SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
This month marks 100 years since the start of the Scopes Trial. That is the 1925 case where teacher John Thomas Scopes was accused of breaking a Tennessee law that banned the teaching of human evolution. It was the first ever trial to be broadcast on the radio, and it captivated the nation. There were songs written about it at the time. Here's "The Bible's True" by Uncle Dave Macon.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE BIBLE'S TRUE")
UNCLE DAVE MACON: (Singing) Evolution teaches man came from a monkey. I don't believe in no such a thing in a day of the week or Sunday. For the Bible's true. Yes, I believe it. I've seen enough, and I can a prove it. What you say, what you say, it's bound to be that way. Lord yes.
DETROW: The case has lived on in various art forms ever since. Among them, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Summer For The Gods: The Scopes Trial And America's Continuing Debate Over Science And Religion." Edward Larson wrote it. He teaches history at Pepperdine University and says the 1920s were a complicated decade.
EDWARD LARSON: We'd just been through that deadliest global war in the history of humankind, the World War I. We just have had the Spanish Flu, the largest epidemic in world history, but also the largest immigration, a huge immigration in post-World War I.
DETROW: Enter William Jennings Bryan - lawyer, populist, former Democratic presidential candidate - who worried that Americans were being influenced by bad ideas. So he went on a campaign to ban the teaching of Darwinism in schools.
LARSON: Bryan had launched his crusade for banning the teaching of human evolution in public schools three years earlier, when he pushed for such a law in Kentucky. And then he carried it from state after state. It wasn't just public - this law didn't cover just high schools. It covered colleges, too. And so, yes, this was a nationally recognized crusade. And that's when, when Tennessee passed its law, the ACLU based in New York, immediately said they would defend any schoolteacher willing to defend it in court. This was a national crusade for it, and the opposition was national. And immediately, this widespread coalition of academics and scientists rose up. The ACLU raised more funds based on that - this lawsuit than they'd ever raised before in anything they'd ever done. The pros and cons - both sides of this - were fully engaged.
DETROW: Given that, would it be fair to call this a culture war issue in the way that we use that term, you know, a hundred years later in the present-day politics?
LARSON: It was a culture war issue. It divided people on cultural lines, not on partisan political. There were both Republicans and Democrats who supported restrictions. There were also Republicans and Democrats on - who opposed restriction. So yes, it divided America along cultural lines. I do think the culture war went way before this. I don't think you can properly define it at a hundred years. But certainly, ever after, people would view this as the starting gun for America's cultural wars.
DETROW: What was the immediate outcome of the trial? And what, if anything, did the trial itself resolve compared to its broader legacy and how it more broadly shaped the country?
LARSON: The immediate result was Scopes was convicted, and the statute was upheld. And with that, other states and countless school districts adopted similar laws. The effect was so strong that evolution virtually disappeared from high school textbooks. You can follow the textbooks, and they'd have evolution before - human evolution. And it literally disappeared. If there was any reference to the concept, it was usually called development. I could find not a single nationally used high school textbook of the '30s that had evolution in it, and that continued until the 1950s. After Sputnik, there was a concern that American scientific education was falling behind, and they passed the - Congress passed the Defense Education Act that poured money into better science textbooks. And one of those were the BSCS textbooks, biological curriculum study. That now, rather than, you know, sort of professional textbook writers, they turn to real scientists. They gave grants to real scientists to write textbooks.
DETROW: I mean, you're talking about a lot of things that I hear and I can apply to a headline today. There is this increased debate about what is in curriculum, what is being taught in schools, increased political pressure from the right, especially on that front. There was just a Supreme Court decision about what say parents have over what their children are learning in school. How much of what happened a hundred years ago do you think is still relevant today?
LARSON: Well, what do they say? History doesn't repeat itself, but it echoes or rhymes. And these are issues that are American. It was a disorienting time, the 1920s. It was right after the war, right after the Spanish Flu, huge immigration issues. There was a lot of things floating around. But even more important, high schools were a new thing then - compulsory education through high school. This was a new thing. And so the argument could be made for the first time is, you are forcing these students - that was the issue in the recent opt-out case - you're forcing these students to go to school, then parents should have a say with what's in the education. And that was Bryan's key line. The taxpayers (ph) writes the check, so they should decide what is taught in public high schools. Culture wars or supposed divisions on these issues go all the way back to the colonial days. But they resonate, and they came about. And what you see then in the 1920s, you see echoes of it, rhymes of it today.
DETROW: That's Ed Larson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Summer For The Gods: The Scopes Trial And America's Continuing Debate Over Science And Religion." Thank you so much.
LARSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
