A soapbox preacher addresses a crowd gathered in a vacant lot a block from the courthouse. (Photo by Underwood and Underwood; courtesy of the Tennessee State Library and Archives.)

In factoring politics, personality must always be part of the equation. In all truth, Clarence Darrow did not belong at Dayton. The ACLU certainly did not want him there, since it sought to contest the case on constitutional grounds, carefully avoiding any confrontation between science and religion. For the ACLU, Darrow was a disaster, an articulate agnostic who was determined to frame the case as a defense of individual inquiry against mass religious bigotry. While the organization desperately attempted to attract more acceptable counsel, inviting both conservative

High school students shaving "monkeys" that were later sold as souvenirs. (Photo by Underwood and Underwood; courtesy of the Tennessee State Library and Archives.)

Democrat John W. Davis and the eminently respectable Republican Charles Evans Hughes to lead the defense, Darrow invited himself, and the star-struck Scopes accepted. Even so, Darrow did not come to Dayton because of Scopes but because of Bryan, whose very presence offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pit enlightened reason against fundamentalist faith. And by the same token, it was Darrow's baiting of Bryan that brought him to the stand, overcoming the outraged objections of his fellow prosecutors and against his own better judgment, for what must have seemed to him like his last, best chance to do battle for the faith of his fathers against the man he considered America's greatest atheist.

Along the same lines, it should not be forgotten that people make mistakes. On the whole, Judge John T. Raulston presided admirably over the proceedings. A small-town politician with a penchant for publicity and an evangelical Christian who lectured the court on the character of Christ,

Joe Mindy, one of several chimpanzees who appeared in Dayton during the trial. Dressed in a houndstooth sportcoat, tie, spats, and felt hat and carrying a walking stick, the young male chimp performed in circuses. Joe's owner brought him to Dayton from Atlanta, with intention of presenting him as an exhibit for the defense as living proof of evolution. The defense declined the offer, but Joe was a big hit on the streets during his several-day stay in Dayton. (Photo by Underwood and Underwood; courtesy of the Tennessee State Library and Archives.)

Raulston was nonetheless committed to dealing fairly with both sides and maintaining a civil courtroom. All things considered, his decisions were rendered wisely under trying circumstances, as when he artfully avoided controversy over the content of the court's opening prayers by assigning the problem to the local ministers' association. But in the final minutes he made a mistake, deciding hastily, and over the objection of the state's attorney, to follow the common practice (common at least to the moonshining trials that came before his east Tennessee court) of imposing the $100 fine himself instead of asking the jury to set the fine as required by state law. The error would prove to be a fatal flaw, allowing the Tennessee Supreme Court to overturn the conviction of Scopes, making further appeal impossible, and preventing any clear and final resolution of the case.

Then, too, since people are human, there is the element of mortality. William Jennings Bryan did not collapse in the courtroom at the close of the trial as played out so spectacularly in Inherit the Wind, but he did die in Dayton five days later, peacefully, during a Sunday afternoon nap. While he suffered from diabetes and struggled to maintain an appropriate diet, he was only sixty-five years old—three years younger than Darrow—and otherwise in apparent good health. Frustrated by his inability to deliver a closing argument to the jury, he had enthusiastically thrown himself into preparing his summation for publication in the days following the trial and was eagerly making plans to deliver the speech to audiences around the country. Nevertheless, his sudden and unexpected death gave his role in the trial unanticipated meaning, as he became, in the eyes of his supporters, not only a victor but a martyr to the cause.

John Scopes and his father, on the porch of Bailey's Boarding House, where he stayed during the trial. (Photo by Underwood and Underwood; courtesy of the Tennessee State Library and Archives.)

Perhaps the most conspicuous conclusion to be drawn from the trial, at least when seen from our own time, is that the media created its message. The Scopes trial was one of the first great political media events of this century, coming complete with scripts, rehearsals, and what we have in our own day come to call "spin." The trial was theater; presentations were carefully choreographed; even its most electric moment, when Bryan was called to the stand as an expert on the Bible, was the product of Darrow's dramaturgy, since he had spent much of the previous weekend practicing for it in simulated sessions in which Harvard scientist Kirtley Mather performed Bryan's predicted part. Then there was the analysis, coming mostly in the trial's aftermath, as some of America's most talented writers, led by the pitiless Mencken, transformed Bryan into a bloated bigot and turned the technicalities of the trial into an apocalyptic battle between science and faith, progress and reaction, Northern cosmopolitanism and Southern backwardness and religious bigotry.

Turning then to consider consequences, it is clear that in the Scopes trial, as in much of our political life, outcomes were unpredictable and often ironic. Ask the citizens of Dayton, who conspired to put their town on the map, and who succeeded spectacularly, only to find their town passed by on the road to progress and themselves derided by an ungrateful press as yapping yahoos and hillbilly ignoramuses. Or ask the antievolutionists who came away from the trial triumphant and even energized by Bryan's martyrdom but who had lost their leader and soon fell to fighting among themselves. Even more ironic were the views of those who had supported Scopes, who left Dayton thinking that they had been the real winners, since the trial had swung public opinion to their side, embarrassing the enemies of evolution and the state of Tennessee. Yet the hard truth was that Scopes had lost, and the Tennessee Appeals Court, while overturning his conviction, upheld the constitutionality of the state statute, which remained in force for more than forty years. In the meantime, science teachers across America did not fail to notice the outcome, and the editors of science textbooks, carefully calculating their sales, excised any serious treatment of evolution.

As a final point, it should be said that the Scopes trial is a vivid reminder that in politics there are no final victories. In the decades following the trial the debates over creation and evolution, far from disappearing, have continued and even intensified, especially with the development of what has been called "creation science" and campaigns to provide equal time for its teaching in the public schools. As recently as the 1980s, courts in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana have declared laws unconstitutional that required science teachers to place equal emphasis on evolution and creation events such as Noah's flood. As predictably as courts have struck down such statutes, however, activists have continued to bring on new ones, including a bill in the most recent session of North Carolina's legislature. Although it might be comforting to think it, these efforts are not atavistic throwbacks to some rapidly receding age. In North Carolina, the most recent antievolution bill was introduced by state senator Russell Capps, whose northwest Wake County district is home to many scientists who work in the Research Triangle Park. A recent Gallup poll found that almost half of all Americans believe the earth was created within the last ten thousand years. Under the circumstances, we can be sure of one thing: we will be trying the Scopes trial for a long time to come.

Further Reading Paul K. Conkin, When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999). Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).

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