Why Is The Scopes Trial Still Relevant 100 Years Later?

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. It’s been 100 years since the Scopes Monkey Trial. Maybe you’ve studied it in history class. Maybe you’ve seen the 1960 movie, Inherit the Wind. And on its face, the case was relatively straightforward. A Tennessee biology teacher, John Scopes, was on trial for teaching human evolution to his students, which at the time was against the law.

Both sides enlisted the help of big-name lawyers to represent them. You had William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense. And the case turned into a national spectacle, as, actually, they hoped it would. We might get into that a little bit more later. But like I say, that was 100 years ago. Why, then, has the legacy of the case persisted over the century? And what can it help us understand about our current moment?

Joining me now to help answer those questions is my guest, Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith– God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation. She’s based in New York. Welcome to Science Friday.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Hi. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. So nice to have you. Can we zoom out a little bit and talk about the context? What else was happening in 1925, when the Scopes trial was taking place? I’m talking about political, cultural context.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Absolutely. 1925, right smack in the middle of what’s called– and everybody’s familiar with the Roaring Twenties. But as I like to say, the Roaring Twenties didn’t roar for everyone. And one of the things that’s very interesting we tend to forget about the 1920s is their tremendous numbers of labor stoppages, assassinations, tremendous economic disparity. There was xenophobia. People were so afraid of immigration that just the year before, Congress passed a rather draconian immigration law that shut the door on most people who’ve been coming in. And so you can see that there are a lot of things in the culture fermenting.

The other thing I would say is the ACLU, which is also still very important today and still with us, was pretty new. It had only been founded in 1920. One more thing while I’m at it– and that is the First World War, called the Great War, although nobody thought it was particularly great, was also a very important facet in the subtext of this trial because people had been shocked by that war. It was gruesome.

And there was– nobody knew, really, why it was being fought. There was a lot of rhetoric about it. But it was still terrifying to people. And one of the reasons it was terrifying is a segue into Scopes– is because people like William Jennings Bryan, who was on the prosecution against Scopes himself– what he felt was that– what did science bring us? It brought us aerial bombardment and poison gas.

IRA FLATOW: I want to go back to the ACLU being new because the ACLU was crucial in this case, right?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Crucial, absolutely crucial. If it hadn’t been for the ACLU, there may not have been a case. What they did was at the time, partly because it was new– it was looking for test cases. And that means the secretary of the ACLU was scanning newspapers to see what kinds of laws would both advertise the fact that the ACLU existed, but also, more to the point, that it was going to defend civil liberties when they’re under attack.

So they saw this Tennessee law that you mentioned. It was called the Butler Act. And they immediately put ads in two Tennessee papers saying that if anyone volunteered to break the law, they would defend that person. And that’s where we get John Scopes.

IRA FLATOW: So he volunteered to do that?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah. He was in his 20s, very unassuming, unpretentious. He was asked by people in the town who were upset about this law if he would do it. And he said, sure. And he said, you can’t teach biology without teaching evolution. And one of the things that I find so interesting is in the state-sponsored textbook, evolution was there. It hadn’t been excised yet. So he’s just teaching from the ordinary textbook that you would assign your students.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. And from what I read– that the town was also very happy to have this here, right? It was a great tourist attraction.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: It was. It didn’t attract as many tourists as people wanted. But when you think of almost 200 journalists, can you get 200 journalists to go anywhere today? I’m not so sure about that. 200 journalists descended on this little town in Dayton, Tennessee. There was a run on hotel rooms. People had to be put up in the houses. Kids on the courthouse lawn were selling hot dogs.

So there was an enormous commotion in the town. And the judge, who was very happy to have this kind of attention brought to himself, to the trial, and to the town, said he would hold court in a stadium. It was fine with him.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. Wow.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: Well, when you have this trial this big, as I mentioned in the introduction, the prosecution and defense are represented by two really famous lawyers, right?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah. Yeah. Well, William Jennings Bryan hadn’t really worked as a lawyer for a very long time. He was known at the time almost as a perennial candidate for president. He had been nominated by the Democratic Party three times for president ever since the 1890s. This is 1925. So it’s almost 30 years later. And he was big, powerful figure in the Democratic Party. I should also add he was a fundamentalist, which meant fundamentalist Christian, which meant that he read the Bible literally.

IRA FLATOW: Right. And then you have Clarence Darrow. What does he bring to this case?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Clarence Darrow had been called by a famous journalist, Lincoln Steffens, “the attorney for the damned.” And he was extremely well-known, first as a labor lawyer. He was happy to defend anarchists. He was an attorney for the damned because if you couldn’t afford him and he believed in your case, he would take that case.

IRA FLATOW: So what did he hope to accomplish in this trial?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Well, the ACLU had other people there. It was John Scopes. I should point out John Scopes actually wanted Darrow. I’m not so sure that the ACLU wanted him as much as Scopes did. And John Scopes said, I need someone who knows how to fight in the gutter. And what he meant by that is that Darrow was going to take this case to the newspapers.

He was going to fight it in the newspapers. He was going to try it there, where the ACLU was more interested in doing a strict constitutional case because the Butler Act defied the First Amendment to the Constitution, which protects free speech. But it also means there should be no state religion.

So they were happy to argue it that way. But to Darrow, the case was broader. And it had larger implications. And for him, the case was about prejudice. It was about bigotry. It was about intolerance. It’s about freedom. And it’s about, in the largest sense, science and the ability of experts, teachers, biologists to teach that which they knew, which was science, rather than have politicians decide.

IRA FLATOW: Right. And in fact, the scientists were very interested in this case, weren’t they?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Very much so. And in fact, at least seven of them volunteered on their own dime to go to Dayton, Tennessee, to testify. One of the odd things– there’s so many odd things about this trial– is that they were not allowed to give their expert testimony.

IRA FLATOW: Really?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah, because in a sense, if you go by the strict letter of the law, there is a law. Scopes broke the law. Everybody knew he broke the law. So from the judge’s and the prosecution’s point of view, what’s to argue? There’s a law. You break the law. What do we need the science for?

And of course, Darrow and the ACLU defense team were saying, how can you talk about this law without understanding what it is? First, you need to understand there are many bibles and many forms of religion, many interpretations of the Bible, on the one hand, plus you need to understand what evolution is. And that’s what the scientists wanted to talk about.

And it’s also important to know that these scientists were religious men. They didn’t see it as a conflict the way maybe we today may see it as a conflict, religion versus science. They were saying, look, evolution and science is completely compatible with a book of faith, with spirituality, with whatever you want to believe, really. It just says that change happens over time.

IRA FLATOW: And the scientists were not allowed to testify. But their written testimony was included in the documents, right?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah, I was able to read it. Anybody can read it if you want to. And I spend a chapter summarizing it, which was the most fun for me to write and to think about because I wanted– first of all, I wanted to make sure I understood it, which I did. I’m not a scientist.

And in the second place, I wanted to make sure that the reader understood the arguments that were being expressed here. And they were fascinating, really, because the scientists talk about discovery of fossils, for example, or they talked about how rivers are formed, how the things that exist in the world exist over time. Early fossils were discovered even before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species.

IRA FLATOW: Right. Right. But what gets overshadowed in this, with all the issues you’re raising, is the verdict. No one remembers the verdict, do they?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Well, it depends on if you’ve seen the movie or not, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: It was not surprising, was it?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: No, it wasn’t surprising. But again, as I said, really, what the defense wanted was to get this law before the Supreme Court. They were going to argue strenuously for John Scopes and for the repeal of this law. But they were also looking for and making a lot of objections so that there could be an appeal and that the appeal would then go– which there was– and that the appeal would go then to the Tennessee Supreme Court and then, from there, to the US Supreme Court.

IRA FLATOW: If it hadn’t been convicted, you couldn’t appeal it?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: That’s exactly right. So they weren’t really upset so much about that. And one of the things– one of the ACLU lawyers said something in another context. But– I like a lot because it really sums up, partly, why we’re still talking about the trial. And he said, we– even when we lose, we win.

And in a sense, that was Darrow’s strategy. Let’s talk about these issues here. Let’s alert the public. And as one citizen in Dayton said when a journalist asked him, well, what do you hope to get out of the trial– he said, I’m going to get a college education for nothing.

IRA FLATOW: Interesting. Well, that’s a great quote.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: What do you think is the biggest misconception that people have about this trial?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Well, that’s hard for me to answer. I’m very close to it. But I would say the biggest misconception is where we started. And that is that it was a spectacle, that it was a circus, a three-ring gambit put on by the chamber of commerce to make a little money in a true American materialist fashion.

I think that that element was there. And we talked about it. And the trial really was a proxy issue or a proxy trial for many other issues that come up. So sure, it was a spectacle. Sure, it was dramatic. But why would we remember it if it was just a kind of– a forgettable silliness?

IRA FLATOW: Well, why do you think that the case has remained in our public consciousness for what, a century now?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Well, I’m interested that you say that it has remained. And I certainly hope it has because I’m a believer in the cliches about history that if we don’t understand history, we really can’t understand our present.

One of the pop culture reasons it stays is because of that movie, Inherit the Wind. I know lawyers who have actually said they became lawyers because of the portrayal of Clarence Darrow. But I think in a broader sense, this trial remains important because the issues that are being discussed– they have to do with change.

But beyond that, they have to do with freedom. And really, this case raises questions, really, about the 21st century, as well as the 20th, the freedom to worship or the freedom not to worship, what it is we worship, who decides what we should believe, or, as I said, who should instruct children what we can read, what we may learn.

These were not arcane questions. And they weren’t dated. They were partly scientific questions. They were partly religious questions. But they were also cultural questions. And we see them today in issues about removing books from libraries or forbidding them being taught in schools or access to health care or the abrogation of civil rights, for example.

One of the things I also like to quote is something that Darrow said. And he said, no subject possesses the minds of people like religious bigotry. And he really thought that bigotry in the largest sense was what was going on.

But at the same time, I also like to quote the great Black historian WEB Du Bois. He wrote about the trial in 1925. And what he said, what he implied, was democracy was on trial. And he said, the truth is Dayton, Tennessee, is America.

IRA FLATOW: Well, Peggy, you could not get a better quote to apply to today, could you?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: No. As I said, that’s the great thing about the past. It’s not dusty. And it’s not irrelevant.

IRA FLATOW: Well, today the courts are flooded with cases aimed at stopping Donald Trump’s policies. Is that a similarity there?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Well, yeah. I didn’t know that when I was working on the book. In a sense, I’m looking backwards, not so much forward. And there was no way I could predict where we are in 2025 by any means at all.

But I also do believe that there are ways in which there are certain strands in our culture, certain issues and certain fissures in our culture, that remain, that certain tensions don’t get resolved easily in one trial or in one event. And I think we’ve seen that happen, that things reemerge in different forms. And certainly, the fundamentalists– in some sense, they won, but they lost in 1925. But you could also argue that they went underground and reorganized evangelically as a political force.

IRA FLATOW: Interesting. I recall going to Florida in the early 1980s, where there was a case about teaching creationism in the classroom.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: That’s right. It’s a famous case, as a matter of fact. And the Supreme Court denied that it needed equal time. And I think it was Stephen Jay Gould, the very famous biologist, but also wonderful writer, who really got science out there to the public. And he basically said people should not be sanguine about that decision because these issues remain with us. And we have to stay vigilant.

IRA FLATOW: Well, Brenda, this is a fascinating book. And thank you for going back in history with us today on the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: My pleasure, and thanks for inviting me.

IRA FLATOW: Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith– God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, a great read if you still have some summertime reading you’re looking for– she’s based in New York City.

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