Three Movies and a Play
(Doh!  And a Trial)

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When Hindsight Doesn't Have the Answers

In 1925, the same year that Franz Kafka's novel The Trial was first published, this real life case was one of the most unusual trials ever seen in, and during its closing stages outside, a US courtroom.

• Despite taking place in a small Tennessee town with a population of less than 2000, it attracted the involvement of a three-time Democrat candidate for the presidency of the United States of America, and a Chicago lawyer who, only months before, had successfully saved two brutal child killers from the death penalty - in what had been widely heralded as 'the Trial of the Century'.
   

• Though it was apparently concerned with nothing more important than the routine activities of a high school football coach and part-time teacher, it became the first ever American trial to be broadcast live on national radio, and was the subject of tens of thousands of column inches in newspapers all around the world.
   
• For the defendant, the outcome, at worst, was a fine of $500, yet thirty years later it was still so famous that it became the starting point for a hit stage play, a Hollywood film and two TV movies.

"It" was, of course, the trial of John Thomas Scopes (shown on the right), better known to posterity as 'The Scopes Monkey Trial' (for an overview of the trial see this Summary).  And of all its unusual features, possibly the most unexpected aspect of the whole affair is the fact that, as recently as September 1999, the ABCNEWS.com web site carried a story headlined The Scopes Trial Revisited with this telling summary:

The passage of time has obscured one important result from the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial": No one is sure who won.

A gross exaggeration?  A naive misunderstanding?  Not in this case.
As Rachel Zoll explained, quoting Professor of History and Law, Edward J. Larson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning record of the trial: Summer for the Gods:

"Not a single [newspaper] editorial at the time determined it was a decisive event either killing the anti-evolution crusade or a tremendous victory propelling it,"

Taking Liberties

Larson describes (p.225ff) how a popular history of the 1920s - Only Yesterday (1931), by F.L. Allen, editor of Harper's magazine - became the first published commentary in which the Darrow-Bryan confrontation was depicted as a defeat for Bryan and hence a defeat for anti-evolutionism.

In reality, however, Allen was no historian, and his account of the event was seriously flawed.  For example, the teaching of evolution in American schools went rapidly downhill following the Scopes Trial (see Part 13 for details).  Nevertheless, Allen's erroneous version of the facts was repeated in subsequent books of a similar nature for decades thereafter, eventually finding its way, in the late 1950s, into a college textbook on American history.

Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee unintentionally helped to perpetuate the myth with their stage play Inherit the Wind, which went on to be re-written as a major film and two TV movies.

There is, however, an important difference between the two historical 'revisions'.
Where Allen's version of the trial and its aftermath came seriously adrift, as Larson demonstrates, was in his determination to make the facts fit his personal overview of the sociological significance of 20's culture.  What happened thereafter, in the numerous books and articles that repeated the original errors, was that the later authors simply ignored - or weren't even aware of - the unreliability of Allen's version of the events.

By way of a contrast. Inherit the Wind, as we'll see in Part 2, was never in error, as such.  And that is because, like Arthur Miller's pseudo-historical drama, The Crucible (ostensibly a depiction of the Salem witch hunts of the late 17th century), the Scopes trial was simply a literary device through which the authors could examine, and comment on, the nature and effects of McCarthyism (see A Word from the Authors in Part 2 for details).  In short, it was never intended to be an accurate depiction of the original trial.  There was, however, an additional irony in the choice to use the Scopes trial as a platform from which to mount an attack on the anti-Communist witch hunt of the early 1950's, for the board of the ACLU, from the time of its formation in 1920, through to the "house cleaning" of the early 1940's, was itself dominated by communists!

So what really happened at Dayton in July, 1925?
It appears that despite the constant references to it - by virtue of the ongoing confrontation over the teaching of evolution in America's public schools - most people, including many Americans, still have very little idea what really happened.
This must surely be due, at least in part, to the poor quality of the information about the trial taught in many educational organisations, and we can only wonder why some educators still present the play/film to their students as though it were some kind of documentary.

Indeed, as you can see in Part 3 - A Cult of Misinformation, it's quite amazing how widespread the misinformation about the Scopes "Monkey" Trial has become.  Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica got some of its facts wrong on this one.

About the Author

Questions raised by previous visitors to this site include: Who wrote this material, and what qualifications does he or she have for the task?
And very fair questions they are.

To keep it brief, my name is Andrew Bradbury and I'm currently a freelance writer.  I've spent most of my career (since graduating with a degree in social psychology), working in training or education of some kind - I've been a teacher in a 6th Form College (that's students aged 16-18 years, approx.), the deputy headmaster (deputy principal) of that same college, and a training manager, trainer and training consultant in the light engineering and IT industries.
I've had seven books and numerous magazine and newspaper articles published, mainly on IT subjects, plus business skills and NLP (check me out on Amazon.co.uk).

As I see it, I have two important qualifications that equip me to be writing about the Scopes Trial, apart from my professional writing abilities.
The first is the fact that I spent nearly ten years as a history tutor in the 6th Form College I mentioned.  The other is not so much what I have as what I don't have.  That is to say, when I decided to research this subject I had none of the preconceptions that most American writers might have.

When I saw the film Inherit the Wind I saw it as pure drama - I had not been brought up believing that it might be related to any real life event.  When I started reading about Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan they were just two figures from history.  I had no pre-formed opinions - favourable or unfavourable - based on the reputation of either man.

I don't remember the Scopes Trial even being mentioned during my time at school or university, so I had no idea that it was thought by some to represent some kind of watershed in the development of American society.  (I did do a course on American history at university, but that covered Turner's Frontier Thesis, which relates to a rather earlier period of time, of course.)

Nor do I have any "baggage" associated with a conflict over the teaching of creationism or evolutionism in schools, because that has never been much of an issue over here.  Indeed, when I was teaching history, the biology textbook used by the college (published by John Murray - original publishers of Darwin's Origin of Species) included a paragraph in the introduction to the effect that the evidence for evolution was open to alternative interpretation - and to the best of my knowledge that was simply taken for granted without assuming that it might opening the floodgates of creationism (and it never has).

Reading List

This is not to say that my views are absolutely objective.  I've studied, and drawn my own conclusions from, a variety of resources, including (in alphabetical order by author):

• Frederick Allen's Only Yesterday - not a lot of use other than as an illustration of how easily history can be re-written to justify a particular point of view.
   
• Caudill and Larson's The Scopes Trial: A Photographic History - Not a very big book, but losts of photographs.  A useful resource for teachers covering the real life trial and/or comparing the trial with the play Inherit the Wind.
   
• Clarence Darrow's The Story of My Life (especially chapters 29-31) - Includes a thoroughly self-serving, patchy account of the trial.  Almost useless as a historical account due to the author's highly biased reporting and his incredibly malignant attacks on William Jennings Bryan (who had been dead some seven years when this book was first published!).
   
• Robert W.Cherny's A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan - is rendered virtually useless, as regards Bryan's part in the Scopes Trial both by the heavy anti-Bryan/pro-Darrow bias and by the amount of misinformation packed into the seven page description.  Errors made all the more inexplicable by the fact that Cherny was a professor of history at San Francisco State University when the 1994 edition was published (and for that matter, still is).  For example, in just one paragraph (page 175) he:
  • claims that the "attorneys for the prosecution" invited Bryan to join them (in fact both Bryan and his son were volunteers)
  • misses the first word off the WCFA's name, calling them "the Christian Fundamentals Association"
  • and far more significantly, he writes:
    

    "By April 5, several leading citizens of Dayton convinced John Scopes to stand as defendent,"

  Considering that the whole business was sewn up in a single discussion lasting less than half an hour (see The Drugstore Conspiracy for details); considering that this discussion did not take place until May 4, 1925; and considering that Scopes was charged with a crime he allegedly committed on April 24, 1925 - which was a whole 19 days after Cherny says Scopes had already agreed to stand trial - one is forced to wonder what the heck the professor was using as his source material?  And if he can be so far wrong on such an elementary point, what value can we place on anything else he writes about Bryan?
   
• Geoffrey Cowan's biographical The People v. Clarence Darrow - is ostensibly the account of the first of two trials in which Darrow was charged with bribing jurors involved in the 1911 trial of the McNamara brothers.  In practise Cowan takes us all the way from Darrow's early years, through his switch from corporate work to involvement with the labor unions; his role in the trial of "Big" Bill Hayward and in the prosecution of the McNamara brothers, in which his strategy lost him the support of the unions, and his tactics nearly landed him in prison.  Only the last 170 pages of the main text are directly concerned with the actually bribery trial.
  Despite Cowan's very obvious hero worship, he tells the story well and delivers a devastating indictment of the man who was allegedly America's greatest ever trial lawyer..
   
• Edward Davis' article on Science and Religious Fundamentalism in the 1920s in American Scientist (May-June, 2005) - a fascinating behind-the-scenes view of some important influences at work in America at the time of the Scopes Trial.
   
• Ray Ginger's Six Days or Forever - reasonably interesting but rather dated now and hampered by the bias fueled by the author's very obvious dislike of William Jennings Bryan.
   
• Freya Ottem Hanson's The Scopes Monkey Trial - Not particularly well written account of the Scopes Trial, ending with a review of more recent court actions over the teaching of creationism.  Although the book is at the high end of average in a few places, it includes far too many subtle omissions and errors, all of which seem to be pro-Scopes/Darrow/evolution and/or anti-Bryan.
   
• Edward Larson's Summer of the Gods - certainly the most interesting, thorough and well-documented account of the trial I've read so far.  There is some bias in the account of Darrow's questioning of Bryan, but it is kept to an absolute minimum.
   
• Olasky and Perry's Monkey Business - a pretty average overview of the Scopes trial which suddenly switches direction to become a lengthy pro-Intelligent Design primer.
   
• Jeffrey Moran's The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents - Despite a few shortcomings this is an excellent introduction to the basics of the Scopes Trial, formatted in such a way as to make it very useful as a study aid for both school and college/university students.  Of the materials I've read to date I'd rate this book second only to Larson's Summer for the Gods.
   
• Scopes and Presley's Center of the Storm - written in a relaxed, easy-to-read style this is an autobiographical account of the Scopes Trial and the events surrounding the trial by the man who was indeed at "the center of the storm."  As a historian I found several places where I would have appreciated a whole lot more detail.  Taken as a whole the book is so thoroughly and consistently adulatory in tone that for much of the time it is hard to tell where the ghost of Clarence Darrow stops and the rather mild-mannered Scopes is allowed to emerge.  It adds a few interesting touches and insights that I've not come across anywhere else, but is otherwise really only of curiosity value.
   
• Time magazine's Book of the Year for 1925 - fairly typical of how the trial was seen by and reported on in the American Press.  Additionally valuable for its information on the life in general in the USA, circa 1925.
   
• The trial transcript and the scripts of the stage and film (1960) versions of Inherit the Wind (see here for details of playscript, 1960 film script, TVM script and court transcript).

So, whatever errors or bias you may find here, they do at least have the distinction of being "all my own work," as the saying goes.

If you find any errors, or want to make a comment, you can contact me at: bradburyac@hotmail.com