Ed Larson: The inside story of the Scopes Trial

This is the (edited for space) speech given by Ed Larson at the Scopes Trial Centennial convention in Chattanooga, Tenn., on July 19. He was introduced by convention emcee Leighann Lord. (To watch the speech, go to ffrf.org/scopescon. To see photos from the event, go to ffrf.us/scopespics.)

Leighann Lord: When I bring on our next speaker, in the absence of the physical presence of John Scopes or William Jennings Bryan or Clarence Darrow, the best person to have at a centennial conference celebrating the Scopes Monkey Trial, is the guy, like capital T, capital G, The Guy.

He won a Pulitzer Prize in history for his book, “Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.” He’s also the author of “Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory” and coauthor of “The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow.” He holds the Hugh and Hazel Darling Chair in Law and is a professor of history at Pepperdine University.

He’s taught for 20 years at the University of Georgia, where he chaired the history department. He has served as a visiting professor at several universities, including Yale Law School, Stanford Law School and the University of Melbourne. And he recently published “American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery and the Birth of a Nation, 1765 to 1795.”

Long story short, he literally wrote the book. And that’s why Professor Ed Larson is the winner of this conference’s Clarence Darrow Award.

By Ed Larson

I am overwhelmed. [Clarence Darrow] was my father’s hero. I’m so, so incredibly honored. I thank you so much. My gosh. 

Well, 100 years is a long time in politics. Less so in science and even less so in religion. This year marks 100 years since the best-known intersection of those three forces in American culture, the so-called “Tennessee Monkey Trial” in the summer of 1925. As you all know, after civic leaders indicted John Scopes for teaching about human evolution in the town’s public high school, Dayton, Tenn., became the setting for one of the most contentious courtroom dramas in American history.

It became a flashpoint in American history that continues to inspire, unsettle and provoke. Seen narrowly, Tennessee v. Scopes is a small-town criminal prosecution brought under a new state law, making it a misdemeanor for any public school teacher — and I’m quoting the entire statute now — “to teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the bible, and to teach instead that man is descended from a lower order of animals.” It was not a big, beautiful bill. It was a very short, ugly bill.

Read broadly, it represented a clash of worldviews, pitting legendary, populist orator William Jennings Bryan and an array of Christian fundamentalists against renowned secularist attorney Clarence Darrow and an honor roll of science educators in a timeless battle over science, religion and their place in American culture. It became a story of religion vs. science.

But, why Dayton, of all places? Responding to the invitation of the ACLU — which opposed the statute on free speech, not religious, grounds — town leaders in Dayton met in a drugstore which was owned by F.E. Robinson, the school board’s chairman, who decided to test that new statute in court by arranging a friendly indictment of a local science teacher named John Scopes. This group wanted publicity for their community and Scopes agreed to the scheme, and soon hundreds of reporters and thousands of onlookers descended on Dayton to witness an event that the press billed as the “trial of the century” before it even began.

The story begins

But, the story did not really begin in Dayton or with Scopes. For all intents and purposes, the story began four years earlier when Bryan, a self-proclaimed fundamentalist, launched what he called his “crusade against evolution” that sought to ban teaching about human evolution in public schools. A charismatic fixture in American politics for nearly three decades by that time, Bryan had burst on the national stage in 1896, when he won the nomination for president of both the Democratic Party and the populist People’s Party by offering a cure-all solution of bimetalism for an ongoing economic recession.

After losing the election, aside from a brief stint as secretary of state in the Wilson administration, he became a public speaker, peddling the shifting arrays of elixirs for whatever then ailed America. Anti-evolutionism simply represented his final nostrum for the nation’s woes, and it chiefly appealed to evangelical audiences. Bryan raised it in scores of addresses during the early 1920s, including one in Nashville on Jan. 24, 1925, leading directly to the introduction and then passage of the Tennessee law that spawned the Scopes Trial.

During the World War I years, states had passed laws to promote teaching patriotism, bar instruction in German or instruction about communism, to mandate flag salutes and to mandate classroom prayer. Schools and colleges across America had dismissed teachers for opposing the war.

Education restrictions accelerated in the 1920s, with state laws requiring bible readings, forbidding the employment of teachers who were deemed radicals, pacifists, communist or socialist, mandating the teaching of capitalism, and prohibiting teaching, well, in the words of one statute, “that ours is an inferior form of government.” The anti-evolution crusade simply added a push for laws against teaching Darwinism.

Now, historians described populism as a movement offering simple solutions for real or perceived social, economic or political problems. In the 1890s, bimetalism, that is, the coinage of silver at a 16 to 1 ratio with gold, was presented as a panacea for the panic of 1893, the worst economic recession in U.S. history before the 1930s. Bryan wrote it for his first nomination for president in 1896. “You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold,” he told cheering delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Clarence Darrow was in the audience.

Attacks on evolution

This phrasing played on his appeal to evangelicals. In the 1920s, out of office and relying on speeches for income, Bryan ratcheted up his populist attacks on evolution, which had long been but a bit player in his addresses. A spellbinding orator, Bryan had already run through not just bimetalism, but also the direct election of senators, the federal income tax, prohibition, treaties to outlaw war, and Jim Crow laws as cure-all solutions to social problems.

He claimed credit for four different constitutional amendments. He always exaggerated his own role, but he had a role in all of them. That’s more constitutional amendments than any person other than James Madison. That would be the prohibition, female suffrage, direct election of senators and the income tax. He came close with child labor laws.

As for his racial views, he opened his memoirs by crediting success for “having been born a member of the greatest of all races, the Caucasian race.” That seems an odd claim for a creationist to affirm that all humans descended directly and relatively recently from Adam and Eve.

Beginning in 1921, Bryan focused on evolutionary teaching as his principle populist prescription for taming the Roaring Twenties. Since leaving public office in 1915, Bryan had traveled the country, delivering up to 200 paid addresses per year from a carefully honed group of set speeches.

He was not a spontaneous speaker, but when he had a set speech that he worked out, it was a humdinger. We know what he said because he printed them all and sold them at his speeches. In a series of post-World War I lectures, beginning with “Back to God” and “In His Image” and “Rising Through the Bible and Its Enemies” and “The Menace of Darwinism,” Bryan increasingly blamed evolutionary teaching for all manner of social ills, from war and labor unrest to secularism and communism.

“Darwinism is the basis of the gigantic class struggle that is now shaking American society throughout the world,” Bryan declared in 1921. “Why? Because the brute doctrine of survival of the fittest is driving men into a life and death struggle, from which sympathy and the spirit of brotherhood is eliminated.” In 1924, delivering his “It Is Written” speech to a national convention of Seventh-Day Adventists, Bryan baldly asserted all — that’s what he said — “all the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution. It would be better to destroy every other book ever written and save just the first three verses of Genesis.”

Well, so much for the rest of the bible and the selfish gene.

This became his panacea, repeated in auditoriums, statehouses, arenas and churches across the land into the spring of 1925. The Great Commoner, as he was then known, needed only a state to administer his elixir. Tennessee, where we’re sitting now, became that state in March. From there, Bryan’s populist crusade against evolution led directly to the Scopes Trial. He then volunteered his services as attorney to prosecute Scopes, which drew in Clarence Darrow, then the nation’s most famous trial lawyer and secularist, to join the defense.

Bryan vs. Darrow

The prospect of Bryan and Darrow litigating the issues of revealed religion vs. naturalistic science and academic freedom vs. popular control over public education turned the trial into a media sensation then and the stuff of legend thereafter. It attracted hundreds of reporters and generated front-page coverage throughout the nation. It became the subject of Broadway plays, Hollywood movies and Nashville songs. Clearly, Scopes remains the best-known misdemeanor trial in American history.

For evolutionists and secularists, the trial’s highlight came when the defense called Bryan to the stand, ostensibly as an expert witness on the Lord’s purpose, but actually as a means to grill him on the bible as a source for science instruction. It took place outside, so more people could attend this key event. Actually, they thought it was going to be the closing arguments, and the judge wanted everybody to be able to hear it because only a few hundred people could fit in the courtroom, but thousands spread across the courthouse lawn to listen to this.

“You claim everything in the bible should be literally interpreted?” Darrow asked. “I believe everything in the bible should be accepted as is given there. Some of the bible is given illustrative light,” Bryan replied.

Darrow retorted, “But when you read the whale swallowed Jonah, how do you literally interpret that?” To which Bryan squirmed, “I believe in a God who can make a whale, and can make a man, and make both of them do what he pleases.”

At other times, Bryan conceded points of biblical interpretation, generally accepted by conservative Christians of his day, in line with 19th-century evangelical thought. For example, when asked by Darrow if the Genesis “days of creation” necessarily meant 24-hour days, Bryan replied, “I do not think it necessarily does.” Not satisfied, as no good trial attorney would be, Darrow shot back, “But you think it does,” leading Bryan to equivocate. “I know a great many people think so.” Darrow pressed the point, “What do you think?” Apparently, after a pause, Bryan testified, “I do not think it does, but I think it would be just as easy for the kind of God we believe in to make the Earth in six days or in six years, or in 6 million years, or in 600 million years. I do not think it is important whether we believe one or the other.”

If Bryan could interpret scripture to fit science, the defense crowed, then why can’t evolutionists and science teachers? Now, Darrow never asked Bryan about evolution. He knew that given the opportunity, Bryan would respond with well-honed answers from his speeches about adverse religious and social results of Darwinian thinking, telling students they would descend from a lower order animals. He would say, as he often did, “Well, they’ll act like monkeys.” “A survival-of-the-fittest mentality leads to war,” he would likely add. As Darrow pushed his various lines of questioning, Bryan increasingly conceded he did not know the answers.

“Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?” Darrow asked at one point, referring to one of Adam and Eve’s two children, both male. “No, sir. I leave the agnostics to hunt for her,” Bryan replied. The audience warmly cheered Bryan. Darrow received very little applause. “The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slaughter the bible,” Bryan declared near the end.

“I object to your statement,” Darrow shouted back. “I am examining your full ideas that no intelligent Christian on Earth believes.”

The judge had heard enough. Over two hours after Bryan took the stand, the judge adjourned court for the day and struck Bryan’s testimony from the record. Despite Darrow’s pleas for academic freedom and his humiliating examination of Bryan, Scopes lost the Tennessee anti-evolution case and Tennessee’s anti-evolution statute was upheld.

Formal and informal state and local restrictions against evolutionary teaching multiplied nationwide, and commercial publishers all but deleted the subject from biology textbooks for decades until some Cold War concerns about the quality of American science education led to an infusion of federal funds for new, better science textbooks during the late 1950s, leading to the BSCS {Biological Sciences Curriculum Studies] textbooks for high school teaching of biology.

By then, the synthesis of Darwinian selectionism and modern genetics had established evolution as the core concept in biology, and in these new high school biology textbooks, authored by academic scientists.

‘Inherit the Wind’ 

It was the time of this change that the 1955 Broadway play and the 1960 Hollywood movie “Inherit the Wind” crystallized the modern Scopes story. In the movie version, town officials, led by a fanatical but entirely fictional fundamentalist minister, arrest Scopes in his classroom for telling his students about the Darwinian theory of human evolution, which we know he actually didn’t do. Limited to a few sets, the play, if you watch it, begins with the jailed Scopes explaining to his girlfriend, “You know why I did it? I had the book in my hand under civic biology. I opened it up and read it to my sophomore class, Chapter 17, Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” According to the script of the play, for doing his job, Scopes is threatened with fine and imprisonment.

Of course, the law didn’t include imprisonment as a penalty. The ensuing prosecution becomes, in “Inherit the Wind,” a virtual religious interrogation, with Bryan mercilessly grilling the defendant’s invented girlfriend, who happens to be the minister’s “pretty but not beautiful” daughter. I got to know Donna Anderson. I think she’s plenty attractive.

About Scopes’ religious doubts, nothing of the sort ever happened in the actual trial. Written during the era of blacklisted authors and actors, the playwrights inserted it to mock McCarthyites, their intended target. “Inherit the Wind’s” closing scenes put the final gloss on the Scopes myth. Bryan is debunked and anti-evolutionism discredited. In the play and movie, Bryan’s debunking culminates with his interrogation by Darrow as the defense’s surprise closing witness. It may have been a surprise in the real trial to Bryan, but it wasn’t a surprise to Darrow; he had planned for it. In “Inherit the Wind’s” reconstruction of this storied encounter, Bryan assails evolution solely on narrow biblical grounds and denounces all science as godless.

By the end of his “Inherit the Wind” testimony, Bryan is totally befuddled. “Mother!” he pleads to his wife in the courtroom. “They are laughing at me, Mother!” In the actual trial, Bryan’s people were not laughing at him. They were seething at Darrow. At the end of “Inherit the Wind,” everyone ignores Bryan when he attempts, after the trial formally adjourned, to deliver a courtroom rant against the theory of evolution, precipitating his final collapse. He is carried off the stage, incoherently delivering his never-used presidential inaugural address.

To ensure that viewers get the point, the writers of “Inherit the Wind” have Scopes ask Darrow after the jury convicts him, “Did I win or did I lose?” Darrow answers, “You won. Millions of people will say you won. They’re reading the papers tonight that you smashed a bad law, that you made it a joke.”

When Darrow hears that Bryan has died, in the “Inherit the Wind” version of the story, Darrow famously quotes from the bible. “He that troubles his own house shall inherit the wind, and the fool shall be a servant of the wise in heart.” Alone in the courtroom at the end, Darrow, in “Inherit the Wind,” picks up the defendant’s copy of “On the Origin of Species,” which is left on the table there, and the judge’s bible, which is also left there, balancing them thoughtfully as if his hands were scales. The attorney jams them in his briefcase side by side and walks off quietly. Well, not that quietly, because in the movie they have Leslie Uggams singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That alone is worth watching the movie for.

The message was clear. Even in Dayton, the Scopes trial ended in defeat for the anti-evolutionist and a triumph for the best in science and religion. When the actual trial concluded, however, people generally did not see it as a clear victory for the defense. To the contrary, in its immediate aftermath, every newspaper editorial that I could read about it depicted the trial as inconclusive, and predicted the anti-evolution controversy would intensify as a result.

When Bryan died unexpectedly in Dayton a week after the trial, he was lionized by millions. Crowds lined the railroad track as this train went in slow motion to Washington, D.C. They lined the track at every stop as his body was carried to Washington for burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

While fundamentalist leaders competed to carry on Bryan’s crusade against evolutionary teaching, several states and countless school districts responded to the trial by imposing restrictions on teaching evolution, especially after 1927, when the Supreme Court upheld the Tennessee state law in Scopes’s appeal. The following year, by a popular initiative that garnered nearly two-thirds of the statewide vote, Arkansas followed Tennessee in making it illegal for public schools to teach the theory or doctrine that mankind ascended or descended from a lower form of animal. An anti-evolutionist college named for Bryan soon opened in Dayton and has expanded over time. Scopes even came back to Dayton to celebrate the town’s 35th anniversary of the trial.

The years since the Scopes Trial are pockmarked with efforts at the state and local level, not only to limit the teaching of evolution in public schools, or to balance it with creationist instruction, but to advance conservative Christian values both in the public schools and through creation-friendly, Christian academies. Christian schools and home schooling, which, now, thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill we mentioned, will begin receiving federal tax support.

In addition, throughout the nation, there’s been an increased movement to allow students, as part of this teach-the-controversy approach, to have parents being able to have their students opt out, which received confirmation by the United States Supreme Court, not only as an option that schools can do, but as a constitutional mandate on public schools across the nation.

The bottom line is that anti-evolutionism did not die in Dayton, nor did evangelicalism or Christian nationalism. Bryan’s brand of religious populism survives in America, and with it, so does the legacy of the Scopes Trial. Thank you very much.