We have been covering the anniversary of the Scopes trial, which concluded with a guilty verdict exactly one hundred years ago today, July 21, 1925. The trial had opened on July 10. Scopes was fined $100 for teaching high school students in Dayton about human evolution, contrary to an ill-advised state law, and prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan offered to pay the fine.
That sounds like an underwhelming conclusion, and yet the echoes of the trial persist. Here’s one that surprised me recently.
John Scopes and Ernest Hemingway were born a year apart, in 1900 and 1899 respectively. I mention this because by a coincidence, as my oldest son was just traveling in Spain and attended a bullfight, I picked up and reread Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which was published in 1926 and, as I had forgotten, has the Scopes trial as a minor motif.
The main themes of the story, which takes place in Paris and Pamplona, Spain, are in order, 1) drinking, which the characters do in epic proportions, 2) romantic jealousy, and 3) bullfighting. Fishing, eating, fist-fighting, and much casual anti-Semitism also figure into the tale. The three main characters are Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, and Robert Cohn, who form a romantic triangle. Jake has a war injury that prevents him from consummating his love for Brett, who is also loved by Cohn, a Jew who was a boxing champion at Princeton and who has an occasion to brutally beat a young bullfighter who also loves Brett. “Jews and bullfighters” are linked in a surprising, suggestive way.
Mencken and Bryan
Hemingway puts forward some interesting, debatable points, such as that “you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship” with her. He assumes you will understand things without his spelling them out — this was his style — including his references to H. L. Mencken and William Jennings Bryan.
Mencken, through his satirical journalism about the Scopes trial, gave American culture many of its cruelest and most unfair stereotypes of evangelical Christians, especially in the South. The stereotypes survive in our secular media, hardly changed, to this day. His influence at the time is registered by Hemingway.
Cohn, for example, wants to get out of Paris in part because of Mencken. As Jake narrates, “That was the way Robert Cohn was about all of Paris. I wondered where Cohn got that incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly from Mencken. Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.”
Eggs and Chickens
Later, in Spain, Jake and his friend Bill are fishing. They are drinking wine and eating hard-boiled eggs and joking about William Jennings Bryan, who had died on July 26, just five days after the conclusion of the Scopes trial.
“First the egg,” said Bill. “Then the chicken. Even Bryan could see that.”
“He’s dead. I read it in the paper yesterday.”
“No. Not really?”
“Yes, Bryan’s dead.”
Bill laid down the egg he was peeling.
“Gentlemen,” he said, and unwrapped a drumstick from a piece of newspaper. “I reverse the order. For Bryan’s sake. As a tribute to the Great Commoner. First the chicken; then the egg.”
“Wonder what day God created the chicken?”
“Oh,” said Bill, sucking the drumstick, “how should we know? We should not question. Our stay on earth is not for long. Let us rejoice and believe and give thanks.”
The parody of religious language goes on as Bill intones:
“Let no man be ashamed to kneel here in the great out-of-doors. Remember the woods were God’s first temples. Let us kneel and say: ‘Don’t eat that, Lady — that’s Mencken.’”
And then:
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Didn’t you like Bryan?”
“I loved Bryan,” said Bill. “We were like brothers.”
“Where did you know him?”
“He and Mencken and I all went to Holy Cross together.”
And so on. To be overly literal-minded and spell things out, I should add that neither Bryan nor Mencken attended Holy Cross.
The Scopes Legacy
As Casey Luskin has pointed out, the legacy of Scopes lives on in ironic ways. Eggs and chickens aside, the main point to take away from this month’s anniversary, I think, is how much our knowledge of biological origins, including human origins, has advanced since then, casting greater and greater doubt on evolutionary orthodoxy. Bryan had a hard time coming up with expert scientific witnesses who were dubious of Darwinian theory. He wouldn’t now.
Our beloved colleague Günter Bechly, the German paleontologist, used to make it a theme of his writing here that mainstream science outlets were constantly announcing that the story of human evolution had been suddenly, dramatically “rewritten.”
As a random example, BBC Earth Science asked just 11 days ago, “What if everything we knew about human origins was wrong?” That was, intriguingly, the very same anniversary day, July 10, on which the Scopes trial started. You find headlines to that effect on, it seems, a nearly monthly basis — meaning that anything poor John Scopes taught his students was likely to have been rendered outdated and nullified in the past century many times over. The history of science is full of ironies.