and misrepresented events in American history. The result is that, although Bryan had successfully argued his case in court, biblical fundamentalism lost the bigger battle in the court of public opinion.¹ In this review, some of the many common claims that caused this loss in the court of public opinion will be outlined. The facts about the importance of racism in the trial, often ignored, will be documented in detail from the court record and the literature about the case. Bryan, creationists, and Christianity are today often demeaned based on a demonstrably false picture of the trial. This false picture especially harms those persons who reject evolution on scientific grounds.² One goal of this book is an attempt to set the record straight. Even the newest book³ on the trial totally ignores the core reasons for the trial as carefully documented in the following pages.

An accurate description of the trial based on documented facts is my goal, a subject which I have been researching for over half a century. From a Christian worldview, belief in

creation matters. The problem is that so few Christians really believe that anymore. They just can’t express that idea with any gumption. For a couple of generations now, evangelicals have increasingly swallowed the line that what we believe about origins is really just about the same as what everyone else believes—except that we think God controlled the process.⁴

Even many of the leading

evangelical colleges quietly but efficiently persuade thousands of students that theistic evolution is a more sophisticated and less embarrassing explanation of origins than that which we learned as beginners in Sunday school. Those who still hold to the quaint idea that God made everything in six

24

-hour days are regularly made to feel as if they should also be speaking Elizabethan English.⁵

The problem is that Darwinism, in one form or another, has entered directly or indirectly

into virtually every aspect of American thought and consciousness. Allied to Darwinism or integral to it was science, or scientism, the claim of Science with a capital S to replace religion . . . as an explanation of ultimate reality. . . . The real issue was thus not whether science would dominate the age—it was already doing that—but whether it would establish itself as the exclusive explanation of the natural and the human world.⁶

False, but commonly believed, claims include Darrow was defending a biology teacher accused of breaking a state law that banned teaching evolution.⁷ Scopes was not a biology teacher and, as will be discussed, the law did not ban the teaching of evolution.

Darwinism Outside of America

The Scopes Monkey Trial was a major event in both the American fundamentalist-modernist conflict and the anti-evolution campaign of the 1920s. The same conflict existed in much of the Western world. For example, in Canada in the 1920s the trial sparked widespread interest by the Ontario secular press.⁸ Betts concluded that the press coverage of the trial mirrored that of the United States except that in Ontario most of the papers praised Bryan’s character and his strong Christian faith, and also expressed reservations about modern science.

Editors and publishers in Canada attempted to facilitate a reconciliation between traditional faith and modern science by advocating tolerance and open-mindedness. To achieve this goal, they attempted to find a middle ground between Bryan’s fundamentalism and Darrow’s modernism. The Ontario press also emphasized Canadian exceptionalism in their coverage of the Scopes Trial which was indicative of the country’s growing nationalism. Betts also found in his survey that, ironically, unlike American church leaders and the Ontario secular newspapers, the Ontario religious press often did not express a clear position about the trial or the challenging questions that it raised. Although the scientists consistently claimed that overwhelming evidence existed for human evolution, as will be documented, this common claim is an irresponsible distortion of the facts. Ironically, all nine science teachers at the high school where Scopes taught were creationists.⁹

More examples of the media’s gross distortions of the trial. In the authors collection are close to

100

similar cartoons.

1

. Jackson and Perkins, Personal Faith Public Policy,

3

.

2

. Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail.

3

. Jarrett, Trial of the Century.

4

. Jackson and Perkins, Personal Faith Public Policy,

3

.

5

. Belz, Maker and Shaker,

4

.

6

. Smith, Rise of Industrial America,

140

.

7

. National Geographic Society, Scopes Trial,

108

.

8

. Betts, Argument of the Century.

9

. Kemper, Evolution on Trial.

2

Vilifying Christianity and Christians

The trial was about human evolution, and more about racism and eugenics than religion and evolution. The concern was particularly human evolution, not just macroevolution in general, and the negative social effects of belief in human evolution. Specifically, the focus was the logical implications of ape-to-man evolution, namely eugenics. Conversely, the common, but distorted, claim is that the Trial of the Century . . . was the ultimate showdown between Evolution and the Church.¹⁰ As Krutch, who was at the trial, correctly observed, the trial is almost always oversimplified by those who have attempted to assess it. It is now more a part of . . . liberalism than of history.¹¹

Another example of the common distortions about the trial is Professor Nigel Barber’s comment that The Scopes trial is one of the most famous [trials] in U.S. history and is remembered today as a turning point in which science broke free from the shackles of religion. Barber added that thanks to the biting humor of journalist H. L. Mencken the entire country laughed at the backwardness of Tennessee. . . . The event turned out to be a moral victory for evolutionists. Defendant John T. Scopes and his defense attorney Clarence Darrow convinced the U.S. public of the folly of placing legislative barriers around intellectual freedom.¹²

The most restrictive legislative barriers around intellectual freedom in education were instituted by the misnamed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In the end, due to massive irresponsible reporting, legislative barriers were formed around intellectual freedom. These barriers did not constrain the freedom of evolutionists, rather they limited the opposing side, the critics of evolution. Krutch quotes the founder of the ACLU, Roger Baldwin, who concluded that, on economics,

my views are left. I can support for that reason the Soviet dictatorship, which tolerates no civil liberties. I do so because, though I oppose dictatorship in principle, the Soviet Union has already achieved economic liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world. In the long run the only ground on which liberty can be securely based is economic.¹³

The Scopes Trial has been misunderstood and greatly distorted by most secular writers. Major examples include H. L. Mencken and the authors of the Broadway play Inherit the Wind, and both motion-picture versions of the play. The majority of secular sources conveyed the conclusion that the debate was between science and religion or, more specifically, between enlightened reason and fanatical radical faith. Professor Aksionczky examined this conclusion and documented that the controversy was primarily between two philosophical worldviews, one side often called theism and the other side, humanism.

Aksionczky also concluded that the major media sources were aggressively biased against Christianity in general, especially conservative Christianity, and for this reason most discussions about the trial were very biased.¹⁴ Prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan made clear that his concerns about Darwinism were its support of militarism and the loss of religious faith that resulted in Nazism.¹⁵

Bryan was also concerned about the negative effects on society that would result from belief in human evolution. Bryan was also very opposed to theistic evolutionism and concerned about the contribution of government schools and colleges to the loss of belief in God.¹⁶ Consequently, this review of the other side of the Scopes Trial and related controversies will also cover the creation-evolution conflicts which occurred in the 1920s.

Although the Scopes Trial is one of the most important events in American history, the current literature on the trial is very hostile towards the goal of the trial, academic freedom and the right of parents to influence what is taught to their children in American classrooms. This issue is a major reason behind the growth of both private schools and home schooling. Several excellent books have been published on the trial from a Christian standpoint. Furthermore, at least four others are generally fair. This book, though, is the first text that focuses on the other side of the trial and the events surrounding it. The present work is an attempt to fill in this important gap, and it is up to readers to determine how successful this tome was. Harvard graduate and historian James Ault, correctly observed that new studies of the legendary Scopes trial have turned prevailing assessments of it upside down.¹⁷ For example the

dominant view had been that the trial’s public humiliation of William Jennings Bryan, the populist standard-bearer of the anti-evolutionary cause, had turned the tide decisively against opponents of evolution. Historians now believe that after the Scopes trial, renewed energy actually flowed into the anti-evolution crusade, shifting the movement’s focus from changing legislation to influencing local school decisions. This intensely local activism, historians now argue, created a powerful [anti-evolution] climate around administrators, teachers, and textbook publishers.¹⁸

The focus of the Scopes Trial defense team was to defend the view that evolution must be the only explanation for the origin of life taught in government schools. Actually, in support of the conclusions of Bryan, Scopes’s defense attorney, Dudley Field Malone, made an

eloquent plea for teaching students both sides of the issue: "For God’s sake let the children have their minds kept open

—

close no doors to their knowledge; shut no door from them. Make the distinction between theology and science. Let them both be taught. Let them both live." Now that evolutionists have gained the upper hand in the battle for curriculum time, such pleas generally come from the lips of creationists, not ACLU lawyers.¹⁹

In the end, most of all the Scopes Trial served as a protean source for legend-making about Bryan and Darrow, about Fundamentalism and modernism, and even about science and religion. In fact, the trial was more about human dignity, eugenics, and racism, and what the trial has come to represent is far more important historically than what the trial accomplished.²⁰ The trial now represents a canopy of myths, a few of which this book carefully exposes in an attempt to set the record straight.

An example of truth-telling is leading historian Willard Gatewood, who stressed that the modernist-fundamentalist conflict involves far more than either interpretation implies. Its origins lie deep in the history of Protestant and Western thought. He concluded that the conflict was far more significant and pervasive than most historians of the twenties have suggested.²¹ Kazin documented that Bryan’s position in the Scopes Trial, as a Democrat, was consistent with his progressive philosophy in general. He also documents that Bryan’s main concern was that Darwinism would cripple the moral foundation of his [Bryan’s] social policies, such as the need to care for the poor.²²

An enormous amount has been written about the 1925 Scopes Trial, the so-called trial of the century, that involved teaching creation and evolution in government schools. Professor of the history of science, Ronald Numbers, acknowledged that, despite a shelf of scholarly studies . . . the Scopes trial remains a grotesquely misunderstood event.²³ In my library alone are forty-five books on the trial, and eighty-seven more that contain chapters or sections on the trial, most of which contain major distortions by their authors. A prime example is Sir Martin Gilbert’s assessment that the year 1927

saw a number of defeats inside of America for those Fundamentalist Christians who wanted to forbid the teaching of evolution in public schools. New Hampshire, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma each passed legislation to ensure that evolution could be taught. The Tennessee Supreme Court, however, upheld the constitutionality of a law forbidding the teaching of evolution in state supported schools, while at the same time reversing the guilty verdict on John T. Scopes, a young school teacher who had been sentenced [to prison] for teaching evolution.²⁴

In fact, the problem was not teaching organic evolution per se, but it was rather the teaching of the evolution of humans using the existence-of-inferior-races argument. This contradicted the biblical teaching that all mankind were descendants of the first human couple, Adam and Eve. The biblical teaching, then, is that there are no inferior races, in fact, all races are one race, the human race, with all men as brothers. This is why, for good reasons, many African Americans had a keen interest in the [Scopes] trial. Black newspapers and Black churches sent eyewitnesses to Dayton, editorialists and intellectuals commented with such acerbity on the ‘monkey business’ in Tennessee, and African American ministers delivered hundreds of sermons on the topic of evolution and the Bible.²⁵

One of the most complete books on Bryan, coauthored by his wife Mary Baird Bryan, covers her husband’s religious background and the motivations which brought him into prominence in the Scopes Trial.²⁶ In short, she documented that the trial was the result of many factors leading up to increasing opposition to the Darwinian worldview and the harm it caused to society.²⁷

One academic study of the Scopes Trial concluded that most of both the popular and academic reviews of the Scopes Trial have been reduced to Darrow’s cross-examining Bryan and the Fundamentalist anti-evolution movement. This is largely due to the writings of H. L. Mencken and a horde of reporters with a secular pro-evolution agenda similar to Mencken’s. Author Lawrence Bernabo argues that the resultant social myth about the Scopes Trial included several significant alterations and omissions, most notably Circuit Attorney A. T. Stewart’s almost total control of the legal issues and the rhetorical role played by defense co-counsel Dudley Field Malone.²⁸

The constitutional issues argued during the trial, and the appeal of Scopes’ conviction, ended in the United States Supreme Court decisions on Arkansas’ anti-evolution law in Epperson v. Arkansas, as well as the Louisiana Balanced Treatment Act in Edwards v. Aguillard.

Of more significance rhetorically is the media shift from Scope’s original defense strategy (reconciliation of evolution and religion, advanced primarily by Malone and the testimony of religious and scientific experts) to the focus on ridicule of theistic religion, highlighted when Darrow put Bryan on the stand. Mark Bernabo concluded that this ridicule focus dominated press coverage that decidedly favored the defense, as did the preponderance of autobiographies, the verdict of the majority of historians and biographers, and, most importantly, the film version of Inherit the Wind’s fictional account of the Scopes Trial.

Revisionist efforts have only served to reinforce the grossly distorted view in the play. Bernabo concludes that ridicule has replaced reconciliation in the current myth surrounding the Scopes Trial, as well as its origins and the reasons for its persistence. Paul Carter correctly observed that those who advocate mechanistic materialism can be as bigoted as anyone living in Dayton.²⁹

Historian Furniss concluded that, although protests against higher biblical criticism and evolution had been underway since the last decades of the nineteenth century, the fundamentalist controversy became an important national issue only in the years after 1918. After World War I, several factors motivated conservatives to begin actively working to defend their beliefs. Among the causes for the appearance of the conflict at this time include the effects of war, and the fundamentalists’ conviction that great evils would result from the new liberal theological and materialistic biological concepts.

The fact that the controversy reached large proportions of the population in the 1920s was due in part to the strength the fundamentalists derived from several sources. These included the beliefs of the common people, the energy of their leaders, and the lack of major organized opposition from liberals.

Furniss also observed that Bryan was a spokesman for these people, and contributed to the vitality of the movement. As a means of critiquing the evolution worldview, fundamentalists formed numerous organizations through which they sought to pass laws to defend themselves against their often strident opposition. Although they failed to achieve their objective in most areas of the country, they experienced some success in the South, especially Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee.

The Scopes Trial proved to be the most sensational event in the evolution controversy. Their opposition to Darwinism produced controversy even in many church conventions. In spite of organizing into groups and repeated displays of strength in several churches, they were usually unable to convince their more liberal brethren of their views on both evolution and its child, eugenics.³⁰ Strife was most heated in the Northern Baptist and Northern Presbyterian churches where the fundamentalists at this time had considerable influence.

A conservative faction in The Disciples of Christ Church was for a time so vigorous in their support for creationism that division seemed to be imminent. On the other hand, serious dispute among Southern Baptists, Southern Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians were limited to a relatively few incidents.³¹ My conclusions are based on extensive reading about the trial attempting to cast aside the common stereotypes existing everywhere. Peter James also reviewed the Scopes Trial with an open mind and concluded, The idea that evolution—of some sort—has now clearly won the day over the dogma of old-fashioned biblical fundamentalism is ironic because public opinion on the crucial point of human evolution was won over at the Scopes trial by ‘evidence’ that we can now recognize as laughably weak.³² James then carefully documented his assertion. In short, the evidence of the experts was accepted and biblical fundamentalist lost the day—but that ‘expert’ evidence is thoroughly discredited today.³³

Vilifying Bryan and His Supporters

Many other persons that agreed with Bryan have been vilified by the secular mass media and in academia for almost a century. Even the judge in the Scopes Trial, Judge John Raulston, has been demonized. One critic wrote that he

presided over the trial in anything but an unbiased fashion. Each day he opened the proceedings with a prayer, and he refused to admit expert testimony on evolution. Deprived of his experts, Darrow called a single witness: prosecutor William Jennings Bryan. By leading Bryan through a series of biblical stories, Darrow discredited the prosecution by pointing out the illogic and contradictions inherent in the fundamentalists’ belief in the literal truth of the Bible.³⁴

It was a common practice then to open court trials with prayer. Second, the expert testimony was admitted in written form, which greatly helped the defense because it did not allow Bryan to cross-examine the scientists as oral testimony would have. The authors added that Judge Raulston failed to win his bid for reelection to the bench,³⁵ implying that he failed to be reelected due to his bias in conducting the Scopes Trial.

After noting that Bryan prevailed in the case, Axelrod and Phillips go well beyond the evidence, writing that Bryan, the hero of fundamentalists and rural conservatives, was broken by the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of Darrow and died a few days after the trial.³⁶ No evidence exists that he died from humiliation; rather, he died because of a long fight with type 2 diabetes.

The man who did more than anyone else to portray Bryan, and those who supported him, as ignorant fools, was H. L. Mencken:

Thanks partly to the biting humor of journalist H. L. Mencken (1880–1956), the entire country laughed at the backwardness of Tennessee. Mencken referred to the local residents as gaping primates and anthropoid rabble. Not wishing to be exposed to the same kind of ridicule as Tennessee, many states that had been considering their own monkey laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution quietly dropped legislative plans.³⁷

Douglas, when discussing the Scopes Trial, called Mencken’s lambasting of Bryan in his (Mencken’s) obituary of Bryan, Mencken’s most brilliant piece of political commentary.³⁸ Oratory was an important part of the trial and its influence afterward.³⁹ The chapter in this book on Mencken provides much insight into the man and why he aggressively attacked Bryan as well as Blacks, Southerners, Jews, and all religions.

Mencken’s letters show that he was an aggressive, dogmatic atheist. He used to attend a Methodist Church but rejected religion because he was thoroughly convinced that there is no survival of human personality after death.⁴⁰ Evidently this church never taught apologetics and the support for the theistic worldview. He called the Scopes Trial an obscenity and Darrow a great man fighting for the forces of light, adding that he did his share to finish poor Bryan.⁴¹ Mencken correctly concluded in 1930 that the 4 or 5 books on the Scopes Trial written at that time were all full of nonsense. The real facts of history are always lost. Only balderdash survives.⁴² Mencken’s total war against Puritanism in all its forms illustrates how important Mencken was in distorting the events of the trial.⁴³ As Professor Giberson concludes,

Is it not disingenuous for evolutionists to pretend that these historical connections are aberrations? How many times do we see John Scopes held up as a martyr for the noble cause of teaching school children the truth, and yet we never read a word of criticism about the racism in the text he used? William Jennings Bryan continues to be ridiculed for thinking that social Darwinism contributed to World War I, but American eugenicists who, in the name of Darwin, sterilized thousands of people against their will have strangely disappeared from history. Darwin’s dark companions are being written out of history, like characters in George Orwell’s novel, 1984.⁴⁴

The bias of the media was enormous. One science journal actually apologized for their bias. The publication of the Washington, DC Science Service openly admittedly the prejudice with which they have treated the Scopes Trial. They added that their biased coverage of the Scopes Trial led the way for their uncritical