Volume 45, Number 18 · November 19, 1998
Darwin in Dayton
By Daniel J. Kevles
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion
by Edward J. Larson
Harvard University Press, 318 pp., $14.95 (paper)
In 1925, the Scopes trial—'the trial of the century,' reporters said at the time—pitted Fundamentalist Christianity against Darwinian evolution in a sweltering courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee. The event was the basis of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's mid-1950s play, Inherit the Wind. Edward J. Larson observes in Summer for the Gods that the immensely successful play 'all but replaced the actual trial in the nation's memory.' Stanley Kramer's film version, which appeared in 1960, had strong performances by Fredric March as the character representing William Jennings Bryan, the enemy of teaching evolution in the public schools, and Spencer Tracy as the one representing Clarence Darrow, Scopes's rumpled, shrewd, free-thinking lawyer. The cynical and caustic journalist based on H.L. Mencken was played by Gene Kelly. In the opening scene, with Leslie Uggams singing 'Give Me That Old Time Religion' in slow, drum-beat cadences, three stern-faced officials and a preacher in a small Southern town march to a schoolroom to arrest the John Scopes character while he is teaching his high school biology class about the descent of man. The high points of the film are still dramatically effective, particularly Darrow's humiliating cross-examination of Bryan on the believability of the literal text of Genesis and the climactic moment after the trial ends with a guilty verdict, when Bryan, seeking to justify his views, is ignored, collapses in mid-speech, and dies.
Review, 4045 words
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