Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

Edward J. Larson's history of the 1925 Scopes trial begins with a publicity stunt. Dayton, Tennessee was a struggling town, and local businessman George Rappleyea saw a chance to put it on the map by testing the state's new Butler Act, which banned the teaching of human evolution in public schools. He recruited John Scopes, a twenty four year old high school teacher who had only briefly substituted in the biology classroom and was not even certain he had taught the disputed chapter, to stand as the defendant the American Civil Liberties Union needed for a constitutional challenge.

The trial that followed drew two of the country's most famous lawyers to a small town courthouse. William Jennings Bryan, the three time presidential candidate and former secretary of state, joined the prosecution to defend the law against evolution, and Clarence Darrow led the defense. On the seventh day, Darrow called Bryan himself to the witness stand and spent nearly two hours questioning him about how literally the Bible should be read, pressing him on Eve's creation from Adam's rib, where Cain found his wife, and how a worldwide population could have descended from so few people. Judge Raulston struck the exchange from the record as irrelevant, and the jury took nine minutes to convict Scopes, who was fined one hundred dollars, a fine the Tennessee Supreme Court later voided on a technicality, since state law required a jury, not a judge, to set any fine above fifty dollars.

Larson builds the case that the popular memory of the trial, shaped decades later by the play and film Inherit the Wind, misremembers what actually happened in that courtroom. He argues the trial was not a clean victory of scientific reason over religious ignorance but an opening skirmish in a longer American argument over how a democratic majority and an individual conscience should divide authority over what children are taught. Reading the book means encountering the real Dayton courtroom, procedural detail and all, in place of the more dramatic version most readers already carry in their heads, and it suits anyone who assumed they already knew how the Scopes trial came out.