Clarence Darrow, left, and William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial in 1925 (Associated Press)

America has largely forgotten Ray Ginger, the mid-20th century historian whose tenure as a professor at Harvard University ended badly during the McCarthy era when the college, to its eternal discredit, demanded that he and his wife swear loyalty oaths. Afterward, Ginger wrote two excellent books, including Six Days or Forever, which remains one of the most colorful and definitive accounts of the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" and the iconic courtroom clash between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan.*

Ironically, Six Days now reads like the Book of Revelations (which Darrow grandly mocked before, during, and after the trial). Indeed, it is revelatory to see how the forces that animated the run-up to the Scopes trial 90 years ago are still present today. We see their work mostly in the dogged renewal of the fight to teach creationism to our children and in the rancor over the truth about the human causes of global warming. To call these forces anti-science is accurate but not the entire story. It's something broader than that.

The Good Old Days

In his introduction to Six Days, Ginger emphasized the role that recent immigration had played in reanimating fear-based practices and policies among white Americans. "The anxiety was nationwide, because some of the major causes were nationwide," he wrote. First, there had been the great European migration to America in the 1890s. "The new immigrant groups came to be voting blocs of more significance than were native-born Americans in one city after another," Ginger wrote.



Next came the Great War. "The sense of losing one's birthright, of alienation, of betrayal, was heightened by World War I," Ginger wrote:

Before the war Christianity had turned increasingly toward the Social Gospel, which sought to face the social problems of industrialism and urbanism and to deal with them in a spirit of practical idealism. ... Then came the war. ... Gone was the previous hopefulness, the cheery conviction that progress is inevitable. ... Present, too, with many, was a vague sense of guilt. ... The feeling of having sinned, of being on the verge of eternal damnation, was intolerable, and men had to assure themselves of their basic goodness. This effort required a simple definition of morality: a good man is a man who does not drink, or smoke, or gamble, or commit adultery, or contravene the Word of the Bible, and who punishes the sins of others.

This "social creed," Ginger argued, was heavily promoted by corporate interests, including the United States Chamber of Commerce. These business groups, he wrote, "helped to create good growing weather for the anti-evolutionary movement. They too preached the overwhelming need for social order, for stony-faced resistance to change." From Six Days:

The big business groups and the fundamentalists likewise agreed that education should consist in the inculcation of received truths, not in the development among students of certain modes of analysis, not in the discovery of new truths. Truth is known. Teach it. Who knows it? We do. How do you learn it? The fundamentalists replied: God revealed it to us. The business groups replied: We are the elite. We know everything.

Ginger distilled these attitudes. "A desperate flight backward to old certainties replaced the prewar belief in gradual adaptation to new conditions," he wrote. "In a convulsion of filiopiety, men tried to deny the present by asserting a fugitive and monastic virtue. Not progress, but stability and certainty." This dynamic helped explain, Ginger wrote, the new rise of fundamentalism as a political force. It accounted for great skepticism of the new truths of science. And it generated the rise in nativism and xenophobia that gripped the nation during that time as well as the restrictive immigration policies that resulted from it.