Today, July 21, marks the 100th anniversary of the verdict in one of the most misunderstood events of the 20th century, the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial.
On this day, high school teacher John Scopes was found guilty of violating a Tennessee law that made it illegal “to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
This case became one of America’s greatest media sensations (the court proceedings were broadcast live on this newfangled thing called “radio”) and a symbol to many of the alleged hostility between science and religion.
I spent a few years researching the trial and writing a master’s thesis about it, so I thought I’d share a few things that most people don’t realize…
1. Don’t believe the play/movie.
If you’ve seen the play-turned-film Inherit the Wind, be aware that its authors never intended for it to be historically accurate. They even say so in the introductory notes. Inherit the Wind (as well as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible) was written in the 1950’s as a parable of McCarthyism.
Unfortunately, most of what people know today about the Scopes Trial comes from Inherit the Wind, and most of it’s just wrong. Some teachers still use the it to teach students about the Scopes Trial. Historian Ronald Numbers observes, “This strikes me as being a little like recommending Gone with the Wind as a historically reliable account of the Civil War.”
For an insightful in-depth historical analysis of the play, see “The Truth About Inherit the Wind” from First Things.
2. John Scopes wasn’t the guy you thought he was.
Most people think John Scopes was a great hero who broke the law in order to open his students’ minds to critical, scientific thinking, and did so even under opposition from the crazy fundamentalists in town of Dayton who hated him for it.
On the contrary, the whole thing was a publicity stunt arranged by some of the town leaders themselves. The ACLU had put an ad in the papers saying they would pay the court fees for anyone willing to challenge the anti-evolution law. John Scopes, a mild-mannered football coach and substitute science teacher, was asked if he would be willing to be accused of teaching evolution so that the town could have the trial there and get a lot of attention. He shrugged and reluctantly agreed (he also later confessed that he didn’t remember whether he’d ever actually taught evolution).
He never spent a night in jail and was only ordered to pay a $100 fine when the court found him guilty—money which didn’t even come out of his own pocket. After the trial was over, he went to graduate school at the University of Chicago where he studied to become a geologist, thereafter doing his best to avoid media attention.
3. The textbook at the center of the trial used evolution to teach scientific racism and eugenics.
Scopes’ defenders today would have a hard time stomaching George Hunter’s A Civic Biology, the textbook from which Scopes supposedly taught. In the 1920s, principles of human evolution and “survival of the fittest” were commonly used to justify (1) the idea that people of European descent were more highly evolved than those from other regions of the world, and (2) eugenics laws requiring “inferior” people to be forcibly sterilized.
Read excerpts here if you want to cringe.
4. The media were really good at unfairly caricaturing Christians in the 1920s, too.
The most prominent reporter to cover the case was the snarky Baltimore Sun reporter H.L. Mencken. If you want to read some scathing caricatures of Southern Christian Fundamentalists, read some of his articles.
If you want to read one of the nastiest caricatures ever written, read his obituary for William Jennings Bryan, the famous politician and Christian who was the primary prosecutor in the case. Here’s a sample:
Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. (H. L Mencken)
(Fortunately, today, Twitter does not allow for that many characters.)
Read the whole thing here.
5. Clarence Darrow was also supposed to go on the witness stand, but never did.
The most widely-remembered scene from the trial is when Clarence Darrow, the famous agnostic and defense attorney, put William Jennings Bryan on the witness stand to defend the Bible. Bryan’s inability to perfectly answer every one of Darrow’s questions has come down in history as a source of mockery of Fundamentalists.
What most people don’t realize is that Bryan only agreed to do it if he could then get Darrow on the witness stand the next day and interrogate him about evolution. This never happened because the judge thought that the first interrogation had gotten out of hand and become totally irrelevant to the case. The important thing to realize is that if Bryan had gotten the opportunity to interrogate Darrow, Darrow would have (in my opinion, and the opinion of some scholars) also ended up looking foolish at some of his answers, and the case would have been reported on and remembered quite differently.
6. Every year since about 1988, Dayton, Tennessee has held a “Scopes Trial Festival.”
I dragged my wife and one-year-old daughter along to this a few years ago, and it was a pretty fun event. The court house where the trial was held still stands, and it even has a small Scopes Trial museum in the basement. Farmers drove their old tractors to the courthouse lawn and sold produce, musicians performed bluegrass, and local businesses like “Monkey Town Donut Company” served food.
The highlight of the festival was a play performed by local residents re-enacting portions of the trial in the very courtroom where it was originally held. It was fairly historically accurate, with many of the lines are taken directly from the trial transcript.
7. Both evolutionists and antievolutionists have used the Scopes Trial’s legacy to their rhetorical advantage.
If you hear an evolutionist talk about the Scopes Trial today, you’ll probably hear something about how silly and unscientific religious people are, and that if only they’d learn the lessons of the Scopes Trial (in which Christians were supposedly shown to be nincompoops), they’d put aside their beliefs and get with the program. The Scopes Trial has thus become a symbol for “Science = good, Religion = intolerant, closed-minded, and bad.”
On the other hand, today’s antievolutionists who want creationism or intelligent design in public schools appeal to the Scopes Trial for a different reason: they admit that it was a bad idea to ban evolution from schools in the 1920’s, but they then point out that the situation today is often the reverse, because in many schools evolution is the only theory of origins that can be taught. John Scopes supposedly said that he thought both evolution and creation should be taught, and in an ironic twist, antievolutionists today appeal to John Scopes as having been correct.
For Further Reading:
To learn more about the true story of the Scopes Trial, check out Edward Larson’s superb Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.
I expanded on some of the themes in Larson’s book in my master’s thesis, The Scopes Trial in American Memory, which included a chapter on Dayton’s Scopes Trial festival that I presented at the NC Graduate Student History Conference.
