LAWRENCE — Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Larson is convinced building blocks of the Scopes trial — a showdown between human evolutionary biologists and fundamentalists beholden to creationism — remains relevant as activists work to build national political movements long after dust settled in Dayton, Tennessee.
The highly publicized battle in the summer of 1925 between defense attorney Clarence Darrow and prosecutor William Jennings Bryan at the trial of high school teacher John Scopes was an international spectacle. Darrow worked on behalf of the forces of scientific inquiry and champions of the separation of church and state, while Bryan stood with Bible-thumping Christian creationists defending a Tennessee law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools.
LARSON, who earned the Pulitzer Prize in history for “Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion,” said Tuesday at University of Kansas the 100-year-old drama addressed broad cultural, religious and legal issues of the post-World War I and pre-Depression era.
Larson said the rhetorical style favored by Darrow and honed by Bryan had periodically resurfaced in American politics as folks sought to capture the public’s imagination about the risk of teaching human evolution in classrooms. It’s been a factor in debates about other issues blending politics, law, science and faith, including gay marriage, climate change and cloning, he said.
Moving forward, Larson said, old-fashioned strategy rooted in populism was being used to undermine public health ideas of mass vaccination tamping down disease threats. Robert Kennedy Jr., the antivaccination activist turned secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has challenged effectiveness of vaccines at a moment when the threat of measles escalated.
“Most people I’m talking to agree it’s not evolution right now. They tend to say it’s the anti-vaccine,” he said. “Another one that could come back is gay marriage. Some states are beginning to play with laws and to test the Supreme Court on that one.”
DESPITE POLITICAL maneuvering in a few states, Larson said, the fight over evolution lost some of its luster. In Louisiana and Tennessee, lawmakers sought to skirt constitutional boundaries set by the U.S. Supreme Court to advance legislation promoting religion. The creationist mantra is shrouded in statute urging critical analysis of all sorts of theories, including evolution.
“The 2008 Louisiana law expressly allows local school boards to promote critical thinking. Not only about evolution and the origins of life, but also global warming and human cloning,” he said. “The 2012 Tennessee act goes further by protecting and encouraging critical studies of such controversial scientific theories as evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”
Larson, who spoke 25 years ago in Lawrence on the Scopes trial, said a common question was why a small, rural community in southern Tennessee became the focal point of tension between religious fundamentalism and scientific theories regarding evolution.
IN PART, he said, the courthouse trial was a publicity stunt by locals to generate attention for Dayton.
He said the forum also placed on a legal scale literal interpretations of creationism found in the Bible and fossil evidence discovered by scientists that pointed to evolution of the species. The messaging was so alluring the trial was the first in the United States to be broadcast on national radio.
“The answer was, because this was every town,” he said. “Such actions generate legislation and lawsuits precisely because religion matters in America. Public opinion surveys invariably find that most Americans believe in God. It troubles many Americans that science does not affirm their faith and outrages some when their children’s coursework seems to deny their religious beliefs.”
He said people who embraced diversity often sought middle ground on controversial topics when possible, but the modern era dominated by social media demonstrated people continued to instinctively respond to stirring oratory.
People will be drawn to the likes of Bryan and Darrow when they persuasively delve into prominent issues of the times, he said.
“They tapped into a cultural device that deeply troubles our national house,” Larson said. “If history is any guide, to borrow from the title of Scope’s own memoirs, we remain in the center of the storm.”
