To explain how the Scopes trial became such a prominent affair, Wineapple devotes nearly half her text to the individuals and movements, intellectual and political, that preceded and presaged it. She offers chapters on the Populist revolt of the 1890s and about Prohibition and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. She describes the dispute among Protestant churchmen about whether to embrace the work of Charles Darwin or condemn it. Nietzsche gets her attention too, since Mencken praised him as “the high priest of the actual,” while Bryan warned that his “philosophy would convert the world into a ferocious conflict between beasts.”
On occasion, these contextual forays seem tangential to the background of the trial itself. What bearing did Mencken’s sympathy for Germany during World War I have on his contempt for the foes of Darwinism? But Wineapple uses them as a backdrop for the main focus of her book: the famous individuals who shaped her particular period of history. Here she excels at portraying them as if they were characters in an entertaining screenplay. No one has written a richer or more dramatic narrative of the trial or its leading combatants than Wineapple has in Keeping the Faith. An esteemed biographer of Hawthorne, Genet, and the siblings Gertrude and Leon Stein, she deftly traces the long roads the two main antagonists took to Dayton.
These paths sometimes even crossed. By the mid-1920s, Darrow had spent nearly four decades defending beleaguered figures on the left and the labor movement against their potent foes. Before the Supreme Court, he represented Eugene Debs, who had spearheaded a national railroad strike that was crushed by federal troops. He won an acquittal for Big Bill Haywood, a leader of a Western miners’ union accused of killing the anti-labor governor of Idaho. Darrow considered becoming a politician himself but decided he could do more for the cause by continuing to perform quite remarkably in court: Into late middle age, “the attorney for the damned” could address a jury both cogently and eloquently for an hour or more without glancing at a single note. And he never took himself too seriously. “When a reporter teased him about his rumpled clothes,” Wineapple writes, Darrow responded, “‘I buy just as good clothes as you boys do, only I sleep in mine.’”