The Scopes Monkey Trial: A Headline Court Case (Headline Court Cases)

Rating:
Summary: The best juvenile history of the celebrated "Monkey" Trial
Review: The Scopes "Monkey" Trial did not appear in American History textbooks until after the play "Inherit the Wind" opened on Broadway. In fact, several textbooks used the fictional account of the trial as the basis for what appeared as history. One of the chief virtues of this book by Freya Ottem Hanson is that she puts the celebrated "duel in the shade" where Clarence Darrow questioned William Jennings Bryan about the Bible and evolution in perspective.

Hanson only spends a couple of pages on the cross-examination, but she does focus on the point where Bryan admitted that the days in Genesis were not necessarily 24-hour days. This, of course, is the focal point of the play's version of what happened. However, an examination of the trial transcript shows that Bryan, knowing where Darrow was going with his questions, was actually attempting to pre-empt the line of attack; he was not force to admit the point, but actually volunteered the point. After all, according to Genesis the sun, moon, and stars were not created until the fourth day. So, while Hanson does not let the cross-examination dominate the story of the trial, she does buy into the importance of that particular declaration. So while "The Scopes Monkey Trial" focuses more on what happened in the court that most juvenile accounts, it still falls short of adequately capturing the legal arguments of the trial.

Hanson provides a lot of information about the trial, including details about all of the various witnesses for the prosecution and the defense. I was also pleased to see that she pays more attention to Dudley Field Malone's speech in defense of academic freedom than you will find in Edward J. Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the trial "Summer of the Gods." However, for a book that is focusing on the trial as a court case, I was surprised that it does not given young readers a clear sense of the stages of the trial. The cross-examination of the third and final stage of the trial was intended to embarrass Bryan; the decision had already been made to ask the jury to find Scopes guilty. Darrow would even refrain from giving a closing argument just to prevent Bryan from giving the "Back to God" speech he had been working on for weeks.

Malone's speech represents the key position of the defense, which was to reconcile evolution and Genesis. This is important because it was this rhetoric of reconciliation that was intended to be their position and not the ridicule of Bryan that came to characterize their position. Furthermore, Hanson ignores the first stage of the trial, where defense attorney Arthur Garfield Hays argued the Butler Act was unconstitutional. Hays is mentioned in the book (but not in the index) so young reader do not learn about how he drafted up a law patterned on the Butler Act to teach that the Earth was the center of the universe, just like it says in the Bible.

Another strength of the book is how Hanson covers the legal cases involving evolution and creationism from the Epperson v. Arkansas case that finally saw the anti-evolution laws declared unconstitutional to more recent court actions. The book is illustrated with black & white photographs, including several which I have never seen before (and since I did my dissertation on the Scopes trial I had some reason to believe I had seen pretty much everything out there). In terms of primary and secondary sources, Hanson certainly availed herself of a better selection than any other author of a juvenile account of the trial....

Rating:
Summary: The best juvenile history of the celebrated "Monkey" Trial
Review: The Scopes "Monkey" Trial did not appear in American History textbooks until after the play "Inherit the Wind" opened on Broadway. In fact, several textbooks used the fictional account of the trial as the basis for what appeared as history. One of the chief virtues of this book by Freya Ottem Hanson is that she puts the celebrated "duel in the shade" where Clarence Darrow questioned William Jennings Bryan about the Bible and evolution in perspective.

Hanson only spends a couple of pages on the cross-examination, but she does focus on the point where Bryan admitted that the days in Genesis were not necessarily 24-hour days. This, of course, is the focal point of the play's version of what happened. However, an examination of the trial transcript shows that Bryan, knowing where Darrow was going with his questions, was actually attempting to pre-empt the line of attack; he was not force to admit the point, but actually volunteered the point. After all, according to Genesis the sun, moon, and stars were not created until the fourth day. So, while Hanson does not let the cross-examination dominate the story of the trial, she does buy into the importance of that particular declaration. So while "The Scopes Monkey Trial" focuses more on what happened in the court that most juvenile accounts, it still falls short of adequately capturing the legal arguments of the trial.

Hanson provides a lot of information about the trial, including details about all of the various witnesses for the prosecution and the defense. I was also pleased to see that she pays more attention to Dudley Field Malone's speech in defense of academic freedom than you will find in Edward J. Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the trial "Summer of the Gods." However, for a book that is focusing on the trial as a court case, I was surprised that it does not given young readers a clear sense of the stages of the trial. The cross-examination of the third and final stage of the trial was intended to embarrass Bryan; the decision had already been made to ask the jury to find Scopes guilty. Darrow would even refrain from giving a closing argument just to prevent Bryan from giving the "Back to God" speech he had been working on for weeks.

Malone's speech represents the key position of the defense, which was to reconcile evolution and Genesis. This is important because it was this rhetoric of reconciliation that was intended to be their position and not the ridicule of Bryan that came to characterize their position. Furthermore, Hanson ignores the first stage of the trial, where defense attorney Arthur Garfield Hays argued the Butler Act was unconstitutional. Hays is mentioned in the book (but not in the index) so young reader do not learn about how he drafted up a law patterned on the Butler Act to teach that the Earth was the center of the universe, just like it says in the Bible.

Another strength of the book is how Hanson covers the legal cases involving evolution and creationism from the Epperson v. Arkansas case that finally saw the anti-evolution laws declared unconstitutional to more recent court actions. The book is illustrated with black & white photographs, including several which I have never seen before (and since I did my dissertation on the Scopes trial I had some reason to believe I had seen pretty much everything out there). In terms of primary and secondary sources, Hanson certainly availed herself of a better selection than any other author of a juvenile account of the trial....