One hundred years ago in 1925, the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, one of the nation’s first media sensations, engrossed and amused Americans across the country. Listeners and readers of all backgrounds tuned in their radios and perused columns by writers like H. L. Mencken to find the latest updates and accusations concerning the high school science teacher accused of breaking Tennessee law by teaching that humans had evolved from lower forms of life. The clash between Clarence Darrow’s defense team and William Jennings Bryan’s band of prosecutors would eventually leave a lasting imprint in America’s self-understanding of science, religion, academic freedom, parental rights, and state power.
But the Scopes Trial’s legacy has never been as simple as its popular narrative suggests. The competing sides at the trial disputed the significance of what was at stake. For John Scopes and Clarence Darrow, representing the pro-evolution side, the trial represented what happens when narrow-minded bigots force their personal beliefs into law and prohibit free inquiry. They used the trial as a platform for attempting to prove the science behind evolution and for mocking Fundamentalists. For William Jennings Bryan and his fellow antievolutionists, the trial was about the rights of parents to influence what their children would be taught in the classroom; more importantly, they desired to hold on to biblically-derived beliefs about human origins and the dignity of mankind as created in the image of God, in contrast with the evolutionists’ perceived reductionism of human nature to mere biology.
Since the 1950s, Scopes and Darrow’s anti-religion narrative has predominated, thanks primarily to Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s play Inherit the Wind. Still performed in high schools and in theaters throughout the country, Inherit the Wind provides an entertaining and moralizing account of the trial that most viewers assume tells the story as it essentially happened. What most fail to realize is that the play was never intended to be historically accurate. The playwrights’ preface should tip us off: “Inherit the Wind is not history,” they wrote in indisputable terms. The play was instead conceived as a denunciation of McCarthyism. The story of the Scopes trial, greatly changed, served only as a parable for a message about freedom of speech. The play’s many divergences from history have been described in detail on many occasions, including Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Summer for the Gods and Carol Iannone’s First Things article, “The Truth About Inherit the Wind.”
Understanding the true story of the Scopes Trial and its legacy therefore involves uncovering parts of the story that never fit the simplistic narratives of science vs. religion and free inquiry vs. bigotry. One such missing element is the science textbook at the center of the trial from which John Scopes allegedly taught. The contents of the book are not what a viewer of Inherit the Wind would expect. Far from being an open-minded, fact-based account of the latest science, this textbook derived from Darwin’s theory a highly politicized and racially prejudiced account of human origins and human nature. It is a book that today’s readers would, in fact, find more scandalous than anything for which the Fundamentalist Bible-thumpers were arguing.
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Biology teacher George W. Hunter published A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems in 1914, after which it became one of the texts most widely used by American high school students. The state of Tennessee adopted the book in 1919—an ironic move, given that it would later ban the teaching of human evolution found within its pages. By writing a “civic” biology, Hunter intended to bridge the gap between the biological and social sciences, and he did not hesitate to insert his progressive political views when merited, in his view, by science.
While much of the textbook simply recounts basic scientific facts and theories, Hunter was, unfortunately, unable to escape early twentieth-century science’s racial biases. If man evolved from lower life forms, the story went, then different races of mankind had also evolved to very different heights. While we do not know which parts of the textbook John Scopes actually taught from (he was only a substitute teacher and might not have taught from the book at all), his students could have read the following:
Evolution of Man. – Undoubtedly there once lived upon the earth races of men who were much lower in their mental organization than the present inhabitants…
The Races of Man. – At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.
For a passage that today would be considered so outrageous, it is curious (though perhaps not surprising) that this portion of the textbook received little if any attention at the trial. In the 1920s, neither evolutionists and antievolutionists had a monopoly on racial discrimination or on civil rights advocacy, and therefore had little interest in broaching the subject in the context of the trial.
But it is worth noting that widely-accepted notions of scientifically-based racial superiority makes the traditional narrative of the Scopes Trial much harder to accept. Whose worldview actually provided the stronger basis for bigotry: Southern Fundamentalists, who inconsistently applied their conviction that every human being is created in God’s image? Or progressive scientists, who asserted that other races were genetically inferior? Hunter’s Biology presented evolution not as a morally neutral, broad-minded scientific theory, but as a narrative about human nature that justified some of society’s worst instincts.
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Hunter’s textbook stopped short of arguing in favor of racial discrimination in practice, perhaps because it was already so well established that it could be taken for granted. The textbook did, however, explicitly promote another early-twentieth-century progressive cause: eugenics.
Seven years before Hunter’s Biology was published, Indiana had become the first state to attempt to improve the genetic constitution of the human race through forced sterilization. Arguing that mental illness, criminal behavior, sexual deviance, and other socially undesirable traits were primarily hereditary, thirty-two states would eventually pass laws giving Eugenics Boards the power to enforce compulsory sterilization procedures. (By contrast, only two other states besides Tennessee passed laws prohibiting the teaching of human evolution in schools; Tennessee was, incidentally, one of the minority of states that never mandated forced sterilization.)
Hunter’s Biology followed the arguments made by legislators and provided students with an easy to understand justification for the recent laws. If we know how to improve domesticated animals through artificial selection, Hunter argued, then shouldn’t humans pursue similar means of improvement? This pursuit could be done through more innocent methods like “personal hygiene,” “selection of healthy mates,” and “the betterment of the environment.” But more vigorous methods can be taken as well:
Eugenics. –When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics.
Parasitism and its Cost to Society. – Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.
The Remedy. – If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country.
In retrospect, Hunter’s observation about “Remedies of this sort [that] have been tried successfully in Europe” would take on a disturbing tone in light of events of the 1930s and 40s. But in the 1910s and 20s, such reasoning sounded progressive and scientific.
Another influential 1920s court case, Buck v. Bell, would fortify the practice of forced sterilization. Carrie Buck, a young woman who bore a child out of wedlock (as her mother had done with her), was ordered by the state of Virginia to be sterilized. The order—which ignored the fact that she had been raped—was challenged in court and, while the Scopes Trial was taking place in 1925, Buck’s case was climbing its way up the appeals process until finally reaching the Supreme Court in 1927. Writing the opinion for the 8-1 majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared:
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes….Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
Students who had read and accepted Hunter’s Biology would, presumably, nod in approval at Justice Holmes’s reasoning.
Like scientific racism, eugenics did not make a prominent appearance at the Scopes Trial in spite of its inclusion in John Scopes’ textbook. One might expect attitudes to have fallen along party lines. William Jennings Bryan and his fellow Fundamentalists would certainly have been disturbed by its association with Darwinism, and progressive scientists were among its most enthusiastic proponents.
But debates about eugenics were not so neatly divided. Evolutionist Clarence Darrow was an outspoken opponent of eugenics, vigorously challenging it in his 1926 essay “The Eugenics Cult.” Bryan’s views about eugenics are harder to pin down. Many have taken his opposition to evolution to imply that he also opposed to eugenics, but recent historical research has shown that this was not necessarily the case.[1] As a man whose views rarely fit into our preconceived boxes—Bryan was an antievolutionist but not a young-earth creationist, and a Christian Fundamentalist but not a political conservative—Bryan was an individual of many nuances (or contradictions, depending on one’s view).
What we do know is that at the trial itself, both sides apparently found discussions of eugenics to be peripheral to their legal strategies. And yet, the compulsory sterilization laws that were sweeping the country based on the reasoning to which Scopes’ students were exposed in their textbook make eugenics a difficult subject to ignore. The teaching of evolution was intended, at least by George Hunter and the many who shared his views, to lead students to accept a science-based social and political ideology intended to improve the genetic condition of the human race. While appealing to many at the time, it is an ideology which would later be universally recognized as an appalling assault on basic dignity and freedom, leaving in its wake 70,000 Americans who were, as recently as the 1970s, forced by the state to be permanently sterilized.
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As the Scopes Trial came to a close, William Jennings Bryan prepared a lengthy closing argument. He never delivered it in the courtroom, but published it after the trial ended. As it turned out, it would be his last public proclamation. He died just days later on July 26, 1925.
Bryan’s closing argument articulated the many reasons he had given over the years for opposing the theory of evolution. It was not only that he believed it contradicted the Bible. As a politician who had tirelessly advocated for the poor, Bryan believed that only a biblical understanding of the imago dei would provide a firm basis for the social advocacy needed to lift up those in need. And with the first world war still fresh in everyone’s memory, the “survival of the fittest” nationalism for which Bryan blamed the war would cause nothing but future suffering if Darwinism became more widely accepted.[2] The Scopes Trial addressed crucial issues about science and religion, but the key conflict at its core was anthropological and moral: What does it mean to be a human being, and how should we then live—and from which sources of knowledge do we base our answers to these questions?
In his closing argument Bryan wrote,
Let us, then, hear the conclusion of the whole matter. Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo.
Bryan’s critique of the excesses of modern science foreshadowed C. S. Lewis’s later warnings against scientism. Does scientific knowledge alone suffice for understanding human nature and developing public policy? Will a purely scientific mindset open the door for human flourishing, or for untold suffering?
One hundred years later, as we continue to debate the same questions, we still have much to learn from the Scopes Trial and its legacy—not the oversimplified Inherit the Wind version of the story we encounter on a high school stage, but the deeper, more important story, whose forgotten textbook prompts us to examine the moral implications of what it means to be human.
[1] See Paul Lombardo’s work, especially “Apes, Men, and Morons: Eugenics, Evolution, and the Scopes Centennial,” April 10, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huOkEzR89JQ and “‘We Who Champion the Unborn’: Racial Poisons, Eugenics, and the Campaign for Prohibition.” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 50, no. 1 (2022): 124–38. https://doi.org/10.1017/jme.2022.17. Making the matter more complex is the fact that the term eugenics had wide-ranging connotations.
[2] Elsewhere Bryan wrote, “The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak. If this is the law of our development,” he worried, “we shall turn backward toward the beast in proportion as we substitute the law of love” (Prince of Peace, 1909)
