Chicago’s most notorious attorney, Clarence Darrow, was riding high in 1924. He basked in the national spotlight while defending Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two Hyde Park teens who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks for the thrill of it.
Darrow admitted their guilt — which was undeniable — placing all his chips on saving the smug idiots from the death penalty. It worked.
In the spring of 1925, Darrow was looking for his next mountain to climb. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union was trying to fight the Butler Act, a new Tennessee statute banning public school teachers from discussing “any theory which denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man is descended from a lower order of animals.”
That law was advocated by another American titan, William Jennings Bryan. Like Darrow, he’d made his name in the 1890s, the “boy orator” who mesmerized the 1896 Democratic National Convention with his “cross of gold” speech advocating free silver. He ran for president three times and lost each time. By the 1920s, he had shifted into religious conservatism, plumping for Prohibition and battling Satan in the form of Darwin’s theory of evolution being taught in public school.
To have a case, the ACLU needed a defendant, and took out newspaper ads looking for one. The hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, bit. Hoping to draw attention to itself and maybe make a few bucks, it enlisted a 24-year-old football coach and substitute teacher, John Scopes.
He never taught evolution.
“I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant’s chair” Scopes said.
With Jennings on board, Darrow leaped into the fray.
“At once I wanted to go,” Darrow wrote. The trial began July 10, 1925.
Limelight can scorch the uninitiated. Dayton, which surprised newsman H.L. Mencken by being “a country town of charm and even beauty,” bit off more than it could chew.
“Here was an ... almost a miraculous chance to get Dayton upon the front pages, to make it talked about, to put it upon the map. But how now?” Mencken wrote. “Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke.”
Despite Darrow’s famous eloquence, the trial’s outcome was never in doubt.
“The Scopes trial, from the start, has been carried on in a manner exactly fitted to the anti-evolution law and the simian imbecility under it,” Mencken wrote. “The rustic judge, a candidate for re-election, has postured the yokels like a clown in a ten-cent side show, and almost every word he has uttered has been an undisguised appeal to their prejudices and superstitions.”
Scopes was found guilty and fined $100.
Bryan won, but also lost. He took the stand himself, poorly. When he died five days after the trial ended, Mencken quipped that God had shot an arrow at Darrow and missed.
Darrow lost, but also won — the Scopes trial cemented his reputation, and he went on to other big cases.
The Scopes trial is important today for reasons that have nothing to do with the case itself, and everything to do with the fact that we’re still arguing over how much religion can bigfoot public education.
The answer: a lot. Two weeks ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parents can “opt out” their children from any public school lessons that include suggesting LGBTQ+ citizens should be tolerated, or anything else that conflicts with religious training — which could include evolution.
The court apparently doesn’t care that letting one group impose its religious scruples on public education lets all factions do so and gives religious prejudice the whip hand over us all. Religious fanatics now have a veto over literally any subject schools would dare teach.
Mencken predicted it all a century ago, and it’s my privilege to defer to the master and give the bard of Baltimore the last word. We were warned:
“Darrow has lost this case. It was lost long before he came to Dayton. But it seems to me that he has nevertheless performed a great public service by fighting it to a finish and in a perfectly serious way. Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law. There are other States that had better look to their arsenals before the Hun is at their gates.”
