| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

When All the Gods Trembled: Darwin, Scopes, and American Intellectuals. By Paul K. Conkin. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. xii, 185 pp. $22.95, ISBN 0-8476-9063-6.)

The story of religion in the United States during the 1920s has largely been framed around the dramatic confrontation at Dayton, Tennessee, that pitted modernism against provincialism, open inquiry against dogmatism, and science against religion. Or so the common wisdom, nurtured on the popular play (1955) and movie (1960) Inherit the Wind, would have it. 1

Little by little that picture, replete with an ineffectual William Jennings Bryan and a heroic Clarence Darrow, has been eroded. We now accept that the trial was neither a humiliating defeat for fundamentalism nor a decisive triumph for the forces of religious modernism. Attempts to ban the teaching of evolution did not end; some of the most vigorous occurred after the Scopes trial. True, fundamentalism suffered a blow in the minds of liberal Protestants and urban intellectuals, but it did not disappear. In the ensuing years it would gather institutional strength to emerge on the national scene once again in the 1970s. And, contrary to the image projected by such hostile journalists as H. L. Mencken, the people of Dayton, far from being a sullen crop of yokels, welcomed the trial, hoped it would be of some economic benefit to the town, and treated their visitors with courtesy. . . .

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