By Jack Cashill

(cont.)

The intoxicating fumes of junk science left the media of that era just as giddy as they do today. “Darwin Theory Is Proved True.” declared the banner headline of a 1912 New York Times. The discovery in question just happened to be the transparently fraudulent “Piltdown Man,” the “alar” of paleontology. As the journalists proved at the Scopes trial, both through the slant of their coverage and their open displays of approval for the Scopes team, ideology has always trumped objectivity in the American media.

Although at the time few considered the Scopes affair a setback for the anti-evolutionists--the New Republic called the trial "a trivial thing full of humbuggery and hypocrisy"--academia and Hollywood have succeeded in transforming progressive propaganda into history. The rewriting began quickly with Frederick Lewis Allen's best-seller, Only Yesterday. Written in 1931, Allen's pop history concluded that the trial was the beginning of the end for fundamentalism. Other historians picked up the theme of "fundamentalism's last stand" even though all objective evidence suggested fundamentalism was growing. By mid-century, even influential historians like Richard Hofstadter were rubbing defeat in the face of their imagined foes. Bryan’s latter career, Hofstadter wrote with obvious spite, represented "the collapse of rural idealism and the shabbiness of the evangelical mind."

Inherit The Wind polished off the liberal rewrite job. The popular play and movie portrayed the Bryan figure as a slobbering buffoon, the Darrow figure as a fair-minded rationalist, and the townsfolk as a mob of witch-hunting McCarthyites. The image of conservative Christianity was fixed in the popular imagination. The trial was a humiliation. Fundamentalism was dying Anti-evolution was dead .

One problem. No one told the fundamentalists. They and their Catholic and even orthodox Jewish allies showed up in Topeka on a typically stark, hot, August day in the hundreds to make their final case before the Kansas Board of Education. They fanned themselves with hats and hand-outs to ward off the heat in the stuffy, L-shaped board room much as they might have in that Tennessee courthouse in 1925 They spilled into the halls to watch on jerry-rigged monitors. They restrained themselves admirably when opponents belittled their efforts. And perhaps 50 among them made impassioned two-minute pleas to influence the board's decision.

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