Appeared in Spring/Summer 2025 Gazette
by Duff Peterson

John Scopes, 1925.

July 2025 will mark the 100th anniversary of a bizarre event in American history, the trial in Tennessee of a 24-year-old teacher named John T. Scopes. Scopes’ crime was teaching evolution in a public school. The trial became a showdown between two legal heavyweights, William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense, ensuring massive publicity. Initially dismissed as a stunt, the trial raised issues of national importance, and its significance is still debated today.

Scopes grew up in Paducah, Kentucky. In 1924, he took a teaching job in Dayton, Tennessee, between Knoxville and Chattanooga. He was mostly a football coach but also substitute-taught science. Tennessee’s legislature passed an act making it unlawful to teach “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Other states followed. The ACLU decided to challenge the Tennessee law, advertising for a teacher willing to participate. Scopes volunteered.

Scopes had an older sister who was also a teacher, Lela Scopes. At about the time of John’s trial, Lela returned to Paducah to resume teaching after taking classes at the state university in Lexington. The Paducah schools required as a condition of her re-employment that she denounce her brother. She refused and was fired. Winnetka offered her a job, and she would teach math at Skokie School for almost 30 years.

William Jennings Bryan has the distinction of being the only candidate in modern times to lose three presidential elections on a major-party ticket. A Nebraskan, he rose rapidly in the Democratic party, becoming the champion of farmers and small-town Americans, denouncing intellectuals, immigration and the gold standard, a firm believer in the literal truth of the Bible. As a young Congressman, he won the party’s nomination in 1896 after a barnburner speech at its convention in Chicago, in which he shouted: “You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold!” His advocacy for ordinary Americans earned him a nickname, the Commoner.

Twenty-five years later, after a stint as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Bryan’s influence had declined. He devoted himself mostly to Prohibition, segregation, anti-evolution and proclaiming his fundamentalist Christian faith, speaking at tent meetings around the country. He was careful not to criticize the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, since many of its members supported him. But his followers were slowly disappearing; by 1920, urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans for the first time, and many considered Bryan the relic of a bygone era. He moved to Florida, invested in real estate and became a pitchman for the new planned community of Coral Gables. By the time of the Scopes trial, the Commoner was a millionaire living in a Florida mansion.

Clarence Darrow, undated.

Clarence Darrow never finished law school. Born in rural Ohio, he came to Chicago in 1887 at 29. Chicago was the world’s fastest-growing city, “loud, lawless, unlovely…an overgrown gawk of a village.” Immigrants from central and eastern Europe were pouring in, finding work in factories, slaughterhouses and railyards, many embracing radical politics. Darrow defended anarchists and Socialists, becoming a protégé of lawyer John Peter Altgeld, later governor of Illinois. He cultivated progressives in Altgeld’s circle, including Jane Addams of Hull House and Henry Demarest Lloyd of Winnetka, who called Darrow “one of our best young lawyers…a zealous friend of the working man.” Darrow was a regular guest at the Lloyds’ salon for radicals at Wayside on Sheridan Road.

Darrow unsuccessfully defended the deranged office-seeker who assassinated Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison in his home during the World’s Columbian Exposition. Later he defended Leopold and Loeb, two teenagers from wealthy Chicago families who bludgeoned a 14-year-old boy to death, stuffed his body into a culvert, and congratulated themselves on their perfect crime. But Leopold had dropped his glasses near the culvert, and the police soon caught up with them. Darrow got them life plus 99 years, saving them from the hangman. His defense of the two thrill-killers sealed his reputation as an advocate for America’s worst misfits and undesirables.

The Scopes trial took place in a circus atmosphere, thousands of people flocking to Dayton despite suffocating heat. Locals selling lemonade and fried chicken lined the streets, trained chimpanzees entertained the crowds, and huge banners went up exhorting citizens to “Read Your Bible.” Chicago’s WGN radio carried the trial live. Over 100 reporters and photographers jockeyed for position, including the nationally syndicated columnist H.L. Mencken, who called it the “Monkey Trial.” Mencken’s acerbic reports from Dayton would become classics of American journalism.

Since Scopes had admitted to teaching evolution, the prosecution’s job was easy. Darrow, by contrast, hoped both to invalidate the Tennessee law and to document the scientific consensus behind evolution. He lined up eight eminent scientists to appear, but the judge excluded their testimony. He obtained written statements from prominent theologians stating that evolution could be reconciled with the Bible, but the judge excluded those, too. His case collapsing, Darrow took the unusual step of asking Bryan to testify as an expert on the Bible, to which Bryan readily agreed.

William Jennings Bryan (left) interrogated by Darrow during tria July 20, 1925.

It was a colossal mistake. Under Darrow’s questioning, Bryan fell apart. Although he asserted the literal truth of Genesis, he admitted he wasn’t sure whether the world was really created in six days and couldn’t explain how ancient civilizations might have survived Noah’s flood. Watching Bryan tie himself in knots on the stand, the judge disallowed his testimony, but the damage was done. Darrow quickly entered a guilty plea, Scopes was fined $100 after the jury deliberated for just nine minutes, and the trial ended. The plea meant that Bryan was deprived of the grand closing argument he’d been working on for months.

The judge then asked John Scopes, who had remained silent throughout the trial, whether he had anything to say. Scopes quietly replied, “I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom – that is, to teach the truth, as guaranteed in our Constitution.”

The stress of the trial took a toll on Bryan’s already declining health, and five days later, he suffered a stroke and died. Mencken penned a scathing obituary, calling Bryan “a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity…full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning.” John Scopes quit teaching and became a petroleum geologist, moving to Houston and later working in Venezuela. When he died in 1970, his sister Lela had the words “A Man of Courage” engraved on his tombstone.

Lela Scopes’ arrival in Winnetka coincided with the sweeping changes to the mathematics curriculum that Superintendent Carleton Washburne introduced in the 1920s. Washburne understood that math was one of the keys to the modern world, believing that every child should go as far in the subject as possible. He published multiple academic papers on what he called the “individual technique” in math education, speaking at congresses around the world. He introduced new teaching materials that included self-paced workbooks, speed tests, word problems and practice tests. Kids advanced at their own pace, some going beyond grade level and others receiving extra help. Students were expected to check their work, freeing teachers from spending hours correcting exercise papers. Lela Scopes became a prolific author of Winnetka’s math workbooks and problem sets. She was a popular teacher, students remembering her as “a very kind person” and “every ounce the Southern lady.” She retired to Paducah in 1956 but often came back. Along with many other retired Winnetka teachers, she attended the dedication of Washburne Junior High in 1969.

For a while, commentators tended to view the Scopes trial as just another Roaring Twenties publicity stunt. But as later historians considered its meaning, they increasingly saw an important event, a victory of ideas over closed-mindedness, of the modern America over the old. When a fictionalized version of the trial, Inherit the Wind, came out in 1955, people immediately understood it as an indictment of McCarthy-era groupthink. The play became required reading for many young Winnetkans. A hundred years on, the battle over what children should learn in school still rages, and the defense of John Scopes now looks like a courageous stand against mob rule.

By standing up for her brother in 1925, Lela Scopes also stood up for learning, for science and for academic freedom. Darrow is credited with a triumph in Dayton, but the real heroes of the Scopes trial were two unassuming young people from Paducah, John and Lela Scopes. ■