1925 Billed as ‘the trial of the century’, the Scopes trial started out as a publicity stunt. The Tennessee state legislature had passed a law prohibiting the teaching in public (state) schools of ‘any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible’. Wishing to put their town on the map, a committee of local businessmen in Dayton, Tennessee convinced John Scopes, a local teacher, to stand in a case to test the law.
Scopes was the school’s football coach, but had stood in for its science teacher while he was ill. He couldn’t remember whether he had actually covered evolution on the few days he had taught the class, but told the group: ‘If you can prove that I’ve taught evolution and that I can qualify as a defendant, then I’ll be willing to stand trial.’
In 1925 the State of Tennessee duly obliged, taking Scopes to court for having broken the law. Dubbed ‘the monkey trial’ by the Baltimore Sun’s astringent columnist H.L. Mencken, the court case astonished and amused the nation, not least because each side attracted such illustrious advocates. The prosecution was spearheaded by the fundamentalist preacher and former progressive Democratic candidate for president, William Jennings Bryan. Leading the defence was Clarence Darrow, distinguished civil libertarian and America’s most brilliant trial lawyer of the time, fresh from his successful defence of thrill killers Leopold and Loeb.
Darrow and Scopes lost their case, but not before an unprecedented legal manoeuvre in which Darrow called Bryan to the witness stand to answer a number of searching questions into the literal truth of the Bible. For instance, did Joshua really stop the sun in its tracks for a whole day? What would have been the effect on the earth, had he managed it? A year later the state repealed the law, perhaps considering that they had had enough publicity on that score.
Thirty years later the trial inspired a workmanlike, amusing and in places moving play, Inherit the Wind (1955), meant by its authors, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, to highlight the red scare then being promoted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and by Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations.
After two years on Broadway, the play was revived twice, in 1996 and 2007. In 2009 the Old Vic in London staged it to full houses and standing ovations, with Kevin Spacey and David Troughton superb as the Darrow and Bryan figures. The powerful movie (1960) starred Frederick March as Bryan and Spencer Tracy as Darrow.
In Epperson vs. Arkansas (1968) the Supreme Court ruled that bans on teaching of evolution were unconstitutional, under the Bill of Rights, which protects free speech and prohibits the establishment of religion, yet it seems that bigotry resurfaces in sufficient new (or warmed-up old) guises to keep Inherit the Wind in business.