ABSTRACT HALBROOK, PATRICK NASON. The Scopes Trial in American Memory. (Under the direction of Dr. William Kimler). The 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial, in which high school teacher John T. Scopes was prosecuted in Dayton, Tennessee for violating the state’s Butler Act forbidding the teaching of human evolution, has been called “the Trial of the Century.” Fundamentalist politician William Jennings Bryan and celebrity defense attorney Clarence Darrow met at the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, for “a duel to the death.” The nation’s media descended on the small town and broadcast the sensational creation-evolution trial around the globe. The locals who arranged the trial had hoped the publicity would put their town on the map, but they never guessed that it would become one of the most prominent symbolic events in American memory. Nor could they have anticipated the way the story of the “World’s Most Famous Court Trial” would evolve into stage and screen adaptations, novels, and dozens of historical works. This thesis explores the ways the Scopes story has been told and the meanings it has been said to embody. Through surveying the writings of historians, playwrights, authors of juvenile literature, residents of Dayton, antievolutionists, and political pundits, I show that the memory of the Scopes trial has both shaped and been shaped by subsequent cultural controversies over issues such as McCarthyism, creation science legislation, climate change science, and same-sex marriage. The memory of the Scopes trial is laden with symbolism and moral lessons. But the meaning and application of these qualities have depended largely upon the circumstances and interests of those who have appealed to it. © Copyright 2012 by Patrick Nason Halbrook All Rights Reserved The Scopes Trial in American Memory by Patrick Nason Halbrook A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts History Raleigh, North Carolina 2012 APPROVED BY: _______________________________ ______________________________ Dr. William Kimler Dr. Jason Bivins Committee Chair ________________________________ Dr. James Crisp ii BIOGRAPHY Patrick Nason Halbrook grew up in northern Virginia outside Washington, D.C., where the city’s monuments, museums, and heritage sparked his interest in American history. His undergraduate work was in Biblical Studies and Liberal Studies (B.A., Florida College, 2005, summa cum laude), and he wrote his bachelor’s thesis on “The Educational Philosophies of Alexander Campbell and John Dewey.” He is a teacher at Cary Christian School, where he has taught high school and middle school classes on the Bible and the history of Christianity since 2006. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. James Crisp, Dr. Jason Bivins, and particularly Dr. William Kimler, for serving on my committee and providing invaluable feedback on this thesis. My idea for the project was inspired by Dr. Michael J. Allen’s “History and Memory” course, which opened up for me new ways of thinking about history. Tom Davis of Bryan College deserves a hearty word of thanks for sharing his insights into Dayton’s Scopes trial festival and for generously providing photographs that I was able to use in a presentation at the 2012 North Carolina Graduate Student Conference. Dr. Monte Hampton helped me begin my research on the Scopes trial four years ago in an independent study. But his more significant contribution has been through our countless informal conversations on history, religion, politics, science, and many other topics over the years. I am blessed to count him as a friend. Similarly, I am grateful to my many undergraduate professors at Florida College who inspired me to love learning. I look back with particular fondness on my classes and conversations with Dr. Mark Bingham, Dr. Brian Crispell, Dr. Thaxter Dickey, Dr. David McClister, Dr. Doy Moyer, Martin Pickup, and Dr. Phil Roberts. I am fortunate to have had the unique opportunity as a teenager to work part time during the summers performing historical research for my father, Dr. Stephen P. Halbrook. I did not realize at the time that while skimming through dusty books and whirring through microfilm, I was learning skills that I would one day put to use for my own research. iv Finally, I am grateful to my wife, Kaylie, for her patience and love during the past six years. While I have been struggling to find time to complete my coursework and write a thesis, she has been engaged in the much more difficult task of being a mom to our three children (and being a great one, at that). v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: The Scopes Trial: The Construction of a Memory ............................................9 CHAPTER 2: Juvenile Literature on the Scopes Trial ...........................................................52 CHAPTER 3: “Inherit the Truth”: Revising History at Dayton’s Scopes Trial Festival ........77 CHAPTER 4: Antievolutionists and the Memory of the Scopes Trial ...................................97 CHAPTER 5: The Scopes Trial in America’s Culture Wars ................................................132 REFERENCES .....................................................................................................................185 1 INTRODUCTION On March 21, 1925, Tennessee governor Austin Peay signed into law a bill deeming it unlawful for any public school teacher “to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Peay declared that day that he did not think the law, which carried a maximum fine of $500, would ever be put to use. Little did he suspect that four months later this law would bring about what would be called “The World’s Most Famous Court Trial,” the most influential science/religion event in American memory. That July, twenty-three-year-old high school science teacher John T. Scopes would be prosecuted for teaching evolution, and national celebrities, like three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, and smart-aleck journalist H.L. Mencken, would descend upon the town of Dayton, Tennessee, to battle before an international audience. According to the popular version of the story, John Scopes was a courageous young teacher who wanted nothing more than to open his students’ minds to the scientific truths of the universe. In the name of freedom and scientific progress, he fearlessly defied an unjust and unreasonable law by teaching them Darwin’s theory of evolution. The people of Dayton were astounded and enraged. They arrested him and called on their hero, William Jennings Bryan, to prosecute him and defend the integrity of the Bible against the heresies of science. Unhappily for them, the dull, pompous Bryan turned out to be no match for Scopes’s 2 attorney, Clarence Darrow. Darrow made a fool of Bryan before the watching world, and even though he ultimately lost the case, he and his fellow evolutionists won in the arena of public opinion. Bryan died five days later (apparently out of humiliation), and the fundamentalists crawled away, ashamed that they and their hero had been proven to be so naïve, so intolerant, so archaic. The country moved on, and fundamentalism and antievolutionism became a thing of the past. Or at least, so the story goes. The story of the Scopes trial was born in sensation and immediately grew into a legend. It is a story that has been performed on Broadway, taught in schoolrooms, narrated and re-narrated by historians, and aggrandized by journalists. Americans remember the trial as a turning point in the nation’s history, an event from the past whose shadow is surprisingly long and whose lessons continue to be disturbingly relevant. It is most frequently applied as a symbol of the perennial American struggles between liberty and oppression, open- mindedness and bigotry, progress and tradition, and science and religion. And because these struggles remain with us, the Scopes trial continues to figure prominently in our collective memory, resurfacing from time with the hope that it might contextualize and enlighten our religious, scientific, and political discourse. Popular conceptions of the trial, however, have hardly been applauded for their historical accuracy. As Ronald L. Numbers has written, “Despite a shelf of scholarly studies on Fundamentalism, antievolutionism, and Bryanism, the Scopes trial remains a grotesquely misunderstood event—largely the result, I think, of its ability to serve so many compelling 3 interests.”1 Indeed, the trial may have been a turning point in American history—but from and to what did we turn? It may have an enduring significance and have left lessons to which we may appeal—but precisely what are those lessons? Even if it does symbolize a struggle between American values, what values are they and what does it suggest about them? To put it simply: what really happened at the Scopes trial, and how does it help us understand subsequent events? This thesis is a study of how historians, journalists, evolutionists, antievolutionists, and residents of Dayton have answered those two questions. Historians of recent decades have written much about the study of collective memory. Maurice Halbwachs, the French sociologist from the early twentieth century whose writings provided the foundation for this perspective, described collective memory as “a current of continuous thought whose continuity is not at all artificial, for it retains from the past only what still lives or is capable of living in the consciousness of groups keeping the memory alive.”2 Groups remember past events through the lens of the present. As Peter Novick put it, “present concerns determine what of the past we remember and how we remember it.”3 Americans’ memory of the Scopes trial conforms to this observation, for the trial can scarcely be invoked without drawing applications to contemporary manifestations of its popular themes.