Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation (Zoom Program)

*This is a Zoom program*

Moderated by Hon. Richard A. Simons

From the Publisher: The dramatic story of the 1925 Scopes trial, which captivated the nation and exposed profound divisions in America that still resonate today—divisions over the meaning of freedom, religion, education, censorship, and civil liberties in a democracy.

“Propulsive . . . a terrific story about a pivotal moment in our history.”—Ken Burns

“No subject possesses the minds of men like religious bigotry and hate, and these fires are being lighted today in America.” So said legendary attorney Clarence Darrow as hundreds of people descended on the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial of a schoolteacher named John T. Scopes, who was charged with breaking the law by teaching evolution to his biology class in a public school.

Brenda Wineapple, the award-winning author of The Impeachers, explores how and why the Scopes trial quickly seemed a circus-like media sensation, drawing massive crowds and worldwide attention. Darrow, a brilliant and controversial lawyer, said in his electrifying defense of Scopes that people should be free to think, worship, and learn. William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic nominee for president, argued for the prosecution that evolution undermined the fundamental, literal truth of the Bible and created a society without morals, meaning, and hope.

In Keeping the Faith, Wineapple takes us into the early years of the twentieth century—years of racism, intolerance, and world war—to illuminate, through this pivotal legal showdown, a seismic period in American history. At its heart, the Scopes trial dramatized conflicts over many of the fundamental values that define America, and that continue to divide Americans today.

Brenda Wineapple is the author of several books including The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation as well as Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, both of them named best books of the year by The New York Times, among many other publications; White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Hawthorne: A Life, winner of the Ambassador Award; and Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. Her numerous other honors include a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, two National Endowment Fellowships in the Humanities, and, most recently, a National Endowment Public Scholars Award. She has been named a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and regularly contributes to major publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and The Nation.

A complimentary copy of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation will be distributed in advance to the first 30 judges who register.