I.

The expression “the trial of the century” is one of those phrases, like “war declared” and “president shot,” that begs to appear in all caps, preferably followed by an exclamation point. It conjures names like Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Adolf Eichmann, Charles Manson, and O.J. Simpson. Generally speaking, it doesn’t make one think of a mild-mannered teacher being tried for a non-jailable offence in a sleepy Southern town. But that’s what people would have thought of if they’d heard the phrase uttered a century ago.

In the summer of 1925, America was riveted to the trial of John T. Scopes, an instructor at Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tennessee, who was indicted for teaching the theory of evolution to his science class. It was the first full-fledged media event in history, covered in newspapers, newsreels, and on the radio as it occurred. Everyone had an opinion on the case, including luminaries like future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, humorist Will Rogers, and novelist Ernest Hemingway, who gave the trial a mention in The Sun Also Rises. That’s because it wasn’t really a trial of John Thomas Scopes; it was, as the Chicago Tribune pointed out at the time, a contest of democratic ideas, many of which we still argue about today, including academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the place of religion in the public sphere.

Most people learn about the Scopes Monkey Trial (as H.L. Mencken christened the case) from Inherit the Wind, the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, which was turned into a 1960 film starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March. But Inherit the Wind isn’t history, and it was never meant to be taken as such. In reality, the events in Dayton weren’t set in motion by Scopes but by the fledgling American Civil Liberties Union, which placed an ad in the Knoxville Journal seeking a defendant to challenge the constitutionality of Tennessee’s anti-evolution law, the Butler Act. That legislation read, in part:

Be it enacted by the general assembly of the state of Tennessee that it shall be unlawful for any person in any of the universities, normals, and all other public schools of the state which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the state, to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

Dayton’s civic leaders, eager to put their town on the map, responded. Scopes, in fact, couldn’t remember for certain whether he’d taught evolution to his class or not. Nevertheless, he was the ideal defendant—young, clean-cut, soft-spoken, bespectacled—and he agreed to be the ACLU’s legal guinea pig. Neither he nor the ACLU expected to win the case. Their hopes rested on the appeal. In other words, the Scopes trial was a performance long before Lawrence and Lee took up the tale—cast, scripted, and staged with a preconceived outcome in mind.

II.

The man who turned the case into a national drama was William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic nominee for president, two-time congressman from Nebraska, and one-time secretary of state. A decade prior, he’d resigned from the Wilson administration in protest, fearing (correctly) that the president was steering the nation into war. That effectively put an end to Bryan’s political career but not his public life. Since then, he’d found a new calling: defending Christianity from the onslaught of science. He gave speeches, he published pamphlets, he taught Bible classes, and, in the summer of 1925, he volunteered to prosecute the Scopes case for the state of Tennessee.

Bryan hated the theory of evolution, which he said “would carry us back to the law of the jungle—the killing of the weak by the strong—the law by which man is supposed to have come up from lower forms of life.” This claim wasn’t quite as outlandish as it sounds today. From 1911 to 1928, Charles Darwin’s son Leonard chaired the British Eugenics Society. George William Hunter’s Civic Biology, the textbook Scopes was alleged to have used to teach evolution to his class, also contained a section on criminals, epileptics, and the mentally retarded. “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading,” the book explained. “Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibility of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.” Bryan, who refused to soil his eyes with the pages of science books, made no distinction between Darwin père and Darwin fils. In his mind, they were both heartless heathens—much like Friedrich Nietzsche, his other great bête noir—turning men into beasts. “The Darwinian theory,” he explained, “represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.”

By this time, Bryan was no longer the dashing blade who’d electrified the Democratic National Convention in 1896. His belly had ballooned, his hairline had receded, and he hadn’t practised law in about thirty years. But he could still fill a Chautauqua tent like no one else alive. His great misfortune, as historians have pointed out, was that his political career peaked before the advent of radio, making it impossible for him to reach as wide an audience as FDR was able to reach just a couple decades later. Even Mencken, the caustic Baltimore Sun columnist who mocked Bryan relentlessly during the trial, was awestruck when he first heard him speak at the Democratic Convention in 1904:

I listened to [his speech] myself with my eyes wide open, my eyes apop and my reportorial pencil palsied. It swept up on wave after wave of sound like the finale of Beethoven’s Eroica, and finally burst into such coruscations that the crowd first gasped and then screamed. ... What a speech, my masters! What a speech!

Bryan’s name on the docket attracted another big name to the case, Clarence Darrow, the most famous—some would have said infamous—lawyer in the nation. Darrow looked more like a stevedore than a trial attorney. He was over six feet tall with a bull neck, broad shoulders, and a face so creased and craggy it might have been pickled in brine. Darrow despised religion every bit as much as Bryan despised Darwin. “The origin of what we call civilization is not due to religion but to skepticism,” he argued in a 1929 essay titled “Why I Am an Agnostic.” And: “The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.” Darrow didn’t believe in heaven and hell, good and evil, or free will. “Nobody fashions his body, and still less is responsible for the size or the fineness of his brain and the sensitiveness of his nervous system,” he wrote in an essay titled “Facing Life Fearlessly.” “Human responsibility,” he added, “is utterly unscientific, and besides that, horribly cruel.” But he believed in compassion. In a deterministic universe, he reasoned, all people—even violent criminals—deserved sympathy, as well as a good legal defence.

Darrow’s own sympathies lay with underdogs: socialists, anarchists, labour leaders, immigrants, and America’s blacks. In 1894, he’d given up a lucrative job representing the Chicago and North-Western Railway to defend organised labour. His abhorrence of the death penalty led him to take the case of Patrick Eugene Prendergast, an insane Irishman who’d shot the mayor of Chicago. Subsequent clients included Big Bill Haywood, the founder of the Industrial Workers of the World; the Scottsboro Boys, the black teenagers accused of raping two white women; and Leopold and Loeb, the thrill killers who murdered a fourteen-year-old boy just to see if they could get away with it. “Everything about Darrow suggests a cynic,” said the publisher E.W. Scripps. “Everything but one thing, and that is—an entire lack of real cynicism.” Over the course of his career, he took part in approximately 2,000 trials. In more than a third of those cases, including the Scopes case, he worked for free.

Darrow and Bryan had a lot more in common than either one of them would have liked to admit. They were both Midwesterners, born just three years apart—Darrow in 1857, Bryan in 1860—and they were both fiery political progressives. During his time in politics, Bryan had supported unionisation, women’s suffrage, a graduated income tax, and the nationalisation of the railroads. Newspapers dubbed him the Great Commoner. “The poor man is called a socialist if he believes that the wealth of the rich should be divided among the poor,” he said, “but the rich man is called a financier if he devises a plan by which the pittance of the poor can be converted to his use.” At one time, Bryan had counted Darrow among his many supporters. They were friendly, if not exactly friends. Darrow had campaigned hard for Bryan in the presidential election of 1896—so hard that he’d lost his own race for Congress that year. But they fell out over religion. Bryan came to believe that Darrow was “the greatest [by which he meant vilest] atheist or agnostic in the United States.” Darrow, in turn, described Bryan as “the idol of all Morondom” in his autobiography.

One of the puzzles of the Scopes trial is why it happened when it did. Church attendance was rising in the 1920s, not declining. On the Origin of Species, the foundational text of evolutionary biology, had been published more than sixty years before. During that time, Christians had found many ways to mould their beliefs around Darwin’s discoveries. “Assume God—as many devout evolutionists do—to be immanent in the evolutionary process,” the theologian James Orr wrote in 1904, “and His intelligence and purpose to be expressed in it; then evolution, so far from conflicting with theism, may become a new and heightened form of the theistic argument.”

Christian fundamentalists like Bryan, on the other hand, held that accepting evolution was simply the first step on the path to unbelief. If the story of Adam and Eve were merely an allegory, what other Biblical stories might be cast into doubt? The flood? The flight from Egypt? Perhaps even the resurrection? Fundamentalism, though, was still a relatively new phenomenon in 1925. The word itself was barely five years old. Even Bryan had been unbothered by Darwinism until the 1920s. “I do not carry the doctrine of evolution as truth as some do,” he told an audience at the turn of the century. “[But] I do not mean to find fault with you if you want to accept the theory.”

It was schooling, not science, that triggered the conflict. For earlier generations of Americans, education was voluntary. The rich got as much as they wanted, while the poor got as much as they could afford. During the Progressive Era, that began to change. One by one, states began making attendance mandatory. Between 1890 and 1920, a new high school opened in the US, on average, each day. Enrolment increased nearly tenfold, and the highest rate of growth occurred in the South. In Tennessee, where the Scopes trial was held, enrolment rose from fewer than 10,000 in 1910 to more than 50,000 at the time of the trial.

Not everyone was thrilled by this turn of events. In agricultural areas, like the region around Dayton, children could be essential farmhands. Parents were understandably upset to discover that they no longer had complete control over their offspring. Did the government really have the authority to take custody of millions of minors—with or without their parents’ consent—and fill their heads with whatever it pleased? The judiciary said yes. “The natural rights of a parent to the custody and control of his infant child are subordinate to the power of the state,” the Indiana Supreme Court ruled in 1901.

Bryan said otherwise: “If it is contended that an instructor has a right to teach anything he likes, I reply that the parents who pay the salary have a right to decide what shall be taught.” His case against Scopes was simple and persuasive. The defendant, by his own admission, had taught the theory of evolution to his class, in plain contravention of the law. If Scopes didn’t like the law, the place to challenge it was in the state legislature, not in a classroom and not in the Rhea County Courthouse.

Darrow had a much tougher case to make. He had to argue that, though Scopes had explained the theory of evolution to his class, he hadn’t actually broken the law in doing so. The Butler Act, after all, said it was illegal for teachers to contradict the Bible and to teach that man had descended from a lower order of animals. Whether by accident or design, the authors of the act had written “and,” not “or.” Therefore, to win the case, Darrow had to show that Darwinism didn’t necessarily contradict the Bible. Not that winning, in a strict legal sense, concerned him all that much. “My object, and my only object,” he later wrote, “was to focus the attention of the country on the programme of Mr. Bryan and the other fundamentalists in America. I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always hampered it—religious fanaticism.”

This didn’t please the ACLU, which wanted the trial to focus on free speech, not the clash of theology and science. As they saw it, the Butler Act was a flagrant example of prior restraint. Technically speaking, it didn’t just outlaw teaching evolution; it also outlawed teaching students about ancient Egypt and Sumer, both of which predated the creation of the universe according to the Old Testament. Scopes, however, insisted that Darrow remain on the case. “It was going to be a down-in-the-mud fight,” he recalled, “and I felt that the situation demanded an Indian fighter.”

In Inherit the Wind, Drummond, the defence attorney, arrives in town alone, humbly carrying his own suitcase. In reality, both the defence and the prosecution showed up in force. Darrow had three co-counsels, and Bryan had five. The townsfolk, far from burning Darrow in effigy, as they do in the 1960 movie, treated him with great courtesy. Even Mencken was taken aback. “I expected to find a squalid Southern village,” he wrote in A Religious Orgy in Tennessee, his account of the trial, “with darkies snoozing on the horseblocks, pigs rooting under the houses and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I found was a country town full of charm and even beauty.” Despite having a population under 2,000, Dayton boasted the second largest courthouse in Tennessee, a handsome redbrick pile, with Romanesque arches and a soaring clocktower, capable of seating a thousand people in the courtroom on the second floor. To accommodate the press, the jury box was relocated from the centre of the room, so that a bank of microphones could sit there instead. It would be the first trial in history broadcast live over the radio.

When Animals Shed Their Wings

Worker ants can sprout wings—but don’t. Ant and termite queens destroy theirs after mating. Many island birds evolve into flightlessness. Can evolution explain why?

QuilletteRichard Dawkins

III.

Proceedings began on 10 July 1925, 29 years and one day after Bryan’s famous Cross of Gold speech, which had secured him his first nomination for president. The judge, a lay preacher named John Raulston, made no attempt to conceal whose side he was on. The Sunday before the trial began, the judge was seen beaming in the front pew of Dayton’s Southern Methodist church, listening to Bryan deliver the sermon. Darrow began by going on the offensive, submitting a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the Butler Act violated Tennessee’s Constitution. “If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools,” he declared. “After [a] while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”

The press ate it up. “While he was talking there was absolute silence in the room except for the clicking of telegraph keys,” the New York Times reported. “His words fell with crushing force, his satire dropped with sledgehammer effect upon those who heard him.” Raulston, however, was unmoved and dismissed the motion. Not to be outdone, Bryan launched into an epic speech of his own. “The question,” he said, “is can a minority in this state come in and compel a teacher to teach that the Bible is not true and make the parents of these children pay the expenses of the teacher to tell their children what these people believe is false and dangerous?”

The best speech of the trial, however, was not given by either Darrow or Bryan but by Darrow’s co-counsel Dudley Field Malone, the sole Christian on the defence. Because of the sweltering heat, Raulston had allowed everyone to take off their coats. Malone was the only person who had kept his on throughout jury selection, leading spectators to wonder if he’d ever take it off. “As he rose to answer Bryan,” Scopes recalled, “he performed the most effective act anyone could have thought of to get the audience’s undivided attention: He took off his coat.” For the next half hour, Malone discussed the principles at stake in the case. He talked about Galileo and Copernicus and the burning of the great library of Alexandria. He talked about the difference between science and theology—how one sought the truth, while the other sought the numinous. And he talked about the importance of free thought:

The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the forces of government. The truth does not need Mr. Bryan. The truth is imperishable, eternal and immortal and needs no human agency to support it. We are ready to tell the truth as we understand it and we do not fear all the truth that they can present as facts. We are ready. We are ready. We feel we stand with progress. We feel we stand with science. We feel we stand with intelligence. We feel we stand with fundamental freedom in America.

When Malone finished, the courtroom shook with applause. “Women shrieked their approval,” one reporter wrote. “Men, unmoved even by Darrow, could not restrain their cheers.” A policeman, brought in from Chattanooga to help control the crowd, pounded a table so hard with his nightstick that the surface split. “I’m not trying to restore order,” he shouted to a fellow officer. “Hell, I’m cheering.”

The main bone of contention was over who would be allowed to testify. To prove that science and religion were not in discord, the defence needed experts to say as much, and they’d brought an array of scientists—biologists, zoologists, and anthropologists, all of them churchgoing men—to do precisely that. The plan backfired. If the defence was allowed to call scientists to the stand, Bryan wanted to know, would the prosecution be able to question them about their religious beliefs? The defence grudgingly admitted they wouldn’t. Under cross-examination, the scientists would be forced to reveal that, though they were Christians, they didn’t believe in miracles like the virgin birth and the resurrection.

After days of debate on the subject, Raulston sided with the prosecution. This caused Darrow to explode. “I do not understand why every request of the state and every suggestion of the prosecution should meet with an endless waste of time,” he shouted, “and a bare suggestion of anything that is perfectly competent on our part should be immediately over-ruled!” “I hope you do not mean to reflect upon the court,” Raulston said. “Well, your honor has the right to hope,” Darrow snickered, earning himself a citation for contempt of court.

The defence, it appeared, was checkmated. Without witnesses to buttress their claims, they had no case to make. H.L. Mencken, along with many of the other journalists, headed out of town. “All that remains of the great cause of the State of Tennessee against the infidel Scopes is the formal business of bumping off the defendant,” Mencken wrote. “There may be some legal jousting on Monday and some gaudy oratory on Tuesday, but the main battle is over, with Genesis completely triumphant.” Darrow, however, had one last move to make. Since the judge wouldn’t let him defend Darwin, he decided to prosecute God. To help him do this, he called an unimpeachable witness to the stand: the attorney for the prosecution, William Jennings Bryan.

The battle of wits between Darrow and Bryan is the most memorable scene in Inherit the Wind, and as it happens, also the most historically accurate—that is, with respect to what’s being said. The actual cross-examination didn’t take place in the courtroom but on the lawn outside, after Raulston decided it was too hot to remain indoors. Some tables and chairs were arranged beneath the maple trees on the north side of the building. Thousands of spectators gathered round. In the play, the contest follows a standard dramatic arc, with the Bryan character ably trading blows with his opponent at first, only to be beaten down over the course of the scene by the relentless power of his logic. In fact, Darrow had Bryan on the ropes from the get-go. His second question (“You have written and published articles [about the Bible] almost weekly, and sometimes have made interpretations of various things?”) was an obvious trap. If Bryan admitted the Bible was open to interpretation, he’d be admitting that it didn’t need to be read literally, making it possible to justify the teaching of evolution. “I would not say interpretations,” Bryan hedged, “but comments on the lesson.”

Darrow asked Bryan about the miracles described in the Old Testament. Did a whale really swallow Jonah? Bryan said yes. Did Joshua really make the sun stand still? Well, Bryan conceded, perhaps he just made the earth stop rotating for a time (though he was happy to attack Darwin, he wasn’t foolish enough to attack Copernicus). And what about the authors of the Bible, Darrow asked, did they believe the sun orbited the earth? After much hemming and hawing, Bryan said that God, through the authors of the Bible, had used “language at that time the people understood.” Not liking the direction in which things were going, Thomas Stewart, the attorney general for the state of Tennessee, tried to put an end to this line of questioning. What, he asked the judge, did it have to do with the case at hand? But Bryan refused to be helped. “They [the defence] came here to try revealed religion,” he huffed. “I am here to defend it, and they can ask me any question they please.”

Darrow began to probe the foundations of Bryan’s religious faith. Was the witness aware that the civilisation in China was at least 7,000 years old, predating the creation, as described in the Christian Bible? Did he have any evidence for the great flood, besides the Old Testament? Had he studied any religions other than Christianity to test the truth claims they made? As the cross-examination went on, Bryan became increasingly circumspect, lest he fall into some kind of verbal trap. He was forced to admit that he knew little about biology, geology, philology, anthropology, or even comparative religion. “I have been so well satisfied with the Christian religion,” he explained, “that I have spent no time trying to find arguments against it.” Yet, when Darrow asked if he really believed the earth was created in six days, Bryan replied with surprising nonchalance: “Not six days of twenty-four hours.”

Stewart shot out of his chair, immediately realising what a huge concession his co-counsel had made. Bryan, however, again waved away his help. “I do not see that there is any necessity for constructing the words, ‘the evening and the morning,’ as meaning necessarily a twenty-four-hour day,” he explained. “You think those were not literal days?” Darrow asked. “I think,” Bryan replied, “it would be just as easy for the kind of God we believe in to make the earth in six days as in six years or in six million years or in six hundred million years. I do not think it important whether we believe one or the other.” “The creation might have been going on for a very long time?” Darrow clarified. Bryan: “It might have continued for millions of years.”

There was a collective gasp from the audience. Bryan had not only sabotaged the prosecution’s case; he’d undermined the entire basis of Christian fundamentalism. In the play, this is where the cross-examination ends. In reality, it went on and on, passing the two-hour mark before Raulston finally adjourned for the day. Bryan alone refused to admit that he’d been whipped. “Papa stood by his guns very manfully,” Mary Bryan wrote to her children. So many questions had been fired at him so fast, she said, that his “answers made him appear more ignorant than he is.”

Legally speaking, none of it mattered. The jury didn’t hear Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan, just as they hadn’t heard the rousing speeches by Darrow and Malone earlier in the trial, having been removed from the courtroom until Raulston could decide whether they were relevant or not. In each case, he decided they were not. With no other witnesses to call, Darrow asked the judge to bring in the jury and instruct them to find Scopes guilty. Best to get it over with and move on to an appellate court. Since Darrow wouldn’t provide a closing statement, Bryan wouldn’t be allowed to provide one either—something everyone knew he’d been anticipating since arriving in Dayton. It took the jury nine minutes to convict Scopes. The judge fined him a hundred dollars.

III.

In the days after the trial, both sides claimed victory. “I made up my mind to show the country what an ignoramus [Bryan] was,” Darrow wrote the absent Mencken, “and I succeeded.” The press overwhelmingly agreed. The New York Times called Bryan’s testimony “an absurdly pathetic performance.” “Darrow succeeded in showing that Bryan knows little about the science of the world,” the Memphis Commercial Appeal more delicately explained. Bryan’s co-counsel Herbert Hicks didn’t see it that way. “We gave the atheist Jew Arthur Garfield Hays, the agnostic Clarence Darrow, and the ostracized Catholic Dudley Field Malone, [sic] a sound licking,” he wrote his brother, “although the papers are prejudiced against us and may not say so.” While he’d miffed some ministers by giving away so much on the stand, Bryan still had the love of common Christians. On Saturday 25 July, in Jasper, Tennessee, more than 2,000 people turned out to hear him give part of the closing speech he’d been unable to give in the courtroom. He may have lost the debate with Darrow on the courthouse lawn, but he had won the trial.

The day after his speech in Jasper, Bryan lay down for a midday nap and never awoke. Decades of excessive eating had devastated his digestive system and he’d been in poor health for years. The fact that he died so soon after the trial, however, made it seem as if he’d succumbed to wounds received in battle. “I could sense an opinion forming that Bryan was a martyr who had died defending the Grand Old Fundamental Religion,” Scopes explained. “Soon afterward there was a rumor about town that ‘that old devil Darrow’ had killed Bryan with his inquisition.” This was nonsense. Bryan was a career politician. He’d lost three hard-fought campaigns for the presidency of the United States. Defeat was hardly new to him, and on this occasion, he hadn’t even lost. His enemies, though, were happy to claim credit for his demise. “Well, we killed the son of a bitch,” Mencken crowed. Darrow was more subtle, feigning sympathy for his erstwhile adversary, while blatantly condescending to him. “I was truly sorry for Mr. Bryan,” he wrote in his autobiography, as though he, not Bryan, had won the case.

Thus began the legend—perpetuated not only by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee but also by respected historians like Richard Hofstadter—that religion had won in the courtroom, but science had won in the court of public opinion. In fact, the lead prosecutor, Thomas Stewart, was elected to the US Senate. The local prosecutor, S.K. Hicks, was elected to the state House of Representatives. Across the nation, Darwin was expunged from schoolbooks. As the historian Ferenc Morton Szasz later wrote:

The trial proved that an evolution law could be passed and upheld, and pressure on many of the legislatures increased after 1925 until the peak year, 1927, when such laws had been introduced in thirteen states. Most failed to pass, and Rhode Island relegated theirs to the Committee on Fish and Game, but Mississippi and Arkansas put antievolution laws on their books. California allowed the teaching of evolution only as “theory.” The governor of Texas, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, personally saw that evolution was eliminated from the school textbooks. Even more effective, and impossible to uncover, were the actions by the various local school boards.

A year and a half after the trial, the case reached the Tennessee Supreme Court, where it was overturned on the grounds that Judge Raulston, not the jury, had fixed the amount of Scopes’s fine. While this might sound like a win for the defence, it wasn’t. By dismissing the case on a technicality, the justices ensured that it would never reach the US Supreme Court, which, as they well knew, had been the aim of the ACLU all along. As a result, the Butler Act remained on the books until 1967. Thirteen years later, Ronald Reagan won the presidency while telling voters:

[Evolution] is a theory, it is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and it is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it was once believed. But if it was going to be taught in the schools then I think that also the biblical theory of creation, which is not a theory but the biblical story of creation, should also be taught.

But as Bryan himself observed, the Scopes trial wasn’t really about evolution. It was about competing rights—about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the community. It was about free speech—about when and where it can be circumscribed. And it was about epistemology—about who determines what is valid information. Should teachers like John Scopes, who are presumably experts in their fields, decide what is taught in schools? Or should parents, who are presumably experts on their children? These remain disputed subjects to this day. If they’re not being fought over the teaching of evolution, they’re being fought over the teaching of critical race theory, genderqueer theory, or the 1619 Project.

Shortly after the 7 October attack on Israel, a history instructor at Berkeley High School, in California, asked her class to respond to the following prompt: “To what extent should Israel be considered an apartheid state?” Was that a thought-provoking query on current events or an inappropriate attempt to bring her personal politics into the classroom? And who decides? The answer to that last question is one of the unresolvable tensions inherent in a democratic society. William Jennings Bryan didn’t understand evolution, but he understood this fact. “The right of the people speaking through the legislature, to control the schools which they create and support is the real issue as I see it,” he said. “If not the people, who?”