“One Little Hour”

I just finished rereading Larson’s examination of the 1925 Scopes Trial, which was awarded the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. Larson is a Harvard law graduate who also earned a PhD in history at the University of Wisconsin.

Larson’s Pulitzer was well-deserved (I’m sure he is relieved to know I approve). He displayed no discernable bias in his treatement and presented the foibles of both creationists and evolutionists with equanimity.

Summer for the Gods repudiates the popular image of the Scopes Trial as a battle between scientific progress and fundamentalist intolerance, portrayed in the Oscar nominated movie Inherit the Wind. The actual case was much more complex and John Scopes was hardly a victim. When the Tennessee legislature approved legislation prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the public schools, a businessman in the aging boomtown of Dayton, who was a transplanted New Yorker, lept at the opportunity to put Dayton back on the map. He gathered support for a test case from several other prominent Daytonians, some of whom personally approved of the anti-evolution law. A delegation than asked John Scopes, a local math and physical education teacher who had filled in for a biology class, if he would be willing to be the defendant. Most of Dayton seemed excited about the national publicity that Dayton would earn.

Clearly the Scopes Trial had little resemblance to any normal criminal case. The prosecution brought famous Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan on board thus prompting infamous defense attorney Clarence Darrow to offer his services to John Scopes. All the subsequent emotion that errupted in attacks on nihilistic rationalists and narrowminded fundamentalists obscured two very real legal principles.

1) Darrow argued that the individual liberty of speech denied the state the right to restrict the teaching of evolution.

2) Bryan argued for majoritarianism and the idea that the public had the right, through the legislature, to teach, or not to teach, its children whatever they wished.

Today, Darrow’s argument has pretyt much completely won out, shown by the recent Ward Churchill controversy at the University of Colorado.

When I finished the book, I asked myself the question, “If I lived in Tennessee in the 1920s would I have supported anti-evolutionary legislation?” For quite some time I struggled to balance the marketplace of ideas approach to education with my natural sympathy for my own creationist beliefs. But then I realized that to some degree it was a moot question.

The problem stems from the arrogation of educational responsibility from the family to the state. Biblically and historically the family was responsible for education. If the family preferred to send their children for training as an apprentice or at a religious school, than that was their choice. In the nineteenth century well-meaning evangelicals and secularists formed a progressive coalition that passed legislation state by state requiring state sponsored mandated education. Thus the responsibility has shifted and opened a Pandora’s Box of problems. Who gets to decide what is taught and what values are instilled? The family? The school board? The NEA?

If we reform our broken public educational system to promote family choice, whether through privitization or school vouchers, the issue mostly goes away. Parents could send their kids to a school that promotes Creationism or to one that favors Evolutionism. Unfortunately our current system forces one or the other to be taught as the law of the Medes and Persians.

Anywho, though I’ve gotten way off topic, Summer for the Gods is a must read for anyone interested in creationism and evolutionism. I would also recommend reading The Creationists by Ronald Numbers if you have a particular interest in the history of modern creationism.