By Jack Cashill

(cont.)

If “moderates” like Graves and Scott are now losing faith in the rough and tumble of the democratic process, America’s progressives lost it a long time ago. Appropriately, one of the first public manifestations of that loss was the famed Scopes trial of 1925. This rather bizarre chapter in American cultural history deserves a second glance as it has served as prototype for liberal reform strategy on a wide range of issues, evolution high among them. Even today, its echoes can be heard loud and clear across the state of Kansas.

The Scopes phenomenon began when the upstart American Civil Liberties Union, looking to win its first court case, decided to challenge a recent Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools.

The ACLU had not involved itself previously in the forced secularization of American life. Indeed, Quakers had been instrumental in launching this organization during the First World War as a means of shielding religious pacifists from military service. But with war issues played out, and their faith in majoritarian democracy dimmed by the various oppressions that tend to accompany war, ACLU board members were looking for a new battleground and found one in the classroom.

Lacking confidence in the court of public opinion, the ACLU turned to the court of law. At the time, this was a novel and controversial strategy, even among progressives.The New Republic , for instance, wanted no part of it. In a strongly worded critique, of the sort no longer heard in liberal journals, the editors argued that the ACLU should have placed the onus for resolving the evolution issue, “not on the Supreme Court, but on the legislature and people of Tennessee."

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