Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

Random House 2024

For a few days in 1925, the small town of Dayton, Tennessee became a battlefield for the eternal contest between reason and faith, and long-simmering tensions around religion, education, and the limitations on freedom erupted in an orgy of passion and acerbity. In Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, experienced non-fiction author Brenda Wineapple writes an account of the Scopes Trial, an American legal case from July 10 to July 21, 1925, in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it illegal for teachers to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.

Commonly referred to as the "Scopes Monkey Trial", the case started as a publicity stunt staged to attract attention to the sleepy southern town, and to test the constitutional legality of the patently parochial Butler Act. Soon after the fuse was lit, Dayton became a magnet for hucksters, itinerant preachers, journalists, lawyers, and anyone else with a desire to witness the absurdities of a town where “the proprietor of a dry goods store, whose name happened to be Darwin, suspended a scarlet banner on his storefront to advertise that ‘Darwin is right inside.’”

Aside from gadflies like H.L. Mencken (given room to live through his caustic wit in Wineapple's account), the struggle materializing around the trial notably attracted two men who were destined to give the proceedings much of it's flavor and ensuing nationwide interest. William Jennings Bryan, lawyer, orator, and political grandee, threw all his rhetorical weight crusading against the "menagerie of agnostics, socialists, and communists ... working together to tear down America", and was a core member of the team prosecuting John Scopes for his crime against Tennessee (and against fundamentalist Christianity). For Bryan, "history and anthropology and comparative religion were veiled arguments against Christianity", and he was (in a rare success as soothsayer) prepared to fight a "duel to the death" against the evolutionists he saw as corrupting the hearts of schoolchildren by robbing them of the opportunity to live by his interpretation of the Bible. And then there was Clarence Darrow, a celebrated lawyer notorious for his involvement in controversial and high profile cases where he represented anyone who paid, from trade unions to psychopathic murderers. Using his wit and eloquence to further the cause of civil libertarianism, Darrow was the foremost defender of Scopes against what he saw as forces of "reaction and despotism."

Using the lives of these two men ("of the nineteenth century, coming to terms with the twentieth in the best ways they knew how") as the spindle around which to hang her narrative, Wineapple provides an engaging account of the social tensions in the water of the country embroiled in this trial, and everyone, from Darwin and Nietzsche, to Woodrow Wilson and Mencken gets their due in succinct summations of their influence. The book glides along at breakneck speed, and whether it be in the courtroom scenes during the trial, or in the din of it's enormous media coverage, Wineapple liberally allows the voices of the time to speak for themselves, creating a polyphonic array of perspectives. Her treatment of the personalities involved is delicious, from an aristocratic lawyer who is "said to strut while sitting down," to the portrayals of Bryan and Darrow, both of whom are depicted with some consideration for their complex humanity. While:

Bryan’s tragedy, if it can be called tragedy, was that he lacked ability, over time, to do anything more than lurch toward a vision of a beneficent world by folding it back into a literal interpretation of the Bible, which contained the only language available to him

Darrow's professed agnosticism is contrasted against his idealism and the hope buried under the veneer of his worldly persona; in the white heat of an antagonistic Daytona, "when [he] finished his speech, a few of the men there said they’d never heard a better sermon."

Writing about an America "obsessed with celebrity and advertising and prosperity ... anxious about change, the unfamiliar, the unknown, and the seemingly incomprehensible," Wineapple captures a watershed moment that laid bare the contradictions embedded in the contours of a country where the prejudices and bigotries perpetrated a century ago are still thriving in the face of enshrined equality and celebrated freedom. It's hard to imagine a more energetic or readable account about those summer days in that Daytona courthouse; about the roots nourishing a struggle still playing out in the world around us.

Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi