Obviously America has yet to recover from the Civil War- One historian explains why

 A lot of learning in this history education essay, about Manisha Sisha's research, reports how the failure of the post Civil War Reconstruction is impacting America today:

Book review by Adam Horchshild

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic Reconstruction 1860-1920

This essay is a book review, authored by Adam Hochschild, published in The New York Review of Books. 

A Maine Writer spoiler: I would not want Mr. Hochschild to be my history teacher. He gives a lukewarm review to Ms. Sisha's research, but I learned a lot by reading his review. 

My take away question raised by Mr. Hochschild's essay is this, "Would Donald Trump have found a right wing proxy Ku Klux Klan MAGA cult if America had succeeded to achieve the intended goals of the post Civil War Reconstruction❓

Thank you Manisha Sisha for writing about the Reconstruction era in American history. Her research may not be expressed the way Mr. Hochild would have written about the subject, but he does justice to describing Ms. Sisha's insightful perspective about how America has not recovered from the Civil War. (My humble opinion).

This short overview was published in an on-line book site: "We are told that the present moment bears a strong resemblance to Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War when the victorious North attempted to create an interracial democracy in the unrepentant South. That effort failed--and that failure serves as a warning today about violent backlash to the mere idea of black equality."

Manisha Sinha is an Indian-born American historian, and the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016) and The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (2024).

One Brief Shining Moment essay by Adam Hochschild: Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a (sadly) different America.

In the sweltering days of early July 1913, more than 50,000 men gathered for a most unusual reunion. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, both Union and Confederate veterans from forty-six states traveled to the battlefield. The War Department provided field kitchens, latrines, cots, and long rows of tents. Boy Scouts and other volunteers pitched in to help the elderly pilgrims, a few of whom had to be taken away in horse-drawn ambulances when felled by heatstroke. Hundreds of photographs show the old soldiers, in Panama hats, white shirts, ties, and suspenders, with medals pinned to their dark vests. Their faces bristle with beards, mustaches, and side-whiskers, all gray or white, and they have that slightly shocked, frozen look that people often show in group photos from long ago.

A climax of the reunion came on July 3, when men who had taken part (or said they had taken part) in Pickett’s Charge and its repulse by Union troops met at the stone wall that had been a center of the fighting and shook hands across it. Photographers eagerly caught more images of the two armies’ veterans—some wearing parts of their old uniforms—greeting one another or dining together at long wooden tables. President Woodrow Wilson, the first southerner to occupy the White House in nearly half a century, arrived on July 4 to speak to “these gallant men in blue and gray”:

We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten…. How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic.

Manisha Sinha does not mention the Gettysburg reunion in her provocative The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, but it is an apt symbol of a central argument she makes: despite its surrender in 1865, the South eventually achieved at least a draw over the central issue that the Civil War was fought to resolve—the rights of Black Americans. In President Wilson’s saccharine “the quarrel forgotten,” there was no hint of Abraham Lincoln’s famous words at that same battlefield fifty years earlier about “the unfinished work” of achieving “a new birth of freedom.” And much of what had happened in between was anything but “benign and majestic.”

Just as we talk about the First Republic, the Second Empire, or the Fifth Republic in France, so Sinha divides American history into phases, although the transition from one to another is not so neatly demarcated, sometimes taking years. Her focus is on what she calls our Second Republic: the promise of Reconstruction following the Civil War. This period, she points out, brought not just new rights for the formerly enslaved but hope for women and Native Americans, surprising flashes of solidarity with freedom struggles elsewhere, and “the forgotten origin point of social democracy in the United States.” All of this, however, was destined to be soon replaced by what she calls the American Empire—a regime that resumed seizing land from Native Americans, ruthlessly suppressed organized labor, and acquired its first overseas colonies.

Reconstruction was bitterly opposed by reactionaries, most notably the ghastly president Andrew Johnson (“This is a country for white men,” he wrote, “and…as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men”), who was in office after President Abraham Lincoln’s death in 1865, until 1869. Sinha reminds us why the radical hopes of Reconstruction enraged racists like Johnson. There were corrupt or incompetent officials, to be sure, but besides safeguarding freedom for some four million slaves, Reconstruction was “a brief, shining historical moment” that held open a door to a different America. Both Black and white northern volunteers went south to work as teachers for former slaves who had previously been barred from all education. Even though most Black Americans never got their promised forty acres and a mule, some 25 percent owned at least a small amount of land by the century’s end. The Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution guaranteed them full citizenship and, for men, the right to vote. Johnson, nostalgic for his days as a slave owner (when he had really been, he claimed, “their slave instead of their being mine”), angrily vetoed one civil rights measure after another, but Congress usually overrode him.

The most important Reconstruction agency was established in 1865: the Freedmen’s Bureau, “a sort of proxy state for African Americans” that did everything from helping them settle on public land to protecting them from wage theft and assault by white planters furious at losing their human property. Its schools taught more than 200,000 children over the course of seven years. It ran orphan asylums and more than sixty hospitals, and its medical workers also treated the newly freed in their homes.

All of this was still grossly inadequate to the needs of millions of impoverished men and women newly freed from slavery and surrounded by resentful, armed whites, but nonetheless, Sinha declares, “the Freedmen’s Bureau was the first government social welfare agency in US history.” Among other achievements, it founded and helped fund a number of what today we call HBCUs—historically Black colleges and universities. The most prominent, Howard University, bears the name of General Oliver Otis Howard of Maine, an ardent evangelical who lost an arm in the Civil War and was the Freedmen’s Bureau’s first commissioner.

Much of this picture is largely familiar from the work of historians ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Eric Foner. What Sinha adds to it are the intriguing signs of a wider radicalism that flourished, if briefly, as this idealistic moment began. Other historians have noted such connections, but I’ve not seen such an array of them compiled before. A Black division of the Union Army, Sinha writes, “called itself ‘Louverture,’ after the leader of the Haitian Revolution.” The country’s first Black daily newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune, declared that “whether the victim is called serf in Russia, peasant in Austria, Jew in Prussia, proletarian in France, pariah in India, Negro in the United States, at heart it is the same denial of justice.” One meeting of Black citizens of Illinois in 1866 warned “lovers of…constitutional liberty” of the dangers of a “coup d’état” such as the one staged in France some years earlier by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. Their statement also spoke of “the aboriginal man of America, once the undisputed possessor of this continent,” who was “by coercion” robbed of land.

Indeed, for a time it seemed as if the Second American Republic might promise a better deal for Native Americans. Ely Parker, a Seneca, had served as a Union officer and aide to General Ulysses S. Grant; the surrender terms that Robert E. Lee signed at Appomattox were drafted in Parker’s handwriting. Four years later, when Grant became president, he appointed Parker commissioner of Indian affairs. Parker pushed for a more peaceful policy toward his fellow Native Americans: protection of their land rights, opportunities for education, and more.

The new constitutions that southern states adopted right after the war (almost all soon amended or ignored) were often wide-ranging. Alabama established an agricultural college and property rights for married women, and its constitutional convention resolved that ex-slaves could collect pay from their former owners for the period they were kept enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation—surely America’s first reparations bill. Sinha, who has a frustrating tendency to race through long lists of events, quotes, laws, and resolutions, does not say if anyone was actually able to collect.

Although several of the conventions debated land reform, none of them enacted it. On the other hand, state constitutions created tax-funded public school systems on a wide scale for the first time in the South, with South Carolina…and Texas making attendance mandatory…. They did away with undemocratic laws that penalized the poor, imprisonment for debt, as well as capital and “cruel and unusual” punishment for minor crimes. Most also protected laborers and sharecroppers by giving them the first share, or lien, on the crops they produced.

Finally, during Reconstruction, Black southerners were elected to office for the first time: to the US Senate and House of Representatives and—more than six hundred of them—to state legislatures.

All these advances, of course, were doomed. As southern whites reasserted their power, they swept away the Black officeholders; in 1874 eighty former Confederate officers were elected to Congress, and by 1910 one, Edward Douglass White of Louisiana, was chief justice of the Supreme Court. The early moment of promise had existed only while the defeated South was under military occupation. The last remnants of that came to an end in the Compromise of 1877, following a disputed presidential election. In return for Rutherford B. Hayes entering the White House, all remaining federal troops were withdrawn from the South. That left white southerners free to impose Jim Crow laws and to use poll taxes, lynching, and a ruthless campaign of murder, mutilation, and castration to terrorize Blacks, prevent them from voting, and ensure that the South would remain white-dominated and highly segregated for nearly a century to come.

It was also a South dominated by the wealthy, for poll taxes reduced voting by poor whites as well as Blacks. 

Again, Sinha’s wide perspective covers more than race:

Once in power, conservatives passed laws that adversely affected all poor and working people, including fence laws that cordoned off common grazing lands…. They also rescinded lien laws that protected sharecroppers and wage workers. Virginia…even authorized whipping for petty theft.

Central to the book is her assertion that crushing the Second Republic was a precondition for the rise of the American Empire. The white elites who overthrew Reconstruction, she writes,




helped make possible other antidemocratic policies and forces, from the conquest of the Plains Indians to the establishment of American empire to the crushing of the first mass labor and farmer movements.

The troops withdrawn from the South were then deployed against Native Americans. Gone from power was Ely Parker and his talk of peace. General Howard of the Freedmen’s Bureau later showed a very different spirit as he led a war against the Nez Perce people. “The rise of the Jim Crow South and the conquest of the West, often told as separate stories, were parallel events connected at a fundamental level,” Sinha writes. General William Tecumseh Sherman, leader of the Union Army’s march through Georgia, was in the field again, declaring, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux even to the extermination of men, women, and children.” Just as the progressives looked overseas, Sinha points out, so did the new empire builders: Sherman sent officers to England to learn how the British were so successful in their colonial wars.

Among those protesting the brutal seizure of Indian lands were many abolitionists. Lydia Maria Child urged in 1868 that “the white and Indian must jointly occupy the country.”
William Lloyd Garrison wrote that “the same contempt is generally felt at the west for the Indians as was felt at the south for the negroes.” He compared a ruthless massacre in Montana to British vengeance following the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Other abolitionists also thought internationally. When the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner argued for civil rights, he compared the treatment of Blacks in the South to the sufferings of the lower castes in India, colonial subjects in Africa, and Chinese immigrants here at home.

The last Indian resistance was crushed in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The big expansion of our overseas empire came eight years later as the United States seized Spain’s colonies, most importantly the Philippines, after the Spanish-American War. Many Confederate veterans had been welcomed back into the US Army for these campaigns. One of them, Major General Joseph Wheeler, got his enemies mixed up and shouted, as his men advanced against Spanish troops in Cuba, “We got the Yankees on the run!”

On the run, also, were labor unionists. Sinha writes that “federal troops, once deployed to secure freedpeople’s rights,” were now “being used on a wide scale to put down striking workers.” In an apt analogy, she reminds us that just as slaveholders had once talked of states’ rights but demanded a federal fugitive slave law, now postwar railroads and industries fended off laws about safety and working hours but demanded that government soldiers suppress unions. And they did, on a huge scale, from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 onward. Intriguingly, Sinha mentions that the Pennsylvania Railroad magnate Tom Scott may have been one of the architects of the Compromise of 1877, although the full story of that fateful bargain will never be known.

It is poignant to imagine the America that could have been if the Second Republic had survived. If Lincoln had lived, or if he had chosen a more enlightened vice-president; if more federal troops had remained in the South; if their presence hadn’t been bargained away…there are many more ifs.

Some of those ifs could have given us a country with less bloodshed and more justice, but I doubt that they would have changed as much as Sinha implies. She writes, for example, that “the conquest of the West after the war…was not inevitable.” I fear it was. As the nineteenth century went on, the powerful new tools of the imperial age—trains and steamboats, the repeating rifle and the machine gun, telegraph lines to send orders to distant troops and officials—enabled colonizers or settlers to seize land across the world at an accelerating pace. It happened on the Great Plains under a capitalist democracy in the United States; it happened in Central Asia and the Caucasus under the absolute monarchy of tsarist Russia; it happened in Africa, India, Australia, and Southeast Asia under a variety of European regimes like Britain, France, and Germany. Even the great Frederick Douglass reflected a touch of this spirit when he said that there might be “a deficiency inherent to the Latin races” and advocated American annexation of what today is the Dominican Republic.

If the Second Republic had lasted longer, would Black Americans be better off today? Surely yes. But even under the best of circumstances, with both an administration and a Congress generous and enlightened, would the victorious North have had the necessary decades-long commitment required to undo the vast gulf in income, wealth, land ownership, education, and more that was slavery’s legacy? I doubt it. Short of revolution—which seldom has ended well—such differences are stubbornly enduring. In every country once blighted by slavery, the huge economic gap between descendants of slaves and masters yawns wide, even on the many Caribbean islands where the former far outnumber the latter and control the government as well.

I wish I could say that Sinha’s writing is as fresh as her perspective. It’s not. Important terms she uses, like the “contraband camps” where refugees fleeing slavery gathered during the Civil War, go undefined and barely described. She piles up cavalcades of detail about matters that are well known, such as the horrific years of terror that restored white supremacy in the South, while she rushes past other eye-catching but less familiar events. She devotes only part of one sentence, for instance, to the proposal by Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire for a federally funded “uniform national system of primary and secondary education.” Versions of this bill passed the Senate three times in the twilight of the Second Republic, but never the House. Think how different America would be if a Black child in the Mississippi Delta had as much money spent on her education as a white one in Silicon Valley.

Sinha also never slows down to paint a narrative picture—whether of a particular community, say, that experienced the dreams and then the crushed hopes of Reconstruction, or of a typical meeting of one of the Black “conventions” of this period that she calls a “missing link” to the twentieth-century civil rights movement. She never gives us full, flesh-and-blood portraits of any of the major figures, especially those like Douglass who had a clear vision of the America that might have been.

Nonetheless, it’s valuable to have her history of unfulfilled hopes. The nation we had become when the frail Union and Confederate veterans clasped hands at Gettysburg in 1913, fell short of the one that at least some of those Union soldiers thought they were fighting for. As the white-haired men met, few Blacks in the South could vote, and in that year alone fifty-one of them were lynched. Native American children were forced to go to the notorious government boarding schools where they were punished if they spoke their native languages. By 1913 the American Empire was well underway; US troops were stationed in Hawaii, Cuba, Guam, Nicaragua, and the Philippines, a list that would grow far longer as the decades passed. One crucial promise of the Second Republic—the right to vote—was finally fulfilled in the 1960s with much effort, suffering, and sacrifice of lives. More remain to be realized. Given the new occupant of the White House, we may well find ourselves living under a Third Republic, with which those side-whiskered Confederate veterans might have been very satisfied.

Adam Hochschild’s most recent book is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. He is working on a book about American social movements of the 1930s. (May 2025)

The Scopes "monkey trial" in Tennessee is a 1925 non-fiction epic, but themes about science versus faith linger

Evolution remains as a "culture war" issue, in spite of scientific support for Charles Darwin's theories. Obviously, right wing fundamentalists and extremist conservatives have tuned into rampant skepticism. 

In her new book, Brenda Wineapple brings to life one of the most inflamed chapters in the history of America’s culture wars: the Scopes trial of 1925. Echo review published the New York Review of Books, by Adam Hoschschild. 

We’ve seen many skirmishes in America’s culture wars over the decades; one recent round, over abortion, was on the ballot in ten states during the 2024, elections. But the most dramatic battle of them all, between two of the twentieth century’s greatest orators, took place in 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, after the high school teacher John Scopes was accused of violating a new state law that forbade teaching the theory of evolution. Time magazine called his trial a “cross between a circus and a holy war.”

The confrontation inspired a 1955, play, Inherit the Wind, which has been widely revived; a film version, with Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, and Gene Kelly, was released in 1960, and nominated for four Academy Awards. The story remains so resonant that it has been remade for television three times, starring actors ranging from Jason Robards to George C. Scott. The actual trial lacked a romantic angle, so the play added a young woman torn between her love for the teacher and for her father, a fire-and-brimstone preacher.

Keeping the Faith, Brenda Wineapple’s lively new book about the Scopes trial, comes as the culture wars have heated up again. Even though the issues have changed over the past hundred years, it is striking how the two warring sides feel much the same: cosmopolitan urban liberals against small-town white Protestants who value traditional family structure. And hovering in the background but largely unspoken, then and now, are strong feelings about race.

What made the Scopes trial such a spectacle was that this local drama had a national cast. Leading the prosecution was William Jennings Bryan, a former secretary of state and three-time Democratic nominee for president. His legendary oratory, it was said, was always “good for forty acres of parked Fords.” Although he opposed an anti-lynching bill, talked about the “yellow peril” of Asian immigration, and said he was a proud member of the “greatest of all the races, the Caucasian Race,” Bryan was, on most other issues, a progressive. He supported labor unions, women’s suffrage, the income tax, public ownership of utilities, a ban on corporate campaign contributions, and food and drug safety laws. Not for nothing was he known as the “Great Commoner.”

Opposing him as chief counsel for the defense was Clarence Darrow, not merely the country’s best-known criminal defense attorney but its most famous lawyer of any kind. Darrow had argued for a long series of colorful clients, from the Socialist hero Eugene V. Debs to the Wobbly leader “Big Bill” Haywood to the McNamara brothers, accused of bombing the Los Angeles Times building in 1910, to countless labor activists in an era when union organizers risked beatings and death.

From the moment Bryan stepped off a train looking like a Victorian explorer with his white pith helmet in the Tennessee summer heat, the eyes of the world were on Dayton. It was impossible for Americans to imagine a greater clash of celebrities. What might be the equivalent today❓ Maybe a trial in Florida, say, of someone violating that state’s prohibition on towns and cities taking action to fight climate change, with temporary law degrees granted to Donald Trump to argue for the prosecution and Rachel Maddow for the defense. Or perhaps, Maddow would take the role of the columnist H.L. Mencken, who gave the Dayton case the name that stuck—“the Monkey Trial”—and whose stream of caustic commentary set the tone for much of the press coverage while he kibitzed with his friends at the defense table. When the defense team moved into a vacant local mansion, it became known as the Monkey House.

Wineapple describes Dayton’s preparations for a flood of visitors:

"Drinking fountains were installed every fifty feet around the town square, arc lights were strung from the maple trees to accommodate nighttime prayer meetings, and newly painted benches were placed near the courthouse. The interior…was repainted pale yellow, the windows were washed until they sparkled."

The biology textbook at issue quickly sold out; one enterprising citizen told an inquiring reporter he could find a copy “if you are willing to pay the price.” Some urged that Dayton build an outdoor stadium for the trial. Instead, officials ordered forty-five loudspeakers—a new technology—to broadcast the proceedings to the overflow crowd on the courthouse lawn.

Dayton Tennessee Center 1925 site of the Scopes Trial

The townspeople relished their moment of fame with a boosterish enthusiasm that seemed far stronger than any feelings they had for or against evolution. Before the trial began, the defense team tried to get the case transferred to federal court, which would have meant moving it out of town. When a judge turned them down, a jubilant local businessman put a sign in his drugstore’s window: “Dayton Keeps It.”

These were the days of fully staffed newspapers, which sent 160 reporters and columnists to Dayton. Some fifty camera operators shot both still photos and newsreel footage. A microphone near the witness stand brought the trial to a national radio audience. Extra police from Chattanooga directed traffic. Fearing that the crowd packing the courtroom might make its sagging floor collapse (white plaster was starting to crumble out of the ceiling below), the judge moved the trial onto the courthouse lawn, where spectators donned straw hats. Vendors sold ice, cool drinks, sandwiches, and monkey watch fobs; preachers held forth on corners; street performers offered the chance to be photographed with chimpanzees. Hotel and boardinghouse owners made a killing. The local congressman suggested that, if need be, the War Department could provide tents and cots.

Even in Tennessee the anti-evolution law was not without its critics, Wineapple explains: “A group of university students…petitioned the legislature to consider a few more bills” to “amend the law of gravity, for instance, and do something about the excessive speed of light.” Others joined in: the Black journalist George Schuyler interviewed a gorilla at the Bronx Zoo, he said, who was appalled to be related to people 🙊🙉🙈🐵:

Nobody had ever seen us carry on war, lynching each other, filling up jails, or working our little children…. Did you ever hear of monkeys allowing one of their race to appropriate all of the trees in the jungle, and then pay rent to him❓

Two events no one anticipated gave the trial an extraordinary double climax. The judge denied Darrow permission to hear testimony from all but one of a group of eminent scientists he had brought to Dayton to question about evolution. But Darrow found a brilliant alternative. He asked to examine a witness about the Bible—and that witness was a man who proudly believed that it should be taken literally: Bryan, who rose to the bait. If he did not testify, Bryan said, “it will go out to the world that I am afraid to let these atheists and enemies of God’s Word question me.”

Bryan found himself in one awkward spot after another as the two men sweated in the heat of the courthouse lawn. “Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still❓” Darrow asked. Of course, Bryan said, but then he had to concede that the earth went around the sun, not the reverse. Then Darrow turned to the great Flood, from which Noah’s ark rescued the only survivors. The flood, Bryan insisted, according to the calculations of an eminent bishop, had happened 4,262 years earlier. But, Darrow asked, what about civilizations known to be more than six thousand years old❓

Moving on to the story of creation, Darrow asked Bryan: If God made the sun only on the fourth day, how were the days measured up to that point? Bryan got into still deeper water when, surprisingly, he said that the six days of creation might not have been days of twenty-four hours. “Now, if you call those periods, they may have been a very long time,” Darrow prompted. “They might have been,” Bryan conceded, finally acknowledging that creation “might have continued for millions of years.” One such query followed another: If the serpent had been condemned by God to forever slither on its belly, Darrow asked, how had it gotten around before then? On its tail?

Nonetheless, after only nine minutes of deliberation, the jury found Scopes guilty. He had, after all, clearly violated the law against teaching evolution. He was fined $100.

Then came the second dramatic flourish that ensured the trial a place in legend: five days after it ended, Bryan, who had stayed on in Dayton to do some speaking, died in his sleep. “I firmly believe,” a local minister told a crowd of shocked mourners, “that William J. Bryan went to an untimely death as a martyr fallen in the defense of the Son of God.” Mencken took a different view: “God aimed at Darrow, missed him, and hit Bryan.”

Though Darrow lost the legal case, it is tempting to feel satisfied by his brilliant rhetorical triumph over Bryan. But ominously similar divisions still run through our country, deeper than ever. And they have been exploited, as never before, by Donald Trump and a raft of other right-wing politicians.

“There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville nearly two centuries ago. “Thus the human mind is never left to wander across a boundless field…. It is checked from time to time by barriers which it cannot surmount.” That is certainly one continuity in the American culture wars; another, closely related, is suspicion of science. “Scientific precedents have very little weight with them,” Tocqueville said of Americans; he would not have been surprised to see the Anti-Vaccination Society of America founded less than four decades after he wrote this, and angry arguments about anti-vaxxers in the headlines today.

When Darrow managed to put a single scientist on the witness stand, Bryan mocked him as someone who had “unrolled degree after degree.” What scientists of Bryan’s day saw as the search for truth, in evolutionary biology and much else, fundamentalists saw as contempt for their faith and, by extension, for them.

Another continuity, and a dangerous one, given the disproportionate power rural states have in the Senate and the Electoral College, is that the culture wars are still largely between big cities—what Bryan scornfully referred to as the “cultured crowd”—and the rest of the country. Although Bryan was selling real estate in Florida at the time of the trial, he always portrayed himself as a man of Nebraska, which he had represented in Congress. His opponent had been born in a small town in Ohio, but Bryan pointedly referred to him in court as “my distinguished friend from Chicago,” where Darrow had spent most of his working life. And partly due to Mencken’s acid pen, the public largely viewed the Scopes trial as a clash between educated people and unlettered hicks. Mencken hated organized religion and saw the South as “almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert.”

Their dignity profoundly stung, the objects of that scorn resented it. When at one point the courtroom crowd cheered Bryan, Darrow noted contemptuously, “Great applause from the bleachers.” “From those whom you call ‘yokels,’” Bryan replied. “I have never called them yokels,” Darrow said. That may be true, but Mencken and others who followed his lead certainly had, and repeatedly so. Such insults were keenly felt—as they are today. Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of some Trump supporters as “deplorables” may have cost her the 2016, election.

One more continuity in our culture wars is that, one level down, they are often about race. Today right-wing rage is aimed at affirmative action and at school curricula that emphasize the centrality of slavery and racism in American history, like The New York Times’s 1619 Project. A century ago much of the fury provoked by Darwin’s theory of evolution was against the idea that we are all descended from monkeys. Not only was “monkey” a common term of opprobrium for Black people, but for many whites, the thought that we might all have a common ancestor of any sort was horrifying. It was much more comforting to believe that the people on Noah’s ark were white and that Blacks—God’s curse upon Ham’s descendants—came later.

Finally, culture wars are fueled by the fear of losing ground. This was widespread a hundred years ago, and the theory of evolution, overturning centuries of biblical certainty, played into that fear. Many Americans of that era—above all, white Protestant men—felt threatened by the millions of Catholic and Jewish immigrants who had flooded into the country in the preceding half-century. Women could now vote, and millions of them had recently come into the labor force—a flow accelerated by World War I—with employers sometimes finding them more reliable than men. Many women no longer included the word “obey” in their wedding vows, and birth control, even when still illegal, was giving them more power over their reproductive lives. Men sensed that their traditional status was menaced. One sign of this is that the American divorce rate, although low by today’s standards, more than tripled between 1890, and 1920.

Further upending tradition, mechanical tractors and harvesters were greatly shrinking the number of Americans on family farms, with their clearly defined male and female roles stretching back centuries. And the giant new plants that produced that machinery, millions of automobiles, and so much more were bringing jobs to industrial centers like Darrow’s Chicago, not to small towns like Dayton, Tennessee.

The Scopes trial was only one sign of these tensions. A much more refined expression of them came five years later from the Southern Agrarians: the dozen writers—all white men—who published the famous essay collection I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Although few if any of them would have contested the theory of evolution, they vigorously defended small-town and farm life and the South, largely ignoring the heritage of slavery.

Today the country is once again roiled by unsettling changes, and the fiercest culture warriors come from the parts of it that have lost out: regions like the Rust Belt, Appalachia, whose coal mines have shut down, and the southern and rural areas that have missed out on the tech boom enriching coastal cities like Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco. And today, again, it is men in these parts of the country who feel most under threat, as the election has just shown us.

The United States of 1925, could be a violent place. Seventeen Black people were lynched that year, and Klan membership was near its peak. However, one surprise for the reader of Wineapple’s book is that for all its drama, the Scopes trial provoked no such violence, even rhetorically. Despite their disagreements, Darrow and Bryan had known each other for years, and Darrow had supported Bryan in two presidential campaigns. Bryan volunteered as prosecutor out of Christian belief, not vindictiveness; he even offered to pay Scopes’s fine. Scopes readily agreed to be arrested and be the defendant in a case testing the new Tennessee law. Local businessmen offered to put up his bail, since no one wanted their children’s teacher in jail.

Despite the impression given by Mencken and other journalists that the townspeople were hillbillies hostile to anything modern and scientific, they welcomed both sides. The Dayton Progressive Club gave banquets for both Darrow and Bryan. Scopes himself attended the one for the Great Commoner, sitting across from the man Mencken had dubbed the “Fundamentalist pope".

“Bryan asked him if he was going to finish his corn and potatoes, and if not, he would,” Wineapple writes. It was all amazingly friendly.

Why the difference in tone between today’s bitter cultural battles and the one that took place in Tennessee in 1925❓ One factor, surely, was that no one was trying to turn the Scopes trial into a political campaign weapon. Bryan had not given up hope of making a final run for president, but he was a fundamentally decent man who was not planning to reach the White House on a wave of venom against his enemies. In today’s Florida, for example, Governor Ron DeSantis clearly hoped to do exactly that. Besides his attacks on any discussion of global warming, he introduced a bill allowing parents to sue school districts that teach “critical race theory” (defined quite broadly), signed a law banning abortions after six weeks, and purged the leadership of the state university system’s honors college. Reporters recently observed a dumpster on campus filled with discarded books from its now-closed Gender and Diversity Center. The governor’s reach for the presidential nomination failed, but all over the country candidates for everything from the presidency to school boards have weaponized culture war issues like trans rights, library books, and vaccines. By comparison, the Scopes trial looks as mannerly as a high school debate tournament.

Wineapple does not take the story past the trial, but it’s notable that this past summer Dayton held its thirty-fifth annual Scopes Festival, a weeklong series of events whose centerpiece is Destiny in Dayton, a play based on the trial and staged at the courthouse. Jurors are chosen from the audience. For extra fees, you can buy T-shirts and “a delicious 1925-style meal” on the courthouse lawn with the cast. Will our current culture wars soon be commemorated in the same cheerful spirit❓ It seems hard to imagine.