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Review
| The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents, by Jeffrey P. Moran. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002. $10.00, paper.
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| As Jeffrey P. Moran notes in this newest study of the infamous Scopes trial, the phrase "trial of the century" had become a cliché even before Dayton, Tennessee schoolteacher John T. Scopes was convicted of the "crime" of teaching evolution before a rapt national audience in July 1925. Yet, with apologies to aspirants for the crown from William "Big Bill" Haywood to O.J. Simpson, it now seems reasonable to say that the Scopes trial was indeed the most sensational of the twentieth century, at least judging by the interest it still draws from historians and the public. The trial has always fascinated me because it seems the embodiment of the 1920s clash of older, protestant Victorian values with an emerging modernity as America became more urban, diverse, and cosmopolitan. This is the stuff of both high drama and rich history, and Jeffrey Moran makes good use of it in crafting a compelling new synthesis of the trial and the larger debates that surrounded it. The book is the latest offering in Bedford publisher's classroom-oriented "series in history and culture" which combines a short, scholarly interpretation of a crucial event in American history with a series of primary documents designed to enable students to make critical judgments of their own. (Pevious volumes have addressed topics from the Cherokee Removal to McCarthyism.) Moran succeeds in both endeavors. His 72-page introduction to the topic is crisp, informative, and surprisingly in-depth for such a succinct piece, while the primary documents included offer a variety of perspectives and contain materials that almost certainly will be new to anyone who has not done original research on the topic. |
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In the first section, Moran convincingly places the Scopes Trial within the larger context of an America undergoing rapid change. This raises the Scopes trial above an isolated event and touches on a variety of topics crucial to any understanding of America in the Jazz Age, including science versus religion, academic freedom, and the rift between urban and rural America. The book seems likely to spark especially good classroom discussion because Moran deftly avoids caricaturing either side in the debate. Instead, William Jennings Bryan, who led the fundamentalist charge against Darwinism, is described as part of a tradition of protestant reform which opposed Darwinism not just because it challenged the cultural and political power of white protestant males, but also because Bryan and his allies associated the doctrine of "survival of the fittest," with the war-mongering of World War I and the waning impulse for social reform within the United States. By offering such a nuanced view of anti-evolutionists, Moran makes the terms and stakes of the debate more apparent and makes it difficult to dismiss offhandedly the agenda of either side. |
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The latter two sections of the book contain transcripts from each day of the trial, newspaper reports and editorials (including cartoons), and a variety of other documents related to the clash between modernism and fundamentalism. While the sheer number of documents (they cover nearly 150 pages) makes it unlikely that there will be time to discuss all of them in a classroom setting, the primary documents are organized so that it will be easy for teachers to pick and choose those they consider vital. The inclusion of primary sources that address how some women and African Americans understood the debate over evolutionism are especially welcome as a case study of both the diversity of opinion among groups too often thought of as monolithic and as a means of showing that the events in Tennessee had ramifications for more than just the white males who stood before the cameras and microphones in Dayton. At times I wished the closely edited documents were longer so that student readers would be forced to identify what is most important in a given piece, but this is probably asking too much if the book is to give a variety of perspectives. Likewise, I would have liked to see more than one more recent document included to show the continuing debate about questions of cultural authority, but the example provided by Vine Deloria, Jr.'s critique of the hegemony of European-derived science over Native American beliefs is compelling and probably suffices. These are but minor quibbles; as a whole Jeffrey Moran performs a great service to those of us who wish to give students (and ourselves) a better understanding of the Scopes Trial and the broader social and cultural world in which it took place. |
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| University of Cincinnati |
Kevin P. Bower |
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