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Column: 99 years after the Scopes 'monkey trial,' religious fundamentalism still infects our schools
Almost a century has passed since a Tennessee schoolteacher was found guilty of teaching evolution to his students. We’ve come a long way since that happened on July 21, 1925. Haven’t we?
No, not really.
The Christian fundamentalism that begat the state law that John Scopes violated has not gone away. It regularly resurfaces in American politics, including today, when efforts to ban or dilute the teaching of evolution and other scientific concepts are part and parcel of a nationwide book-banning campaign, augmented by an effort to whitewash the teaching of American history.
I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always hampered it—religious fanaticism.
— Clarence Darrow, on why he took on the defense of John Scopes at the ‘monkey trial’
The trial in Dayton, Tenn., that supposedly placed evolution in the dock is seen as a touchstone of the recurrent battle between science and revelation. It is and it isn’t. But the battle is very real.
Let’s take a look.
The Scopes trial was one of the first, if not the very first, to be dubbed “the trial of the century.”
And why not? It pitted the fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan — three-time Democratic presidential candidate, former congressman and secretary of State, once labeled “the great commoner” for his faith in the judgment of ordinary people, but at 65 showing the effects of age — against Clarence Darrow, the most storied defense counsel of his time.
The case has retained its hold on the popular imagination chiefly thanks to “Inherit the Wind,” an inescapably dramatic reconstruction — actually a caricature — of the trial that premiered in 1955, when the play was written as a hooded critique of McCarthyism.
Most people probably know it from the 1960 film version, which starred Frederic March, Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelly as the characters meant to portray Bryan, Darrow and H.L. Mencken, the acerbic Baltimore newspaperman whose coverage of the trial is a genuine landmark of American journalism.
What all this means is that the actual case has become encrusted by myth over the ensuing decades.
One persistent myth is that the anti-evolution law and the trial arose from a focused groundswell of religious fanaticism in Tennessee. In fact, they could be said to have occurred — to repurpose a phrase usually employed to describe how Britain acquired her empire — in “a fit of absence of mind.”
The Legislature passed the measure idly as a meaningless gift to its drafter, John W. Butler, a lay preacher who hadn’t passed any other bill. (The bill “did not amount to a row of pins; let him have it,” a legislator commented, according to Ray Ginger’s definitive 1958 book about the case, “Six Days or Forever?”)
No one bothered to organize an opposition. There was no legislative debate. The lawmakers assumed that Gov. Austin Peay would simply veto the bill. The president of the University of Tennessee disdained it, but kept mum because he didn’t want the issue to complicate a plan for university funding then before the Legislature.
Peay signed the bill, asserting that it was an innocuous law that wouldn’t interfere with anything being taught in the state’s schools. The law “probably … will never be applied,” he said. Bryan, who approved of the law as a symbolic statement of religious principle, had advised legislators to leave out any penalty for violation, lest it be declared unconstitutional.
The lawmakers, however, made it a misdemeanor punishable by a fine for any teacher in the public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animal.”
Scopes’ arrest and trial proceeded in similarly desultory manner. Scopes, a school football coach and science teacher filling in for an ailing biology teacher, assigned the students to read a textbook that included evolution. He wasn’t a local and didn’t intend to set down roots in Dayton, but his parents were socialists and agnostics, so when a local group sought to bring a test case, he agreed to be the defendant.
The play and movie of “Inherit the Wind” portray the townspeople as religious fanatics, except for a couple of courageous individuals. In fact, they were models of tolerance. Even Mencken, who came to Dayton expecting to find a squalid backwater, instead discovered “a country town full of charm and even beauty.”
Dayton’s civic boosters paid little attention to the profound issues ostensibly at play in the courthouse; they saw the trial as a sort of economic development project, a tool for attracting new residents and businesses to compete with the big city nearby, Chattanooga. They couldn’t have been happier when Bryan signed on as the chief prosecutor and a local group solicited Darrow for the defense.
“I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always hampered it — religious fanaticism,” Darrow wrote in his autobiography. “My only object was to focus the attention of the country on the programme of Mr. Bryan and the other fundamentalists in America.” He wasn’t blind to how the case was being presented in the press: “As a farce instead of a tragedy.” But he judged the press publicity to be priceless.
The press and and the local establishment had diametrically opposed visions of what the trial was about. The former saw it as a fight to protect from rubes the theory of evolution, specifically that humans descended from lower orders of primate, hence the enduring nickname of the “monkey trial.” For the judge and jury, it was about a defendant’s violation of a law written in plain English.
The trial’s elevated position in American culture derives from two sources: Mencken’s coverage for the Baltimore Sun, and “Inherit the Wind.” Notwithstanding his praise for Dayton’s “charm,” Mencken scorned its residents as “yokels,” “morons” and “ignoramuses,” trapped by their “simian imbecility” into swallowing Bryan’s “theologic bilge.”
The play and movie turned a couple of courtroom exchanges into moments of high drama, notably Darrow’s calling Bryan to the witness stand to testify to the truth of the Bible, and Bryan’s humiliation at his hands.
In truth, that exchange was a late-innings sideshow of no significance to the case. Scopes was plainly guilty of violating the law and his conviction preordained. But it was overturned on a technicality (the judge had fined him $100, more than was authorized by state law), leaving nothing for the pro-evolution camp to bring to an appellate court. The whole thing fizzled away.
The idea that despite Scopes’ conviction, the trial was a defeat for fundamentalism, lived on. Scopes was one of its adherents. “I believe that the Dayton trial marked the beginning of the decline of fundamentalism,” he said in a 1965 interview. “I feel that restrictive legislation on academic freedom is forever a thing of the past, … that the Dayton trial had some part in bringing to birth this new era.”
That was untrue then, or now. When the late biologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould quoted that interview in a 1981 essay, fundamentalist politics were again on the rise. Gould observed that Jerry Falwell had taken up the mountebank’s mission of William Jennings Bryan.
It was harder then to exclude evolution from the class curriculum entirely, Gould wrote, but its enemies had turned to demanding “‘equal time’ for evolution and for old-time religion masquerading under the self-contradictory title of ‘scientific creationism.’”
For the evangelical right, Gould noted, “creationism is a mere stalking horse … in a political program that would ban abortion, erase the political and social gains of women … and reinstitute all the jingoism and distrust of learning that prepares a nation for demagoguery.”
And here we are again. Measures banning the teaching of evolution outright have not lately been passed or introduced at the state level. But those that advocate teaching the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific hypotheses are common — language that seems innocuous, but that educators know opens the door to undermining pupils’ understanding of science.
In some red states, legislators have tried to bootstrap regulations aimed at narrowing scientific teaching onto laws suppressing discussions of race and gender in the classrooms and stripping books touching those topics from school libraries and public libraries.
The most ringing rejection of creationism as a public school topic was sounded in 2005 by a federal judge in Pennsylvania, who ruled that “intelligent design” — creationism by another name — “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents” and therefore is unconstitutional as a topic in public schools. Yet only last year, a bill to allow “intelligent design” to be taught in the state’s public schools was overwhelmingly passed by the state Senate. (It died in a House committee.)
Oklahoma’s reactionary state superintendent of education, Ryan Walters, recently mandated that the Bible should be taught in all K-12 schools, and that a physical copy be present in every classroom, along with the Ten Commandments, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. “These documents are mandatory for the holistic education of students in Oklahoma,” he ordered.
It’s clear that these sorts of policies are broadly unpopular across much of the nation: In last year’s state and local elections, ibook-banners and other candidates preaching a distorted vision of “parents’ rights” to undermine educational standards were soundly defeated.
That doesn’t seem to matter to the culture warriors who have expanded their attacks on race and gender teaching to science itself. They’re playing a long game. They conceal their intentions with vague language in laws that force teachers to question whether something they say in class will bring prosecutors to the schoolhouse door.
Gould detected the subtext of these campaigns. So did Mencken, who had Bryan’s number. Crushed by his losses in three presidential campaigns in 1896, 1900 and 1908, Mencken wrote, Bryan had launched a new campaign of cheap religiosity.
“This old buzzard,” Mencken wrote, “having failed to raise the mob against its rulers, now prepares to raise it against its teachers.” Bryan understood instinctively that the way to turn American society from a democracy to a theocracy was to start by destroying its schools. His heirs, right up to the present day, know it too.
After weeks of testing, NASA and Boeing officials said Thursday they have identified problems with the Starliner’s propulsion system that have kept two astronauts at the International Space Station for seven weeks — but they didn’t set a date to return them to Earth.
Ground testing conducted on thrusters that maneuver Boeing’s capsule in space found that Teflon used to control the flow of rocket propellant eroded under high heat conditions, while different seals that control helium gas showed bulging, they said.
The testing was conducted after the thrusters malfunctioned when Starliner docked with the space station on June 6 and a helium leak that was detected before launch worsened on the trip to the station. The helium pressurizes the propulsion system.
However, officials said the problems should not prevent astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore from returning to Earth aboard the Starliner capsule, which lifted off on its maiden human test flight June 5 for what was supposed to be an eight-day mission.
“I am very confident we have a good vehicle to bring the crew back with,” Mark Nappi, program manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, said at a news conference.
NASA and Boeing officials have said previously that the Starliner could transport the astronauts to Earth if there were an emergency aboard the space station, but they opted to conduct the ground tests to ensure a safe, planned return.
Decisions on whether and when to use Starliner or another vehicle will be made by NASA leaders after they are presented next week with all the information collected from the testing, which will include a “hot fire” test of the engines of the Starliner docked at the space station, Nappi said.
Rigorous ground testing conducted at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility on a thruster identical to the ones on the Starliner found that, despite the issues with Teflon degradation, the thruster was able to perform the maneuvers that would be needed to return Starliner to Earth, said Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
Official also have said that the Starliner still has about 10 times more helium than is needed to bring the capsule back to Earth.
The problems that have cropped up have been an embarrassment for Boeing, which along with SpaceX was given a multibillion-dollar contract in 2014 to service the station with crew and cargo flights after the end of the space shuttle program. Since then, Elon Musk’s Hawthorne-based company has sent more than a half-dozen crews up, while Boeing is still in its testing phase — with the current flight delayed for weeks by the helium leak and other issues that arose even before the thrusters malfunctioned.
Should NASA make a decision not to bring the crew home on the Starliner — which could still return to Earth remotely — the astronauts could be retrieved by SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, though SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket is currently grounded after a failure this month.
The Russian Soyuz spacecraft also services the station and carries American astronauts.
Video game performers are going on strike for the second time in a decade.
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director and chief negotiator of performers union SAG-AFTRA, called a strike Thursday on behalf of thousands of video game actors covered by the Interactive Media Agreement. The strike takes effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday.
The announcement came days after the national board of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists granted Crabtree-Ireland the authority to initiate a walkout and nearly a year after union members voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike.
On Saturday, SAG-AFTRA warned that a work stoppage was imminent if the union and the video game producers could not iron out contract terms related to artificial intelligence.
“We’re not going to consent to a contract that allows companies to abuse A.I. to the detriment of our members. Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said in a statement.
The Interactive Media Agreement — a contract covering roughly 2,600 performers who do voice-over and motion-capture work in the video game industry — expired in November 2022.
“We are disappointed the union has chosen to walk away when we are so close to a deal, and we remain prepared to resume negotiations,” Audrey Cooling, a spokesperson for the video game producers, said in a statement.
“We have already found common ground on 24 out of 25 proposals, including historic wage increases and additional safety provisions. Our offer is directly responsive to SAG-AFTRA’s concerns and extends meaningful AI protections that include requiring consent and fair compensation to all performers working under the IMA. These terms are among the strongest in the entertainment industry.”
Game actors are seeking a new deal that would require producers to obtain their consent before reproducing their voices or likenesses with AI. They also have demanded compensation when AI is used to replicate their performances, as well as wage increases, more rest time and set medics for hazardous jobs.
Performers in the video game industry say they are especially vulnerable to AI due to the invisible nature of voice-over work.
“Our resolve is unwavering and should not be tested,” Crabtree-Ireland said in a statement released Saturday.
“We are steadfast in our commitment to our membership who work this contract and whose extraordinary performances are the heart and soul of the world’s most popular video games. Time is running out for the companies to make a deal.”
Cooling replied that the companies were negotiating “in good faith” and pointed out that the two parties had “reached tentative agreements on the vast majority of the proposals.”
“Based on that progress, we remain optimistic that a deal is within reach,” she said.
Video game actors last went on strike in October 2016, before AI was a major concern.
Back then, performers were seeking residual-like payments based on the number of physical and digital game copies sold — similar to how film and TV actors are compensated for their work.
Both residuals and AI emerged as sticking points during last year’s strike by Hollywood actors. That walkout lasted 118 days and culminated in an agreement containing wage increases, AI protections and streaming bonuses, among other gains.
The California Supreme Court on Thursday upheld Proposition 22, the voter initiative that allows Uber, Lyft and other gig economy companies to classify drivers for their ride-hailing and delivery services as independent contractors rather than as employees.
In a unanimous decision released Thursday morning, the state’s top court rejected claims brought by a group of drivers and unions that the law is unconstitutional because it interferes with lawmakers’ authority over matters dealing with worker compensation.
The ruling, which was expected following a lopsided hearing in the case in May, marks the end of a years-long legal fight over Proposition 22, which essentially carved out a new classification for workers who are entitled to limited benefits but not the array of rights granted full-fledged employees.
Because the law has remained in effect throughout the legal process, the decision will not change how delivery and ride-hailing services operate in California. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and other gig companies had argued their business models depended on the law being upheld and threatened to shut down in California if it was struck down.
The decision has sweeping implications for the million-plus people who drive for various app-based companies in California. Some of these workers have raised concerns over low wages, minimal workplace protections and exploitative practices they say they face. The decision also is likely to have ripple effects on drivers across the U.S., as Uber has pushed for laws similar to Proposition 22 in other states .
The decision Thursday falls in line with comments made by justices in May when they heard oral arguments on the constitutionality of the law. Their line of questioning suggested they were not persuaded by the argument that Proposition 22 should be overturned because it interferes with the state Legislature’s authority to provide workers’ compensation protections to drivers.
Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and other companies poured upward of $200 million into a campaign to sway voters in favor of Proposition 22 in 2020. It passed with 59% of the vote and went into effect soon after.
Under the law, drivers are considered to be their own employers, a designation that frees the companies they drive for from having to provide the full slate benefits that traditional employees in the state are entitled to, such as overtime, sick leave and a minimum wage.
The Service Employees International Union and a group of drivers first brought the lawsuit challenging Proposition 22 in January 2021, just after the law went into effect. They unsuccessfully sought to take the case directly to the California Supreme Court and were left to pursue the case in a lower court.
Then, in a sweeping decision in August 2021, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch ruled that Proposition 22 was unconstitutional and unenforceable. The law failed to pass constitutional muster, Roesch wrote, because it infringed on the power of the Legislature, explicitly granted by the state Constitution, to regulate compensation for workers’ injuries. “If the people wish to use their initiative power to restrict or qualify a ‘plenary’ and ‘unlimited’ power granted to the Legislature, they must first do so by initiative constitutional amendment, not by initiative statute,” the judge wrote. In March 2023, a split three-judge panel from a state appeals court largely reversed that ruling, finding the law did not impede the Legislature’s authority and upholding the legality of the law’s provision classifying drivers as contractors. Supporters of the law celebrated the ruling as a “historic victory for the nearly 1.4 million drivers who rely on the independence and flexibility of app-based work to earn income, and for the integrity of California’s initiative system.”
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