Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

In this gripping and expansive reexamination of the Scopes Monkey Trial, a lightning-rod debate over what was allowed to be taught in public schools caps a decades-long run of divisiveness, which eroded Americans’ belief in the power of democracy. Historian Wineapple (The Impeachers) depicts the country’s contemporaneous obsession with the 1925 trial—in which a Tennessee school teacher fined for teaching the theory of evolution was defended by a fledgling ACLU—as a culmination of decades of upheaval, violence, and inequity, from the Civil War to WWI. Tracing the lives of the trial’s prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan, the “de facto voice” of Christian fundamentalism in the country by the 1920s, and its defense attorney, Clarence Darrow—a “lion of the bar” already famous for saving bomb-throwing anarchists and murderers from the electric chair—Wineapple shows how both men, over the course of tumultuous lives that mirror the travails of the country, had developed influential but incompatible notions of democracy. Wineapple’s elegant appraisal notably departs from depictions—popularized at the time, especially through the “acerbic” reporting of H.L. Mencken—of the fundamentalists’ side as purely buffoonish (a take actually more in line with Darrow’s own appraisal of the trial as a “tragedy”). With its obvious parallels to today’s battles over public education, and its depiction of a fractious, in-fighting Democratic Party, this historical investigation pulses with urgency. (Aug.)