OF MONKEYS AND MEN

IN THE SUMMER OF 1925, SCIENCE AND RELIGION CLASHED IN A TENNESSEE COURTROOM

Author: By David Mehegan, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 3, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's play ``Inherit the Wind,'' and the Spencer Tracy-Fredric March movie version that followed, cast the Scopes ``monkey trial'' in the sort of ominous tones of Arthur Miller's ``The Crucible'': a combat of freedom and truth against repression and ignorance. That's the public image of it today, perhaps, but the facts were more complicated and a good deal less sinister. A burst of Protestant fundamentalism swept parts of the country after World War I, largely as a reaction to the spread of modernism in mainline Protestantism, which sought to accommodate Christian teaching with modern science. Led in part by former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, this movement resulted in laws in Tennessee (1925) and several other states prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools.

Bryan, ``the Great Commoner,'' was a Democrat and a lifelong friend of the little man, and it was just this tradition that made him fear and loathe the theory of evolution. He disliked the idea of man descending from ``lower'' animals, but most of all he feared social Darwinism and eugenics -- the application of natural selection to improve the human species. This idea had widespread support at the time: In fact, the text used by John T. Scopes referred to the importance of proper ``mate selection'' in enhancing desirable human evolution. In a 1904 speech, Bryan said, ``The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate -- the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.'' Bryan and others believed that such thinking had brought about World War I. And of course, what else was there for a great public ego to do in the early 1920s? The three-time Democratic presidential nominee, at age 65, could hardly run for office again.

Chances are, nothing would have come of the law had not a group of citizens in Dayton, Tenn., a down-at-the-heel mining town, noticed an advertisement placed in the Chattanooga Times by the American Civil Liberties Union, offering to help any Tennessee teacher challenge the antievolution law in court. Eager for publicity for the town, the group gathered in Fred E. Robinson's drugstore and hatched a plan whereby part-time teacher John Scopes would agree to be the offender, while one local lawyer agreed to assist the defense and two local city attorneys agreed to prosecute. Scopes consented to his role; he was promptly served with an arrest warrant ordered up from a local justice of the peace, then departed for a game of tennis. The Dayton promoters promptly wired the ACLU in New York, and the drama was under way.

The Scopes Trial could have been played as a comedy, something out of George Ade or O. Henry, had it not involved Bryan and Clarence Darrow, who at 67 was the most famous and controversial defense lawyer of the day. Bryan volunteered to assist the prosecution, while Darrow, a freethinking skeptic who had gained fame for defending labor leaders and celebrated murder defendants (most famously in the Leopold and Loeb trial) did the same for the defense. ACLU leaders wanted no part of Darrow, who they feared would turn the narrow case into an attack on organized religion, but Scopes's local defense lawyer publicly accepted Darrow's offer. Thus was the ground laid for the famous monkey trial.

Of course, there were serious issues, but the confrontation between science and religion was not foremost: No one, not even in Tennessee, believed the theory of evolution was going to go away. The issues were constitutional: whether the state could deny and prohibit the dissemination of the sum of intellectual inquiry, and whether the biblical account of creation, as understood by fundamentalist Protestant Christians, could be established as the sole legitimate explanation of the origin of the universe permitted in public schools in Tennessee. Underlying both questions was a clash between pure majoritarian democracy -- where a legislature can make any law it wants on behalf of local voter sentiment -- and a conception of liberty in which the Bill of Rights limits the power of even a large majority.

The forces arrayed outside the courtroom understood these issues well, even though H. L. Mencken and the rest of the national press made much sport of the monkey trial itself. Editorial cartoonists showed Bryan tussling with monkeys. Dayton and its boosters had fun as well, welcoming the hordes of reporters and spectators (puckish local merchants incorporated monkey imagery into their window displays). Yet something important was going on in the country at large, perhaps unnoticed at the time, which explains the nation's fascinated attention to the trial. Darrow's legendary examination of Bryan on the stand, in which Bryan was shown to be bereft of coherent ideas about the relation of science and the Bible, seemed to symbolize the waning of an old order in America and the rise of a new -- more plural, diverse, skeptical; more tolerant of minority views, and less obsessed with intellectual control.

Darrow's triumph over Bryan notwithstanding, the defense lost. On appeal, the state supreme court upheld the law while overturning Scopes's conviction on procedural grounds (the judge, instead of the jury, had determined the $100 fine). Five days after the trial, Bryan died in his sleep, and his movement pretty much lost steam thereafter. Even so, as Larson ably shows, the slow punching between liberal science and conservative religion went on -- and goes on still in efforts to maintain ``creation science'' in school curriculums.

But there is no question that the defense won in the long run. A great expansion of individual rights took place before and during the Warren years on the US Supreme Court, especially the incorporation of First Amendment rights into the 14th Amendment's equal protection guarantees. With the rise of the Cold War, the government began funding research and teaching of science in a big way. The Supreme Court finally struck down the Tennessee law in 1967, citing vagueness, a lack of public necessity, and especially a violation of the rule against establishment of religion. Today it is the antievolution forces that are in the minority and on the defensive.

Edward Larson, who holds dual appointments in law and history at the University of Georgia, tells the Scopes story with clarity and energy. His sketching of the cultural and intellectual background of the case, and of the long-term aftermath, are a little disappointing in their thinness. He is perhaps preoccupied with the narrative: who said what and exactly who did what. Still, his book may be among the best one-volume primers on an American intellectual twilight, and he frames the significance of the case perfectly: ``Indeed, the issues raised by the Scopes trial and legend endure precisely because they embody the characteristically American struggle between individual liberty and majoritarian democracy, and cast it in the timeless debate over science and religion.''