As discussed in the last three posts, as a purely legal matter, the Scopes trial was inconsequential, setting no legal precedent whatsoever. While the Dayton civic leaders achieved their goal of creating huge publicity around the trial, like all publicity stunts, the hoopla eventually died away, the crowds disappeared, and life went largely back to normal. The Butler Act that triggered the trial was quietly repealed only four decades later. The first major case involving the teaching of evolution was the 1968 Epperson v. Arkansas in which the US Supreme Court struck down a law similar to the Butler Act that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. This was the case that the Scopes trial sought to be and yet few have now heard of that case while the Scopes Monkey trial, as it has come to be known, is firmly embedded in the public culture.

How did that come to be?

The Scopes trial may well have faded into obscurity if not, thirty years later, the huge success of the play and film Inherit the Wind catapulted it back into public consciousness and it has stayed so ever since. The play was produced in 1955 and received rave reviews, and was used as the basis for the film of the same name that came out in 1960.

It is important to understand that the play and the film were not meant to be about the actual Scopes trial. If that were the case, we have seen that it would have been more suitable to make it as a comedy than a drama. Everyone involved was chummy with one another, there was no real hostility among the protagonists, the townspeople welcomed all the outsiders, Scopes was well liked and William Jennings Bryan, the lawyer for the prosecuting team, even offered to pay his fine if he should be found guilty. Clarence Darrow did think that the religion espoused by Bryan was absurd and said so openly but otherwise the two were friends and allies in many causes.

They were both born in the Midwest — Darrow in Ohio and Bryan in Illinois. Both of them spent a good portion of their lives in Illinois. Both were lawyers. Both were intensely political and involved in party politics. Both were life-long Democrats. Together they were instrumental in remaking the Democratic Party.

In short, they knew each other well, had the same circle of colleagues, worked together for years, and had known each other’s criticisms for decades. That they would square off here in Dayton was not a surprise to each other or anyone who knew them. Nor should it surprise anyone that they were friends. And when Bryan died shortly after the trial, Darrow was shocked and saddened, saying of his fallen friend that he was “a man of very extraordinary powers. . . . I sincerely regret his death, and extend my sympathy to his grief-stricken family.”

Second, there were several issues that defined their lives, not just one. Not just the debate between evolution and creationism.

Here’s where they agreed — at least for some moments in time.

They both thought that American politics should serve working people first. In the 1890s, Darrow and Bryan worked together to transform the Democratic Party, and in so doing, American politics. The 1890s was a period — Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age — when corporations and the propertied had power and sway over the American system of laws, politics and economics. It did not work for the average person; it did not work for families. A few daring young politicians and their allies stood up against the system which they considered unjust, if not immoral. Darrow worked behind the scenes to achieve change while Bryan was out in front.

Darrow and Bryan at various moments were in and out of touch with American politics for most of their lives. Yet, neither of them ever abandoned their basic agreement that our system of governance should work for everyone, not simply those who have more than others.

So why did the playwrights change the subtext of the episode? It is because they were not interested in accurately depicting the Scopes trial. They merely wanted to use it as an allegory about the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s and the red-baiting McCarthy trials that were then going on. That was far more ominous and threatening to free speech and free association and the mood in the country was undoubtedly hostile and antagonistic. So the writers had to create that kind of tension around the Scopes trial.

But while they had a disclaimer that their play was not meant to be taken as a historical account of the Scopes trial, in many aspects it so closely resembled the actual case that audiences could be forgiven for thinking that it was so. Even the names of the main characters were evocative: Henry Drummond (for Clarence Darrow), Matthew Harrison Brady (for William Jennings Bryan), Bertram T. Cates (for John T. Scopes), and E. K. Hornbeck (for acerbic journalist H. L. Mencken). The structure of the trial was largely maintained and some of the trial transcripts were used as dialogue.

The closeness of the portrayal to the real events and the enduring popularity of both the play and the film has not just resulted in its portrayal being mistaken for the real thing, it also has shaped way that the legal, educational, and political war between science and religion has been viewed in the US in subsequent years.

H.L. Mencken’s trial reports were vituperative and heavily slanted against the prosecution and the jury, which he described as “unanimously hot for Genesis”. He mocked the town’s inhabitants as “Babbits”, “yokels”, “morons”, “peasants”, “hill-billies”, and “yaps”, and called Bryan a “buffoon” and his speeches “theologic bilge”. He chastised the “degraded nonsense which country preachers are ramming and hammering into yokel skulls”. In contrast, he called the defense “eloquent” and “magnificent”. Even today, some American creationists, fighting in courts and state legislatures to demand that creationism be taught on an equal footing with evolution in the schools, have claimed that it was Mencken’s trial reports in 1925 that turned public opinion against creationism. The media’s portrayal of Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan, and the play and movie Inherit the Wind (1960), have been credited with causing millions of Americans to ridicule religious-based opposition to the theory of evolution.

In the next and last post on the Scopes trial, I will look at some of the underlying issues that were raised in that trial that remain unresolved today, issues that were discuss in my book, God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005.

The main one is the question of who gets to decide what public schools should teach students.