Book Review: ‘Keeping the Faith,’ by Brenda Wineapple

KEEPING THE FAITH: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, by Brenda Wineapple

The schools were banning books. White supremacists were marching in the streets. The donor class was waging a war on democracy. Immigrants, wayward women, bad music and a godless elite were blamed for, well, everything. There’s a lot about the 1920s that feels familiar today. How are we to make sense of the last time America came this close to fascism?

The critic and historian Brenda Wineapple points to an answer in “Keeping the Faith,” her surprisingly timely new book about a trial that happened a century ago. On a spring day in 1925, a substitute high school biology teacher, John T. Scopes, broke Tennessee law when he read aloud pages from a textbook that had a section on the theory of evolution. Few doubted that a Tennessee jury would find him guilty, but a great many people figured that the law was as unconstitutional as it was idiotic.

The Scopes trial of 1925 — the “monkey trial,” as the irascible journalist H.L. Mencken branded it — was one of those only-in-America events that periodically fill the newspapers of a nation that is always asking questions about itself, and it howls back to life again in this captivating history.

This tale is usually told as an epic confrontation between faith and science, with the past on one side and the future on the other. Wineapple frames it much more interestingly as a conflict between political visions that remain very much alive in the present. The “trial of the century” of 1925 was much more about political theater than points of law or scientific theories, she makes clear, and everyone knew who the two stars of the show were.

Entering stage right was William Jennings Bryan, a.k.a. the Great Commoner, an aging lion determined to rescue real Americans from an insidious “oligarchy of the professors,” jazz music, socialists and German philosophy. A three-time Democratic Party nominee for president, Bryan rose to fame by standing up for the little guy, the small farmer, the small-business owner, the craftsman and all the other people left behind in the mad dash for cash known as the Gilded Age — as long as they were white.

He gathered up their collective grievances and invested the rage in policy ideas high on righteous symbolism but rather low in efficacy: a strange monetary plan (go silver!); a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol (no rum!); and, finally, the prosecution of the culture wars of the period. The Scopes trial, he inveighed, was about stopping what he once called “apeism,” a (supposedly) Darwinian doctrine about the (supposedly) un-biblical origins of humanity that would destroy everything that made America great.

Entering stage left was Clarence Darrow, a famous labor lawyer, an infamous criminal lawyer and a positively notorious agnostic. A defender of the rights of women, Black people, union organizers, anarchists, socialists as well as psychopathic murderers, Darrow made friends in all the wrong places.

With his rumpled shirt and cigarette-chiseled face, he strides through these pages, in the words of a friend, as “human as pie à la mode,” a humanitarian with a whole lot of hustle, a champion of the damned with a taste for the headlines. Yet, as Wineapple perceptively observes, his “trenchant wit, often mistaken for cynicism, masked an old-fashioned romanticism.” At the core of his political vision lay the conviction that “there could be no democracy without reason.” That was why he just had to volunteer for Scopes’s defense, free of charge.

By the time of the showdown in Tennessee, Bryan’s so-called populism had curdled into reactionary demagogy. The onetime foe of the plutocracy was hawking real estate from the new palatial home he had built for himself in Florida, castigating workers for daring to unionize and earning the admiration of the renascent Ku Klux Klan, which he seemed to think had some very fine people on its side.

His Christian nationalism became a way to mobilize the resentments of the left-behinds to satisfy the greed of the well-aheads. Though widely portrayed as a throwback longing to anchor America in a simpler past, as Wineapple hints, Bryan is better understood as a political entrepreneur feeling his way toward a steely future in which the vast powers of a modern state would be harnessed to majoritarian intolerance and the demon-haunted imagination of ethnonationalism.

Darrow, paradoxically, arrived in court as the representative of something older and arguably more American. He was a man in the mold of Robert Ingersoll, a.k.a. the Great Agnostic, the freethinker who tore through the lecture halls of the 19th century smashing all the idols of Christian America. The labor leader Eugene V. Debs, the women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and a very long list of philosophers, writers, education reformers and politicians were of the same, heretical stripe.

These were Darrow’s people — his friends, his admirers, his clients, his forebears, his fellow dreamers — and some of them get cameos in this book. They saw themselves, rightly, as part of a movement that, extending back to the Republic’s enlightened founders, defied the orthodoxies of the time to keep America true to its democratic promise. They played a critical, underappreciated role in navigating the economic and social conflicts that roiled the Progressive Era.

It all came to a head once again in the crucible of a Tennessee summer, when Darrow and Bryan faced off. At stake was the very idea of self-government. One man held that the safety of the nation demanded the enforcement of a common creed revealed from on high. The other maintained that the foundation of human freedom rests not on the uniformity of belief but on the contest of ideas among an educated public at the bar of reason.

Under Darrow’s ruthless cross-examination, Bryan’s ignorance even of the Bible (never mind Darwin) was exposed. Scopes was found guilty (no surprise there), but the idea of government of, by and for the people lived another day.

Wineapple prefers not to draw as many explicit connections with the American past and future as this reviewer would have liked. She is also not nearly as judgmental. But I will get over it. “Keeping the Faith” is history at its most delicious, presented free from the musty smell of the archives where it was clearly assembled with great care. And if you have been awake for the past 16 years or so, you won’t miss the point. The struggles of yesteryear between reason and ignorance do not merely illuminate those of the present. They are the same struggle. This is a story from a past that isn’t even past.

KEEPING THE FAITH: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation | By Brenda Wineapple | Random House | 509 pp. | $38