Looking back at the Scopes Monkey Trial

This July marks the centenary of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. On a return trip from Florida nearly two decades ago, my wife Alice and I stopped at Dayton, Tennessee, the site of the trial. We knew that in 1925 the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act, designed to close off discussions in the public schools as to whether humans had descended from a lower form of animal. Within weeks John T. Scopes, a popular general science teacher, was criminally charged for violating the law by discussing in class the evolution of species. When the American Civil Liberties Union decided to challenge the law, William Jennings Bryan, former Secretary of State, three-time Democratic presidential nominee and fundamentalist hero stepped forward to prosecute Scopes. Clarence Darrow, who in the course of a lifetime had defended many political and labor radicals, volunteered to defend the school teacher. With a media battle looming between the two titans, hucksters and hundreds of reporters descended on the small town nestled in the foothills of East Tennessee. The legal issue was simple: Had Scopes broken the law by referring in class to the theory of evolution? He admitted he had, which should have settled matters. But an eight-day trial developed that resembled a cultural gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Scientists and intellectuals were horrified at the prospect of state laws barring scientific knowledge from the classroom; civil libertarians saw it as a test case for academic freedom; majoritarians (like Bryan) argued that local communities have the right to determine what is taught in its schools; big-city editors saw it as a good story; and religious fundamentalists saw it as their solemn duty to save children from the perils of modernism. The jury met for less than 10 minutes before finding Scopes guilty. Judge John T. Raulston fined Scopes $100, a ruling that soon was overturned on the technicality that the jury instead of the judge should have imposed the fine. Neither side had really won, although each thought it had. Nevertheless, within a few years 40 other states had put anti-evolutionary laws on their books. (The Butler Act was rescinded in 1967.) The cultural level of Tennessee during the 1920s is revealing. At that time only 25% of Tennessee public school teachers had completed four years of high school, and another 25% had never attended high school at all. Teachers were barely ahead of the students they taught. Today, Dayton remains a small, stretched-out town with a number of stores. The Rhea County courthouse, the well-preserved site of the trial, remains in use today. The second floor courtroom contains Judge Raulston's bench and other items that remain from 1925: four tables, jury chairs and spectator seats. I tried to imagine the media crammed into the room that had drawn the likes of Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken, whose technique in gaining attention was to "turn the obvious into the scandalous by stating it plainly," and Westbrook Pegler, whose vitriolic anti-government columns in the Lima News I read as a young country boy six miles west of Bluffton. From the second-story windows I gazed down at the lawn where because of stifling heat and the pumped up interest of spectators the trial moved to on the seventh day. On the bottom floor is a small museum, featuring blown-up photos of the trial and its dignitaries. It's a long way from the rural southern heartland to New York City's 45th Street. But in 2007 when we learned that "Inherit the Wind" would open at the city's Lyceum Theater, we booked a room in a theater-district hotel and took in the play that is based on the trial. The play starred Christopher Plummer as Henry Drummond (corresponding to Clarence Darrow) and Brian Dennehy as Matthew Brady (corresponding to William Jennings Bryan). Plummer gave a sterling performance, one of the finest in his long acting career. At various moments during the play a quartet, standing on a rear balcony, sang "The Old Rugged Cross" and belted out other old Christian favorites such as "When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder." Though modeled on the Scopes trial, "Inherit the Wind" was in fact written to counter the threat to intellectual freedom posed by McCarthyism in mid 20th-century America. The enemy then was not anti-evolutionism but the blacklisting of writers and actors who didn't hew to every chapter and verse of prevailing anticommunist politics. Altogether our two trips helped to frame an American controversy that continues in the public mind today. A Gallup poll (May 2024) reveals that although their numbers are declining, 37% of Americans hold that "God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years." Some communities still struggle to force "creationism" into science classrooms. Perhaps William Faulkner was on to something when he wrote: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Ron Lora, a native of Bluffton, is professor of history emeritus at the University of Toledo.