Lessons learned from monkeying with history

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

Over the weekend, the 6,000 or so residents of Dayton, Tenn., put on a play, the same play they have put on every year about this time. It retells the story that put Dayton on the map 80 years ago.

Townsfolk prominent and not so prominent dressed up in the styles of the Roaring ’20s and assembled outside the Rhea County Courthouse to recite the proceedings of the real Trial of the Century: the prosecution in 1925 of John T. Scopes for teaching his students the theory of evolution.

It is perhaps curious that Dayton would do such a thing; after all, the town didn’t come off all that well in the wake of the trial, which ended with Scopes’ guilty plea.

It was the first trial to be covered with the full arsenal of modern media — broadcast live on the radio, filmed for newsreels in the theaters, chronicled by hundreds of newspapers that printed the daily transcript.

The picture that emerged, especially in the hyperventilating prose of the iconoclastic Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken and later in the play and movie “Inherit the Wind,” was of a town full of “Christian pro-creation” believers who were “uneducated, dimwitted people who came to town barefoot and married their cousin,” said historian John Perry, co-author of a new book, “Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial.” He and co-author Marvin Olasky recount the trial and argue for teaching the hypothesis that an intelligent designer shaped the course of human development.

Library of Congress Clarence Darrow, left, and Judge John T. Raulston, who started each day’s session with a prayer, much to Darrow’s annoyance.

That caricature, like so much we think we remember about the famous Monkey Trial, was largely wrong. And because history has a way of repeating itself — witness recent debates over whether to teach intelligent design in the schools — it is worthwhile to look back at what really happened 80 years ago.

“Why do people still debate the meaning of life or is there a God or not a God?” asked Olasky, a journalism professor at the University of Texas and editor of the Christian-themed newsweekly World. “These are basic, fundamental questions.

“We are, as human beings, the one species that actually can contemplate its own death, and that changes everything,” he said. “The whole question of where we came from, I think, is so fundamental that I don’t think it’s ever going to go away.”

For Dayton, a shot at fame
The most important thing to understand about the Scopes trial was that it was a publicity stunt. There were no fundamentalist preachers trolling the hallways of Dayton’s schools hunting for teachers who were violating Tennessee’s prohibition on teaching evolution.

“By Southern standards, Dayton was relatively progressive,” said Douglas Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City law school who maintains the exhaustively detailed Famous Trials Web site, from which some of this account is adapted. “Evolution had been taught in the classroom for a couple of years without any controversy.”

The American Civil Liberties Union had published an offer to defend anyone willing to challenge the statute, and Scopes, a football coach and substitute teacher at Rhea County High School, volunteered at the behest of prominent Dayton residents who thought a show trial would be a good way to get attention.

Clarence Darrow, the most acclaimed criminal defense lawyer in America and a famous skeptic when it came to religious matters, volunteered to help defend Scopes. The prosecution brought in equally impressive firepower: William Jennings Bryan, the champion of progressivism and a renowned orator whom the Democrats nominated three times for president.

For more than a week, Darrow and Bryan sparred over the Bible, Charles Darwin and academic freedom. Or, at least, they tried to. State Circuit Judge John T. Raulston more or less kept the trial focused on the legal matter at hand and eventually barred Scopes’ scientific expert witnesses from testifying on the validity of evolution — it was immaterial to the question of whether Scopes had violated the statute.

“I don’t think many lawyers would really disagree with that conclusion, that as a matter of law he was probably right about that,” Linder said. But its effect was to drain the trial of much of its attraction: the titanic confrontation between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan over God, life, the universe and everything.

So Darrow decided late in the trial to call an expert on the Bible. He called Bryan. And that was where what had already been a media sensation turned into a circus.

The other prosecutors tried to object, but Bryan, a fervent fundamentalist who saw his participation in the trial as a righteous act, waved them off, saying he had nothing to fear. “I have studied the Bible for about 50 years,” he declared.

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