Book Review: Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation
BOOK BY BRENDA WINEAPPLE
RANDOM HOUSE, 2024
“It’s all about the fabulous monkey trial that rocked America!” That was the slogan on the poster of the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, but it describes Keeping the Faith, Brenda Wineapple’s new book about the Scopes trial just as well—or even better, considering that Inherit the Wind was only loosely based on the events in Dayton, Tennessee, during the scorching summer of 1925. Where Inherit the Wind portrayed Tennessee v. Scopes as a battle between science and religion, declaring a truce as Henry Drummond, the Clarence Darrow figure, packs a Bible and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species together into his briefcase, however, Keeping the Faith construes it as a duel between rival political visions. “The Scopes case asks, then and now, where the country was headed, where it should be headed, and how to make it better and kinder in light of privation and prejudice and disillusionment and war,” Wineapple suggests in her preface (pp. xxix–xxx). But it takes a considerable while for her to reach the dueling ground, not arriving at the first day of the trial until chapter 13.
In the preceding dozen chapters, Wineapple sets the stage for the trial. The author of a number of highly regarded biographies of American literary figures, she plays to her strengths by offering a series of biographical vignettes; Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, and H. L. Mencken—the most famous of the attorneys defending Scopes, the most famous of the attorneys prosecuting Scopes, and the most famous reporter covering the trial, respectively—receive their own chapters. Consistently with her view of the trial as political, though, she also devotes chapters to Prohibition (favored by Bryan; opposed by Darrow and Mencken), the Ku Klux Klan (tolerated by Bryan; despised by Darrow and Mencken), and eugenics (rejected by Bryan, Darrow, and Mencken, but promoted by a host of scientists in the 1920s, including a number of the scientific luminaries who supported Scopes, such as Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the American Museum of Natural History). Chapter 12, on Dayton, helpfully emphasizes, contrary to stereotype, that the eastern Tennessee town was not part of the solid South.
The trial itself is the subject of chapters 13 through 22. Consulting the transcript, the contemporary reportage, and the later memories of the participants and observers, Wineapple offers a lively day-by-day account of the proceeds, albeit with no particular novelties. Her subsequent discussion of the appeal of Scopes’s conviction to the Tennessee Supreme Court, however, shines. Popular accounts of the Scopes trial often neglect or even omit the appeal. But Keeping the Faith devotes a chapter to the machinations whereby the appeal was entrusted to the erratic Tennessee lawyer John R. Neal, largely excluding Darrow, and a chapter winkingly entitled “The Lost Cause” (a phrase typically used in the context of praising the Confederacy) to the appeal itself. Particularly impressive is Wineapple’s fortitude in examining the state’s response to the appellant’s brief, which “ran to four hundred pages”; it was, as she reports, “[l]ess concerned with legal arguments than with ridiculing the defense team … Tossing around such words as ‘pathetic,’ ‘perverted,’ ‘hysterical,’ and ‘repulsive’ … ” (pp. 374–375).
The epilogue, “The Four Winds of the Sky,” discusses the fates of the trial’s principal figures, except for Bryan (who died only days after the trial, as related in chapter 23), and sketches later developments. A significant error here is mischaracterizing the 1981 Louisiana law that was successfully challenged as unconstitutional in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) as “stipulating that ‘creationism’—a Bryan-like, literal interpretation of Genesis—must be given equal time in the classroom if evolution was being taught there” (p. 406). In fact, the law required equal time for “creation science,” which was defined minimally as “the scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those scientific evidences.” To be sure, when the bill was first introduced, creation science was defined to include specific details such as a worldwide flood and a separate ancestry for humans and apes. But a similar Arkansas law (briefly mentioned by Wineapple) was challenged as unconstitutional shortly after it was enacted, prompting the Louisiana legislature to revise the definition of creation science before passing its bill.
Wineapple’s assiduous attention throughout her book to the ways in which gender, region, race, and politics intersected with attitudes toward evolution and the teaching of evolution is admirable. Her discussion of religion is not entirely satisfactory, however. A case in point is the treatment of Bryan’s religious views. Famously, Bryan was called—anomalously—by the defense in the Scopes trial as a witness on the Bible. (In Inherit the Wind, the Bryan figure Matthew Harrison Brady is likewise called to the stand, and much of the ensuing dialogue is taken directly from the transcript of the Scopes trial.) When Bryan testified that in his view the days of creation were not six days of twenty-four hours, Wineapple writes, he “had walked into a trap … he had just contradicted his own literal interpretation of the Bible” (p. 324), even describing him as fidgeting under the stress of Darrow’s examination. She is evidently unaware that Bryan, like most of the major antievolutionists of the 1920s, accepted a so-called day-age interpretation of Genesis, which he placidly regarded as literal.
Well-researched, well-paced, and well-written, there is a lot to like about Keeping the Faith. If it has a flaw, it is that it is apparently more concerned with telling a story than with extracting a moral. Readers seeking historical insights into the Scopes trial will prefer Ronald L. Numbers’s The Creationists (2006) for its description of the religious underpinnings of the antievolution campaigns of the 1920s; Adam Laats’s Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era (2010) for its account of the fundamentalist campaigns aimed at the public schools; Jeffrey P. Moran’s American Genesis (2012) for its treatment of gender, region, and race; and Carl R. Weinberg’s Red Dynamite (2021) for its discussion of politics; while Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Summer for the Gods (1997) remains the best general history. (Curiously, except for Larson’s, none of these books appears in the bibliography of Keeping the Faith.) But at a time when attacks on evolution education seem to be sadly resurgent, it is good to be presented with such a spirited chronicle of the fabulous monkey trial of a century ago.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include some minor corrections.