The 100th Anniversary of the Scopes Trial

July 10 marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the Scopes Trial, which centered on the ability to teach the theory of evolution in public schools. We reflect on the legacy of this monumental case and its relevance today, with Brenda Wineapple, author of the book Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation.

Alison Stewart: This is All of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. 100 years ago today, the Scopes trial began in Dayton, Tennessee. The case centered around Tennessee's Butler Act, which outlawed the teaching of evolution in the state's public schools. The defendant was John Scopes, a local biology teacher who was arrested for doing just that. The case exploded in publicity when two celebrity lawyers joined the case. For the prosecution, there was William Jennings Bryan, a four-time presidential nominee. He believed that religion and morality were at stake in this case.

For the defense, there was Clarence Darrow, a lawyer known for defending labor unions. He felt the case was an important test for freedom of religion and for academic freedom. The Scopes trial captured the attention of the public, and was even the first trial in American history to be broadcast nationally on the radio. It helped spur on a debate about who decides what is taught in public schools. A debate we are still having today. Joining me on the centennial anniversary is historian Brenda Wineapple. She is the author of the book Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation. Thank you for being here, Brenda.

Brenda Wineapple: Thank you. It's a pleasure.

Alison Stewart: When did the theory of evolution first become a widespread topic of debate?

Brenda Wineapple: Well, very early on, almost 75 years before the Scopes trial, 1859 is the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. I should also point out that fossils were already found before Darwin published the Origin of Species. Scientists were beginning to be, if they weren't already, aware of the long time it took to develop different species. That was published-- Darwin published in 1859. There was, of course, some controversy about this, what was called Darwin's Bulldog, a man named Thomas Huxley, who was the grandfather of Aldous Huxley and biologist named Julian Huxley. He was very famous at the time. He even came to America.

He himself was, believe it or not, biology as a rock star. He was a great writer, and he fought against the church and those people who felt that Darwin's theory of evolution or the theory of evolution somehow conflicted with the church. By 1925, this was settled science. It was a theory in the scientific world. A theory doesn't mean it's fiction. It just means that it hasn't been refuted.

In fact, there was more and more evidence coming to light that could support the theory of evolution. It was not contested territory at this particular time, at least not for most people. Certainly not in the scientific community, or the academic community, or even in popular culture. I don't think people were necessarily thinking about it.

Alison Stewart: When did it become taught in public schools? Because that seems to be the big issue.

Brenda Wineapple: Public schools were always the issue. [laughs] One of the things that I always found ironic about the Scopes trial itself was that John Scopes, the biology teacher you mentioned, very unassuming, actually a substitute teacher, was teaching from the Tennessee authorized textbook. This was part-- as I said, this was so settled, it was in the textbook. There were other things in the textbook that might be a little more disturbing then and certainly now, like eugenics. All the textbook really said was evolution is change. It had nothing to do with God, it had nothing to do with origins, but that was it. It was in textbooks.

Alison Stewart: That was so amazing that John Scopes was a part-time teacher. He just happened to be teaching what was in the book.

Brenda Wineapple: I think he also-- he was a coach for the football team, too.

Alison Stewart: Why did he seem to be chosen for this case?

Brenda Wineapple: It's interesting. Actually, what happened, a little bit of back story here, the ACLU, which wasn't that old, it was only five years old, still with us, American Civil Liberties Union, it saw that this Butler Act prohibiting the teaching of evolution had been passed by the Tennessee legislature. They were looking for what's called a test case. We might understand what that is today. What they wanted to do with this test case, they, ultimately, wanted to get it before the Supreme Court. They felt the Butler Act was a violation of the First Amendment and what's called the establishment clause, that you can't really mandate a national religion.

They took out ads in Tennessee newspapers saying, if anyone was willing to step up and say that they violated the law, that they would defend that person. People in the town of Dayton, Tennessee, little town in Tennessee, got together, and they said this would be great. They asked John Scopes to do it. John Scopes merely said, "Yes, you can't teach biology without teaching evolution. He was willing to, in a sense, be, I guess, the guinea pig for all of this. One of the things that's interesting, if I could just go on for a second. One of the things that's interesting is that he became a celebrity, because as you said, I think you used a great word, this case exploded.

It's almost hard to think about, why was this such a big deal? As a result, and this is America, 1925, just like now, as a result, John Scopes got all kinds of offers to be in a movie, to write a book. He was very unassuming, and he turned everything down. He kind of disappeared. When we talk about the Scopes trial, we really don't talk about that young man. He disappears. He goes off to University of Chicago, finishes advanced degree, gets a job, and doesn't really appear again until 1960 or late '50s when there's a movie based on the trial.

Alison Stewart: This Butler Act in Tennessee, what do we know about why it was passed? Why it was passed you couldn't teach evolution in school.

Brenda Wineapple: It's so funny, because there were people in the legislature who were very passionate about it. Even John Washington Butler, the man who proposed it, he didn't know anything about evolution. Somebody came to his little town and said, "This is bad. This conflicts with the Bible." He said, "Oh, no." I think it was on the kitchen table, in fact, he wrote out the law. People in the legislature passed it. I think a number of them. Some were outraged.

They passed it because they thought it wasn't going to be enforced. Even the governor who signed it really didn't think it would go anywhere in that particular case. They knew-- there was a group called the Christian Fundamentals association, and they were adamant about this, and they wanted control of the schools. They had a spokesperson in the person you mentioned, William Jennings Bryan. People maybe have forgotten who he is today, but he was a powerhouse then.

Alison Stewart: Big deal. He was a big deal. My guest is author Brenda Wineapple. We're talking about the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial, which began Today in 1925. Brenda is the author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation. Let's keep talking about William Jennings Bryan.

Brenda Wineapple: What a guy.

Alison Stewart: What a guy. He was a massive political celebrity. What did religion and faith mean to him?

Brenda Wineapple: It's very interesting in that sense. What fundamentalism meant then, specifically as a branch of Protestantism, and it meant you read the Bible literally. You and I, Allison, we came from Adam's rib, literally. Not poetically, not spiritually, literally. As a result, he thought the earth could only be 6,000 years old, that creation really took place in six days, that the sun was stopped because the Bible said so. He said, "If the Bible said so, that's the rule of God, because God wrote the Bible. God is male, he wrote the Bible, and that's it." No questions asked.

What was interesting about Bryan, besides that faith, insofar as he believed what he said, and I think he did, he was also progressive. That's one of the things that's so interesting, because you can't really slot people into nice categories. He might seem a bit of a fanatic. That's what the opposition thought. At the same time, he was in favor of women's suffrage. He was in favor of senators being elected directly by the people. He was called the commoner because he represented the poor, the neglected, the forgotten person, particularly in what we call today flyover country. Not in the east, not in the west, not in urban centers. He's an unusual person.

Alison Stewart: He did believe in white supremacy, though.

Brenda Wineapple: Funny thing about that. [laughs] One of the things that interested me about the trial, among many, was that the period in which it took place, we think, "Oh, the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz age." Jazz and that which was roaring made people very, very nervous. Just a few weeks after the trial was over, the Ku Klux Klan marched in Washington with about 20,000 to 30,000, 50,000 Klanspeople gathered there. They were saying, "America first." They didn't like Blacks, Jews, Catholics, you name it.

This is one of the, I guess you'd call subtext about this particular trial. William Jennings Bryan basically said, "Caucasian race is the best race, the only race." His view of evolution, which really had nothing to do with evolution, was one in which you have racial hierarchies. One of the things that threatened people, I think, in the 1920s about the theory of evolution was that it suggested there are no such thing as racial hierarchies. That was very threatening because there were people who really felt we have to keep the status quo. There's a lot of change that's going on. Evolution has changed. How do we stop it?

Alison Stewart: On the other side was Clarence Darrow. He made his name as a big-time lawyer representing labor unions. I don't know where to start. Where do you start? What made him a great lawyer? Let's start there.

Brenda Wineapple: One of the things that made Darrow a great lawyer, and I mentioned Inherit the Wind, which I don't think is a great movie, but it has a cultural presence to it. It's played to the hilt by Spencer Tracy. I didn't see it until I finished the book. What that actor got about Darrow was that Darrow knew how to speak to juries, and he knew how to speak to people. There was not a bit of arrogance about him. He wore suspenders, and he kept his thumbs in his suspenders. He really cared about the cases that he took.

In fact, he had just come off a trial which was one of the weirdest and most awful trials of the 20th century, probably of any time. Where two teenagers, Leopold and Loeb, had killed a third teenager. They admitted they did it. They were happy to do it. They thought that they could get away with it. When they didn't, they were still proud of it. They thought they were Nietzsche and supermen. Darrow took the case, not because he thought they were innocent. He knew they weren't innocent, but he didn't want them to get the death penalty. He hated capital punishment. He hated fanaticism. He hated bigotry.

As you said, he was happy to defend anarchists, labor, people in labor, and Leopold and Loeb. In that particular sense, he was called the attorney for the damned. People who the general population might think of as damned in whatever way, he would take that case. He was a complicated guy. I said Bryan was complicated. He was a progressive. Darrow was complicated, too. He was indicted twice for bribing a juror. What's interesting, again, is that people are so multifaceted. They're so unusually difficult to put into a category.

Alison Stewart: Do we know his personal feelings about religion and evolution? Does it really matter?

Brenda Wineapple: It doesn't, theoretically, because the Constitution not only is supposed to protect religion, all religions, but also to protect the freedom not to have a religion. I mentioned Huxley before, Darwin's Bulldog. He invented, or he gave a word that we still have called agnostic, which isn't the same as atheist. It's not believer. It's someone who says, "I don't know"

Alison Stewart: I don't know.

Brenda Wineapple: Exactly. I don't know. Show me. That's what Darrow was. Darrow was an avowed agnostic. Which, of course, made it seem as if he was of the devil party, attorney of the damned. One of the journalists, very well-known at the time, H. L. Mencken. Shortly after the trial, Bryan died. Mencken said something to the effect of, in his nasty way, he said, "God shot an arrow aimed at Darrow and hit Bryan by mistake."

Alison Stewart: We've talked about the who and the what. Let's talk about where. Dayton, Tennessee. What was Dayton like?

Brenda Wineapple: Small town, population 2,000. You can imagine what it was like when almost 200 journalists with their cameras, newspaper people, as well as movie people, all descended on the town. Spectators, people came in with chimpanzees that went up and down the street. There were Pentecostal preachers. There were big signs out saying, "Read your Bible." There were monkey trinkets sold. It was, by the way, Mencken, who called this the monkey trial because the common idea was, "Oh, we're descended from monkeys." That was so offensive to Bryan, which, of course, Darwin never said. Dayton had been the strawberry capital of the country.

Alison Stewart: How did it react? Did people make money off of it? Did they say, "We want all this media to go away?"

Brenda Wineapple: Neither. I think they had hoped they would make more money than they did. It was America. It is America. People coming to town, you want to sell hot dogs, and trinkets, and lemonade, and everything that you possibly can. The judge was excited. He was happy to have his picture taken. He said, "If you want to hold the trial in a football stadium, that's fine with me." I'm not sure that-- it obviously put the town on the map, but I don't think that they made that much money. One of the things that I found endearing is one of these journalists went over to a Dayton citizen and he said, "What do you expect to get out of the trial?" The citizen said, "An education for nothing."

Alison Stewart: Wow. Oh, that's really interesting.

Brenda Wineapple: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's really interesting.

Brenda Wineapple: The way Mencken saw this play since came to us in popular culture is either people are fanatics or they're completely ignorant. They were open minded. Even Mencken himself was surprised at how hospitable people were.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Barbara Wineapple. It's the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial, which began today in 1925. She's the author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation. In this case, Barbara, was the theory--

Brenda Wineapple: Do you mind if I correct you?

Alison Stewart: Oh, what did I say? Brenda. Sorry. Brenda Wineapple. In this case, Brenda, what was on trial? Was it the theory of evolution, or was it the right to teach evolution?

Brenda Wineapple: Great question. It was not the theory of evolution, per se. Actually, the defense wanted to have scientists testify and explain what evolution was. I don't think anybody really understood. They really weren't talking about that. They were talking about the right to teach. They were talking about the right of a teacher to decide what would go on in the classroom. As far as someone like Darrow in the defense, and even the ACLU felt, it was about freedom, the freedom to worship or not to worship.

In that particular sense, it was about the Constitution, it was about democracy. W.E.B. du Bois, we were talking about racial categories before, very carefully watched the trial. He was a very eminent Black historian and the editor of magazine called The Crisis.

Alison Stewart: The Crisis.

Brenda Wineapple: Yes. Exactly. He said, Dayton, Tennessee is America. What's going on is not about the theory of evolution, per se. It's really about people's rights. It's about civil rights. It's about fairness. It's about equality. It's about all of those things.

Alison Stewart: Who was the judge in the case?

Brenda Wineapple: Man named Judge Ralston, John Ralston, who, by the way, was up for election. He was also a fundamentalist like Bryan. He was very excited to hear whatever Bryan had to say. When Darrow did this unusual thing, this unusually unlawyerly thing, he put Bryan on the stand because Bryan said he was an expert on the Bible. He put Bryan on the stand. By this time, it was July, like now. It was hot like now. The courtroom was crowded. The floor began to give way, so everybody marched outside. There were platforms set up and bleachers. Everybody's watching.

These two men of a certain age were basically having an argument. The most dramatic courtroom in the open air that you could imagine. Darrow began to interrogate Bryan about the Bible. Bryan really, he undid himself. It said that Darrow humiliated him and Bryan humiliated himself. Basically, he showed that he didn't really believe what he said he believed. When he basically said he didn't know how long a 24-hour day was when God created the world. It must have been really awful to watch this.

Alison Stewart: Everybody did watch, though, and everybody heard. It was the first to be broadcast on the radio. How did the public interpret what they heard of the trial?

Brenda Wineapple: One of the things that Darrow did, and I'm not sure-- I know certain members of the ACLU didn't like, he brought the trial to public attention. Really, in some sense, the trial took place in the newspapers. People really knew about it. Even though the case never got to the Supreme Court, the Tennessee Supreme Court threw it out on a technicality. It never went to where the ACLU wanted.

As one of the defense lawyers said, "When we lose, we win." To a certain extent in the public, it was made-- what people could see was these issues were not easily understood in the ways that they were presented. Bryan was made to be a fool. The case began to seem like a circus and a spectacle, and it was over. In a sense, the fundamentalists for a while went underground. Reemerged later.

Alison Stewart: What happened to the Butler Act?

Brenda Wineapple: It stayed on the books, believe it or not. Stayed on the books till the 1960s, but it really wasn't enforced.

Alison Stewart: To your point, Scopes was found guilty, and he was fined $100 or something like that.

Brenda Wineapple: $100.

Alison Stewart: That wasn't the point.

Brenda Wineapple: It wasn't the point.

Alison Stewart: What was the point?

Brenda Wineapple: It wasn't the point. The interesting thing is that the Tennessee Supreme Court used that fine that the judge imposed. That's the technicality. He said, "No, a fine--" The Supreme Court said, "No, a fine of that amount has to be decided by the jury, so case closed, case over." That was it. It was token. It was a token amount. $100 was a lot, but not much. The scientists who were going to testify and others got together, a fund to send Scopes to get more graduate work. Everything disappeared in that particular sense. It was just tokenism in that sense.

Alison Stewart: As we were talking about at the beginning of this interview, a lot of the political discourse is over public school, and who has the power to dictate what is and what isn't taught in our public school. In what ways do you think the issues presented at the Scopes trial are still issues in American life today?

Brenda Wineapple: To the extent, as we were saying, that one of the issues under the whole episode was bigotry and fanaticism, we certainly see that. More specifically, when we're talking about censorship, when we're talking about removing books from libraries, whether it's Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, something by Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou, that these books are suddenly being censored or forbidden for students to teach. When we see legislation that is proposed to make Bible reading mandatory, which, of course, what about the Quran? Which Bible? What about agnostics?

All of this, whether it's censorship, freedom to worship, all of these kinds of issues are very much with us today. In terms of questions about, as Darrell was pointing out, questions about freedom, questions about democracy, questions about xenophobia, questions about even immigration, really, because that was one of the key issues underlining this case. Xenophobia, fear of other people, fear of anybody who isn't like you. Fear, as I said earlier, of change.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation. Brenda Wineapple has been my guest. Thank you so much for this wonderful lesson. We really appreciate it.

Brenda Wineapple: Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure to see you and be here. To see you in the flesh.