The Monkey Trial Pages and pages of fascinating FACTS about the actual Scopes "Monkey Trial" PLUS A Closer Look at Hollywood's Inherit the Wind
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The Movie: Inherit the Wind	The Facts: Trial of John Scopes
The statements under this column are either contained in or strongly implied by the popular play and movie Inherit the Wind (1955 and 1960, respectively). Because of the influence of this play and movie (see over 35 video clips from the movie below), reading down just this left-hand column will strike most people as a fairly accurate (or at least familiar) synopsis of the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial.” But don't settle for “Hollywood history”!	The statements under this column contain information of a more factual nature relating to the actual trial of the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (1925). To purchase a best-selling, word-for-word copy of the actual trial transcript in electronic (downloadable and searchable) form, click here.  It's a very fun and educational read!! Included is the undelivered closing argument of William Jennings Bryan.
Once upon a time, the State of Tennessee passed a statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution.	In 1925 the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act which made it a misdemeanor to teach the evolution of only one species—mankind—in the public schools. The evolution of 99.9999% of all other plant and animal life (about two million other species), or the evolution of the earth or the solar system, could all be taught as either compelling theory or proven fact without violating the Butler Act. This fact bears repeating: The Tennessee legislature did not outlaw the teaching of evolution but for one drop in a very large bucket. To suggest, therefore, that entire fields of academic study such as astronomy, botany, anatomy, geology, biology, etc., were dealt a death blow in the Volunteer State is highly inaccurate. Yet this allegation was repeated constantly by the mainstream press in 1925 with Columbia University perhaps going the furthest in suggesting that it might begin to refuse to matriculate any high school students from the State of Tennessee because the Butler Act may now be rendering them unsuitable for further academic study. The statute was supported by a large majority of Tennessee parents exercising what they believed to be their responsibilities in the oversight of their children’s educations; the Butler Act did not touch upon the teaching of evolution outside of the tax-supported public schools.
The Tennessee statute gave an unfair advantage to fundamentalist Christianity over objective science (evolution) in the classroom.	The intent of the Butler Act was not to favor Christianity over evolution but to put the two prevailing theories on a level playing field of silence. The supporters of the Butler Act did not advocate teaching the Bible in the public schools (which they believed to be impermissible) and so they naturally felt powerless as a competing theory (Darwinian evolution) could be freely taught in opposition to the silenced story of creation contained in the book of Genesis.
Violation of the statute (the Butler Act) was punishable by fine and/or imprisonment.	The Butler Act provided only for a fine from $100 to $500 (same as bootlegging) and there was no provision in the Act for any jail time.
At the time that the anti-evolution statute was passed, the biology textbook used in the Tennessee public schools supported the theory of creation as taught in the Bible.	The biology textbook used in Tennessee in 1925 was Prof. George W. Hunter’s Civic Biology, the most popular biology text for secondary schools in the country. It was 100% pro-evolutionist and had been so for over two decades. There is no mention in the text of God, creation, Adam, Eve, the book of Genesis, or any other book or person in the Bible. Therefore, the idea that evolutionists in 1925 were valiantly trying to introduce evolution into the schools—and being censored in the process—is, again, false. Rather than the Christians attempting to deny evolutionists a “seat at the table” (so to speak), it would be far more accurate to say that the Butler Act would continue to permit evolutionists to thoroughly dominate the “table” while forbidding either evolutionists or creationists to occupy just one of the 2,000,000 seats (the seat belonging to the evolution of mankind, that is). The reason for this proposed truce of silence regarding mankind is discussed below and provides an insight into the curious title of Hunter's text—what does civics have to do with biology, you might wonder. Read on!
John Scopes (“Bertram Cates” in Inherit the Wind), a young and earnest high school biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee (“Hillsboro” in Inherit the Wind), was arrested by a grim clergyman and heavy-handed town fathers as he was teaching evolution in his classroom. He was the victim of a fundamentalist witch hunt. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	John Scopes, a high school football coach and mathematics teacher who only substituted for Dayton’s regular biology teacher, never taught evolution to anybody. As he confided to acclaimed newspaper reporter, William K. Hutchinson, “I didn’t violate the law. . . . I never taught that evolution lesson. Those kids they put on the stand couldn’t remember what I taught them three months ago. They were coached by the lawyers.” Although not actually guilty of the alleged crime, Scopes cooperated in a clever and friendly plan to test the constitutionality of the Butler Act. The ACLU in New York City had advertised in Tennessee newspapers for a willing teacher/defendant. This ad was then answered by Scopes at the encouragement of a few town fathers of Dayton on both sides of the evolution issue. Their reasoning was that such a case—if held in the local courthouse—would boost the economic prospects of their small and shrinking town. No clergymen (mean-spirited or otherwise) were involved in the instigation, planning, or hosting of the trial. Far from being arrested by hostile henchmen, Scopes was arrested by his friend, Sue Hicks, the City Attorney of Dayton (and the original “boy named Sue” of Johnny Cash fame). In his autobiography, Center of the Storm (1960), John Scopes always put quotation marks around the word “arrest” to highlight its voluntary character. The trial could not properly be called a witch hunt, one trial historian notes, because “the accused [Scopes] and his defenders—the ‘witches’—were actually the hunters, stalking the law with the intent of overturning it or at least making it unenforceable.” de Sprague, The Great Monkey Trial (1968), p. 490.
After his arrest, Scopes was put in jail where he was hit in the head by a bottle thrown through the window of his cell, burned in effigy, threatened with being lynched from a “sour apple tree,” and generally made to fear for his life. This fear was all the more regrettable because it was inspired by the very townspeople Scopes had grown up with all his life. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	In part because he was a quiet, likable person and in part, perhaps, because he was the coach of their winning high school football team, John Scopes was well-liked by the people of Dayton. Scopes was never jailed for a moment (he violated a misdemeanor statute, recall, not a felony), never faced the prospect of jail, and was welcome in Dayton both before, during, and after the trial. Further, there were no bottles, no burnings, no lynch threats, and no angry mobs. Quite to the contrary, the kindness and generosity of the people of Dayton toward Scopes was all the more commendable because he—far from being a lifelong resident—had only lived in Dayton for one year prior to the trial and therefore was a newcomer to town.
Alone and afraid, Scopes was unrepresented by counsel up to the day before his trial. He had written a newspaper in Baltimore for assistance but had, as yet, heard nothing. And besides, whomever would be sent by the paper to defend Scopes would have to defend him against the country’s most famous politician/attorney, the fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan (“Matthew Harrison Brady” in Inherit the Wind). Click here for a video clip from ITW.	From the very onset of the case which he himself helped instigate, John Scopes unquestionably enjoyed the best legal defense team ever assembled for a misdemeanor trial in the history of the United States and quite possibly the best ever assembled for any trial. In addition to Clarence Darrow (still regarded by many as the greatest criminal trial attorney in American history), Scopes enjoyed the expertise of Dudley Field Malone (who delivered a speech in Dayton that Bryan honestly believed was the finest speech on any subject that he had ever heard), and two other attorneys (one a law professor, one from the ACLU). The back-up team for Scopes included such names as Bainbridge Colby (preeminent NY attorney and former U.S. Secretary of State), John W. Davis (former US ambassador to Great Britain and Democratic nominee for president), and Charles Evans Hughes (former Republican nominee for president and former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court). In contrast, the Prosecution made do with local representation of no particular distinction and no national reputation whatsoever. Bryan, although a very famous politician, had not practiced law in 30 years and was invited into the case by the Prosecution primarily to deliver the closing argument at the end of the trial.
Bryan strenuously opposed the teaching of evolution in the public schools.	Bryan did not oppose the teaching of evolution in public schools. For a number of reasons noted below he did oppose teaching the evolution of mankind (one species) as scientific fact and especially in the manner in which evolutionary theory was practically being applied in his day. As Bryan wrote in the New York Times: The only part of evolution in which any considerable interest is felt is evolution applied to man.  A hypothesis in regard to the rocks and plant life does not affect the philosophy upon which one's life is built.  Evolution applied to fish, birds, and beasts would not materially affect man's view of his own responsibilities. . . . The evolution that is harmful . . . is the evolution that makes [man himself] a descendant of lower forms of life. (Feb. 26, 1922) Specifically—and this is very important to understanding both the Butler Act and the trial—Bryan opposed those applications of Darwinism to mankind that were rapidly gaining popularity and were contained in Prof. Hunter’s Civic Biology. These teachings included (1) that mankind can be described in terms of five “races” of differing evolutionary status with the Caucasian race being the most advanced, followed by the “yellow” race, etc.—p. 196, (2) that public houses for the poor and asylums for the sick or insane make no sense from an evolutionary perspective and should be at least reconsidered if not dramatically curtailed—p. 263, (3) that certain “parasitic” elements of the human population should not have children (“If such people were lower animals,” Hunter writes, “we would probably kill them off”) and, in some cases, such reproduction should be forcibly prevented (“Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe”)—p. 263, (4) that society’s business classes should be given generous economic latitude (known as “hands off” or “laissez faire” capitalism) to further advance the most successful members of the human species—p. 261ff, and (5) that the gap between the monkeys and the most evolved apes is akin to the gap between those apes and the lowest human “savages”—p. 195. The above teachings were favorably referred to as “eugenics”—a term invented by Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton—and generally pertain to the active management of the gene pool of the human species by the more evolved over the less evolved. This was scary stuff gaining momentum in the 1920s and, as noted below, no longer confined to discussions in Ivory Towers. Statutes permitting sterilizations by force, laws forbidding marriages between people of different races (miscegenation), immigration quotas favoring Northern Europeans (Caucasians), and economic policies benefiting the most successful capitalists, were all popular policies advanced by elitists (university professors, industrialists, Planned Parenthood, liberal ministers, etc.) who self-consciously and persuasively invoked the “scientific” principles of Darwinism. Despite vocal opposition primarily from people outside the academic and scientific communities such as Bryan and the popular evangelist Billy Sunday (both of whom regarded all men as created equal by God), eugenics enjoyed steadily increasing currency in the 1920s, especially among liberal academics. Nazi Germany eventually brought to horrific fruition many of Bryan’s worst fears and put a halt to public support for eugenics and its euphemistic “civic biology” (recall here the title of Hunter's biology textbook). The Soviet Union and, later, the Communist Chinese adopted the practices of eugenics with similar results. The majority of the scientists called by the Defense to testify on behalf of John Scopes in 1925, in fact, belonged to eugenic societies—organizations now regarded as no less (and perhaps more) reprehensible than the dreaded KKK. In addition to eugenics, Bryan opposed the teaching of evolution as fact because the theory was based more on philosophical presuppositions (a commitment to naturalism) than observed facts (like the fossil record). A good summary of his views are contained in his undelivered closing argument at the trial and an article published after his death in the Reader's Digest.
No intellectual or other person of decency and goodwill could reasonably oppose the teaching of evolution in the public schools.	As noted above, Bryan did not oppose the teaching of evolution in the public schools. As it related to applying evolutionary principles to mankind (which Bryan and the legislators of Tennessee did oppose), no intellectual or other person of decency and goodwill could reasonably oppose removing Hunter’s Civic Biology from the curriculum of today’s public schools. Judged with the benefit of hindsight, Bryan, it turns out, was absolutely right about the offensive and unscientific content of evolution as taught and applied to mankind in the textbooks of his day. For this one might imagine he would get some credit from historians but such credit due appears to have been overshadowed by Bryan's act of placing leading American evolutionists and their theories at the crime scene.
Christian fundamentalists like William Jennings Bryan all believed in a literal 6-day creation as described in Genesis 1-3.	The Fundamentals, a collection of 12 books published in from 1905 to 1915, sets forth the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith (such as the Virgin Birth, the Deity of Christ, etc.). The Fundamentals discuss the creation of the world but present several theories as orthodox, including the view that creation took place over millions of years and that the “days” of Genesis are actually epochs of time. (See Gen. 2:4 where the word “day” is used to mean an indefinite period of time.) Not all fundamentalists, therefore, held to a 6-day creation and Bryan himself, as it turns out, did not believe in a literal 6-day creation (!). (See more discussion of Bryan’s testimony during the trial regarding his view of creation and the age of the earth below.)
Unlike most intellectuals, the people of rural Tennessee were a bigoted bunch, stuck in their ways and intolerant of new ideas. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	Of course each person is entitled to his own views on such a proposition, but of considerable relevance to the Scopes trial, at least, we have the perspective of John Scopes himself as he relates in his autobiography, Center of the Storm: “I have often said that there is more intolerance in higher education than in all the mountains of Tennessee.” (p. 276).
Once in town, Bryan turned out to be a political hack and a blustering buffoon. He was a conservative (we can safely assume) who had captured the hearts of the rubes in rural Tennessee with little real substance but with lots of corny appeal. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	John Scopes himself, to cite again the Defendant as especially relevant to this trial, called Bryan “the greatest man produced in the United States since Thomas Jefferson.” Bryan was a three-time presidential candidate for the Democratic Party (including being the youngest nominee of any party in US history), a two-time congressman, a Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, a driving force behind four different constitutional amendments (income tax, woman’s suffrage, direct election of senators, and prohibition) as well as an influential proponent for the establishment of the federal department of health, education and welfare. Too left-leaning politically to be electable (so much for being a conservative!), Bryan was a great supporter of trust busting, labor unions, higher taxes, government schooling, federal regulations of every sort, and strict government control (if not ownership) of many key industries. He was also a principled pacifist and so he resigned from being Secretary of State when President Wilson determined (prematurely, thought Bryan) that the United States should no longer remain neutral in World War I. All these political positions made Bryan a favorite of the ACLU and, prior to the Scopes case, he was considered by that organization to be a model statesman of the “progressive” sort. Bryan is also still regarded as one of the greatest (if not the greatest) orators in American history. On the famous Chautauqua speaking circuit, he was second in popularity only to Helen Keller. Even up until his death at the age of 65, his outdoor Sunday School lectures were attended each week by over 5,000 people and he was the editor of a newspaper as well as the author of a popular syndicated column on Bible topics that appeared in over 100 papers each week. Although certainly no fan of Bryan (quite the opposite, in fact), trial historian L. Sprague de Camp had this to say about the Great Commoner in his book The Great Monkey Trial (1968): In personality he was forceful, energetic, and opinionated but genial, kindly, generous, likable and charming. . . . Although an intellectual absolutist—a black and white thinker—he showed a praiseworthy tolerance towards those who disagreed with him. (p. 36)
H.L. Mencken (“E.K. Hornbeck” in Inherit the Wind), an editorialist from the Baltimore Evening Sun (the “Baltimore Herald” in Inherit the Wind), was a liberal-minded intellectual—deeply cynical, but a brutally honest man. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	Editorialist H.L. Mencken is one of the most fascinating and entertaining characters connected with the Scopes trial. A small-government, anti-FDR, anti-public-school libertarian (not to be confused with the pro-government, pro-FDR, and pro-public-school liberals of today), he was also intensely anti-Christian and given to exaggeration and lies of the most ridiculous and often hilarious sort. This ridiculousness and hilarity, however, could be vicious and often was. Because of both his libertarian politics and antipathy to religion, Mencken genuinely hated the Christian populist Bryan. Consider how witheringly Mencken describes Bryan in one of Mencken's several reports from Dayton written after the trial: It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. Mencken's obituary of Bryan is even more scathing, but the popular reporter seems to have had his own moral shortcomings. He believed, for instance, that the Jews were “the most unpleasant race ever heard of,” and that their unpleasantness was, in large part, responsible for the mass resentment that put the Nazis in power (The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout (2002), p. 268). Commenting upon the Mencken character in Inherit the Wind, Prof. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School writes in his book America on Trial, “The real life Mencken was himself a rabid racist as well as an anti-religious bigot.”
Bryan had a poor understanding of evolution. He even had the annoying habit (whether out of sheer ignorance or on purpose is not clear) of pronouncing “evolution” as “evil-ution.”	Because he had taken the time to know both sides of the issues, Bryan had a very good understanding of evolution and publicly debated in the pages of the New York Times with such evolutionary experts as the president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn.  For many people, of course, Bryan's opposition to evolution is simply ipso facto proof that he was scientifically illiterate. Osborn, on the other hand, applied his considerable understanding of the theory in such a way as to fall for nearly every evolutionist hoax that came down the pike as well as reach the conclusion that Negros were of a different species than Caucasians. It may be impossible to gauge Bryan's understanding of evolution compared to other participants at the Scopes trial but it seems worth pointing out that several of the Defense attorneys and the only scientist to give verbal testimony at the trial, Prof. Maynard M. Metcalf, all mistake simple “change over time” (which is not disputed by creationists or anyone else) with “evolution” of the sort that can explain the emergence of new and increasingly complicated species from the first single cell by means of natural processes only. The attorneys and scientists alike even site the development of a fertilized egg into an adult animal as evidence of evolution (which it emphatically is not because, among other things, this development occurs within the life span of the very same animal at issue and, secondly, the fertilized egg already has 100% of the genetic information it needs to mature and thus no new developmental evolution is occurring merely by virtue of this maturation process). For enlightening quotations in this regard, see pp. 116 (Malone), 136 (Dr. Metcalf), 156 (Hays), and 189 (Darrow) of the trial transcript. Bryan, suspecting that it may be intentional, complained about this misuse of the word “evolution” in his undelivered closing argument to the jury. Dr. Metcalf’s single-sentence definition of evolution given from the stand (take a deep breath!) contains the egg-to-adult misdirection common among evolutionists at the trial: Evolution, I think, means change; in the final analysis I think it means the change of an organism from one character into a different character, and by character I mean its structure, or its behavior, or its function, or its method of development from the egg or anything else—the change of an organism from one set characteristic which characterizes it into a different condition, characterized by a different set of characteristics either structural or functional could be properly called, I think, evolution—to be the evolution of that organism; but the term in general means the whole series of such changes which have taken place during hundreds of millions of years which have produced from lowly beginnings the nature of which is not by any means fully understood to organisms of a much more complex character, whose structure and functions we are still studying, because we haven’t begun to learn what we need to know about them. (p. 139-140 of the trial transcript) H.L. Mencken—this time presumably not attempting to be humorous—called Dr. Metcalf’s testimony “one of the clearest, most succinct and withal most eloquent presentations of the case for the evolutionists that I have ever heard . . . . The doctor was never at a loss for a word, and his ideas flowed freely and smoothly.” Bryan knew that evolution was not the development of a fertilized egg into an adult. He knew that evolutionists could not account for the first living cell in contradiction of the law of biogenesis. He knew that the fossil record had yielded no convincing transitional forms and suspected that many hominid fossils were probably fraudulent (which turned out to be true). He also knew that the theory (rightly or wrongly) was being widely used to denigrate the veracity of the Bible and justify practices that later became synonymous with the worst evils of Nazi Germany. In sum, Bryan's understanding of evolution was not weak, it simply did not match the consensus views among leading evolutionists of his day.
Bryan was greeted upon his arrival with a big parade led by belligerent, hard-faced Christians singing what might be best described as “hate hymns.” Click here for a video clip from ITW. The last-minute arrival of Clarence Darrow (“Henry Drummond” in Inherit the Wind), the world-famous atheist and criminal defense attorney, was ignored. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	Bryan arrived to much fanfare at the Dayton train station—as did Darrow—but there was no parade for either. After their arrivals, both Bryan and Darrow were treated on separate nights to welcoming banquets at Dayton’s finest hotel where every effort was made to avoid any show of partiality between the visiting dignitaries. At these banquets, the townspeople and visiting press were treated to wonderful and winsome speeches by both Bryan and Darrow. For the organizers of the trial, these were heady days (but without the booze)! Far from acrimonious, the trial began with excitement, expectation, and mutual good will. Even the cynical and ever-irreverent Mencken had the following backhanded (and thoroughly racist) “compliments” to give in his first report from Dayton: The town, I confess, greatly surprised me. I expected to find a squalid Southern village with darkies snoozing on the horse blocks, pigs rooting under the houses, and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I found was a country town full of charm and even beauty . . . . Nor is there any evidence in the town of that poisonous spirit which usually shows itself when Christian men gather to defend the great doctrines of their faith. I have heard absolutely no whisper that Scopes is in the pay of the Jesuits, or that the whisky trust is backing him, or that he is egged on by the Jews who manufacture lascivious moving pictures. On the contrary, the Evolutionists and the Anti-Evolutionists seem to be on the best of terms, and it is hard in a group to distinguish one from another.
Notwithstanding his dull intellect and simplistic fundamentalism, Bryan was enormously popular in Tennessee and was the hometown's clear favorite in Dayton. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	While Bryan was very popular with common people, he was very unpopular with the most influential voices of his day: large city newspapers, academics, and the cultural/commercial elite—a powerful triumvirate! It would be only true in one (albeit important) sense, therefore, to say that Bryan was the “favorite” in Dayton. Also, as was mentioned above, Bryan and the Tennessee attorneys for the Prosecution were clear underdogs compared to the legal talents marshaled on behalf of Scopes. Finally, it may be worth mentioning that Bryan was a socialist-leaning, pacifist Democrat while Dayton was situated in a solidly Republican-voting county whose favorite son (Sergeant Alvin C. York) was a hero of the first World War.
Clarence Darrow’s goal in Dayton was to secure for all Tennesseans a measure of academic freedom; Bryan’s goal, in contrast, was to further insulate Christianity’s reigning hegemony.	Taking these assertions in reverse order, we have reason to question any claim of Christianity's “reigning hegemony.” It is commonly assumed—mistakenly—that the biology textbooks in Tennessee were solidly rooted in the Bible if not explicitly anti-evolutionist. Yet as has already been noted above, the truth is the opposite: the textbooks were thoroughly evolutionist and contained not a single word about creation or the Bible. Christians in Tennessee, therefore, were the ones fighting for some representation in the public schools, not evolutionists. So, it can be fairly asked, “How can Bryan be accused of trying to insulate Christianity from Darwinian influences when there was no Christianity in the textbooks to insulate and when the law did not outlaw evolution?” Taken at his word, the objectives of Bryan at the Scopes trial were “First, to establish the right of taxpayers to control what is taught in their schools. Second, to draw a line between the teaching of evolution as a fact and teaching it as a theory.” W.J. and M.B. Bryan in The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan (1925), p. 485. Also taken at his word, Darrow plainly stated, “We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States." (p. 299 of trial transcript) By “bigots and ignoramuses” Darrow meant, of course, Christians—the same people whom he had “spent a lifetime ridiculing.” (Larson, Summer for the Gods, p. 71). But these were the people whose children filled the schools, who are responsible as parents for their children's educations, and who paid the vast majority of the taxes to support the system. What of their right to the “free exercise of religion” also guaranteed to them by the First Amendment? It might be most accurate to say that if it were Darrow’s goal in Dayton to secure for all Tennesseans in posterity a measure of academic freedom, and Bryan’s goal to further insulate Christianity’s reigning hegemony, they both failed badly.
The religious community of Dayton was both fervent and of one accord (against evolution) and can be fairly represented as having a single spiritual leader. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	In 1925, only about half of the citizens of Dayton were church members of various (mostly Protestant) denominations. In a state most heavily populated by the more conservative Baptist denominations, two Methodist (more liberal) congregations were the largest in Dayton, though neither one had as many members as the (secular) Masons. Of the Christian churches, several were “modernist” and did not hold to a literal 6-day creation or the view that the miracles of the Bible (such as the Resurrection) actually occurred.
The people of Dayton were angry that Darrow was coming to their town and tried to keep him out altogether. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	The people of Dayton were generally delighted that Clarence Darrow volunteered to be a participant in the trial and treated him graciously. Recalling Dayton’s economic motivations for hosting the trial, one can easily imagine how Darrow was “good for business.” At the start of the trial, especially, Darrow's winsome ways and quick wit made him a favorite among a great many Daytonians. Darrow himself said in open court: [A]nd so far as the people of Tennessee are concerned . . . I don’t know as I was ever in a community in my life where my religious ideas differed as widely from the great mass as I have found them since I have been in Tennessee. Yet I came here a perfect stranger and I can say what I have said before, that I have not found upon anybody’s part—any citizen here in this town or outside—the slightest discourtesy. I have been treated better, kindlier and more hospitably than I fancied would have been the case in the North, and that is due largely to the ideas that southern people have and they are, perhaps, more hospitable than we are up North. (pp. 225-6 of the trial transcript)
Rather than being a disciplined and abstemious Christian (as he presumably preached), Bryan himself was a belching glutton. Darrow, on the other hand, was moderate and simple in his appetites. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	Bryan had a large appetite due, perhaps, to his being a diabetic. He was considered by observers of the trial, however, to be in good health and, at about 230 lbs. (judging from photographs taken at the trial), was certainly not obese.
Bryan was, for all practical purposes, the lead attorney for the Prosecution at the trial as well as a show-boater and a nonstop talker. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	Bryan was invited to participate as an assistant prosecutor, not the lead prosecutor for the State of Tennessee. Except for a stray comment or two, Bryan literally did not address the Court or the jury at all until late in the fifth day of an eight-day trial. He never impaneled a potential juror, never cross-examined a witness, never made a motion, and only introduced two documents into evidence: Hunter’s Civic Biology and Darwin’s Descent of Man. His final summation to the jury—his raison d’etre for appearing in Dayton—was never delivered due to a clever (if not devious) trial strategy by the Defense which denied both sides any closing arguments. In re-reading the original trial transcript, one strongly suspects Darrow’s de facto “closing argument” was, by design, delivered at the end of the second day of the trial, p.74 ff. In later writings he admitted that denying Bryan the opportunity to deliver his closing argument was an important part of the defense’s strategy. This strategy is also, of course, an implicit recognition by Darrow that—for whatever reasons, noble or otherwise, creative or cowardly—he did not prefer to go head-to-head with the Great Commoner in a battle of pure oratory on the legality and appropriateness of the Butler Act.
In a gesture politically motivated by the sleazy and groveling Mayor of Dayton, Bryan had been dubbed upon his arrival in Dayton an honorary “Colonel” of the Tennessee State Militia. This blatant show of favoritism was understandably objected to by Darrow in court. Darrow was then begrudgingly given the same title of “Colonel” (except that the word “temporary” was clumsily attached). Click here for a video clip from ITW.	The title “Colonel” was a courtesy title used for all attorneys in Tennessee just as the title “General” was a courtesy title used for all attorneys general. At the Scopes trial, therefore, the title of “Colonel” is used over 100 times. The first six times occur when the Judge addresses Darrow as “Colonel” (not Bryan), and the next five times occur when one of Bryan’s fellow assistant prosecutors also refers to Darrow by the same title. All the attorneys in the trial on both sides were referred to by these courtesy titles as appropriate. Bryan was not referred to as “Col. Bryan” by anybody for any purpose until the fifth day of the trial when he was first referred to in this manner by Col. Malone of the Defense who, in the same sentence, called Bryan a “great leader.” But it gets even better: Ironically, Bryan actually was a Colonel in the Spanish American war and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery for this reason! None of the attorneys for the Defense ever served in the military in any capacity.
At the end of the first day in court, the Judge read an announcement from the bench advertising a prayer meeting to be lead by Dayton’s anti-evolutionist minister, the fundamentalist Rev. Jeremiah Brown. This announcement, understandably, was hotly objected to by Darrow for its “commercial” content. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	There was no Reverend Jeremiah Brown in Dayton and no prayer meeting announced from the bench. What actually was objected to by Darrow at the trial was not the announcement of a prayer meeting led by a fundamentalist minister outside of court, but a prayer offered by the Court itself in opening each day’s session much like the Supreme Court and Congress open each day’s session with prayer today. Darrow in his own defense noted that, by the Court's own admission, this practice had not been consistently applied in the Judge’s courtroom in the past and that, under the circumstances of the present case, it was prejudicial to his client. The Prosecution, in response, noted that since the Defense had been alleging that evolution was perfectly consistent with both the Bible and the religious beliefs of many faithful Christians, why should they now display an antagonism toward prayer? The Judge finally explained that he had opened court in prayer on numerous instances in the past whenever a minister was available. In deference to concerns raised by the Defense, however, he did turn the selection of ministers for the opening prayer over to the local Pastor’s Association. This suggestion was met with some amusement as it was assumed that the Association was thoroughly fundamentalist and would select ministers accordingly. The next day and thereafter, however, names presented for giving the opening prayer included a Rabbi as well as prominent modernist (non-fundamentalist) ministers. The ACLU in New York was apparently unaware that Darrow would raise a formal objection to opening prayers in the Tennessee courtroom. The backlash against them and Darrow was considerable and the bold request was publicly and privately (including by the ACLU itself) denounced as ill-advised and inflammatory. (It is worth keeping in mind as it relates to prayer that in its early days the ACLU was largely supported by Quaker and other Christian denominations of pacifist and liberal traditions.) Later in the trial, the proceedings were moved outside on the Courthouse lawn.  There the Defense objected to a large sign posted on the Courthouse wall that read, “Read Your Bible!” Again the Prosecution asked what the problem was since the Defense was alleging that evolution is consistent with the bible.  It was Bryan, however, who concluded that “if leaving that [sign] up there during the trial makes our brother to offend, I would take it down during the trial.” (p. 282 of the of the trial transcript) The Judge agreed with Bryan and the sign was removed.
At a dark and menacing prayer meeting led by Jeremiah Brown, the Reverend called upon God to strike down Scopes for his belief in evolution and prayed that his soul be consigned to hell. When the minister’s own daughter tearfully objected to such a harsh condemnation of her fiancé (Scopes), he (the minister) fanatically invoked the same wrath of God upon his daughter “though she be blood of my blood and flesh of my flesh.” Click here for a video clip from ITW.	There was no such minister in Dayton, no such prayer meeting, and no such fiancée of Scopes. There is also no Christian doctrine which equates a belief in evolution with sin.  As noted earlier, even the famous series of books that gave rise to the very term “fundamentalist” accommodates theistic evolution and long “days” of creation (lasting millions of years) as orthodox positions for bible-believing Christians.
Bryan was disingenuous about his faith in God and the Bible. He privately believed that the common people simply needed “something to believe in” and that, even if not exactly true, Christianity fills that purpose. Darrow, in contrast, thought that the truth, however discomforting, was better than an opiate lie. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	Bryan believed in God and the Bible and it has never been suggested (outside of Inherit the Wind) that this belief was an accommodation to people to whom Bryan was merely patronizing.
Mencken commented to Scopes during the trial that Bryan is the only man he knows who can “strut sitting down.” Click here for a video clip from ITW.	The description of a man being able to “strut sitting down” was made by a newspaperman about Bainbridge Colby, a prominent New York attorney who was being considered by the ACLU to represent Scopes in Dayton. The description struck Scopes as funny and he noted it about Colby in this autobiography, Center of the Storm (p. 70). The remark was never made of Bryan who was known as a decent and agreeable man, even by his enemies.
Bryan called Scopes’s fiancée, Rachel, as a surprise witness to the stand. She was horrified for, in a moment of great vulnerability the evening before, she had confided in Bryan about personal details relating to Scopes’s views on Christianity. Bryan betrayed this trust, badgered her to tears on the stand, and ultimately humiliated both her and Scopes by shamelessly twisting their words, all at the risk of sabotaging their intended marriage. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	Scopes had no fiancée or even girlfriend in Dayton. Bryan never elicited any testimony from anyone at the trial since he conducted no direct examinations or cross-examinations. The only surprise witness in the case was called by the Defense (who called Bryan to the stand), not the Prosecution.
When it came time for the Defense to call its first witness—an eminent scientist—the Prosecution objected, vehemently opposing any expert testimony on the subject of evolution. But, as Darrow countered, how could the jury fairly convict Scopes for teaching “evolution” if they had no real understanding of the term? Bryan clearly feared a confrontation with any viewpoint different from his own. Click here for a video clip from ITW.	The testimony of one scientist (Dr. Maynard M. Metcalf) was taken for nearly two hours on the fourth day of the trial. On the following day, a Motion was made by the Prosecution to deny further scientific testimony as irrelevant. Thereafter commenced a series of crucial speeches arguing in favor of more scientific testimony (by the Defense) and, in opposition, that scientific testimony was irrelevant to the simple factual question of whether or not Scopes had taught evolution to his students. The likely outcome of the trial depended on the resolution of this dispute. In his written opinion, the Judge ruled against the admission of scientific testimony as irrelevant to the basic charge that would go before the jury. This ruling, while damaging to the prospects of the trial as a source of entertainment and even scientific instruction, was nevertheless considered to be legally sound and was supported not only on appeal but by such pro-Defense editorial voices as the New York Times and the Chattanooga Times. If human evolution were a valid subject for Tennessee schoolchildren, the place to make that argument was in the State Legislature, not in a trial where the only issue at hand was whether or not the statute (however sensible or ill-advised) was violated by the defendant as charged. Interestingly, upon hearing the Judge’s ruling, Arthur Hays, an attorney for the Defense, then advanced the proposition that their scientists be permitted to verbally testify on the stand without the jury present for the purposes of (a) assisting the appellate court in its review of the Judge’s decision to exclude scientific testimony and/or (b) possibly persuading the Judge that, because evolution is so obviously true (it would be argued), he had earlier made an error in declaring that the statute was a proper exercise of Tennessee’s legislative powers. Hays’s proposal had its obvious merits (the show could go on, for one!) but it was Darrow who then refused to allow the scientists to testify.