In the sweltering summer of 1925, an unassuming teacher named John Thomas Scopes became the lightning rod for one of this country's most historic legal battles, whether Darwin's theory of evolution should be banned from being taught in public schools. The trial became legend because of the mesmerizing courtroom showdown of the most well-known orators. William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. The sensational case seized the attention of the nation, and a heated debate raged in the press. Did man and animals descend from a common ancestor?
Join us as we explore the story behind the story of the Scopes Monkey Trial as we go In Search of History. The quiet town of Dayton, cradled in the hills of eastern Tennessee. The peacefulness of this rural town belies its tumultuous history. In the mid-1920s, Dayton was rocked by one of this country's most legendary legal battles, the Scopes Monkey Trial. The roaring 20s, a vibrant time in the United States.
The country was still high from its success in helping end World War I. The cultural elite embraced everything new. Meteoric advances in medicine and science, coupled with an atmosphere of free thinking and sexual liberation, created a Jazz Age renaissance. But for some, a backlash had begun. It was a grassroots movement, one calling for a simpler life, focused on basics, especially a belief in God. Nowhere was this return to fundamentalism more pronounced than in the South, the buckle of the country's Bible Belt.
During the spring of 1925, the state of Tennessee passed a law to ensure that the moral decay legislators saw spreading through the North would not infect their children. The edict prohibited teachers in state-supported schools and universities from teaching any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, including Darwin's theory of evolution, which said humans and animals had descended from common ancestors. Legislators and lawmakers who passed it thought that it would be self-enforcing, that teachers would obey the law.
They were public servants, they were employed by the state, and if the state said don't teach evolution, they wouldn't teach evolution. If they said don't teach physics, they wouldn't teach physics. The law caught the attention of a fledgling group of New York City lawyers known as the American Civil Liberties Union. which saw Tennessee's movement to ban teaching evolution as an attack on freedom of speech. The debate over Darwinism had been raging for decades, ever since the theory was first published in 1859. Often mocked and attacked, evolution had gained wider acceptance by the turn of the century.
This shift in popular thinking enraged religious fundamentalists, who continued to believe in the literal word of the Bible, that God created the world in seven days. By the time of the Scopes trial, both sides were bitter and looking for a fight. The ACLU ran ads in Tennessee newspapers looking for a teacher to challenge the law.
A businessman named George Rapalier responded, not just because he was an advocate of teaching evolution, but because he thought a trial could put his eastern Tennessee town of Dayton on the map and boost the local economy. Rapalje's plan was hatched in Robinson's drugstore, which was owned by the president of the school board. Several town leaders attended the informal meetings.
I don't think they realized how big this was going to become and the top lawyers who were going to volunteer their services. They did put out a booklet, Robinson and others, that summer that the trial took place. A 30-some page booklet, half of which deals with the Scopes trial.
The book was entitled Why Dayton of All Places. The other half deals with how great a place Dayton is to live and work and invest your money. All the local businessmen needed was a teacher willing to challenge the law. They chose a 25-year-old high school football coach named John Thomas Scopes. Scopes was the ideal candidate.
He was young, it was his first year teaching. He was carefree, he was free of any commitments, he was not married, he was new to town. He was basically popular, he was the football coach, he was well liked. The only drawback is he never taught evolution.
John Scopes knew very little about evolution. He was surprised that the high schoolers who were asked about this knew as much about evolution as they did, and he thought they must have learned it from someone other than himself, because he was barely acquainted with it. Ironically, evolution was included in the state-approved high school biology textbooks.
Scopes had once substituted for a few days in a biology class, and though he barely mentioned evolution, the town's leaders convinced Scopes that was enough. They called him in, sat him down at the local drugstore, sat around him, got him a fountain drink, and asked him the question, would he test the law? looking around and seeing his bosses around him and his friends, he said, I might as well. Scopes was charged and trial set for July.
But what the ACLU believed would be an unspectacular test case settled quickly soon took on a life of its own. Three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, the 65-year-old charismatic orator and self-proclaimed expert on the Bible, offered to try the case for the state. A dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist, Bryan relished the opportunity to turn wayward educators back to the only book that mattered, the Bible.
In response, 68-year-old Clarence Darrow, the nation's most celebrated lawyer and an avowed agnostic, took the case for the ACLU. The curmudgeonly lawyer was famous for taking lost cause cases. Less than a year before, he had introduced science into the courtroom in the notorious Leopold and Loeb murder trial.
in which he successfully used psychiatric testimony to keep two teenage killers from being sentenced to death. As a record-setting heat wave descended upon middle America during the summer of 1925, Creationists and evolutionists stoked the pre-trial flames of what would become known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. The trial was...
It's a media event. It was a symbolic event. It was like a parade or a fireworks display. And the businessmen of Dayton, Tennessee were on the verge of getting their wish. Dayton was about to become the center of the universe.
It was hot in Dayton, Tennessee in July of 1925. Many residents were suffering from heat exhaustion in the relentless 100 degree weather. The stifling heat was the first thing that greeted those coming to town for the Scopes Monkey Trial. The second was its carnival atmosphere.
Preachers shouted from park benches. Hot dog vendors did a brisk business, along with ice merchants who sold chunks of freezing relief from their trucks. Steers were roasted in pits behind the courthouse. Street performers brought trained monkeys, a wry commentary on Darwinism, which said man and apes had a common ancestor.
Revolution teaches man came from a monkey. I don't believe no such a thing in the day, not a week, not some day. But if I was true, oh yes I believe it, I've seen enough and I can prove it. What you say, well it's bound to be that way.
When the Scopes trial started, I was 12 years old, approaching 13. It was like a circus. Everything was excitement. From a child's point of view, I was having a lot of fun, enjoying all of the monkeys that came to town. The trial was becoming the darling of the nation's press. There were two things going on in Dayton, Tennessee that week.
One was the trial of John Scoves. He was guilty, and quick conviction was the only way to get the case appealed to a higher court that could determine the constitutionality of the law. But there was also a wonderful public relations event that had a lot to do with American cultural history and the history of American education. Boarding houses overflowed and more than 100 reporters wound up sleeping in a downtown hardware store that doubled as a press room. The Scopes trial was a national media event from the start.
The media knew it was coming and they prepared for it. They had laid special telephone and telegraph wires into town. Newsreel footage was made of the entire event.
Cameras were set up in the courtroom. And for the first time ever, live radio broadcast nationwide was sent out right from the courtroom. A sensation-loving 20s, this was a sensation.
The Baltimore Sun and its acerbic reporter H.L. Mencken loved the case which they saw as pitting modern science against bumpkin ignorance. They relished the coming battle. The atmosphere in town became electrified when the two lawyers arrived. William Jennings Bryan was given a hero's welcome with a parade and banners that said, Read Your Bible.
Bryan delivered what he was famous for, thundering speeches that mesmerized crowds. As he spoke, the audience seemed to hold on to every word. He held their attention, you know, so tightly it seemed.
Even we squirmy kids sat there and listened very quietly. I had a seat right up on the front, and I could look right up at him. I don't know what I learned from that sermon, but he had a way of spellbinding the crowd.
The battle was joined when the hard-nosed lawyer Darrow came to town. Both Brian and Darrow were welcomed to Dayton like major stars to an opening Hollywood movie. They were why the trial was on the map.
They were what brought the attention and that's what Dayton wanted. Dayton wanted a spectacular trial and these were their main actors. The image of Dayton, Tennessee that's come down to history is of this fanatical community that's trying to impose this religious straitjacket. The reality was apparently quite different from that.
You had boosters that were trying to promote the town. Both Darrow and Bryan were welcomed to town and had their supporters and were treated very courteously. The image of fanaticism is wildly exaggerated.
As jury selection got underway, Darrow knew his case was in trouble. The jury pool was made up mostly of farmers who were churchgoers and who believed in the Bible. Evolution was something that was not only foreign to their way of thinking, but a challenge to their beliefs.
Darrow asked one potential juror if he had ever read about evolution. The man said, no, I can't read. Darrow asked if that was because of his eyes, and the man said, it's because I'm uneducated.
One of the other defense lawyers commented later that it was said with such simple dignity that they knew they had an honest man, and they put him right on the jury. More critically, it captured, dramatized, for America to see the anomaly. The spectacle of these illiterate farmers sitting in judgment on a scientific theory. Darrow was known for taking weeks, sometimes even a month, to choose a jury.
But jury selection for the Scopes trial lasted just two and a half hours. He knew his chances of finding an impartial jury were nil. Reporter H.L. Mencken summed up Scope's chances.
Such a jury, in a legal sense, may be fair, but it would certainly be spitting in the eye of reason to call it impartial. From Clarence Darrow's point of view, the point... It was not to defend Scopes, but to prosecute William Jennings Bryan. To discredit Bryan and his fundamentalist crusade.
That's why he couldn't lose. The case that began as a fight for a teacher's right to free speech had evolved into a trial about how humans came to walk the earth and would be decided by six Baptists, four Methodists, one disciple of Christ, and one non-churchgoer. As the Scopes Monkey Trial began, defense attorney Clarence Darrow had what he thought was a brilliant plan.
Since there was no doubt John Scopes had mentioned evolution in his classroom, a violation of Tennessee law, Darrow planned to prove that the law itself was foolish. and flawed. Darrow planned to do this by bringing to Dayton a team of scientific experts to testify on the validity of Darwin's theory.
The defense strategy was to portray this as an exercise in bigotry and superstition against science and rationality. The defense had brought experts to come in and... testify, and I suppose what they hoped to do was just embarrass the judge and the jurors into an acquittal, or if they didn't get that, win the case. ...in the newspapers.
No, I just wanted to try and specifically answer the question that you asked Mr. Malone. As the lawyers jockeyed for legal positioning in the trial's opening days, spectators and journalists sweltered in the overcrowded courtroom that baked in the Tennessee heat wave. But Genesis or the Bible says nothing about...
There was no air conditioning. There weren't even any fans in the courtroom. And so the heat and the crowds...
Built this sense of emotion and oppression that just built day after day in the courtroom that made it a memorable scene. Truly, as Darrow once called it, a summer for the gods. Does your theory speak of immortality?
A lot of people believe in evolution and immortality. Brian and the prosecuting attorneys presented their case. It was a simple exercise in law. They called a few of Scopes'students to the stand and asked them if their teacher had ever mentioned evolution in the classroom.
But Bryan used the opportunity to attack those who attacked the Bible. The evidence of experts would shed no light. Court is adjourned until 9 o'clock tomorrow. The strategy of the prosecution in Scopes'defense reflected the ideals...
of its leader, William Jennings Bryan, the great commoner, the promoter of populist and progressive reform, of democracy in America, a spokesman of the people. He wanted to establish at the Scopes Trial the principle of majority rule, that the public who pays for public education should control the content of public education. Bryan took his campaign against evolutionism outside the courtroom.
Though city officials had banned it, Bryan preached on the front steps of the courthouse. No one tried to stop him. He also preached in the local Methodist church.
This is a uniquely American phenomenon. There is no other Western nation that has a strong creationist movement. It just wouldn't come up if you don't attack the fundamental truths of nature in courtroom battles. It only emerges out of the curious, diverse, regional history of America, and in that sense is a fascinating part of our cultural history, but a deeply distressing one as well. Darrow was at first frustrated, then subdued.
He and Bryan had been friends for years. Darrow had even given speeches for Bryan during one of his presidential campaigns. But on the issue of evolution, they were divided by ideology. Darrow was determined to prove Bryan wrong. But Judge J.T. Ralston quickly quashed Darrow's plans.
Ralston said the trial was about whether Scopes had broken the law, not the issue of evolution. At the end of the trial's first week, the prosecution rested its case. Brian gave a rousing, hour-long summation, typical of his charismatic, oratorical style.
A style that won over everyone, even the defendant. It wasn't so much what he had to say, as how he said it. By the time he was finished...
I was totally mesmerized. John Thomas Scopes. As the court recessed for the weekend, nearly everyone believed Brian and the prosecutors of Ray County had won. Even news reporters favorable to Scopes admitted there was little that his attorney, Clarence Darrow, could do to win. But Darrow was not ready to give up.
Even if he couldn't save John Scopes from being convicted, Darrow was determined to win. While Dayton sweltered in that weekend's continuing heat wave, Darrow formulated an historic courtroom tactic that would become legend in American folklore. On the seventh day of the Scopes Monkey Trial, the prosecution...
and rested. Famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow prepared to present his case, but the legal proceedings had to defer to man's architectural limits. A week of standing room only crowds in the second floor courtroom had buckled the support beams of the Ray County Courthouse. Judge Ralston ordered a bench and chairs placed on a bandstand outside the courthouse, a welcome relief from the stifling temperatures inside.
The trial resumed that afternoon. Darrow wasted no time in dropping his legal bomb. If the court would not let him call his expert witnesses to testify about the validity of evolution, then he would call a witness to testify about the validity of the Bible.
Darrow's expert? William Jennings Bryan. When the defense called William Jennings, Brian, to the stand as an expert witness for the defense, there was an audible gasp from the audience.
They didn't expect it. They didn't know it was coming. But they had a chance, finally, after many frustrating days when most of the trial had been taken up with legal maneuvering, to hear the great agnostic question the great defender of the faith.
The county's prosecutors objected to having Brian put on the witness stand, but Brian welcomed the opportunity. When Darrow put Brian on the stand, it was a great act of public relations. After all, the judge hadn't allowed him to put his own witnesses, so he conceived this marvelous bit of grandstanding, which was clearly illegal and had nothing to do with the issue of John Scope's guilt or not. Surprisingly, Judge Ralston said if Bryan didn't have a problem with it, the court didn't either.
Darrow's idea of putting William Jennings Bryan on the stand was brilliant. He was probably amazed that it worked as well as it did, that Brian agreed to do it. Because once Brian was there, he was set up for ridicule on every point. That was Darrow's main objective.
After all, the Bible is full of supernatural events. And such events are, from a scientific materialist perspective, absurdities. So all Darrow had to do was bring that out and ridicule him, and he was an expert at that. With Brian on the stand, Darrow was free to question his opponent about metaphorical stories in the Bible that are difficult to take literally.
But do you know the only thing that I remember, really remember from that afternoon, and this would impress a child, was when Dara said to Brian, Snapping his red suspenders and going on with his antics like he loved to do. He said, now do you really think that that whale swallowed me? Jonah.
Now when you read that Jonah swallowed the whale, excuse me please, that the whale swallowed Jonah, how do you literally interpret that? Does not say whale. Are you sure?
Says a big fish. But does it the New Testament say whale? I'm not sure. But in the New Testament, it does say whale, doesn't it?
I cannot remember. Do you believe the big fish was made to swallow Jonah? The Bible merely says it was done. And you don't know whether it was the ordinary run of fish or made for that purpose? You guess.
You evolutionists guess. Well, when we guess, we have a sense to guess right. But don't do it very often.
But you believe that he made such a fish and it was big enough to swallow Jonah. Yes, sir. One miracles. as easy to believe as another. Well, it is for me.
It is for me. Perfectly easy to believe that Jonah swallowed the whale? If the Bible said so.
But the Bible doesn't make as extreme statements as you evolutionists do. You have a definition of fact that includes imagination. Your definition excludes everything but imagination. For nearly two hours, Darrow hammered away at Brian to try to get him to explain the more fantastic stories told in the Bible. Darrow's questions became more rapid fire.
How long had man walked the earth? Brian said 6,000 years. Darrow asked him about cultures such as the Chinese, which had been on earth longer. Brian could only respond by saying, If the Bible says 6,000 years, than at 6,000 years. a national radio audience was captivated by the live coverage of the event.
Well, all of the time that I sat on that bench and watched that cross-examination, I was irate at Dara for what he was doing, the way he was attacking Brian. And I felt like he was trying to show him up. Do you think the sun was made on the fourth day? Yes. And they had evening and morning without the sun.
I'm simply saying it was a period. And they had evening and morning before that time for three days or three periods without the sun. I believe in the story of creation as they're told. If I'm unable to explain it, I accept it.
And they had evening and morning for three days or three periods. Now, if you call these periods, they may have been a very long time. They might have been. The creation might have been going on for a very long time.
Millions of years. Oh, my gosh. The crowd was stunned. In admitting to such an enormous gulf of time, the nation's greatest orator, and perhaps its greatest champion of the Bible, had just agreed with a basic tenet of Darwinism. Here was a man arguing against evolutionary teaching in the schools when he didn't really understand what evolution was all about.
And he didn't understand the theory of evolution. His concerns were social, political, and religious. And his lack of scientific knowledge undercut his credibility.
One reporter covering the duel wrote, Brian was broken. Darrow never spared him. It was masterful, but it was pitiful.
In one afternoon, Darrow had turned the case in his favor. It suddenly seemed as though the victory over Brian that Darrow so craved was within reach. An eerie stillness enveloped Dayton, Tennessee, the evening of July 16, 1925. The town was quiet, considering the legal fireworks that had gone on in the Scopes Monkey Trial earlier in the day.
The courthouse spectacle had stunned those left in town. People knew something big had happened. They just weren't sure what.
Well, even at the end of the trial, observers didn't agree on who'd won. Bryan actually did much better in the famous cross-examination than later accounts indicated. The following day, day eight of the trial, the proceedings moved back into the courthouse with a limited number of spectators allowed inside.
Judge Ralston ordered Brian's testimony from the previous day expunged from the record. It makes wonderful reading, but it had nothing to do with the trial, and it was legally irrelevant, though wonderful public entertainment. The case was turned over to the jury, which took nine minutes to convict Scopes of violating state law. He was fined $100. The only job this court had was to determine whether John Scopes had violated the law.
Now, the law clearly stated that it was a crime to teach, I'm quoting, that man descended from a lower order of animals, close quote. And indeed, John Scopes had taught that, so he was guilty under the law. The jury didn't need scientific knowledge, and their decision to convict him was correct. It's the law that was unconstitutional, but it wasn't that court's job to decide such an issue. In many ways, the Scopes case was a facade, a charade.
Yes, they were testing the constitutionality of a case, but it was primarily for a lot of people a publicity stunt. It was a case that never should have gone as far as it did. For five days, Brian stayed in Dayton, preaching, putting the best political spin on what essentially would be remembered as a victory by Darrow.
But on Sunday afternoon, after a large meal, Brian, who was a diabetic, died during a nap. Dayton was just devastated. You know, it was like someone in the family had died. Because they really did respect Brian. No reporter had been more critical of William Jennings'Brian's participation in the trial than H.L.
Mencken. And when he heard the report of Brian's death, his comment was, we killed the son of a bitch. When the buzzard folks had their trouble Down in Dayton far away Brian was taken to Arlington Cemetery in Washington, DC where he was given a hero's funeral.
The town of Dayton founded Bryan College, which today is a thriving fundamentalist university. Darrow appealed Scope's guilty verdict. Darrow wasn't trying to win an acquittal for Scopes.
Scopes was guilty. The purpose of the trial was to get the law declared unconstitutional, and that couldn't happen in Judge Ralston's courtroom. It needed to be appealed to a higher court that could then declare the law unconstitutional. In 1927, Tennessee's Supreme Court overturned the decision, saying Judge Ralston erred in imposing a fine.
The amount of the fine should have been determined by the jury. Tennessee opted not to retry Scopes, saying it wanted the whole bizarre matter put to rest. Clarence Darrow continued to take on controversial lost cause cases.
He published his autobiography in 1932, and he died in Chicago in 1938 at the age of 80. After his trial, John Scopes never taught high school again. He went to graduate school and became a geologist. He shunned publicity and rarely talked about the trial.
I want him to have all the... The trial was later used as the basis for the hugely successful play and movie, Inherit the Wind, starring Spencer Tracy and Frederick March. And the case is reenacted in Dayton every year on its anniversary.
That is the ignorance of Tennessee, the megatree. It remains the biggest event ever to happen in that part of Tennessee. He does not believe in your full religion.
I will not stand for what he is doing. Laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution, however, remained intact in many states. In 1967, the ACLU joined a lawsuit against Arkansas for having a similar law.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such laws were unconstitutional. When asked about the Supreme Court ruling, the ACLU's founder said that he had been waiting for the decision for more than 40 years. The impact of the Scopes trial continues to this day. The lines for both sides remain clearly drawn.
Those who choose to believe in Darwin's theory do so with as much passion as those who say God created the world in six days. The human species is a couple hundred thousand years old. A geological eye blink.
Nature wasn't made for us, but that's a frightening conclusion for many people and they resist it with all their hearts, even though I think it's a liberating conclusion. What I find most significant about the trial is that it raised for the first time in the public mind issues of academic freedom and the need for freedom of speech. While Scopes was convicted and the law upheld, those ideas stuck with us. It wasn't just boobs versus intelligent people.
It wasn't just people who take the Bible too literally against people with a little bit broader view. It was whether there's a creator who brought about our existence for a... purpose against no.
It's material processes that are mindless and purposeless, and life has no inherent purpose. In a country that believes in the separation of church and state, but also considers itself one nation under God, the Scopes Monkey Trial was an early salvo in a war that continues to this day. It's a story still looking for an ending, but one that may eventually be found as we continue to go in search of history.