Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial

by John R. Perry and Marvin N. Olasky

Book Overview

The Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee was a watershed moment in the history of this country. The ramifications of those proceedings are still being felt today. However, it is not necessarily the arguments from the courtroom floor that are reverberating in the halls of America today. The way the entire event was conducted and perceived by the rest of the nation set the tone for how creationists and evolutionists have been viewed by society ever...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805431578
• ISBN13: 9780805431575
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: B&H Books
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial

Marvin Olasky has written a detailed and fascinating account of the Scopes Trial which delves into the background of the major figures involved and sheds light on their viewpoints of the Creation/Evolution Controversy. The jury ruled in favor of creationism, a quite defendable position, but popular opinion since the trial has been dominated by what secular liberals in the media reported. The problem is that their reporting was a great misrepresentation of the facts.

Pretty good reading

The 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial has come to define the evolution vs. creationism debate like no other event in American history. It was supposedly going to "settle" the question once and for all. It was also intended as an intellectual battle royal between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, two of the greatest minds of the early 20th century. According to this book, the reality was a lot less interesting. The American Civil Liberties Union was a new liberal organization in New York, looking for publicity. The Butler Act was a Tennessee state law which mandated the teaching of creationism alongside evolution (which had been taught in Tennessee for the previous 15 years). The ACLU put ads in local newspapers, looking for a teacher to be arrested to test the law. John Thomas Scopes, a teacher and athletic coach in Dayton, Tennessee (a former steel town that had fallen on hard times) was persuaded to be that person. The trial quickly became the talk of America. Spectators descended on Dayton by the hundreds (the city fathers hoped for thousands). The trial was marked by a lot of procedural wrangling by both sides, with the jury absent, on such questions as whether or not each day's session should open with a prayer. The jury only heard about 3 hours of actual testimony. There were moments of great eloquence during the trial, but there was little of the hoped-for Bryan vs. Darrow. The authors don't end with Scopes being found guilty of teaching evolution, which both sides had planned on, but looks at more recent things like intelligent design. Those who believe in ID are portrayed as flexible and willing to listen to skeptics, while those who believe in evolution are shown as dogmatic and totally unwilling to listen to anyone who doesn't believe as they do. If the authors had ended this book at the end of the trial, I would give it two thumbs up; I can understand showing the current state of the evolution debate. Whatever your feelings on the matter, this is still recommended.

How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot 101

The first problem with this book is that it isn't quite what it seems to be. The second problem is that the authors start out making a valid point - but end up shooting themselves in the collective foot. The book isn't what it seems to be because it has a very strong subtext, which actually becomes the main text for more than 80 of the 326 pages (plus notes, bibliography and index). Olasky and Perry start out with a reasonably interesting, readable but hardly inspiring account of the events surrounding the Scopes "monkey" trial of 1925. It covers the facts fairly competently, but adds very little of any consequence to the material which makes up the far more interesting and comprehensive account of the trial to be found in "Summer for the Gods" by Edward Larson. But then, having presented this as a piece of genuine scholarship, the authors mutilate their collective foot by sliding off into the subtext: The Scopes Trial has been grieviously misrepresented in the plays and film versions of "Inherit the Wind"; and on page 181 we come to what seems to be the primary motivation for writing the book - a critique of evolutionism as a religion and the comparative value of the concept of intelligent design. Hold it! Where did that come from in an account of the events of 1925? The front cover of the book says this is "The true story of the Scopes Trial". There's nothing about this being a defence of intelligent design except for the rather ambiguous final sentence of the back cover blurb: "[the authors] show that advocates of creationism and intelligent design have nothing to be ashamed of." How about the fact that this book is a real "pig in a poke"? In my personal opinion someone ought to feel some regret about that for a start. My recommendation to anyone interested in the Scopes Trial would be to give this book a miss. There's plenty of information on the web about the myths surrounding the Scopes Trial. And as far as books are concerned, in my opinion you'd be a whole lot better off with Larson's "Summer for the Gods" where you'll get what you've paid for.

Debunking Debunkers: A Solid History of the Scopes Trial.

Many years ago as a young undergraduate in college, I read a collection of H.L. Mencken's articles. Included as a matter of course were his dispatches the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee. Like many readers before and since, I revelled in Mencken's portrait of the intellectual giant Clarence Darrow, and chuckled appropriately at his elitist view of Dayton residents as ignorant backcountry yokels and hicks. I also, like many readers before and since, I mistook his reporting for historical fact. It was not. Mencken, the great debunker, had his own agenda and was rather careless in his reporting of the substance of the trial. Unfortunately, his views have subsequently become the dominant interpretation among historians and journalists alike. 'Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial' re-examines the Scopes trial and the events which led up to it. It also provides a broad discussion of the issues at stake then and now. The bulk of the book is devoted to refuting a number of myths that continue to flourish about the trial. Scopes was not a science teacher and in all likelyhood had never taught evolution in the classroom. Indeed, the whole trial resulted from an effort on the part of some citizens in Dayton to bring national publicity to their town in the hopes of revitalizing the local economy. The ACLU, which "defended" Scopes, was in fact simply looking for a test case on the question of teaching evolution, largely because the organization had lost its main rationale for existence (defending opponents of the draft in World War I) and needed publicity to continue. The "trial" for its part, was largely conducted out of sight from the jury, and the townspeople of Dayton were quite hospitable towards both Bryan and Darrow. In the end, Scopes was found guilty, fined $100, and his case was overturned on a technicality, much to the frustration of the defense, which had hoped to have the question heard before the Supreme Court. Alternately amusing and lively, the historical recreation of the trial is the heart of this book and alone makes it worth the purchase price. The authors, however, are no more free of bias than Mencken was. They hope their reappraisal of the trial will also rescue Christians, especially Creationists, from the charges that they were (and are) ignorant fearful haters of the truth. Toward this end, they note that the triumph of Darwinism as scientific orthodoxy following Sputnik and the release of the film "Inherit the Wind" led philosophers such as Julian Huxley and Richard Dawkins to proclaim an end to religion and the triumph of materialism. Such ideas have consequences and the authors blame the fall of moral standards and the rise of ideas like pornography as a form of free speech upon such views. They also favorably review the work of Intelligent Design theorists like William Dembski and Michael Behe. Some readers will be disappointed with this partisanship, or at least claim that it goes to far. Int