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The readers of the daily newspapers in the U.S., if there are any left, will be aware that in this Year of Our Lord 2025 we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial held in the sweltering heat of Dayton Tennessee in 1925 and featuring three giants of the public platform: the two biggest legal names in the nation, on the one hand the three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and on the other the notorious “Defense Attorney of the Damned” Clarence Darrow. The third was H. L. Mencken, the widely read journalist, writer, satirist, and cultural critic who commented acerbically on the social scene. It was Mencken who dubbed the Scopes circus the "Monkey Trial," while continuing to contribute his satires to the Baltimore Sun, which was also paying part of the costs of the defense. Not intent on making friends in Tennessee, he referred to the guileless farmers as "gaping primates" and "the anthropoid rabble." With this triumvirate present, we remember
Clarence Darrow about 1925
this event today as the first time in American history when a trial became a mass-media event as well as a circus, drawing crowds of media reps and onlookers from a multi-state era.
H. L. Mencken about 1920
Darrow and Mencken were heroes of my adolescence and early twenties, while by that time Jennings Bryan just the bum whom Darrow had defeated and Mencken mocked. Any lingering fame attached to Bryan’s name today probably comes from his Cross of Gold speech delivered at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on July 9, 1896. In his address, Bryan supported "free silver" (i.e. bimetallism), which he believed would bring the nation prosperity. He decried the gold standard, concluding the speech with the famous and eloquent words, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
William Jennings Bryan, 1925
No, I am attributing to much importance to the Cross of Gold Speech. Bryan has acquired a new avatar in the present as a forerunner of creationism, a fact which would surprise him as much as it does me. Except that I learned long ago that while every society has its own form of insanity, the characteristic form of mania in the U.S. is religious insanity. I learned this indelibly in print (as opposed to childhood experience) from a Church of England minister named Henry Caswell who visited the U.S. in the 1830s, and desiring to meet the prominent religious figures of his host country got himself introduced to the Mormon prophet Joe Smith. In the book recounting his experience, America and the American Church, Caswall writes: “Religious mania is the prevailing form of insanity in the United States” (325).
It is also Brian whose bible-haunted brain provides the title of the play. In the play, Rev. Brown rallies the townspeople, calling down God's vengeance, and when his daughter Rachel, who is engaged to the evolutionist Cates, protests, he condemns her. Admonishing the young woman, Brady (Bryan) quotes Proverbs 11:29: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind," sending the crowd home.
By the early 1960s, the time of which I write, the Snopes trial had returned to the public mind because of a fine film called Inherit the Wind (1960) directed by Stanley Kramer and starring the memorable Spencer Tracy as Darrow. Tracy’s powerful hunched and pugnacious figure captured Darrow for all time in the public mind, or so it seems to me. Perhaps I retain that impression because of Larry Allen, my high school classmate who had a similar physique plus genuine thespian talent. Being the son of a local minister, Larry also inherited the platform oratory exemplified by Jennings Bryan, whose silver tongue was smelted from the same ore. (Larry could mock Bryan too perfection. Unsurprisingly, given the reversals between the Sturm und Drang of adolescence and the calm of adulthood, he is now the minister of a large church in Oklahoma.)
In this way the stage was set (literally!) for the Chandler High School graduating class of 1963 to present a one-act version of Inherit the Wind as their senior play. The Ministerial Council (whoever those august men may have been) got wind of what was going on, however, and persuaded the Superintendent of the Chandler School System to stop the play. I don’t know how the deal was wrangled, but wrangled it was, witness the following article, which appeared in the Chandler newspaper for February 15th, 1963:
Neither do I know who wrote the one-act play version of Inherit the Wind that caused all the ruckus in Chandler, though it could well have Jerome Lawrence and his co-author Robert Lee, who should have had the copyright to the 1960 film script. The publication of the one-act version would have required their permission. By the mid-1950s, however, the original playwrights had come to think that the play could best be understood as an attack on McCarthyism--the antics of the right wing Senator Joseph McCarthy who was blackmailing legislators across the country by smearing them with accusations of being communist. In the shadow of this extortion of public figures, historians writing of the fifties inevitably placed the Scopes trial alongside the Red Scare, even though fundamentalists did not initiate or disproportionately participate in that earlier assault against alleged domestic Communists.
Such fascination with the Scopes trial as a foreshadowing of McCarthyism inspired Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's play, Inherit the Wind (1955)."In the 1950s, Lee and his partner became very concerned with the spread of McCarthyism," a student who interviewed him reported. "Lawrence and Lee felt that McCarthyism paralleled some aspects of the Scopes trial. Lee stated, “I was very concerned when laws were passed, when legislation limits our freedom to speak; silence is a dangerous thing.'" Tony Randall, who starred in the original Broadway cast, later wrote, "Like The Crucible, Inherit the Wind was a response to and a product of McCarthyism. In each play, the authors looked to American history for a parallel."
However scholars and playwrights may have regarded the play, the primary impetus for me to write the present essay--the story of how the monkey trial played itself out in Chandler Oklahoma in 1963--was personal. The original verse from which the play’s title is taken states the matter with stark clarity: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind” (Proverbs 11:29). In my family, I was the one who troubled my own house. The wind in question is not the fruitful wind of romantic poetry. It is the pitiless sand-bearing wind of ancient Israel, evoked again by the prophet Hosea, “and they shall reap the whirlwind” (Hosea 8:7). In short, it’s a word for desolation. I was fortunate, however, and escaped the most dire of the prophecies, including those that proceeded from the mouth of my mother, herself a practiced hand at quoting scripture as a way of establishing the authority of her pronouncements.
My mother and I had disagreed over religious questions for some time. As Whitman said of Emerson, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.” It was the advent of Inherit the Wind to Chandler that brought yours truly to a boil. That was when my mother and I came to our first full-blown quarrel over religion. I at last openly rebelled against the teachings of her church, and those of course were also her teachings. For my public rebellion I found a public occasion--our senior class play, a tradition in our high school. Our class --a bright group, we'd always been told, and we believed it--wanted to do Inherit the Wind, a replay of the old Scopes monkey trial, but the Ministerial Council got word of it and opposed it. Mama and I fought it out on the same grounds Darrow and Bryan had fought over, knowledge (science) versus faith, and to equally little avail except to define our antagonism and intransigence. I played the part of the skeptic reporter H. L. Mencken and she took the part of the Bible beating Jennings Bryan, while Larry Allen a preacher’s son played Darrow.
To play the part of Mecken, I had to practice sneering. This I did every day, standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom and learning to turn down the corners of my mouth. I got good at it. The sneer came to me much more easily than the smile, which I had never learned for the good and simple reason that at home I had no example to follow. My mother told me I should smile, that I’d be more attractive if I did, but effective teaching comes from example, and at home my mother provided none. She was about as smiling as the left-hand wing of Judgment.
As a consequence of the family turmoil, one of the clamps that locked the iron lid of depression over my life for the next 12-15 years was my realization that my parents could be of no use to me, and that such life as I would ever have, if I wanted to avoid their condemnation, would have to be apart from them. Basically, I accepted damnation, or at least the risk of damnation, as the price I had to pay to explore life on my own terms. It was Pascal's wager in reverse. I wagered my mother was wrong, because to have wagered otherwise would have been to run the risk of a secular damnation: a life as narrow and joyless as hers. A scary gamble for a sixteen-year-old.
At that age, I either had not read Huckleberry Finn or had read it as a kid’s book. Huck finds his ultimatum and moment of decision two years earlier than I, since the novel makes him out to be fourteen. If you recall, Huck is escaping south down the Mississippi River on a raft with his friend the black slave Jim when as they are approaching Cairo (the southern tip of the last free state) it occurs to Huck that he is stealing Jim. Huck believes Jim is the property of Miss Watson and consequently finds himself in a very hot place, for he realizes that he is imperiling his immortal soul with the sin of theft. This struggle with his “diseased conscience” (as literary critics across the decades have come to call it) is the center of Huck’s human development in the novel. He tries to pray but finds that he cannot pray a lie, for Jim is his friend. So in a dramatic triumph, Huck decides, “Alright, I’ll go to hell” and he continues to travel south with Jim, aiding his escape.
The arguments between my pious mother and my sinful self brought me a last to Huck’s state of mind. If opposing her was the only way I could purchase the freedom to think for myself and to choose my own way of life, I would go to hell. Like Huck, I found this a painful choice, butI had no other. "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind," says Proverbs. That was myself, but I was too young to care.
Meanwhile, by hook and by crook, the show went on. High school students are like horses: you can lead them to the water but you can’t make them drink. Within the relatively unpublicized precincts of the drama section of our Speech and Debate Group, we took the one-act version of Inherit the Wind on the road--the road being the sequence of speech tournaments held by Oklahoma’s state colleges, typically named for their geographical locations: Northwestern, Northeastern, Southwestern, Southeastern, and points in between. These events, especially when we won prizes, were duly reported in the Chandler newspaper, so they were not secret. I can only suppose that the Powers That Be benefitted from the compartmentalization that is part of all bureaucracy including the upper levels of the public school system. As long as the play was not being offered as the school-sponsored senior play, they were willing to ignore it. Evidently, even in benighted Oklahoma and even in what the poet Robert Lowell called “the tranquilized fifties” (which last until JFK’s assassination in 1963) some ideal of academic freedom operated. We hadn’t yet entered the Brave New World of right-wing control (followed by its abandonment) of the public school system. Parents still sent their children to public (not private) schools.
The modern Scopes legend emerged during a thirty-year period bracketed by the appearance of two enormously popular creative works. The process began in 1931,
when Harper's magazine editor Frederick Lewis Allen published his surprise best-seller, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties, and culminated in 1960 with the release of Inherit the Wind, a popular motion picture based on a long-running Broadway play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Far more than anything that actually happened in Dayton, these two works shaped how later generations would come to think of the Scopes trial.
Playwright Jerome Lawrence explained in a 1996 interview that the drama's purpose was to criticize the then-current reign of McCarthyism. The play was also intended to defend intellectual freedom. According to Lawrence, "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." Stephen J. Gould, the contemporary historian of science, expresses concern about the error which may have lulled evolutionists into a false sense of security. He noted in 1983, "sadly, any hope that the issues of the Scopes trial had been banished to the realm of nostalgic Americana have been swept aside by our current creationist resurgence."
We are not finished with the drama at Dayton, however, until we note its dramatic finale. Of the three giants at the trial, Bryan was clearly the weakest. By the end of his encounter with Darrow over the Bible, he was no more than a punching bag. It was almost fitting that he should die five days after their encounter. The cause of his sudden and unexpected death was simple enough--mortification. Darrow shamed Bryan in public, and Bryan was human enough to feel it. If Bryan had a soft place in his heart, Mencken did not. He is reported to have remarked, “Well, we killed the son of a bitch.”And: “God aimed at Darrow, missed, and hit Bryan instead.”
Sources
Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties. 1939; New York: Harper and Row, 2021.
Caswell, Henry. America and the American Church. London: J. G. & F. Rivington, St. Paul’s Church Yard, 1839/1851. Reprinted Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, n.d.
Farrell, John A. Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned. New York: Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.
Gould, Stephen Jay. Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes. New York: Norton, 1983.
Larson, Edward J. Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History.
Pounds, Wayne. The Ghost Roads of Fallis Oklahoma and Other Trails. Monee, IL: Kindle Books, 2003.
Digital
Caswell, Henry. References to Caswell at https://catalogimages.wiley.com/images/db/pdf/9780470656341.excerpt.pdf. Accessed April 2025.
“Inherit the Wind.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherit_the_Wind_(play). Accessed April 2025.
Linder, Douglas O. “H. L. Mencken.” https://www.famous-trials.com/scopesmonkey/2094-mencken. Accessed April 2025.
“Scopes Trial”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial. Accessed April 2025.
