Scopes at 100

He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind;
And the foolish shall be servant to the wise of heart.
—Proverbs 11:29

One hundred years ago, on July 21, 1925, high school teacher John Thomas Scopes was found guilty of violating Tennessee’s controversial Butler Act. The act, which was named after State Representative John Washington Butler, prohibited the teaching of human evolution in public schools in Tennessee.

The trial sent shock waves across the nation, even though Scopes’ conviction was overturned on a technicality.

What exactly had Scopes done to incur the wrath of the people of his town? He taught his classroom full of young children Darwin’s theory of evolution, which taught that humans had evolved gradually from single-cell organisms, rather than being created in a single day by God.

The clash between Fundamentalists and Modernists

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, theological modernism arose, with its adherents touting the validity of scientific advancements. Christian fundamentalism grew in response, emphasizing a literal (or literalist) interpretation of Scripture and a belief in core doctrines, including the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth of Jesus, and the reality of miracles.

The Scopes trial was intended to address this controversy. It was deliberately staged to pit modernists, who believed that evolution could be consistent with religion, against the fundamentalists who argued that the word of God, as presented in the Bible, took precedence over human understanding of science.

In 1925, prominent attorney William Jennings Bryan wrote a letter to Tennessee’s governor, thanking him for signing the state’s anti-evolution law. “The Christian parents of the state,” Bryan wrote, “…owe you debt of gratitude for saving their children from the poisonous influence of an unproven hypothesis.”

In response, the American Civil Liberties Union stepped up, offering to defend anyone who violated the Butler Act.

Teacher John Scopes was not sure whether he had ever openly taught his students about evolution, but he was a willing partner in the case against Butler. Scopes deliberately incriminated himself, becoming a willing defendant in the case. His trial was the first to be broadcast live on national radio.

Retelling the story

The Scopes Monkey Trial, as it was called, continued to draw interest throughout America. In 1955, playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee penned a stage play, titled Inherit the Wind, to tell the story. The title was drawn from the Book of Proverbs, which says that those who cause a problem within their own families would “inherit the wind”–presumably, instead of a more substantial inheritance.

An important note: the play used the trial as a way of discussing the importance of freedom of thought and expression. The playwright Lawrence apparently said, “We used the teaching of evolution as a parable, a metaphor for any kind of mind control … It’s not about science versus religion. It’s about the right to think.”

Following the success of Lawrence and Lee’s stage play, two movies were produced to present the story on the silver screen. A 1960 version of Inherit the Wind starred Dick York as Bertram Cates (the fictional version of teacher John Scopes), and Spencer Tracy as Harry Drummond (who was based on real-life attorney Clarence Darrow). Frederic March played attorney Matthew Harrison Brady (based on counsel for the prosecution William Jennings Bryan), and Gene Kelly played E.K. Hornbeck, a reporter for the fictional Baltimore Sun.

Almost forty years later, in 1999, Inherit the Wind was again released, this time as a made-for-TV drama. For that television release, the role of Bertram Cates was played by Tom Everett Scott; Henry Drummond was played by Jack Lemmon; George C. Scott was Matthew Harrison Brady; and Beau Bridges was the reporter E.K. Hornbeck.

Both the 1960 and 1999 versions of Inherit the Wind are available for viewing on Amazon Prime. One more version, a 1988 television movie, is no longer available for viewing.

The cinematic evolution of some details

Both the 1960 and the 1999 movies were based on the Scopes trial, which dominated the headlines in the 1920s. But while the story was essentially fact-based, the films changed the names of the prominent characters.

Also changed were some of the details, sometimes to simplify the story. The actual Scopes trial occurred in Dayton, Tennessee, but the stage version and later movie versions took place in the fictional town of Hillsboro, located in the American South (although no specific state is named).

And William Jennings Bryan, the conservative Presbyterian attorney representing John Scopes, actually died five days after the trial ended. But in the film version, he (or rather, his stand-in Matthew Harrison Brady) died in the courtroom after the sentence was read.

The playwrights included an explanatory note at the front of their theater program, explaining that Inherit the Wind was not intended to be a historical account.

A hundred years later

While many Christian denominations accepted the scientific theory of evolution, as explained in Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of the Species, Butler and other fundamentalists objected, believing that the Bible was inerrant. For Butler, the literal creation narrative in the Book of Genesis, claiming that God created the universe in just six days, was the only acceptable view of man’s origin.

It was Scopes’ presentation of the theory of evolution that landed him in the courtroom in 1925 and brought the story to stage and screen years later.

Both film versions of the Scopes trial artfully revealed the passions that existed on both sides of the issue. It is an argument that still exists and resonates in many corners of our society. The late Peter Berger, a few years ago, summarized it by stating he thought that what the event “did was to fortify a secularist worldview in the American intelligentsia, with a concomitant perception of Evangelicals as backwoods illiterates. The intellectual decline of Evangelicals has stopped. The secularist bias of intellectuals has not.”

A century later, the Scopes trial marks a line that has continued to grow, even as the debates about creation, evolution, Christianity, and science seem to devolve in the public square.