Worst. Book about the Scopes Trial. Ever!

Reprinted with permission from Worst. Book about the Scopes Trial. Ever!, published on September 10, 2024, by Righting America, a forum for scholarly conversation about Christianity, culture, and politics in the US.

Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.

In the summer of 1925, a young teacher, John T. Scopes, was on trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for violating a recently enacted state law, the Butler Act, which forbade educators in the state’s public schools to “teach any theory that denies the truth of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The Scopes trial was instantly a national sensation, partly thanks to the participation of two national figures — William Jennings Bryan on the prosecution team and Clarence Darrow on the defense team — and the reportage of a third, the brilliant but mordant journalist H. L. Mencken. With its hundredth anniversary just around the corner, the Scopes trial is understandably attracting attention again, with recent treatments including Randy Moore’s The Scopes “Monkey Trial” (2022), Gregg Jarrett’s The Trial of the Century (2023), and Brenda Wineapple’s Keeping the Faith (2024). These are all more or less readable and accurate guides to the context, personalities, conduct, aftermath, and significance of the trial. And then, in contrast, there is Jerry Bergman’s The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial (2023).

What is the thesis of The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial? According to its subtitle, At Its Heart the Trial was about Racism, while within the text, Bergman awkwardly declaims, “The trial was about human evolution, and more about racism and eugenics than religion and evolution” (p. 5, emphasis in original). Later, a section complaining that commentators on the trial ignore the racism and eugenics of both classroom textbooks and the American scientific community of the 1920s is entitled “Denying the Core of the Scopes Trial”; in the following chapter, Bergman writes, “That the teaching of eugenics was at issue in the Scopes Trial was obvious to those who understood what eugenics is all about is clear” (p. 61); and the chapter after that is entitled “The Scopes Trial: A Struggle Against Eugenics and Racism.” And in the final chapter, Bergman concludes, “The racism and eugenics that was central in the Scopes Trial has been ignored, even though it is a well-documented part of the record” (p. 195). Thus, although there is a certain perplexing vacillation between racism and eugenics, the book’s thesis appears to be that the Scopes trial was about these issues.

There is a glaring obstacle to the thesis, which in fact Bergman briefly acknowledges: that “in the entire Scopes court transcript the topic of eugenics and racism was avoided” (p. 81, link added). He then clutches at a counterfactual straw, suggesting that if Bryan, a prominent Democrat, had been a Republican, then he might have focused “on the racism and eugenics core of the Hunter textbook [A Civic Biology, from which Scopes taught]” (p. 81). But as matters stand, the Scopes trial was clearly not about racism and eugenics. It is equally clear that a number of the participants in and observers of the Scopes trial held various attitudes toward racism and eugenics, which were matters of public controversy in the 1920s — but there would be no point in writing a book to document the fact. Is there a thesis in the neighborhood that is neither clearly false nor clearly trivial? Perhaps that the attitudes toward racism and eugenics of the participants in and the observers of the trial significantly and substantially influenced the conduct of and the public understanding of the trial? That suggestion threads the needle, but it would require meticulously collected and judiciously assessed evidence to make the case.

No attempt to make such a case is visible in The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and meticulous collection and judicious assessment of evidence are likewise absent. Instead, there is hagiographizing, conspiracy theorizing, and mudslinging. For example, amid Bergman’s fulsome praise for Bryan, there is no mention of what his biographer Michael Kazin described in A Godly Hero (2006) as “Bryan’s habit of ignoring the ‘race problem’ or minimizing it with fatuous rationales,” which culminated with his last political success: convincing the 1924 Democratic National Convention not to adopt a party platform plank condemning the Ku Klux Klan by name. Bergman alleges that the leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union, which coordinated Scopes’s defense, “no doubt openly, or covertly, agreed to ignore the most important part of the Scopes case, namely its racism” (p. 74), a claim for which there is no rationale evident except for the need to protect his thesis come what may. Chapter 10, the longest chapter of the book, is a sustained attempt at assassinating the moral character of Mencken — who, to be sure, was not exactly a paragon on matters of race, gender, and religion.

Even independently of the fact that it consists entirely of a string of decontextualized quotations from Mencken’s voluminous oeuvre with Bergman’s perfunctory and sometimes bizarre comments on them, intended to portray Mencken as, inter alia, a vicious racist, eugenicist, and bigot, chapter 10 is deeply problematic. The problem is that Bergman’s discussion is conspicuously similar to Vincent Torley’s 2012 blog post “H. L. Mencken: Is this your hero, New Atheists?” — not only in the selection and order of the quotations but also in the language used to summarize and criticize them. For example, Torley asks, with respect to a whimsical suggestion of Mencken’s that God should have used platinum rather than carbon as a basis for life, “But has Mencken even thought for a moment about how a platinum organism would eat, excrete, reproduce and for that matter, evolve?” while Bergman declares, “Mencken had obviously not thought about how platinum-based organisms could possibly eat, grow, excrete and, for that matter, evolve” (p. 161). Bergman cites Torley’s blog post only once (p. 128, n. 15), regrettably not in a way that adequately acknowledges his apparent debt to it.

Bergman’s scholarly practices are otherwise troubling. He often cites subpar scholarship, including from his fellow creationists, without any evident discernment. He repeatedly interpolates unwarranted text of his own into verbatim quotations, including in a passage from Martin Gilbert’s history of the twentieth century (p. 9), a letter from Leonard Darwin — a son of Charles Darwin, writing on behalf of the Eugenics Education Society — to Scopes (p. 61), and a passage from Edward J. Larson’s book about the trial (p. 195). Similarly, he claims that “a survey of AAAS members found that close to 99 percent are functional atheists, meaning that they live their lives as if there is no God”: he is evidently referring to a Pew Research Center survey in 2014 that found that close to 99 percent of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science accept that humans have evolved over time: the “functional atheism” claim is a confabulation. He wrongly claims that the pistol-packing pastor J. Frank Norris came to Dayton, Tennessee, during the Scopes trial, citing “Larson, ‘Classroom Controversy,’ 54”: the article in question begins on p. 63 of The Panda’s Black Box (2007) and Norris is not mentioned in it.

A particularly interesting error is not entirely Bergman’s fault. Relying on James Gilbert’s account in Redeeming Culture (1997), he claims that Bryan argued to the West Virginia legislature in 1923 that evolution is precluded by the second law of thermodynamics. (He then proceeds to endorse the argument, unaware or uncaring that it is scientifically bankrupt.) That would be strange if true, not only because Bryan fails to use the argument in his most famous antievolution writings, such as In His Image (1922) and his planned closing address in the Scopes trial, but also because the argument seems to have gained currency only with the work of two British creationists, Robert E. D. Clark and E. H. Betts, in the 1940s. (The wrinkle that the second law is the objective correlative of the Fall would later be introduced in The Genesis Flood [1961], by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris.) But it is not true. And it would not have been difficult for Bergman to locate Bryan’s speech, reprinted as the second part of Orthodox Christanity versus Modernism (1923), and there to find that the closest Bryan approaches the second law of thermodynamics is invoking the distinct phenomenon of radioactive decay.

Bergman repeatedly, and correctly, emphasizes that the Butler Act, under which Scopes was prosecuted, only concerned the teaching of human evolution. He accordingly devotes chapter 9 to a discussion of human evolution. The result is inaccurate and incompetent. He claims that the scientific evidence for human evolution presented at the Scopes trial consisted of “Nebraska Man, Piltdown Man, Java Man, and Neanderthal Man fossils” (p. 106), and devotes most of the chapter to “Nebraska Man,” repeating whole sentences and paragraphs in the process. “Nebraska Man” was known only from what proved to be a fossil peccary tooth — not, pace Bergman, a fossil pig tooth — and was not presented at the Scopes trial, although it might have been if Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the American Museum of Natural History and the chief promoter of the fossil, had testified. Perhaps exhausted by his Nebraskan efforts, Bergman dismisses “Java Man” as “another race of humans called Homo erectus” (p. 118) — not exactly a devastating rejoinder — and fails to rehearse the standard, long-ago-refuted, creationist complaints about “Piltdown Man” (a never tremendously convincing hoax) and Neanderthals.

Not all of Bergman’s myriad errors are tendentious. Stephen Jay Gould is misquoted as referring to the “populace” rather than the “populist” thinking of Bryan (p. 26); the anthropologist Ruth Benedict is rechristened Ruth Bennet (p. 37); the polling organization Gallup departs at a gallop (p. 55). Bergman reports that “the Supreme Court refused to hear the Scopes appeal” (p. 103): if he’s thinking of the Tennessee Supreme Court, he’s wrong because the court indeed heard the appeal, overturning the verdict, while if he’s thinking of the United States Supreme Court, he’s wrong because the case was not appealed to it. Two paragraphs of chapter 12, which contains only six paragraphs, rely on the conclusions of “Georgianna,” with no full name or bibliographical information provided. (“The Moral Majority and Fundamentalism: Plausibility and Dissonance,” Sharon Linzey Georgianna’s 1984 dissertation at Indiana University, was presumably intended.) The sole appendix presents the text of a Tennessee law: not the Butler Act, but House Bill 368/Senate Bill 893 of 2012, nicknamed “the monkey bill” and codified as Tennessee Code 49-6-1030. No explanation is offered.

Early in The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial, Bergman writes, “The present work is an attempt to fill in this important gap” (p. 7). Characteristically, there is no explicit description of a gap in the preceding text, but he appears to mean that there’s a lack of discussions of the trial sympathetic to the prosecution, which overlooks any number of works, including Marvin Olasky and John Perry’s Monkey Business (2005), which appears in Bergman’s bibliography. A shoddy and biased apologia for creationism, Monkey Business is nevertheless head and shoulders over The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial: not nearly so badly conceived, researched, organized, written, and edited. After offering his description of “the present work,” Bergman continues, “and it is up to readers to determine how successful this tome was” (p. 7) — for all the world as if readers are unaware of their prerogatives. Only readers who are already relatively familiar with the trial are guaranteed to recognize the abject failure of the book, unfortunately; despite the crudity and incompetence of what can only be described as Bergman’s propaganda, there is a risk that the uninformed and the gullible will be misled.