Science Friday - Why Is The Scopes Trial Still Relevant 100 Years Later?

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

In July 1925, the Scopes “Monkey” Trial captivated the nation. On its face, the case was relatively straightforward: A Tennessee biology teacher named John Scopes was accused of teaching human evolution to his students. At the time, that was against state law. Both sides enlisted the help of big name lawyers to represent them, and the case turned into a national spectacle. But, why has the legacy of the case persisted? And what can it help us understand about our current moment?Host Ira Flatow talks with Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation. Read an excerpt of the book at sciencefriday.com.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi, it's Ira Flato, and you're listening to Science Friday. On the show today, revisiting the Scopes trial, today marks the last day of the trial 100 years ago. Why is the case still relevant today? The issues that are being discussed, they have to do with change, but beyond that, they have to do with freedom. It's been 100 years since the Scopes Monkey trial. Maybe you've studied 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.

Hi, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. 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. Absolutely. 1925, right smack in the middle of what's called and everybody's familiar with the roaring 20s. But as I like to say, the roaring 20s didn't roar for everyone. And one of the things is very interesting, we tend to forget about the 1920s, is there are 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 of 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 out of. 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 nobody knew really why it was being thought. It 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-Bryon, 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. I want to go back to the ACLU being new, right? Because the ACLEO was crucial in this case, right? 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.

So he volunteered to do that. Yeah, he was in his 20s, very unassuming, unpretentious. He was asked by people in the town who were upset about this law if you would do it. And he said, sure, 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. I mean, it hadn't been excised to it. So he's just teaching. from the ordinary textbook that you would assign your students.

Wow. And from what I read, that the town was also very happy to have this here, right? It was a great tourist attraction. It was. It didn't attract as many tourists as people wanted. But when you think there were almost 200 journalists, can you get 200 journalists to go anywhere today? I'm not so sure about that. The 200 journalists

and descended on this little town in Dayton, Tennessee. There was a run on the 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 kind of 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 state. stadium. He was fine with him. Wow. Yeah. Well, when you have this trial this big, as I mentioned in the introduction, the prosecution and defense were represented by two really famous lawyers, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, William Jennings, Brian 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 a 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. Right. And then you have Clarence Darrow. What does he bring to this case? 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 damage because if you couldn't afford him and he believed in your case, he would take that case. So what did he hope to accomplish in this trial? 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 them 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 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 know, which was science, rather than have politicians decide. Right. And in fact, the scientists were very interested in this case, weren't they? Very much so. 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. Really? 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 judges and the prosecution's point of view, what's to argue, right?

Right. 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. So they didn't see 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.

And the scientists were not allowed to testify, but their written testimony was included in the documents, right? Yeah, I was able to read it. Anybody can read it if you want to, and I spent 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 talked about discovery of fossils, for example. Or they talked about how rivers are formed. You know how the things that exist in the world exist over time. Early fossils were discovered even before Darwin wrote the origin of species. Right, right. But you know, what gets overshadowed in this with all the issues you're raising is the verdict.

No one remembers the verdict, do they? Well, you know, it depends on if you've seen the movie or not, Ira. It was not surprising, was it? No, it wasn't surprising. But again, as I said, really what the defense wanted was to get this law before the Supreme Court, right? I mean, 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 U.S. Supreme Court. If you hadn't been convicted, you couldn't appeal it. 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 sort of sums up partly why we're still talking about the trial. And he said, you know, even when we lose, we win. And in a sense, that was Darrow's strategy.

You know, let's talk about these issues here. Let's alert the public. And as one citizen in Dayton said, when a. 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. Interesting. Oh, that's a great quote. Yeah. After the break, how the scopes trial mirrors the issues currently facing our nation.

The great black historian, W.E.B. Du Bois. He wrote about the trial on what he said, what he implied was democracy was on trial. And he said, the truth is, Dayton, Tennessee is America. What do you think is the biggest misconception that people have about this trial? 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 kind of gambit put on by the Chamber of Commerce to make a little money in a true American materialist fashion. I mean, 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, you know, a forgettable silliness? Well, why do you think that the case has remained in our public consciousness for, for what, a century now? 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 Inherent 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. You know, the freedom to worship, the freedom not to worship, what it is we worship, who decides what we should believe, or as I said, we 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, you know, no subject possesses the minds of people like religious bigotry. And he really thought the bigotry in the largest sense was what we were. was going on. But at the same time, I also like to quote the great black historian, W.E.B. 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. Well, you could not get a better quote to apply to today, could you? No, as I said, that's a great thing about the past. It's not dusty,

and it's not irrelevant. Well, today, the courts are flooded. with cases aimed at stopping Donald Trump's policies. Is that a similarity there? Well, yeah. I mean, I didn't know that when I was working on the book. I mean, you know, 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. certain tensions don't get resolved easily in one trial or in one event. And I think we've seen that happen. 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. Interesting. I recall going to Florida in the early 1980s where there was a case about teaching creationism in the classroom. That's right. It's a famous case, as a matter of fact. And the Supreme Court denied that, you know,

it needed equal time. And I think with Stephen J. Gould, a 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 are. issues remain with us and we have to stay vigilant. Well, Brenda, this is a fascinating book. Thank you for going back in history with us today on the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial. My pleasure, and thanks for inviting me. 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. Hey, thanks for listening. And don't forget to rate and review the podcast,

but only if you like the show. See you next time. I'm Ira Flato.