The Scopes Monkey Trial: Hatred Trumps Comedy...at first

Recently, the Foo Fighters—led by my supposed doppelganger, Dave Grohl—performed an impromptu, tongue-in-cheek (though not another man’s cheek) roadside concert for the most infamous protesters since the WWI-era National Woman’s Party: The Westboro Baptist Church. While the resulting footage received some clapping approval from fans of the alt-hip-rock band, it further demonstrated the conclusive discrepancy between the sides of cultural toleration and fundamentalists. Indeed, the very flippant, disinterested and somewhat annoyed attitude embodied by the Foo Fighters is why social liberals are doomed until the rise of the next generation. Precedent? Well…it starts back in 1925.

In the wake of “social Darwinism”—a notion Charles Darwin himself despised—the Tennessee state legislature passed a law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. Afraid that the La-Z-Boy factory and birth place of Red Holt was not enough to draw tourists to Dayton, local business owners convinced 24-year-old science teacher John Scopes to let his lawyer friends charge him with teaching evolution. Scopes agreed and the ACLU got involved and immediately made a spectacle of the small town. This got the attention of three-time presidential candidate, and eight-time Spelling Bee winner, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan’s moral high-roading got the attention of famed agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow. With as much inflated ego as any psuedo-reality TV show, all parties agreed the trial should be broadcast on national radio. And so we have the battle.

While the ultimate difference in the trial’s outcome was Scope’s confession, the pivotal difference in the public discourse, as much then as now, is that evolutionists saw/see the whole affair as an annoying display of willful ignorance, whereas the conservative right saw/see the trial as a trans-national holy war. The groups’ disparate enthusiasm of the trial as a whole shaped the outcome and how it is remembered today. The 1920s Christian fundamentalists in Tennessee were among the most outspoken against evolution being taught in public schools, going as far as to make this case a battle of two religions. Reverend John Roach Straton explicitly made the connection of evolution being a rival religion to Christianity, commenting, “[The question is] whether religion of the Bible shall be ruled out of the schools and the religion of evolution—with its ruinous results—shall be ruled into the schools by law.”

This holy war thought process turned the trial into an invasion by “this so-called science…with destructive forces which will destroy our civilization.” The fundamentalists felt they were under attack and at the brink of ruin. Many Tennessee natives wrote into their local papers for a call to proverbial, or literal, arms. The raw hatred toward this new science was a held as dogmatically important as the persecution of Christians over a thousand years earlier (fed to the lions, kicked out of England, etc.).

Rather than calling the Scopes Trial a war against ignorance and critiquing the Christian stranglehold on American politics, many intellectuals saw the trial as a joke with plenty set-up but with no real payoff. (Example: So the Pope walks into a bar...) Included in the group of occasionally smug intellectuals was W.E.B. Du Bois, who poked fun at Tennessee with his characteristic eloquence, calling it, “a great, ignorant, simple-minded land, curiously compounded of brutality, bigotry, religious faith and demagoguery.” The Butler Act, forbidding the teaching of evolution in public schools, was a state law and did not directly affect other Americans--including Du Bois, who was a writer in Chicago. His and others’ interest in the state law was then more of a philosophical problem or passing conversation topic soon trumped by the Bears drafting Red “Shovel Face” Grange. Though Du Bois felt America’s reputation was being damaged in the international political arena, most European countries, lost in their “Age of Anxiety,” had much more to worry about in the 1920s than one of America’s state’s legislation (i.e. food, etc.).

Bryan and others’ irascible terror followed that if children were taught evolution, they’d actually be taught that there is no God, as if God were Santa Clause. He, and others, concurred that evolution eliminated the miracles of the infallible, thousand year old Bible. What the point came down to was whether the Tennessee people had the right to choose “...the kind of education they want.” This proposal eerily resonated in a lot of congregations, who then wondered if religion was a less informed education. This would have forced people to decide if ignorance is bliss but the inspiration behind Dr. Zaius, Reverend John Norris, stepped forward and bluntly elaborated, “The Bible and Evolution do not agree because the Bible is a fact and Evolution is not a fact.”

Armchair scientists believed, and enough still do, that this means evolution is open to speculation and reasonable doubt. Similarly, gravity could be labeled a theory, as people can only see its effects, but not the actual process. This corruption of science reaches "Stephen Summers" lows in resurrected discussions of the Scopes Trial, or evolution in general, thanks to eighty years worth of scientific advances and the damning isolation of Kansas. Granted the idea of evolution was still relatively new and even unsettling to people in the 1920s. The notion that mankind has physically improved implied that we were still evolving and could benefit the race by dropping the imperfections out of the gene pool. This was the straw man eugenics paranoia—which did not actually create a race of “straw people.”

"If you're a dumb straw man, don't you want to come to Kansas with me?"

Many 1920s commentators believed society was collapsing because of the supposedly lost morals of society, largely due to capitalism, big cities, and science. Of course the largest cities (New York, Chicago, etc.) were the most modern and were censured by religious conservatives. In a “whatever” logic that remains today, some saw that evolution was being taught in these big city schools, and thus explained why these big cities had the highest crime rates. Obviously then Tennessee would fall to crime and weakened morals if they allowed God to be killed in their children’s classrooms. Then the ideological battle was less ideological and stood more as a territorial battle of corrupt big cities invading the lives of regular, kind, patriotic, small town folk. However, the big city “elitists” really wanted to invade Tennessee as much as modern “elitists” want to move to Topeka.

And so after 8 days of court proceedings and nine minutes of jury deliberation, Scopes was found guilty (fined some moneys) and not really vindicated until the 1960s, when social conservatives saw Communist Russia as the most convenient scapegoat for the problems of the world. This can bring us back to 2011, when once again a social battle is being fought and will only end like how all conflict ends: when one side discovers that the conflict is stupid. In fact, that’s how almost everyone has ever won a war: by being the last to figure out that the fight is dumb. And in this case, the Foo Fighters are not likely to win the battle against the Westboro Baptist Church until their music is on the Oldies’ station.

(POST–SCRIPT: I needed to include this late-addition, yet incredible, epilogue.)

The battles fought by Westboro Baptist Church may take a back seat to reality much sooner than I originally thought. And no, I don’t mean with the repeal of DADT or the feuds with Anonymous or Fox News. I mean the Westboro Baptist Church response to the Foo Fighters. The response is a mp3 parody of the Foo Fighters' “Keep it Clean,” called “Try Unclean.” This parody is an audacious, fulminating, stupefying paean/folk song. And best/worst of all…it joins a list, on the Westboro website, of dozens of similarly baffling pop song parodies.

Personally, I have no reservations spreading the message of the WBC when the message has been toned down from protesting soldiers’ funerals. I just hope this reaches history students a hundred years from now.