Inherit the Myth

Popular conceptions of the Scopes trial are misleading

By Mary Anne Marks

In 1925, John Scopes was jailed for teaching evolution in a Tennessee public school. William Jennings Bryan, a blustery, locally lionized orator and a committed anti-evolutionist and Biblical literalist, undertook the prosecution. Counsel for the defense Clarence Darrow, champion of reason and true gentleman, lost the case but skillfully succeeded in publicly humiliating Bryan, who collapsed while declaiming his final speech to a quickly emptying courthouse.

All false. In fact, Scopes never faced jail. His participation in the case was entirely voluntary, a response to an American Civil Liberties Union ad looking for a teacher willing to take part in a test case directed against the recent Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. The main prosecutor, Sue Hicks, was a friend of Scopes’s, and Scopes actually taught physics and math at the local school, not biology. He was substituting for the school’s biology teacher when he read the theory of evolution to the class—from the state-approved textbook.

Reality proves equally startling in the case of William Jennings Bryan, a fiery character who canvassed the country denouncing not only Darwinism but also, ironically, American aggression overseas and female disenfranchisement. Nicknamed “The Commoner,” he was also a shrewd legal tactician who advised that anti-evolution laws not include penalties—probably foreseeing the future martyrdom of a Scopes figure.

Bryan believed strongly in the literal truth of the Bible as a work inspired by God, but even he allowed for a non-literal interpretation of the seven-day creation described in Genesis. And while he did object to evolution, he would have been willing to accept it—had he felt science provided conclusive evidence—as long as an exception existed for humans. By asserting “brute” ancestry for humans and positing survival of the fittest, Bryan felt, scientific Darwinism propelled and legitimized the social Darwinism of eugenicist movements in 1920s America and Nazi Germany.

Incidentally, whatever his feelings about Darrow’s masterful attack at the trial, Bryan took the offensive as soon as it ended and moved forward with characteristic vigor and optimism. He died unexpectedly five days later in his sleep at the age of 65.

And the real-life Clarence Darrow was no knight on a white horse. As Edward Larson reports in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Summer of the Gods, Darrow, the most famous lawyer in America at the time, “kept his name in the headlines” by “defending an odd mix of political radicals and wealthy murderers,” summoning psychological determinism to his aid in exonerating the latter. He believed that religious certainty bred intolerance and delighted in attacking Christianity and the Bible. Forcing his way into the Scopes case, he dominated it to the chagrin of the ACLU, which prided itself on defending freedom of speech for both religious and non-religious groups. The ACLU, in fact, spent the next months trying every possible means to shake Darrow off the scent, but to no avail.

How could the popular conception of the Scopes trial be so wrong? The names might be the problem; if we substitute the names of the characters from Stanley Kramer’s theatrical adaptation Inherit the Wind—Cates for Scopes, Brady for Bryan, and Drummond for Darrow—our first paragraph is the truth—of Inherit the Wind. Unfortunately, it is also the truth of the Scopes trial for many Americans. Inherit the Wind has come down to us as the authoritative version of the trial, the only version that most of us ever encounter. The authors of the play on which the movie is based warned that the work’s goal was not historical accuracy; the slightly different names serve as a token of their caveat. But in this case, as in so many others, people quickly forgot the professed historical inaccuracy of the artistic work and adopted Inherit the Wind as the truth of the Scopes story. Larson points out that a 1994 set of standards from the National Center for History in School recommended “selections from the Scopes trial or excerpts from Inherit the Wind” as sources for the event.

Inherit the Wind’s creators operated in the 1950s, not the 1920s; they worked in response to the Red Scare and sought an historical precedent for the suppression of free speech. They found endless possibilities in the Scopes trial.

Whatever the deleterious effect of Inherit the Wind on the American historical consciousness, the questions raised by Drummond in his dramatic showdown with Brady deserve pondering. Drummond makes an impassioned plea for the sanctity of the human mind and of each man’s right to think. He argues that laws banning the teaching of evolution in public schools point the way to the “banning of books and newspapers,” and that “soon, with banners flying and with drums beating, we’ll be marching backward, backward, through the glorious ages of that sixteenth century, when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind.” All this resonates well with a modern audience, but examination reveals chinks. No one was questioning Scopes’s right to think, and it is fine to set reason as the arbiter of what should and should not be taught. But in the end, there will always be an arbiter. Arbitration can be faulty; there are examples of inhumanity on both sides, the French Revolution being one that Drummond conveniently omits. But no one doubts that an arbiter is necessary. And whether reason alone is the right one remains very much an arguable question.