Abstract

The Scopes trial has long been interpreted through claims about science and religion and about individual rights and liberties. This article recovers a different debate about the trial's political history that emerged in the later 1920s and resonated down the twentieth century. Here the trial figured as a fraught national circus, which raised difficult questions about the relationship between media spectacle and cultural conflict in the United States. The trial's circus dynamics intensified the conflicts it staged without ever actually resolving them; this trap was then perceived and negotiated in different ways by contemporary liberals, conservatives, socialists, and far-right activists.

Highlights

  • The Scopes trial has long been interpreted through claims about science and religion and about individual rights and liberties

  • The trial figured as a fraught national circus, which raised difficult questions about the relationship between media spectacle and cultural conflict in the United States

  • The New York Times claimed that the Scopes trial generated “the greatest debate on science and religion in recent years,” and later historians often explored its importance for the development of evolution, creationism, and fundamentalism

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Summary

By taking the circus seriously and seeing its publicity as

Tom Arnold‐Forster significant politically, this article argues that the trial’s politics were both more fraught and more consequential than has generally been appreciated. Many prominent commentators in the mid- and late s saw the Scopes trial not as a contest between science and religion, nor as a struggle over individual rights and liberties, but rather as a broader debate about the political relationship between cultural conflict and media spectacle in the United States. Liberals approached the trial by advocating modernization and consensus, but the right responded by making anti-liberal arguments for traditional cultural values, which the far right tried to radicalize while the left found itself marginalized In this sense the Scopes trial was not a culture war about education, but nor was it a just a bit of ballyhoo that can be separated from the broader political history of s America.

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