Abstract
Kelso Rice, the court policeman in Dayton, Tennessee, struggled to make his voice heard over the laughter and applause in the loud, crowded courtroom. “People, this is no circus,” he demanded. “There are no monkeys up here. This is a lawsuit, let us have order.”1 The roomful of East Tennesseans, newspaper reporters, big-city lawyers, and curious onlookers could have been forgiven for assuming they were at a circus. For days, the East Tennessee town of Dayton had shown all the signs of it. The streets were full of buskers, snack stands, and carnival games. The hot July sun roasted the courthouse until even this latest “Trial of the Century” was forced outdoors under the shade of some cottonwood trees. For the first and only time in its history, Dayton was the most talked-about small town in the world. Reporters telegraphed hundreds of thousands of words daily from the town to the waiting world, as America held its breath for the outcome.2
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Clarence Darrow, William J. Bryan, et al., The World’s Most Famous Court Trial: Tennessee Evolution Case (Cincinnati, OH: National Book Company, 1925), 282.
The best source for understanding this trial is Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Another good source is Jeffrey P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2002). Also helpful is Douglas O. Linder, “Famous Trials: Tennessee vs. John Scopes: ‘The Monkey Trial,’” University of Missouri, Kansas City School of Law, http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes.htm (accessed July 18, 2005).
Governor Austin Peay, “Statement,” Moody Bible Institute Monthly [Moody Monthly] 25 (June 1925): 462.
Harry Emerson Fosdick, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Christian Century 39 (June 8, 1922): 716.
F. Z. Brown, “The False Premise of Dr. Fosdick’s Farewell Sermon,” Moody Monthly 25 (June 1925): 453.
Harry Boehme, “Can the Fundamentalists Lose?” Christian Fundamentals in School and Church [CFSC] 5 (October–December 1922): 29.
H. L. Mencken, “The Hills of Zion,” in Prejudices: Fifth Series (New York: Octagon Books, 1977), 82.
Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 5, 17, 99, 115, 240.
Maynard Shipley, The War on Modern Science (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 357.
T. S. Stribling, Teeftallow, in Controversy in the ‘Twenties: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and Evolution, ed. Willard B. Gatewood Jr. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969), 376.
Kenneth K. Bailey, “The Antievolution Crusade of the Nineteen-Twenties” (PhD dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1954), 242.
Moran, Scopes Trial, 35–39. See also Donald E. Boles, The Bible, Religion, and the Public Schools (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1963).
J. Frank Norris, “Bryan Wins Greatest Victory of his Career—Bible Triumphs Over Infidelity: Commoner Outwits Darrow in Dayton Evolution Trial,” The Searchlight 8 (July 24, 1925): 1.
Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York: Harper and Bros., 1931), 206.
Maynard Shipley, “Evolution Still a Live Issue In the Schools,” Current History 27 (March 1928): 801.
H. L. Mencken, “In Memoriam: WJB,” in Prejudices, Fifth Series (New York: Octagon Books, 1977), 68.
H. L. Mencken, “Jacquerie,” in The Bathtub Hoax and Other Blasts and Bravos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 136–40.
Curtis Lee Laws, “Editorial Notes and Comments,” Watchman-Examiner 13 (August 20, 1925): 1071.
William Bell Riley, “William Jennings Bryan University,” CFSC 7 (October–December 1925): 52.
T. C. Horton, “Bryan’s Benediction,” King’s Business (December 1925): 534–35; T. C. Horton, “Bryan the Brave—‘Defender of the Faith,’” King’s Business 16 (September 1925): 372.
Philip E. Howard, “William Jennings Bryan as his Friends Knew Him,” Sunday School Times 67 (August 8, 1925): 499.
Alabama House Bill 30, Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Alabama 1927, 89; Alabama House Bill 969, Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Alabama 1927, 1622, 1983, 2040; Alabama House Bill 1103, Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Alabama 1927, 2153, 2426–27, 2596; Arkansas House Bill 34, Journal of the House of Representatives for the General Assembly of the State of Arkansas 1927, 68–69, 263, 323–24; California Assembly Bill 145, Journal of the Assembly during the Forty-Seventh Session of the Legislature of the State of California 1927, 182, 445, 482, 543–44, 566, 2 639–41; New Hampshire House Bill 268, “Journal of the House of Representatives 1927,” Journals New Hampshire Senate and House 1927, 154, 274; North Dakota House Bill 222, State of North Dakota Journal of the House of the Twentieth Session of the Legislative Assembly 1927, 519, 1022; Oklahoma House Bill 81, Journal of the House of Representatives of the Legislature of the State of Oklahoma 1927, 281, 305; South Carolina House Bill 60, Journal of the House of Representatives of the First Session of the 78th General Assembly of the State of South Carolina 1927, 70, 1128, 1482; West Virginia House Resolution, Journal of the House of Delegates of West Virginia 1927, 65, 97–98; West Virginia House Bill 264; Journal of the House of Delegates of West Virginia 1927, 104, 663; West Virginia House Bill 358, Journal of the House of Delegates of West Virginia 1927, 129; North Carolina House Bill 263, Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina 1927, 85, 241; Delaware House Bill 92, Delaware House Journal 1927, 156; Maine House Paper 834, Legislative Record of the Eighty-Third Legislature of the State of Maine 1927, 239, 242, 247–49, 313, 835; Minnesota Senate Bill 701, Journal of the Senate of the State of Minnesota 1927, 508–9; Florida House Bill 87, Florida House Journal 1927, 3000–3001; Richard David Wilhelm, “A Chronology and Analysis of Regulatory Actions Relating to the Teaching of Evolution in Public Schools” (PhD dissertation, University of Texas–Austin, 1978), 373 [Missouri House Bill No. 89].
See Jonathan Zimmerman, Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America’s Public Schools, 1880–1925 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999).
See Stewart Cole, The History of Fundamentalism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971);
Norman F. Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918–1931 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954);
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963);
H. Richard Niebuhr, “Fundamentalism,” in The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman (New York: Macmillan Co., 1931), 526–27.
T. T. Martin, Hell and the High School: Christ or Evolution, Which? (Kansas City, MO: Western Baptist Publishing Co., 1923), 72. Emphasis in original.
Ronald L. Numbers, “Reading the Book of Nature through American Lenses,” in Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 62–68.
Alfred Fairhurst, Atheism in Our Universities (Cincinnati, OH: Standard Publishing Co., 1923), 71.
George Wilson McPherson, The Crisis in Church and College (Yonkers, NY: Yonkers Book Co., 1919), 119.
Quoted in Virginia L. Brereton, Training God’s Army: The American Bible School, 1880–1940 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 179n19.
William Jennings Bryan, In His Image (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1922), 93, 94.
James Gilbert, Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 24–27; Burton E. Livingston [permanent secretary to the American Association for the Advancement of Science] to William Jennings Bryan, 29 September 1924, Bryan Papers, file 1924.
Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 33.
George McCready Price, “Modern Scientific Discoveries,” CFSC 5 (October–December 1922): 74.
George McCready Price, “Modern Problems in Science and Religion,” Moody Monthly 21 (February 1921): 256.
James M. Gray, “Editorial Notes,” Moody Monthly 21 (November 1920): 101.
Leander S. Keyser, “Seeking for Obscure Causes,” Moody Monthly 22 (August 1922): 1139.
T. T. Martin, The Evolution Issue (Los Angeles, CA: n.p., 1923?), 19; Martin, Hell and the High School.
Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 54–55.
Dennis Royal Davis, “Presbyterian Attitudes Toward Science and the Coming of Darwinism in America, 1859 to 1929” (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 1980), 125–26;
Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 125, 138.
Arthur I. Brown, “Evolution and the Bible” (1922), in The Antievolution Works of Arthur I. Brown, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995), 10.
Copyright information
© 2010 Adam Laats
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Laats, A. (2010). Of Monkeys and Men. In: Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106796_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106796_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38507-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10679-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)