APUSH – Unit 11 Ch. 23 and 24 The 1920’s and the Great Depression
Activity: The class will be divided into 2 opposing groups that will be representative of the arguments, debates,
and differences of the 1920s. Using the below thesis as our guide, we will have a series of historical debates
which address the conflict of attitudes throughout American society.
The 1920's were a period of tension between new and changing attitudes on the one hand and traditional
values and nostalgia on the other. What led to the tension between old and new AND in what ways was
the tension manifested?
The Scopes Trial, July 21st, 1925
The Scopes trial of 1925 reflected the numerous cultural clashes occurring across America at the time. But,
even more than Prohibition and the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan, "the trial of the century" has endured in
the American culture. One reason is that the trial (and its appeal) did not decide the two key issues at stake: (1)
whether so-called rural values associated with religious fundamentalism^ or so-called urban values associated
with science and modernism was to be the main basis of American
culture, and (2) whether academic freedom should give way to the
right of the state legislature to determine what the state's children
learned in school. The debates over fundamentalism and modernism
and over who controls the content taught in public schools continued
throughout the rest of the 20th century. The trial, along with other
cultural clashes in the 1920s, was a keen indication that Americans
had begun in a more intense manner than ever before--even during
the Revolutionary War period--to debate the basic values of their
civilization. In large measure because of the cultural issues involved
and the fact that the trial did not resolve them, some of the historical
facts have given way to legend.
^American Protestant fundamentalism evolved from revivalist movements stretching back to the 18th century.
Basic to fundamentalists were the beliefs in the infallibility of the Bible, the Virgin Birth, and the resurrection
of Jesus. But not all fundamentalist Protestants opposed the theory of evolution; rather they equated the process
of evolution with God's grand design, with God's hand. What these fundamentalists opposed was something that
many biologists opposed: Charles Darwin's concept of "natural selection." These notions came under attack by
more conservative members of the Protestant churches in the second decade of the 20th century. By the 1920s,
the conservatives became especially alarmed at the growing impact of liberal views within Protestant circles
and with changes in the broader society. The broader societal changes included reactions to the depravity
associated with World War I, the rise of communism, the upsurge in worker unrest, and, generally, a breakdown
in traditional societal values (widespread drinking before Prohibition, the New Woman, and new ideas coming
from the new social sciences). Some intellectuals among the fundamentalists opposed the "Modernist"
techniques, such as literary, scientific, historical, and sociological analysis of the Bible, that tended to
undermine their beliefs in the teachings of the Bible. The non-intellectuals, the church goers, if you will,
opposed what they perceived as the modernist attack on traditional life. Thus, a coalition of Protestant sects
joined together in a fundamentalist, anti-evolution movement.
In an odd sense, Bryan was not the best defender available, for he held a more liberal view than most. For
example, he believed others could believe in evolution if they wanted to; he had opposed the way in which the
Tennessee legislature had written the law; and, he offered to pay Scopes' fine.
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A key point in all of this is that the Scopes Trial and the attending publicity forced fundamentalists to continue
their war with modernist forces. That cultural war continues today and many of the complex forces still
contextualize the cultural clashes.
The Scopes trial occurred within a rather complex context of political, legal, and cultural events. The First
World War had focused Americans on the notion of "Americanism"; the First Red Scare (1919-1920) and the
on-going Sacco and Vanzetti affair (1920-1927) continued the debates over the place of "radical" ideas in
American society and gave rise in 1920 to the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which
was dedicated to promoting the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution).
Fundamentalists, moreover, were attacking modern forces that, to them, undermined the Protestant beliefs upon
which they believed the United States had been founded.
There were other forces at work, of course. The trial happened in Dayton, Tennessee, because of a confluence
of fortuitous events and enterprising individuals. First, the Tennessee legislature, influenced by fundamentalists,
enacted the statute forbidding the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution as fact to Tennessee school children.
(The law did not forbid the teaching of evolution, per se.) Second, the American Civil Liberties Union placed
ads in Tennessee papers announcing that it would aid any individual willing to challenge the new law as
unconstitutional. Then, George W. Rappleyea, a transplanted New Yorker who managed area mines for
Northern business interests in Dayton, saw one of the ACLU ads and had an idea. He called a meeting in
Dayton's drugstore in which he, area prosecuting attorneys, John Scopes (a substitute teacher), and a handful of
others discussed the new law and how the town might take advantage of it. By the end of the meeting, Scopes
had agreed to be the object of a test case. While most in the group opposed the new law, the main force in their
decision to go forward was not legal or even cultural but rather economic: the trial, they hoped, would put
Dayton on the map and increase its economic fortunes, which had been flagging for some time since the smelter
had been shut down. Thus, civic leaders chose to take advantage of the cultural clashes to boost the fortunes of
the city of Dayton.
The ACLU agreed to join the Dayton trial. Initially against the ACLU's desires, Clarence Darrow joined the
defense team, which consisted of local and ACLU lawyers. Approaching 70 years in age, Darrow had the
previous year made headlines with his impassioned (and successful) plea to the judge to spare the lives of two
young defendants, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, in an infamous murder trial in Chicago. Then William
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Jennings Bryan offered his services to the prosecution team. A proponent of anti-evolution laws, if not the
specific Tennessee law, Bryan had been an American cultural figure since the Gilded Age: several times a
presidential candidate; a tireless supporter of a variety of Progessive era causes; Secretary of State under
President Woodrow Wilson (a position he resigned in protest over Wilson's policies towards Mexico); a
huckster for Florida real estate; and, always, a proponent of the fundamentalist point of view. With the addition
of Darrow and Bryan, the hopes of Dayton's civic leaders for a circus-atmosphere that would garner lots of
media attention were met.
The so-called "monkey trial" attracted a lot of media attention across the U.S. and in Europe. Satirist H. L.
Mencken discovered that Dayton was not the backwater Southern village he had expected and that the natives
were extraordinarily friendly to their cultural foes. Perhaps in disappointment, he left before the trial ended. The
New York Times included coverage every day during the month of July, sometimes including several stories.
Although the New York Times included copy on both sides of the issue, the newspaper's editorial stance clearly
favored one side: modernism over fundamentalism. Reviews of international coverage of the trial were
especially poignant, for most of the media in Europe could not understand why the Americans were spending so
much time on an issue that Europeans had decided long ago in favor of modernism.
Social commentators then and historians and other scholars since have skewed our views of the Scopes trial.
Ironically, the very people who had ballyhooed the trial for over a week in the summer of 1925--the press-came close to identifying the real importance of the trial immediately after it was over: it had decided nothing,
the press claimed, and had instead been an opening battle in what was to be a long conflict between
fundamentalists and modernists.
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Popular conceptions of the trial as the triumph of science in an epic battle with religion have been shaped by
journalists, artists, and historians. Six years after the trial, the popular-culture chronicler, Frederick Lewis Allen,
maintained that while Fundamentalism had won the battle (because Scopes was found guilty of breaking the law
against teaching evolution), it had clearly lost the war against modernism. In the 1950s, two playwrights
associated with The Ohio State University's Theatre Department wrote a play, Inherit the Wind, which despite
the authors' protestations that it not be considered as "history," became the major medium through which
Americans "remembered" the trial. The play, whose real target was the intolerance of the Red Scare-McCarthy
movement of the late 1940s and 1950s, emphasized the victory of reason and modernism over fundamentalism
and religion; at least three film adaptations have continued that view of the story. In 1963, historian Richard
Hofstadter proclaimed, in an even more emphatic way than had Allen, that the trial represented the "last gasp"
of rural America in its quest to define American values. Even the courts employed the legend of the Scopes case
in written decisions.
At the end of the century, however, two historians, Edward J. Larson and Paul K. Conkin, placed the
controversies into broader and more conceptually-sound contexts and corrected some misunderstandings about
the 1925 trial. From them, we know that the various positions of the combatants in Dayton in 1925 were more
complex than the legend proclaimed (particularly in the positions of William J. Bryan, the purported defender of
Fundamentalism) and that, contrary to a last gasp, the trial encouraged Fundamentalists to try other avenues
through which to promote their points of view. A flurry of activity occurred in the 1960s, with Tennessee
rescinding its law, but with other states adding restrictions on the teaching of evolution. The U.S. Supreme
Court struck down Arkansas' law. In several states during the 1990s, Fundamentalists have taken two tacts in
the war: They have opened more private, religious-based schools and have lobbied to force biology teachers to
include "creation science" in the curriculum. Given these legacies, surely Scopes is in fact the trial of the
century.
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