KEEPING THE FAITH

Another account—and among the best—of the spectacular 1925 trial of John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher accused of breaking the state’s law against teaching evolution.

The trial itself was a media circus covered by a mob of reporters, most notably and zestfully Henry L. Menken, a fierce, take-no-prisoners polemicist already a national figure. Looking beyond its circus atmosphere, award-winning historian Wineapple notes that the trial “raised issues that have perplexed America since its founding and still do today.” The traditional villain, prosecution lawyer William Jennings Bryan, was a progressive who crusaded for the poor, but he shared the religious fundamentalism, ignorance of science, and casual bigotry common at the time. Hero of stage and screen as well as biographers, his trial opponent Clarence Darrow was a dazzling courtroom lawyer and genuine foe of injustice but also, in Wineapple’s portrait, a shady character: vain, arrogant, and greedy. Defending Scopes, Darrow made brilliant arguments for freedom of speech and religion and called experts to explain evolution, but the jury did not get to hear them because the judge ruled that the jurors’ sole purpose was to determine whether Scopes had broken the law. Evaluating the famous interchange in which Bryan took the stand promising to defend the Bible’s literal truth, Wineapple shares the common judgment that he did a terrible job of it, commenting, “William Jennings Bryan had been no match for Clarence Darrow.” Nonetheless, many observers accused Darrow of humiliating Bryan, who attracted a good deal of sympathy and died five days after the trial. Following Scopes' conviction, the ACLU, which had organized his defense, tried unsuccessfully to remove Darrow’s team from the appeals in favor of more conservative lawyers. What followed was an anticlimax largely ignored by the media: Tennessee’s Supreme Court reversed Scopes’ conviction on a technicality. Aiming to avoid further fireworks, it upheld the Tennessee law but with so many qualifications that it was unenforceable.

The notorious “monkey trial” in expert hands.