History professor's new book uses Scopes trial as window to U.S. culture in 1920s

LAWRENCE -- University of Kansas history professor Jeffrey P. Moran regards the 1925 Scopes trial on the teaching of evolution as a window to American culture in the 1920s.

Scouting for good books on the Scopes trial for a course he teaches on 20th century American history, Moran decided to write his own -- "The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents," published this spring by Bedford St. Martin's Press.

"There was nothing out there for undergraduate use" to examine the trial that rocked the nation and continues to reverberate in the 21st century, Moran says.

As a Tennessee schoolteacher, John Scopes brought the question of teaching evolution in schools to every dinner table, and it remains an essential topic in American history, in education and in religious history.

"The trial shows American society in transition from a rural toward a more urban society," Moran says.

"The trial also addresses issues that continue to speak to us today," he adds, such as the rights of majority vs. minority, the roles of public schools, the role of experts in our society and the role of faith in public life.

The 1920s marked the first time more people were living in cities than in rural areas in the United States. "For many this signaled that the country had broken away from the Jeffersonian concept of 'a nation of rural yeomen,'" Moran says.

Americans feared that the United States could become a nation of cities, Moran says. Cities were regarded as the strongholds of corruption, vice and intellectualism. The stronghold of evolution has been in urban rather than rural communities, Moran explains. A fear of intellectualism grew out of the 1920s, when issues resulting from clashes of urban and rural as well as regional north and south cultures were exploding. Moran lists race, immigration and Prohibition among those issues.

In his book, Moran intersperses newspaper accounts and political cartoons with transcripts of the often fiery and witty debate between the populist presidential politician William Jennings Bryan, who argued for the prosecution to banish teaching evolution, and Clarence Darrow, regarded as one of the best lawyers in the nation, who defended Scopes.

The book includes an account of a stabbing reported in the Kansas City Call, then 6 years old. When an argument between two couples about whether man descended from apes escalated, a fight erupted. Moran says it was the only stabbing in the nation reported to have resulted from the trial.

Moran also includes a W.E.B. DuBois essay on the response of African-Americans to the trial. "DuBois and other black intellectuals identified with Scopes as a victim of the white power structure," Moran says. Black intellectuals also had hopes that science would erode habitual racism. "The trial was not just of interest to the white middle class," Moran adds.

Although Scopes lost, the conflict on teaching evolution never really went away, Moran says. "It went underground."

It continues to resurface. In the 1960s, less evolution was being taught in the schools than in the 1920s, Moran says. Today's anti-evolution movement grew out of the Cold War space race in the 1960s. Moran was working on his book when in 1999 the Kansas State Board of Education voted to make the teaching of evolution optional in public schools.

"The only real winners in the trial," Moran concludes, "were the monkeys."