The Past Isn't Even Past: The Trial That Riveted A Nation With Brenda Wineapple

REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH, HOST:

Brenda Wineapple is the author of seven books, including The Impeachment: The Trial of Andrew Johnson, named by The New York Times as one of the ten best nonfiction works of 2019, and Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848 to 1877. It was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, among other publications. She is a recipient of the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pushkin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Council of Learned Society Fellowship. She has also received three National Endowment Fellowships, including its Public Scholarship Award.

Brenda has authored groundbreaking biographies and historical books, most recently Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, Which goes deep into the Scopes Monkey Trial, so-called, of 1925. New York Times reviewer Mathew Stewart said: “Keeping the Faith is history at its most delicious, presented free from the musty smell of the archives where it was clearly assembled with great care.”

Brenda, Welcome to The State of Belief!

BRENDA WINEAPPLE, GUEST:

I'm delighted to be here. Thanks, Paul.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Oh my God. Delicious. When I read that, a review of you, I mean that word in book reviews… Rarely, you know, rarely.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

It couldn't have been better if I wrote it myself.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I mean, really, and I just love the word “delicious” in general, but to have it be part of a book… And, you know, I've spent time with this book, it is delicious. And it's not only delicious because of the writing and the research that you see it, but also, for me, just the revelation that I've had about something that I thought I knew about, which is the Scopes trial. I think the sum total of my knowledge of that was from “Inherit the Wind,” and my guess is that I'm not alone in that that play and then movie, I guess, really influenced how many of us view the narrative and also, you know, the range of the characters, but also constricted the characters.

So, why don't you just take the next few minutes to talk a little bit about, just broadly, what was that trial so that we enter into the conversation kind of already learning something about something we thought we knew about, but still have so much more to learn.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

That's very interesting, Paul. Just as a side note, by the way, about “Inherit the Wind,” I never saw it; and, in fact, I didn't watch it until I had finished the book, because I'm very careful about not letting movies or other books of a certain kind, say fiction, get into my head. And I really didn't want to see that book. and it was the editors - not my editor, but the legendary editor Bob Gottlieb - told me, you have to put something about the book in the end. So it's in the epilogue. I do mention it in passing, but, you know, it's interesting, too, that your knowledge comes from “Inherit the Wind.” And I think you are, as you say, not alone in that.

But I've also found that there's a demographic that does not know that movie. Actually, when you think of it, it came out, I think, in 1960, and maybe it was around for the 60s and 70s, but more or less it's disappeared. But it's part of the conversation. It's part of the culture. It's part of what people know, if they know anything, about the Scopes trial.

So, in some sense, I came to this book as a virgin. And in a way, I knew about the Scopes trial from history, basically from, probably, high school. it was taught, and I remembered it vaguely. And I got very, very interested in it for several reasons.

One was because I was interested in trials, which I find are very dramatic. And I had written a book about the trial of Andrew Johnson, who was the first American president ever to be impeached, which was amazing to me, really, when you think about it. It was right after the Civil War, and in the past I'd written about the 20th Century, early 20th Century, and I thought, there's a trial here, too, that riveted people. And yet it's more or less disappeared, although the issues remain with us and, very, very important.

For those who don't remember or haven't seen the movie and certainly haven't read the book, the trial was ostensibly about evolution and whether the theory of evolution that Darwin proposed in the middle of the 19th century, if the theory of evolution should be taught in the public schools. And the legislature, the state legislature in Tennessee, in 1925, which is almost a hundred years ago, passed a law that banned the teaching of the Theory of Evolution in public schools. And it caused a furor internationally - but not just the banning of the law, because people wouldn't have known about it, but the fact that the newly-founded ACLU, which wasn't very old, decided that this would be a great test case for the protection of civil rights, which is what they had been founded to do.

So they put an advertisement in the Tennessee papers, and somebody read it and decided that if the ACLU would back a school teacher who said he taught evolution - and there was someone who did, his name was John Scopes. He was a young biology teacher, actually a substitute teacher, and he had read from the state-authorized textbook about evolution - which didn't say anything terrible. But according to the state legislature, if you taught the theory of evolution, it conflicted with the theory of creation in the Bible. That was key. And he said, yeah, I taught it, and he did that in order to go to trial - because he was obviously guilty. He had broken the law. So that's how the whole thing began.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

And I just have to say, the cast of characters who were present. I mean, that's like one of the wonderful things that you do in all your books, and, you know, I'm a fan, is that you bring to life this cast of characters. And I want to read one more thing that the New York Times reviewer said. He said, “This is a story from a past that isn't even past.” And so we, in some ways, these characters, like Clarence Darrow and Bryan Jennings and all the people that surrounded it and the many, many people - many of whom are familiar to me from, you know, kind of looking into history from that day, and I hadn't really put together - they intersected with this trial.

But you know that this past that is not even past. Say a little bit more about what issues that were at stake. It was about evolution, but it was a bigger question about society. And as I read it more and more, I was like, oh my God, this is one of those nexuses of American democracy asking a question of itself that we are asking again and again, and we're asking again in 2024.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

Right, we're asking that particular question about so many things, starting with what should be taught in the schools. And we know that books are being banned in libraries, and in schools themselves, by school boards that take upon themselves the idea of what children should read and they legislate that. There's also censorship more widely about what people can do in their private lives: who they can love, for example; whether or not women have rights to their own bodies. This is the kind of legislation and these are the kinds of issues that are still with us. And sometimes they form in different ways.

I'm not sure a woman's right to choose was on the boards at that particular time. Women had only just gotten the right to vote. But in point of fact, women were very much part of what's going on. Because suddenly in 1925, as now, the world seemed to be changing, and the question of who decides what the direction of the country should be was really what's at stake.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

It's amazing to just read about kind of the broader trajectory that Bryan represented and that Darrow represented - in their both kind of best and worst selves. But, you know, I mean, it was really fascinating around, like, I think it's much today about like, what does democracy mean? And who is democracy for? And what do we mean by, you know, a certain collection of people imposing? I mean, I think one of the interesting things that your book revealed was that there was a sense that there was an elite outside of our control, and these were the folks who were promoting Darwinism. And with Darwinism came communism. And with Darwinism came anti-religion; and with Darwinism… All of this stuff. So it wasn't just about one thing.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

It was about race, as well.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Oh, say more about that.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

I mean, when you think that in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan, which had been more or less eliminated in the 19th century, it revived itself and it revived itself particularly… It started in 1915 with Birth of a Nation, which was horrific. And the NAACP, which was also fairly new, protested it.

And after the war, especially, there was a time of real retrenchment - after World War I. And so suddenly, there were tremendous numbers of immigrants. So anybody who wasn't White, was suspect. And certainly that had to do with Blacks, but it also had to do with Italians and Jews, everybody who was considered a person of color at that particular time.

So what William Jennings Bryan, who had run for president on the Democratic ticket three times - I mean, that's really, in some sense, unthinkable, too, although perhaps that's very present in a certain way, people at least run twice these days - but he thought he represented the people. But, when he said he was representing the people, for him, the people were basically White Anglo-Saxon males. And that's the kind of people and that's the kind of world that he wanted to represent.

But he was also, to be fair to him, he was a religious man. He was a man of firm belief. He was upset when Wilson was tending toward war, and he had been Secretary of State, and he resigned. So he was a complicated character. All of these characters, like people today, they're complicated, really. Well, like most people today, maybe not everybody. But in any case, what you have is someone here who really wanted to turn the clock back in many ways. And he was deciding who “the people” were.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I just think that one of the interesting resonances is that, you know, I mean, William Bryan talked about the little guy, he talked about the farmer. He talked about the worker. He was very concerned with that. And yet what he meant by that was really circumscribed.

And, you know, you talk about the Ku Klux Klan. That was another revelation: the Klan participation, whether, you know, immediate or just one circle outside, I hadn't put that together. But, you know, they marched 50,000 strong in Washington, D.C. And at that time, it was a huge part of it.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

Huge. In fact, they wanted the president, who was Calvin Coolidge at the time, to speak. He fortunately did not. He went on vacation, conveniently - but it was 50,000 strong, walking through the streets of Washington. They’d just moved their headquarters to Washington. And that was in August.

The trial had been in July, and one of the crosses they burned around this time was in honor of William Jennings Bryan, who they said was a wonderful Klansman. Again, to be fair, he was not a member of the Klan, but he would not denounce it, because I personally think he wanted to run for president again had he won, and he did not want to alienate southern White voters who were the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party had been the party of slavery, basically. And slavery, too, was one of those issues that was a quote-unquote “Democratic issue.” If you want slavery, you should be able to vote for it, you see. And that was in the 19th century.

So now if you want to ban books, you should be able to vote for it - because who wants these, as you said, and as he said: who wants these elites controlling education? Who wants elites controlling legislation? And these elites, what are they? They are Atheists! And they weren't. I mean, that's the irony is that many religious people, many serious religious people that I'm sure you and your audience knows, you know, like Henry Fosdick and Charles Potter, were, of course, they were very much part of the Church. But this was what was called “liberal theology.” Bryan wanted no part of it because he… That's a slippery slope, just liberal.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

You know, so just to put a dot on that “I” is that, you know, when my great grandfather was studying in seminary in like 1888, he was studying with a professor who introduced Darwin into the conversation. And he considered himself a Christian evolutionist, which was not uncommon. It was controversial, but I know my great grandfather would have not seen this as completely, you know, evolution.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

And he wasn't alone, by any means, at all. In fact, you know, you could almost say the fundamentalists or evangelicals - they were called fundamentalists at the time - William Bell Riley was the head of them from the Baptist Church, but they were, in a sense, a splinter group. And they weren't necessarily representative. They wanted to have more power than they actually did. And you could argue that after their, in a sense, defeat at the Scopes trial, Scopes was found guilty because he was. But it really, because it had become front page news and because so many people internationally were scratching their heads and saying, what's going on in America? The theory of evolution, kind of like the theory of gravity, basically, nobody's going to question that. All it means is change over time. And there could be divinity involved in that.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Well, and that was the big point of Christian evolutionists, is that it doesn't actually rule out how it happens. But so we have this we have this law, the Butler Act, that said we cannot teach evolution. And then a substitute teacher, as you say, Scopes, what was his full name?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

John Scopes. Nice young man. He was also the football coach. And he basically said, wait, you can't teach biology without teaching evolution. And in fact, he used the state-authorized textbook, and all that authorized textbook said his evolution has change.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Evolution is change. It was very, very simple. It didn't say like, you know, “And that means there's no God!” But that's the way it was interpreted.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

The way certain people interpreted it.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Right, right, right. Certain people tried to use it.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

They interpreted it that way. And those were the people who said that the virgin birth was true.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Yeah, they will, all of it.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

The world was started 6000 years ago. So in the face of paleontology and geology and everything that had been going on, so it was disturbing to people in the Church and outside of the Church who really thought, well, wait just a minute here. This is education. These kinds of questions were settled. They were settled in the middle of the 19th century, and nobody had questioned them before. So my question was, writing this book, so what's really going on? Because these seem to be settled questions. So what do they represent in a larger way?

And I think that's where I wanted to get underneath the question, because in one sense, people didn't really even understand what evolution was. People weren't well versed, your average person, in science, any more then than they were today. And, as a result, it seemed to me that, sure, these issues were important and they should be discussed, but they also represent something broader, wider or deeper, which doesn't just eliminate them as important because they should be thought of as important.

Scientists came, Christian scientists came, like your great-grandfather, came to testify on behalf of evolution at the trial. So there was something else that was going on. And according to Clarence Darrow, the other main person that you mentioned, the question was the Constitution. You know that the Constitution forbids an established Church, one Church, you know, and he would say in the courtroom, what about the Qur’an? What about other forms of belief? Which Bible are you talking about you have to take literally? There's the King James Bible, there's the Oxford Bible, there are many Bibles. And what about biblical translations? What if the translations are wrong? So he was trying to show, himself, that there was something else really at stake.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

And what is that thing? What was at stake for people? You know, because this, I think, is what continues into this day. Like, that's what I feel is so interesting about this book is that it feels like what people understood to be at stake then is very similar, maybe a little bit different terminology, very similar to what people feel is at stake today.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

Yeah. The ability to have professionals profess, to work in their own way. The ability for people to make their own decisions. What Darrow said, one of his great quotes really is, “If I'm not free, you're not free.” And really, what was in stake was intolerance.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I have a great quote that I got from your book that I want to read now, and then for you to continue. But Darrow said: “’Tolerance means a willingness to let other people do, think, act, and live as we think is not right. The antithesis of this is intolerance, and it means that we demand the right to make others live as we think is right, not as they think is right.’ Otherwise, as he had declared, no one was safe.”

And I thought that got to some crux of what he was arguing for - and we're still arguing for it. I mean, honestly, with a lot of these issues that seem at stake right now. It's like, there's a way to get through this, which is just to let other people… It's very much like Tim Walz saying, like, leave us alone, you know.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

Stay out of my bedroom or, you know.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

So but keep going about.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

A simple way to put it: the issue was bigotry, and the issue was the imposition of my ideas, my sort of White supremacist, literalist ideas on everybody else. And in fact, that was also true - even though there were mixed motives - it was true of prohibition in the sense of, you know, maybe your religious practice has wine at dinner or something like that. Prohibition wanted to get rid of alcohol. The distribution and the drinking of alcohol as a constitutional amendment. Well, we know how that went. Bryan was very much behind that, sometimes for good reasons. But my point is that he also wanted, I think, a constitutional amendment banning the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools, which is remarkable, really. It would be, like I said before, like banning the theory of gravity. I mean, you can't really do that. And that's an imposition. That is bigotry.

Darrow had a pin that he wore in the trial, and it said, “LLL.” And somebody else said, well, what is “LLL”? “Live and let live” was what it stood for. And that's what he meant by freedom. The freedom to think, the freedom to worship. Constitution, right? The freedom not to worship if you don't want to worship. That's what he was standing for. Which is also, as I said, the freedom to think and the freedom to learn. Not to say you can't learn about this, which is, he said is a form of intolerance that's not unlike the witch trials.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Well, I actually think it's a direct lineage, you know?

So one of the questions I had for you was, because you went deep into this and you hadn't even seen “Inherit the Wind.” One of the reasons I had seen “Inherit the Wind” was because there's a regional theater in this little town in Cape Cod where we have a house, and they love to do “Inherit the Wind.” That was a big favorite - just because we were all elites, by the way, probably. But the question is like, what are the characters that we don't know? Like, we know Darrow and we know Bryan. What were a couple characters who were really, like, when you were reading about, they were like, aha! That's someone who history has really kind of blipped over, but it's really interesting.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

Yeah. Well, you know, one of the things that Darrow was able to do is assemble what I consider to be, in a way, a dream team. he had a man named Dudley Malone, who had been an undersecretary in Wilson's administration. He knew Bryan. He was then Collector of the Port of New York. He was very well known. He was an Irish Catholic, by the way, which is, I think, wonderful. And when he got up and spoke, he said, you can't tell me what to believe. Don't say I don't believe. These men on the defense team were all northerners, which was also an issue. So there was Dudley Malone, who was a wonderful and gifted orator, really fabulous. And he gave one of the best speeches at the trial about freedom and fear. And he basically said to Bryan and the prosecution, what are you afraid of? You know, you're basically afraid of something. So there was Dudley Malone.

And there was also a man, Arthur Garfield Hayes, who worked for a very, very long time with the ACLU - into the 50s. He stood up against the Red scare. He worked against censorship when books were banned in Boston, like American Tragedy was banned in Boston. Mencken’s American Mercury was banned in Boston. So he was a longtime civil libertarian, Arthur Garfield Hays - which, by the way, he was named for three presidents: Arthur, Garfield and Hayes. But he was Jewish. He was a secular Jew. so that meant that he was not observant.

He certainly wasn't Orthodox, but he was Jewish. He was brought up as Jewish. He was proud to be Jewish. He even defended two of the men accused of the Reichstag fire, in Germany. And of course, the Nazis didn't want to hear him because he was Jewish. So on this team - he was also brilliant - was Malone, Darrow, and Hayes. So you have a Catholic, you have a Jew, and you have Darrow, who is an Agnostic. And he was a definite Agnostic. He said he's not an Atheist because an Atheist is too, to his mind, dogmatic. He said he just didn't know. And he represented those who say skepticism is itself a form of wisdom. How do you know something? And he said, if you believe, that's fine. I wouldn't take away anybody's belief. But I have to be free to ask questions and perhaps not believe because I have proof. So there were three very, very interesting men on that particular defense team that we really can pay a kind of homage to.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

As you know, I'm writing this book about my grandmother and just running across amazing people. And you know, we tend to get stuck in the really, like, the big, big, big names. And we don't have capacity to have all of them. But it's kind of reassuring to know that there's just a lot of great folks out there who are doing important work, and inspiring in a way that not everybody has to be, like, celebrated by history for good or for bad. But there's many - it's actually at the heart of democracy that there's many actors, and I think one of the great gifts, of your gift as a storyteller and a historian and a writer, is that you bring these people back to life. In some ways, you're like bringing them back in front of the American public.

I do want to ask you: you went into this not… I mean, because you can't turn around things that quickly. And I want to say: there's something about Brenda Wineapple, which is: she catches the moment before the moment arrives. Like the fact that you wrote about the first presidential impeachment, and almost the day it came out was when the impeachment trial of Donald Trump was happening. It was wild. And then when I saw... Actually, you know, you should know your main publicist is Brad, because he was like, have you seen this book that Brenda has… You have to interview her!

Brad, for all of our listeners, is my husband, and we are friends with Brenda and her wonderful husband Michael. And then I looked at the title, and I was like, that title could be written today. But you didn't go into it thinking, okay, I'm going to write a book that will allow me, actually, to talk about today. But undoubtedly there are things in your book that, while you were discovering them, you were like, oh my God, you know, echo, echo, echo, you know?

What were some of those moments in your research when you were listening to a testimony or looking at testimony or looking at documents and you're like, that could have been written in 2023?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

Actually, all of it could have been written today. And that's both the bad news and the good news. The bad news is that we're still fighting these kinds of battles with a population that is so firmly entrenched in, well, I would have to say bigotry and intolerance, I do agree with Darrow on that, and wants to turn the clock back to some kind of time that didn't exist, and deport immigrants who are the bedrock of the country. You know, to legislate what you can do, as I said before, who you can love, what you can think about, what you can read. You know, all of that is today... That's the bad news, really. I came across it among many people.

And, you know, to be fair, there were people like W.E.B. Du Bois who were horrified by what was going on in Dayton. But he also wisely said that Dayton really is America. So it's not just this weird thing that's happening in this little town in Tennessee, and Tennessee's the South, and we don't expect that of the South. Strongholds of the Klan weren't just in the South. They were in the Midwest and the East. So, people knew that that's all the bad news.

But the good news is there were people like Dubois. There were people like Darrow. There were people like Fosdick, the clergyman in what later became the Riverside Church in New York. There were so many people who were kind of shocked by this, and who really, sung and unsung, were pushing against it and were themselves openminded. They were curious. They were willing to combat this kind of prejudice. And I find that really inspiring, as you said, really inspiring, because I felt that, all right. So maybe we've been here before, but that doesn't mean nothing has changed. Not at all. It means there are strains of intolerance. There are strains of prejudice. There are strains of actual hatred in this country. and that's unfortunate, but it's not an ideal place.

And there are people who really have a vision. And you think to yourself, how did they get that vision? Why do they have that vision? and it's so moving. I find it very, very moving that these people will go on the line. They will sacrifice, really, everything. That Darrow took on this fight because he was a believer. He didn't take a fee. And he only went to Tennessee because he thought that this kind of what he thought of as dangerous nonsense – nonsense, but dangerous - had to be stopped. And he felt it was up to him to stop it.

And this wasn't the only thing that he wanted to stop. He hated capital punishment, for example. So he would fight for people who he knew were guilty, were awful people, like Leopold and Loeb. But he would take on their case to make sure that they weren't executed so we could learn something.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Yeah, well, there was a great quote from Scopes, who was at the center of the trial, that he gave later in life. He said, “Liberty is always under threat, and it literally takes eternal vigilance to maintain it.” And I think that that is a lesson from the past, and it's a lesson for our time, and it's a lesson into the future. What's so interesting - and, you know, I give talks around the country about White Christian nationalism and this moment that we're in, and just so much of what you're talking about… You know, I mentioned the 20s and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, but also the effort to restrict immigration from areas that had Jewish and… It was restricting immigration based on the race of Europe: the southern nations that were Italians, Catholics and Jewish from the East. And all of this really important history. That's the reason it's never helpful to say, oh, this isn't who America is. It's like, well, yeah, it is who we are. But we also are the other thing, and as much as we can continue to move forward.

Maybe one of the things that would be helpful - for those of us who are kind of in the field today, not that anybody that is going to write about me later - but it's one of the things that we do need is the best lessons we can garner from the past. What were some really important lessons that you thought maybe those of us who are in the field today trying to take on the latest manifestation of this, what are some things that we should be aware of that you think would help us be more effective?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

Well, in one sense and one thing that's interesting about the trial is that, as I said, the defense lost. Scopes was found guilty. I mean, you know, he got a nominal fine, basically. And Darrow and to a certain extent the ACLU protested and pushed this to the legislature, to the Supreme Court of Tennessee. The state Supreme Court - it never went to the higher courts. Okay. So they lost. So the lesson I would say is when you lose, you don't necessarily lose, and you don't give up. Because even though there was a loss here, there was a larger win, which is we're talking about this trial. We know what happened. it's important to know what happened. There were people, as we were both saying, vigilant, protecting liberty, willing to fight for it. And that kind of combat, that kind of struggle, that kind of energy really is also very much with us. And it's something to harden us and make us think, oh, there is a future of possibility, of hope and of change.

There are setbacks, to be sure. You know, there is the narrowmindedness, to be sure. There is, I would say, sometimes soullessness to be sure. But that's not the whole picture. And so to become mired in despair - look at someone like Darrow. I mean, he was flawed for sure. He didn't always do right? He’s not ideal. He's human. And he kept fighting. You know, he kept fighting against people who wanted to deport other people. People who wanted to jail pacifists - and they were jailed. I mean, jailing a pacifist, you think what is going on? But that actually happened.

So that's the sense in which I find all of this inspiring. There's always another vision when the same thing with the failure to convict Andrew Johnson and get him out of office. It failed. But there was no way that guy was going to ever be able to run again. And what was presented in the trial was a vision of an alternate, fairer, not prejudiced, inclusive country. And that's what you have here. Even though this trial was a head-scratcher: like, what's going on? Bernard Shaw and people in England and internationally thought, well, what is this backwoods America? But it wasn't the case, really. Something was larger at stake. And that sense of struggle to make - it's almost a cliché, now - a more perfect union, that's something to be thought about, and think, that there are people who are going to do that.

Maybe one of us, in our own little ways, can be one of those people. And even though a lot of people are lost, we don't know Dudley Malone or Arthur Garfield Hays and we don't know Doris Stevens. There were a lot of actors at this particular time, we don't know them. So what? It's not about celebrity, really. It's not about fame. It's that kind of desire to create something - that's different than just notoriety. And I think that's important.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

There was a word that came up that I read in your book about, actually, the side that won technically, but really, there was a sense and I think, it was Jennings who got into this, that there was humiliation experienced by the people he felt he was representing, which were largely aggrieved White folks from various classes. I'm very interested in this idea: obviously the people who won this battle, but they very much feel they've lost the war, or that they're or that they're in danger of completely losing the war.

And we see this again today as like the idea of that we are being humiliated by people. We're being told we're wrong, we're being told our vision is wrong. And so we're going to fight back. And they feel that they are the victims. And I'm curious if you had any insight on that, because we see that today a lot.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

I do think some people actually feel victimized. I also think it's a strategy, and it's a fairly pernicious strategy: a way of garnering sympathy or something to that effect. But I think there's a reality to be reckoned with about that, because there's a sense in which, when we were talking about the intolerance of that kind of bigotry or narrowmindedness or the sense of exclusiveness, all of that, and the sense that these so-called elites are coming to humiliate them. The North is coming to humiliate the South; the urbanites, the city mouse is coming to humiliate the country mouse. All of that is at play. But at the same time, there's a truth to that. And the truth to that is that sometimes, the two sides do not listen to one another. And you have to be careful of that.

One of the things I say at the end of the book is when Bryan went on the stand and was questioned by Darrow, both men really lost their tempers – understandably; plus it was very hot out. But when that happened and it was revealed that that Bryan didn't even know about the Bible that he was supposedly championing, he didn't really understand what was going on and contradicted himself. But there was a way in which also Darrow, who was angry, did humiliate Bryan. And it was the way he felt that he had to do this. But the larger lesson is that people who aren't using that victimization as a strategy and feel that they aren't themselves being heard. It's important to hear them. One of the things that that someone in Dayton, Tennessee, where the trial took place, said is that when you have these jousting antagonists come to town, what it is, is education. And that's what I think is important about a trial, too, is that it's educational.

You got to hear both sides, really. And then you got to hear that Bryan's side really didn't have a leg to stand on, that it was filled with prejudice. He was saying he was fighting a duel to the death for Christianity. I mean, that language is kind of crazy because he's not fighting for Christianity. He's only fighting for a sort of narrow interpretation of the Bible. So when that happens in a trial, and I think what's important about for my mind, dramatizing the trial, which is dramatic to begin with, is you hear what's going on and that is revealed. And I think the revelation is important. And that's a way of listening, too, so that you can be a judge and, okay. Darrow was human. There is a sense in which you shouldn't humiliate people. That goes back to in the present, really. Well, Hillary Clinton saying, basket of deplorables. And there's a way in which that was deplorable.

I understand why she said it, but that just speaks to a sense that people feel less than, and that's not right. That really isn't.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Yeah. I think that Donald Trump is promising to avenge these folks who claim to have been humiliated, and he's playing off of this idea. And I think in that way it is pernicious, as you're talking about. But there is some way, how do we - and this is more of a question for me trying to imagine a way forward, is like, how do we bring people along? How do we emphasize the education that happened in that trial rather than the humiliation, and the lessons learned.

And I do think the idea of what we can know and who gets to decide what we know is at the root of the book banning controversy, and the schools, and, like, really, who gets to decide what the country is. This idea of like, this is a Christian country. We're dueling for the Christian vision of America, which of course, is like a very terrible understanding of the First Amendment and our founding. So all of these things are at stake today.

This book, which I think is just a great way to think about what we're going through now, which is not a hundred years ago. But Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and The Trial That Riveted A Nation could be a title about today. And so it's just really helpful to have these historical points of light which we can look back to and say, oh, okay, now I understand some of how we got here.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

There's a there's a part of a line in a poem by T.S. Eliot called “Four Quartets,” you’re probably familiar with it, and the part of the line that just came to mind as you were talking is: “History is now.” And that's the line, also, “the past is not even past,” which comes from Faulkner, actually. But history is now, and so there's a sense in which it's not just back there. We're constantly in the moment, in a way, and it's important to see that in the long view, you know, in the sense that we're part of something, and it's ongoing. And that means that we're part of something larger than ourselves. And we want to change it, turn it in the direction of what we consider to be, I suppose, truly a republic of ideas and of tolerance and difference and kindness and generosity, in a sense. And so we take these moments, these sort of trials, which are just a kind of moment in time, to watch these kind of battles playing out without weapons.

Their weapons are words. That's, in a sense, what you're doing, what I'm doing is, is that what we have is words and trying to understand: what do people mean by something. Words and ideas, and again, to push back a little bit, to be able to push back against Christian nationalism. What is you know, what is that? It's unchristian, for one thing.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

To start. And also, a terrible representation of our country.

I end every interview with the question: Brenda Wineapple, what gives you hope?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

How about this: what gives me hope is you, is the podcast, is the sense of curiosity that you and others and myself and hopefully everybody has. And in the sense that I think we have, now, we're on the cusp of a vision that is of hope. And I think that's really important. We begin to see that instead of a dark, dystopian, apocalyptic vision, filled with, as you just mentioned, vengeance, retribution and fire and brimstone, is something else that I think is beginning to emerge.

It's taken a while. but there we have it. And we'll keep our fingers crossed.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Brenda Winepple is the best-selling author of seven books, the newest of which is titled: Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation. It's a priceless and timeless look at how America's institutions can become proxies for existential struggles of power, cultural dominance, and fundamental values.

Brenda, I just want to thank you so much for being on The State of Belief and speaking with me. I just appreciate your scholarship so much. And just who you are. You are a national treasure.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

Oh, you are much too kind. Speaking of kindness, generosity…

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I'm insisting upon my words and you may not reject them. We're going to have our own trial. Okay?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks, Paul. It was my pleasure.