You may have noticed that the 100th anniversary of the so-called “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, has rolled around this month, with various offerings, notably my colleague Ron Grossman’s excellent recent story, which informed me, among many things, that the town’s main street “took on a carnival atmosphere. Rival trainers brought chimpanzees to town — including a celebrated simian named Joe Mendi, who wore a plaid suit and a fedora hat. Vendors hawked toy monkeys and Bibles. Shop windows had monkey-theme displays.”
Read that story and perhaps you too will be compelled to dive deeper into the past. The simplest way is to watch the 128-minute 1960 movie based on the events that took place, mostly in a sweltering courtroom, from July 10-21 in 1925.
I did that, and “Inherit the Wind” is a great movie. Adapted from a successful play written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee and based on real events, it is dominated by those towering actors Spencer Tracy and Fredric March. They portray, respectively, opposing attorneys Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, though they’re given the names Henry Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady.
See what I mean by “based on.” Still, Amazon touts the movie as the “thrilling recreation of the most titanic courtroom battles of the century,” hyperbolically ignoring a trial the year before, when Darrow took on the defense of killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in Chicago. (There’s a pretty good movie of that too, 1959’s “Compulsion”).
The trial, more formally called the Scopes trial, or the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, involved a high school teacher, John Scopes, who was accused of violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee state law banning the teaching of human evolution in public schools.
After watching “Inherit,” I did some further digging and feel fortunate to have learned some encouraging things about Scopes. For instance, “He did not capitalize at all on his celebrity,” said John Mark Hansen. “He had offers of tens of thousands of dollars to go on vaudeville stages and talk about the trial. Instead, he came to the University of Chicago to further his education, never seeking attention.”
Hansen is a longtime University of Chicago political science professor and Hyde Park resident. He is also a talented writer, and his “Evolution on Trial” story in the university’s magazine makes for enlightening and lively reading.
Among the other things I learned:
Darrow, the principal defense attorney, knew many University of Chicago scientists and professors, because for years, living in an apartment on 60th Street near Stony Island Avenue, “he hosted an informal biology club … directing discussions on biology, religion and evolution,” Hansen writes.
He recruited some of these folks to testify at the trial, and they stayed in “a big Victorian house on the edge of Dayton,” which is described as “ancient and empty … now crudely furnished with iron cots, spittoons, playing cards and the other camp equipment of scientists,” Hansen writes. “It was called the Mansion, Defense Mansion, and, inevitably, the Monkey House.”
Scopes decided to study geology at the University of Chicago. His tuition toward earning a doctorate was paid for by a grant and other donations. But when he applied for a third year to finish his studies, the president of another school that administered the fellowships refused to consider his application, saying, “As far as I am concerned, you can take your atheistic marbles and play elsewhere.”
And so he did, fading away into life as a working geologist, Hansen tells me, living in Texas and Louisiana. He did return to the University of Chicago campus for a conference in 1960. When asked about the 1925 trial, Hansen writes, “Scopes had little to add. ‘I hope that I don’t ever have to go through something like that again.’”
“Some of the issues of the trial still echo,” says Hansen. “Ever debated is the role of religion in public school classrooms, as is the question ‘Who controls what gets taught in school?’”
Bryan died only days after the Scopes trial and Darrow lived until 1938, the most famous lawyer in the world then, and arguably still. Reading Hansen’s fine story and watching “Inherit the Wind” put Darrow solidly in my mind and compelled me to go to see a small and pretty bridge in Jackson Park. It sits behind the Museum of Science and Industry, named in Darrow’s honor and dedicated in 1957 by relatively new mayor Richard J. Daley. Closed to pedestrians since 2013, it’s sadly in bad shape, recently having been listed as one of Preservation Chicago’s 7 Most Endangered Buildings for 2025, noting, “As necessary maintenance continues to be deferred, the bridge is increasingly vulnerable to further disrepair. If conditions worsen, demolition and removal are possible outcomes.”
I also found the time to read Darrow’s 20,000 some-word closing argument in the Leopold and Loeb sentencing, the words that saved those two men from execution.
Here are some of them: “You may hang these boys; you may hang them, by the neck until they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past. … I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.”
