Keeping the Faith

March 1, 2024

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a NYT "100 Notable Books" author, Wineapple delves into the history of the 1925 Scopes case, exploring how the "trial of the century" limned religion, censorship, teaching, and science as two giants in legal circles argued about the future of the nation. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2024
Another account--and among the best--of the spectacular 1925 trial of John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher accused of breaking the state's law against teaching evolution. The trial itself was a media circus covered by a mob of reporters, most notably and zestfully Henry L. Menken, a fierce, take-no-prisoners polemicist already a national figure. Looking beyond its circus atmosphere, award-winning historian Wineapple notes that the trial "raised issues that have perplexed America since its founding and still do today." The traditional villain, prosecution lawyer William Jennings Bryan, was a progressive who crusaded for the poor, but he shared the religious fundamentalism, ignorance of science, and casual bigotry common at the time. Hero of stage and screen as well as biographers, his trial opponent Clarence Darrow was a dazzling courtroom lawyer and genuine foe of injustice but also, in Wineapple's portrait, a shady character: vain, arrogant, and greedy. Defending Scopes, Darrow made brilliant arguments for freedom of speech and religion and called experts to explain evolution, but the jury did not get to hear them because the judge ruled that the jurors' sole purpose was to determine whether Scopes had broken the law. Evaluating the famous interchange in which Bryan took the stand promising to defend the Bible's literal truth, Wineapple shares the common judgment that he did a terrible job of it, commenting, "William Jennings Bryan had been no match for Clarence Darrow." Nonetheless, many observers accused Darrow of humiliating Bryan, who attracted a good deal of sympathy and died five days after the trial. Following Scopes' conviction, the ACLU, which had organized his defense, tried unsuccessfully to remove Darrow's team from the appeals in favor of more conservative lawyers. What followed was an anticlimax largely ignored by the media: Tennessee's Supreme Court reversed Scopes' conviction on a technicality. Aiming to avoid further fireworks, it upheld the Tennessee law but with so many qualifications that it was unenforceable. The notorious "monkey trial" in expert hands.

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Starred review from September 2, 2024
In this gripping and expansive reexamination of the Scopes Monkey Trial, a lightning-rod debate over what was allowed to be taught in public schools caps a decades-long run of divisiveness, which eroded Americans’ belief in the power of democracy. Historian Wineapple (The Impeachers) depicts the country’s contemporaneous obsession with the 1925 trial—in which a Tennessee school teacher fined for teaching the theory of evolution was defended by a fledgling ACLU—as a culmination of decades of upheaval, violence, and inequity, from the Civil War to WWI. Tracing the lives of the trial’s prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan, the “de facto voice” of Christian fundamentalism in the country by the 1920s, and its defense attorney, Clarence Darrow—a “lion of the bar” already famous for saving bomb-throwing anarchists and murderers from the electric chair—Wineapple shows how both men, over the course of tumultuous lives that mirror the travails of the country, had developed influential but incompatible notions of democracy. Wineapple’s elegant appraisal notably departs from depictions—popularized at the time, especially through the “acerbic” reporting of H.L. Mencken—of the fundamentalists’ side as purely buffoonish (a take actually more in line with Darrow’s own appraisal of the trial as a “tragedy”). With its obvious parallels to today’s battles over public education, and its depiction of a fractious, in-fighting Democratic Party, this historical investigation pulses with urgency.