Glenn Branch on the Scopes Trial in Books

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/11/07

Glenn Branch is the deputy director of the National Center for Science Education. He is a prominent critic of creationism and intelligent design and an activist against campaigns of suppressing teaching of evolution and climate change in school education. He is also a fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. The Scopes trial, though historically overblown and specific to its era, remains emblematic of the creationism versus evolution debate, influencing later legal and educational battles. Despite setbacks and evolving legal frameworks, including recent Supreme Court decisions, there is hope for evolution education’s improvement, driven by secularization and enhanced state science standards.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Reporters and scientists continue to come back to the Scopes trial. Why is this particular trial so pivotal? 

Glenn Branch: The historical significance of the Scopes trial is complex. On the one hand, it would be wrong to take it as the creationism/evolution controversy in a nutshell. It was artificial, overblown, and not decisive; a lot of its features are peculiar to its historical context (constitutional law, for example, has developed significantly since the 1920s); and many people only know it through Inherit the Wind – which was not a documentary.

On the other hand, the Scopes trial is, for better or for worse, emblematic of the creationism/evolution controversy. It showcased the enduring themes of creationist rhetoric. And it provided a template through which many continue to understand the creationism/evolution controversy. When Tennessee adopted an antievolution bill in 2012, it was with the Scopes trial in mind that a former legislator dubbed it “the monkey bill.”

Jacobsen: What does Keeping the Faith by Brenda Wineapple bring to the table for the Scopes trial?

Branch: Well, Keeping the Faith is the most recent full-length treatment of the Scopes trial. The author of a number of highly regarded biographies of American literary figures, Wineapple knows how to tell a compelling story. Of course, 99 years after the trial, you wouldn’t expect any new discoveries, and there wasn’t anything surprising in the book’s narrative; it was a little disappointing that Wineapple didn’t bring any new historical insight to her project, but it’s certainly well worth reading, especially for people with only a nodding acquaintance with the trial.

Jacobsen: How do authors like Wineapple portray Darrow, Bryan, and Mencken, in the Scopes trial? My first introduction to the trial was through H.L. Mencken, who was hilarious. 

Branch: There’s a lot of variance, I think, but one fairly common tactic, which Wineapple among others in effect adopts, is to put Bryan and Mencken at opposing poles, leaving Darrow to be the voice of moderation, the voice of reason. That’s also the approach of Inherit the Wind, both the play and the Hollywood movie, where Matthew Harrison Brady is Bryan, E. L. Hornbeck is Mencken, and Henry Drummond is Darrow. Brady is a monster of intolerance and bigotry (although he has a moment, defending the ingénue Rachel against her father), while Hornbeck is flippant and cruel, especially toward and about faith; whereas Drummond, at the end of the play, thoughtfully hefts a copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and a Bible, and slips them together both into his briefcase. A writer of non-fiction can’t take such liberties, but you still see a tendency to take this line, although Darrow was clearly closer to Mencken on the Bryan-to-Mencken axis than the midpoint. I should say, though, that even though he helped to shape the historical memory of the trial, Mencken wasn’t tremendously important for the trial as such — obviously he wasn’t involved in the trial, and while he certainly offered hilarious dispatches from Dayton, as you say, he actually left town before the end of the trial, so he missed the spectacle of Darrow putting Bryan on the stand. We should also bear in mind that there were a lot of other players, including Dudley Field Malone, one of Scopes’s attorneys who gave what both Bryan and Mencken regarded as the most stirring speech of the whole trial. Malone, by the way, eventually left the law for Hollywood, where he had a minor career as an actor, including playing Churchill in Mission to Moscow.

Jacobsen: How are Prohibition, the KKK, and eugenics, to which Wineapple devotes substantial attention, part of this narrative too?

Branch: The period after World War I was busy, with a lot of schemes for social betterment burgeoning in the wake of the global conflict — even schemes that were poorly thought out or even vicious. Prohibition, which was intended to solve social problems like alcoholism, family violence, and political corruption, went into effect in 1920. The white supremacist terrorists known as the Ku Klux Klan revived around 1915, and aimed at purifying the country for the benefit of native-born white Protestants, to the exclusion of blacks, Catholics, and Jews. The eugenics movement had been around for a while, but it was certainly enjoying influence in the 1920s: the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned immigration from Asia and set quotas on immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, was sponsored by a member of Congress named Albert Johnson, who was president of the Eugenics Research Association at the time. Also among such schemes was the post-war expansion of public education, which led to children across the country being exposed to more than just the traditional readin’, ritin’, and ’rithmetic — even, as in Dayton, Tennessee, to evolution. So anybody who was in, or who was commenting on, public life would tend to have views about these schemes and the connections among them, even if they weren’t actively involved in promoting or resisting them.

Jacobsen: And where did our trio of Darrow, Bryan, and Mencken stand on these issues?

Branch: Prohibition is easy: Bryan was a major booster of Prohibition. An editorial published in a Chicago newspaper not that long before the Scopes trial joked, “Mr. Bryan, being frequently intoxicated by his own ideas, has no use for wine. It is immoral to deny that the world was made in six days and it is immoral for grapes to ferment. He is pained because he has not got the six day opinion written into the constitution of the United States, but he is glad that he has the grape opinion written there.” (That editorial was alluding to a report that Bryan was interested in a constitutional amendment to ban the teaching of evolution; whether or not that was an accurate report, no such amendment was ever introduced.) In contrast, Darrow and Mencken despised Prohibition — Mencken opposed it on principle and also because, as he said, “I am omnibibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink, and I enjoy them all.”

Darrow and Mencken also despised the Klan, although their attitudes on race differed a bit. In between the Scopes trial and the appeal of the Scopes trial, Darrow spent his time defending Ossian Sweet, an African American physician in Detroit who had moved into a traditionally white neighborhood, defended himself against a hostile white mob, and was tried for murder; Darrow helped in his defense, which ended with a hung jury and a mistrial. Mencken indulged in casual racism both in his published writings and in his correspondence, but he also encouraged the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and one of his last publications castigated a local authority for segregating its tennis facilities — he was a complicated guy. Bryan was a racist, but a paternalistic rather than a vicious one, unlike some of his southern colleagues in the Democratic party of the time; his last political success was convincing the Democratic National Convention in 1924 not to adopt a plank condemning the Klan by name.

As for eugenics, shortly after the trial, Darrow published a hostile essay entitled “The Eugenics Cult” in The American Mercury, of which Mencken was the editor. Mencken wasn’t any friendlier to the eugenics movement, although that may have been owing to his general opposition to organized efforts for what he called “uplift”; otherwise, he regarded himself as a follower of Nietzsche, and had a lot of time for “weak-to-the-wall” slogans. Bryan, who was a champion of the common man — as long as he was pious, rural, and white — was very much opposed to “weak-to-the-wall” attitudes; part of his opposition to evolution was based, in fact, on his view that Darwin’s Descent of Man espoused such attitudes. But he never seems to have complained about the contemporary eugenics movement, and his wife, Mary Baird Bryan, was a supporter of at least one major eugenics organization of the day.

Jacobsen: A common view is religion and science at combat for the Scopes trial. Although a part of it, what is a more accurate, potentially non-adversarial, perspective?

Branch: Perhaps surprisingly, none of the participants in the Scopes trial really regarded it as a combat between religion and science. Bryan, who really led the 1920s crusade for antievolution legislation, thought that it was a combat between religion — well, between Christianity, not to put too fine a point on it — and atheism. His attitude toward evolution wavered a bit — at times, he seemed to suggest that he’d be fine with evolution except for human evolution, and you’ll note that the Butler Act, under which Scopes was prosecuted, banned the teaching of human evolution specifically; at other times, he seemed to suggest that evolution was all bunk — but what he clearly opposed was what he regarded as attempts to undermine the foundations of Christianity, society, morality. It’s for that reason that he felt the need to impugn the scientific bona fides of evolution. But he was unsuccessful in recruiting people with scientific credentials as expert witnesses in the Scopes trial, and partly for that reason the prosecution team chose a legal strategy that wouldn’t have benefited from expert witnesses, instead simply arguing that Scopes had broken the law, end of story.

On the defense side, Darrow might have come closest to regarding it as a combat between religion and science, although his agnosticism means that he was less concerned about religion writ large and more concerned with dogmatic religion. One member of the team, Dudley Field Malone, was religious, a liberal Catholic. Arthur Garfield Hays was of Jewish descent but not particularly observant; I don’t know about the erratic and slovenly John Randolph Neal Jr., which of itself suggests that he wasn’t particularly religious. But the defense team strategy was in general to argue that the Butler Act falsely assumed that science and religion were in conflict. In the same vein, they picked expert witnesses not only for their scientific credentials but also for their expressions of faith. As it turns out, the judge held that the testimony of the expert witnesses was irrelevant — their testimony was read into the record for the purposes of appeal, but it wasn’t heard by the jury — and that the prosecution’s legal theory, that the only relevant issue was whether Scopes had taught human evolution, thus violating the law, was correct.

It’s a mistake, I think, to regard the Scopes trial as a manifestation of some eternal struggle between two monolithic capitalized entities called Science and Religion. Rather, it was a local, context-dependent, contingent struggle between a particular religious outlook and a particular area of science, all influenced by social and cultural factors and values in play in that particular place and at that particular time. Like the Facebook status says, it’s complicated.

Jacobsen: How did race, gender, and regional differences affect the public’s perception of the trial?

Branch:  The Scopes trial divided the African American community. Devout African Americans declared their fidelity to the Bible, and even to fundamentalism, although the presence of established denominations and the absence of modernist theology hindered the spread of organized fundamentalism in the African American community. African American intelligentsia such as the great sociologist W. E. B. DuBois, however, took the side of evolution, regarding it as representing progress, both in general and for their race. They did so even though scientific racism was alive and well in 1925; in part because they saw that scientific racism was on the wane, and in part because they were convinced that antievolutionism in the South was driven by a fear of evolution’s implications with regard to race.

As for gender, traditionally, women were responsible for the education, especially in faith and morals, of their children. Thus it was common for antievolutionists of the Scopes era to appeal to motherhood: John Washington Butler, who introduced the law under which Scopes was prosecuted, explained his motivation by saying, “As a little boy I was taught by my mother to believe in the Bible.” And women, at least in Tennessee, were eager for the public schools to become (or to continue to be) involved in teaching faith and morals. Yet women were not leaders in the antievolutionist movement, in part, because it was driven by a self-consciously combative, intellectualized, masculine form of Christianity: female antievolutionist crusaders like Aimee Semple McPherson were, and are, unusual.

Region is quite interesting. It’s not usually realized that fundamentalism was initially a Northern and urban phenomenon: a reaction to modernizing tendencies in religion that were initially influential only in the urban North. If there’s one person that I’d credit — or blame — as launching the antievolutionist movement in the 1920s, it would be William Bell Riley, who was a Baptist pastor in Minneapolis; it was his World Christian Fundamentals Association that recruited William Jennings Bryan for the Scopes trial. John Roach Straton, a pastor in New York City, was also influential. But fundamentalism was adapted to flourish in the South. In Fort Worth, Texas, the pistol-packing pastor J. Frank Norris, who memorably denounced “that hell-born, Bible-destroying, deity-of-Christ-denying, German rationalism known as evolution,” was as responsible as anyone for bringing antievolutionism south. And today the South enjoys a reputation as particularly hostile to evolution, even though the Midwest is probably on a par.

Anyone who’s interested in these aspects of the trial should read Jeffrey Moran’s American Genesis, published in 2012, which has a good discussion.

Jacobsen: What religious views were responsible for the Scopes trial?

Branch: That turns out to be a remarkably complex question! If you wanted to give a one-word answer, it might be “fundamentalism,” and you can certainly find respectable historians who study the trial who would agree. But in his American Apocalypse, published in 2014, Matthew Avery Sutton emphasizes that “evolution had not been a significant factor in the rise of the fundamentalist movement, nor had fundamentalism been at the base of Bryan’s crusade, nor were fundamentalists the only Americans uncomfortable with Darwin’s theories.” All three of those points are generally right, I think, so I’ll expand on them just a bit.

First, fundamentalism is often said to begin with the publication of The Fundamentals, a series of pamphlets published between 1910 and 1915 that addressed various issues from what we would now describe as a fundamentalist perspective. Evolution was not a major concern of these pamphlets, and the attitudes toward evolution that were visible were not especially hostile — dismissive or skeptical, perhaps, but not hostile. Second, Bryan, although a devout Presbyterian and someone eager to help steer the church — he ran for the position of Moderator of the General Assembly — wasn’t really involved with the fundamentalist movement until the 1920s, and his theological approach for much of his career was more similar to the so-called social gospel movement, which aimed to apply Christian ethics to social problems: Prohibition was one of the results, and Bryan was a keen Prohibitionist. Third, perhaps less impressive, Sutton is right that fundamentalists weren’t, and aren’t, the only Americans leery of evolution — but, on the other hand, they seem more inclined to try to enshrine their leeriness into public policy!

In any event, despite its potential to mislead, “fundamentalism” might be the best one-word answer you can give.

Jacobsen: Scopes was convicted, but although his conviction was overturned on appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, the Butler Act remained on the books. What became of it and of the other Scopes-era bans on teaching evolution?

Branch: The Tennessee legislature repealed the Butler Act in 1967, in part because of the publicity about it due to the Hollywood movie version of the play Inherit the Wind and in part because there were credible lawsuits being filed against its enforcement. Only two other states then had evolution statutes: Arkansas and Mississippi. The Arkansas law was challenged in a lawsuit that wound up with the Supreme Court in 1968, which ruled, in Epperson v. Arkansas, that the law violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Mississippi law was similarly struck down by the Mississippi Supreme Court in 1970.

Jacobsen: But that wasn’t the end of efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution, was it?

Branch: By no means! The strategy in the second wave of legislation, from the 1970s to the 2000s, was to balance the teaching of evolution with a supposed alternative: “biblical creationism,” “creation science,” or “intelligent design.” But these proposals, when adopted, were routinely — and successfully — challenged as unconstitutional in the federal courts: a statute in Tennessee requiring equal time for biblical creationism in textbooks in Daniel v. Waters (1975); statutes in Arkansas and Louisiana requiring equal time for creation science in classrooms in McLean v. Arkansas (1982) and Edwards v. Aguillard (1987); and a Pennsylvania school district policy requiring the teaching of intelligent design in Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005). In each case, the court held that the supposed alternative to evolution was, at the bottom, religious, so a public school’s presentation of the supposed alternative as scientifically credible would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Jacobsen: But even the Kitzmiller trial didn’t put an end to it.

Branch: Alas, it didn’t. It was already clear to the proponents of intelligent design that despite their hopes their ideas weren’t going to survive constitutional scrutiny. As a result, a third wave of legislation emerged circa 2004, seeking to blunt the teaching of evolution. Without mentioning any supposed alternatives to evolution, such proposals typically allow (rather than require) public school teachers to present “the strengths and weaknesses” of supposedly controversial scientific topics, with evolution often the sole example adduced of such a topic. About eighty such bills have been introduced in state legislatures since 2004, with three enacted: in Mississippi in 2006, Louisiana in 2008, and Tennessee in 2012. These laws have not been challenged as unconstitutional in court in part because they are permissive: in the absence of egregious conduct on the part of a teacher, it would be difficult to demonstrate the harm caused by such a law to a prospective plaintiff. By the same token, however, it is unclear to what extent teachers in these states avail themselves of the license that the laws afford them to miseducate their students about evolution.

Jacobsen: What does the survey data tell us about evolution education at a national level — based on surveys from 1939-1940, 2007, and 2019?

Branch: The first of these surveys found that 53.7 percent of high school biology teachers reported that evolution was taught either as a fact or as a “principle underlying plant, animal and human origin.” The second found that 51 percent of high school biology teachers reported emphasizing that evolution was a fact while not giving any credence to creationism. Now, these surveys aren’t exactly comparable: there was probably a selection bias and a response bias in the earlier survey, resulting in a rosier picture for evolution education, and the questions are obviously different. Still, these results suggest a lack of progress over 67 years.

Matters are quite different when we compare the results of the 2007 survey with those of the 2019 replication, however. In that short 12 years, there was a considerable improvement, since the latter survey found 67 percent — up from 51 percent — of high school biology teachers reporting that evolution was a fact while not giving any credence to creationism. The improvement was in part to increasing exposure to evolution on the part of pre-service teachers and in part to increasing emphasis on evolution in state science standards, especially the Next Generation Science Standards, a model set of standards developed by 26 states and a consortium of various non-profit organizations, released in 2013, and adopted by 20 states plus the District of Columbia.

Jacobsen: So are we out of the woods, as far as evolution education is concerned?

Branch: Unfortunately, no. Of particular concern is the currently revanchist Supreme Court. In its decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), the court discarded what had been the settled tests for whether a government action violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution — the Lemon test and the related endorsement test — which were the foundation for the successful litigation against the antievolution legislation in the second wave. It is unclear whether such cases would be decided differently without those tests. But creationists are alive to the possibility. In 2021, Mary Bentley, a state representative in Arkansas, introduced a bill that would allow the state’s public school educators to “teach creationism as a theory of how the earth came to exist” — which it isn’t, but whatever. On the floor of the legislature, she was reminded by a colleague about the case law establishing the unconstitutionality of her proposal, and replied by “noting that the high court’s makeup has changed since then.” 

Jacobsen: But is there reason to hope?

Branch: Fortunately, yes! Despite the occasional outbreak of explicit attacks and a background level of implicit hostility across the country, creationist attacks on evolution education are on the wane, owing to the accelerating secularization of the United States and, perhaps, to the efforts of people of faith to reconcile their communities to evolution. Part of the reason that it’s been so easy historically to launch such attacks, of course, is that the U.S. educational system is so decentralized, with about 13,500 local school districts calling the shots with respect to curriculum. But despite the continuing decentralization of the American educational system, there are centripetal forces at work. State science standards have been increasing uniformity, as well as quality, in teacher preparation and professional development, textbooks, and curricula, with the availability of free, vetted, and standards-aligned curricula a recent phenomenon contributing as well. Perhaps in the future all American students will be in a position to appreciate that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Jacobsen: What are your thoughts on the positive and negative aspects of K-12 education, particularly in situations where some students in certain school districts attend a more evolution-oriented biology class while others do not, based on the preferences of their parents? How might this affect those students after they graduate from K-12? How might this impact them during their K-12 education if they receive a less comprehensive understanding of the objective reality of evolution?

Branch: Well, there are numerous inequities in the U.S. educational system, many of which stem from local control, where most schools are funded by local property taxes and governed by locally elected school boards. This means that even within a single state, one student might be learning evolution from a prepared teacher willing to teach it effectively, while another may not. The system of local control extends even to individual schools and classrooms. Thus, a student in one classroom might receive a quality education in evolution while another student does not. There are anecdotes suggesting that, in some schools, students are informally placed into different classrooms based on what teachers anticipate their family’s reaction to learning about evolution.

This is unfair to students deprived of a complete understanding of a central concept in biology. It can also have long-term consequences if these students pursue higher education in fields where the study of evolution is essential or in careers in fields like medicine and agriculture, where knowledge of evolution is economically important. 

Jacobsen: I’m curious: What do we know about the 13,500 school districts? Have any representative surveys been conducted? 

Branch: In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were a few surveys of school board members and their views on evolution education. Additionally, there may have been some studies of administrators from that period, but there has been little since then, so more work needs to be done.

In 2007, two political scientists from Penn State, Eric Plutzer and Michael Berkman, conducted only the second national survey of high school biology teachers regarding their thoughts on and teaching evolution. In 2019, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) and Eric Plutzer replicated that survey and found substantial improvements. The NCSE, where I am the deputy director, promotes accurate and effective science education, particularly teaching evolution and climate change.

Jacobsen: If you were to conduct a new survey today, several decades later, covering the full 13,500 school districts, which factors would be the most critical to target for gaining insight into how these districts handle evolution and biology education?

Branch: That’s an interesting question. One important area would be to inquire about explicit formal policies. While school districts often have policy manuals, they tend to be generic or only slightly modified from boilerplate; but sometimes they have adopted formal policies aimed at undermining the teaching of evolution in one way or another What might be more revealing—but harder to uncover—would be informal policies, such as the extent to which students are informally tracked into evolution-friendly or evolution-unfriendly biology classes, as I mentioned earlier.

It could be challenging to ask administrators or board members about this, as they might be unwilling to report accurately if they believe a truthful answer could reflect poorly on them. Thoughtful consideration is needed to design questions that yield reliable information without triggering too much concern from respondents.

Jacobsen: Who is most important for a public education and critical thinking organization to engage with administrators, high school teachers, or local school board members?

Branch: Well, local school board members, who are locally elected, are crucial, but  in general, their main constituency is who they will listen to. We at NCSE have had friendly relations with several members of local and state school boards, but it’s not something we can always count on. Rather, we are more likely to assist local citizens by giving them talking points, suggestions, or strategies to approach local school board members, administrators, or teachers if they face challenges to evolution education in their schools. Teachers and administrators are responsive to certain types of claims they’re familiar with. For example, teachers and administrators can be reminded to check their local district’s policies if they need to follow them, or they can be directed to state science standards, which are documents specifying the skills and knowledge students are expected to gain through science education.

State science standards can be especially useful if a parent comes in and says, “Why are you teaching my kid evolution? I don’t like it. Stop”? Standards that contain evolution allow teachers to say, “Evolution is part of the state’s science standards. The state expects your child to learn about evolution, and that’s what I’m doing—just my job.”

Jacobsen: What do you find to be the most meaningful part of your job?

Branch: One thing I enjoy about my job is doing various tasks daily, so I stay energized. However, one of the most rewarding aspects is helping people navigate the intricacies of their local education system to resolve conflicts over the teaching of evolution. Most people don’t want to be publicly associated with lawsuits; they just want the issue to disappear. So, it’s a win for science education whenever NCSE can help them resolve the situation quietly. That’s one of the most gratifying parts of the job.

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Glenn. 

Branch: My pleasure, Scott!

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