Looking for Writing About the Scopes Trial "Civic Biology" Textbook
June 7, 2023 11:27 AM   Subscribe

I am looking to read more on the Scopes Trial, but specifically things that address the content of the textbook at the heart of the trial, "A Civic Biology." I am not looking for some kind of shallow "balanced" or "both sides" take on the trial, but I would love to read some things that grapple with the content of that book, whether contemporary accounts or more recent ones.

Some years ago I read a Marilynne Robinson essay in her book Death of Adam, which takes a little bit of a contrarian position on the Scopes Trial--if I could characterize roughly I think she sees it as a battle over ethics rather than a battle over science. She mentions in the essay that the text itself is basically racist to its core, and a glance at the Wikipedia page makes that clear.

TW for racism and eugenics but here is the Wikipedia page for the book. I spent a bunch of time excerpting it in this post and then deleted that stuff because it's just kind of ugly and I didn't want my post to be mostly cartoonish racism, ableism, and classism from this book which laments that "humanity will not allow" us to kill people on the public dole, but anyway, I guess that is what passed for "science" in the U.S. in the 1914.

I read a really interesting biography of William Jennings Bryan, "A Godly Hero," a couple years ago and while it addresses the Scopes Trial at length it didn't address the textbook itself as much as I'd hoped. I don't honestly get the sense that Bryan's critique was ever explicitly about the racism in the book--I mean, the man was Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State. Still, if there's anything that frames Bryan's role there as against what is going in that text, I'd be interested to read that, too.

So, I'm looking for books, magazine articles, newspaper articles, anything from any time since the trial which addresses the textbook itself. Thanks.
posted by kensington314 to Society & Culture (3 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Sorry if this is too obvious, but you did see that you can read the actual textbook, right?

The Digital Public Library of America has an online exhibit on the Scopes trial that might be of interest.

Did you glance through the citations on that Wikipedia article? The book Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools might be useful.

Taking a step back, I am wondering if you are trying to calibrate the content of this book versus the thinking in biology more broadly at the time?
posted by bluedaisy at 11:40 AM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]


Best answer: If you have the patience to sift through the stenographic report of the trial itself, it's available for free through the Internet Archive.

Your remark about Bryan contains, I think, a key insight into this whole issue: it is entirely possible for A Civic Biology to be deeply, unabashedly racist, and for that fact to be utterly irrelevant as far as the Scopes trial is concerned. I suspect that, reading through the transcript of Bryan's speeches, you will find that to have been the case.
posted by the tartare yolk at 10:57 AM on June 8, 2023


Best answer: To double post: you may be interested in the works of Jeffrey Moran, especially his article "Reading Race into the Scopes Trial: African American Elites, Science, and Fundamentalism" (JSTOR link). Moran's The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents (Internet Archive link) may also be helpful, esp. the section on race in the trial, pp. 180-188.
posted by the tartare yolk at 11:07 AM on June 8, 2023


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