“I Don’t Know About This Monkey Business”

As Christian fundamentalism gained strength in American political culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, debate sparked over whether or not the theory of evolution should be taught in science classrooms. When John Thomas Scopes was indicted for teaching the theory in Tennessee in 1925 in violation of a recent fundamentalist law, the debate reached the national stage. Yet although the controversy included the voices of politicians, parents, pastors, and many others, the voices of students seemed unheard, even by historians who have since written about this debate. Primary documents telling their story are available, however, and together they display that students in the 1920s were far less in danger of abandoning Christianity after learning about evolution than fundamentalists proclaimed.