The main point of this book is that the Tennessee v. Scopes trial of 1925, dubbed the most significant trial of the century, influenced legal, political, and societal beliefs and practices for years to come by challenging what was at the time the foundation of many Americans’ religious and moral identities.

In the Scopes trial, Clarence Darrow and Arthur Garfield Hays represented John Scopes, a biology teacher from a Dayton, Tennessee high school who was persuaded to take up the issue of evolutionists and claim that he had taught the theory of evolution to his students. The State of Tennessee along with the help of William Jennings Bryan, a staunch creationist, prosecuted Scopes for violating the recently passed antievolution bill that made teaching evolution to students in a public school a misdemeanor. The trial created a national phenomenon in the media, and Dayton was immediately transformed into the platform from which evolutionists and creationists, scientists and fundamentalists battled. Although many other issues were presented as being at the heart of the debate, such as the rights provided in the Fourteenth Amendment, the rights of students to be provided with education, not religion, ultimately the issue came down to an argument over which theory was true, evolution or creation. Although the original court and the appellate court both ruled that the antievolutionist legislation was valid and that Scopes was guilty of violating it, the stimulation of thought that the trial instigated set the stage for future progress in the direction of religious freedom in the public school system. In 1966, Tennessee repealed the legislation contested in the Scopes trial, and the issue was taken to the United States Supreme Court in the case of Arkansas v. Epperson and the resulting ruling was the same.

Larson brilliantly probes the seemingly innumerable effects that the Scopes trial had on the cornerstone principles of American society, by showing the shift that education took from a imitation of English education based on fundamentalist principles and passed antievolutionary legislation, to a more enlightened, scholarly society that eventually was compelled to pass legislation that allowed for the fundamentalist theories of creationism to be taught in public schools, in addition to the already approved theories of evolution.

Larson substantiates his claim by presenting the progressive aftermath of the trial. He notes that although Scopes was convicted and the ruling was upheld, the audience at the trial and the media was swayed by the persuasive closing statement of Arthur Hays. The impression left upon the minds of the American people was lasting. Although more states, including Arkansas and Texas, passed legislation that banned textbooks from referring to evolution, the repeal of the Scopes decision weakened the argument of antievolutionists. In the appellate review, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the ruling against Scope on a weak basis that the statute did not violate individual rights because it only affected public employees.

However, during the Cold War, Americans feared that students were falling behind in public education, thus encouraging improved science programs and textbooks created by the National Defense Education Act. With the necessity of improved science curriculums, antirevolutionary legislation was repealed, notably in Tennessee in 1966 and in Arkansas in 1965. These repeals may have been viewed as too extreme by Americans in the sixties if the Scopes trial had first approached the idea.

A Pulitzer Prize in History winning book, I found little left to desire in the documentation and style. I feel that the addition of transcripts of the trial to the appendices would give the reader a rare opportunity to read them in their entirety and would benefit from examining the tactics and rhetoric of both the defense, which includes what was deemed to be one of Darrow’s greatest legal speeches of all time, and prosecution. This book illuminates a depth to the trial and the political and societal thought that stimulated it, that I was not aware of prior to reading the book. As the book so aptly exposes, many historical accounts portray the trial as cartoonish and a humiliating defeat of the fundamentalist ideals through the finely tuned wit and rhetoric of Clarence Darrow.