Road Apples
June 9, 2008

Monkey business in Dayton

By Tim Sanders

A few weeks ago my wife and I visited our friends, Joe and Maxine Jones, in Dayton, Tennessee. While there we toured the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, where the famous Scopes Monkey Trial was conducted.

In March of 1925, the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act, which forbade the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public classrooms. Due to a serious lack of tourism and a really poor economy in Rhea County, some enterprising Dayton city fathers did what all small town big wigs do when things are not going well–they planned a comprehensive, large-scale publicity stunt. Since the ACLU had already agreed to defend any teacher who defied the Butler Act, these local merchants and businessmen persuaded John T. Scopes, a high school football coach and part-time science teacher with nothing better to do, to admit to having taught Darwin’s theory in his Dayton classroom. Scopes would later say that he didn’t actually remember ever having taught evolution per se, but hey, the town needed a little economic boost, and if all he had to do was get himself indicted, he felt it was his civic duty to do so. So the ACLU persuaded several defense lawyers, including the renowned Clarence Darrow, to defend Scopes, and the state brought in famous orator and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan to help with the prosecution.

This inevitably leads to my third paragraph, where I explain how Darrow affirmed his unwavering faith in Darwin’s theory, which held that, given enough time, pond scum would morph into monkeys and eventually those monkeys would, through no fault of their own, become congresspersons. Darrow said he knew it was true due to the vast herds of congresspersons roaming the fruited plain at that time, coupled with the incontestable fact that merely two hundred short years ago there hadn’t been a single, solitary example of the congressional species running loose anywhere on the North American continent. Bryan, of course, having been a congressperson himself at one time, took umbrage. Umbrage in hand, he countered that the truth of the matter was that after the serpent tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, God cursed the serpent and condemned it to crawl on its belly from that point on and produce children by the sweat of its brow and the skin of its teeth, and that those little serpents and their succeeding generations were all destined, verily, to become trial lawyers. Of course one thing led to another, names like "old baboon butt" and "venomous reptile" were tossed about inside the little courtroom, and chimpanzees danced beside the Ferris wheel on the courthouse lawn while journalists wrote scathing reviews and radio broadcasters broadcasted scathing broadcasts. In short, everyone had a high old time, and for at least a couple of weeks in July, 1925, Dayton prospered.

But all good things must come to an end, and so did the monkey trial. To make a long story short, after nine very short minutes of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict which held, unequivocally, that President Calvin Coolidge was responsible for the whole mess, somehow, and they all wanted to go home because the heat was unbearable. Scopes was found guilty and his punishment included going back to the classroom in the Fall. Nothing about the teaching of Darwin’s theory was really resolved until 1960, when Stanley Kramer directed "Inherit the Wind," starring Spencer Tracy as Darrow and Frederic March as Bryan. Gene Kelly was in the movie too, but since he didn’t do any dancing or singing in the rain, nobody noticed. I have seen that film more than once, and it was never clear to me just who was inheriting whose wind. But since Spencer Tracy was nominated for an Oscar in the role, the American public immediately warmed to the idea of teaching evolution as documented historical fact. Movies are very influential that way.

So Joe, Maxine, Marilyn and I walked up the steps to that venerable brick edifice and trod the halls of the old courthouse, looking intently down each and every corridor until we finally found the restrooms. A few minutes later we went upstairs to the second floor to view the original courtroom where the monkey trial was held. No one else was there, so we could survey the place at our leisure, strolling across the old hardwood floor, testing the tensile strength of the original wooden theater-type seats where the spectators sat, and sitting behind the original desk on what was probably not the original chair where the judge sat (I don’t believe Dayton’s La-Z- Boy Corporation was making naugahyde recliners in 1925). We even took some very historically significant home videos in which all four of us stood in that revered spot where those magnificent legal minds of decades gone by once stood, and jumped up and down and thumped our knuckles on the hardwood floor, after which we closely examined each others’ heads in search of bugs and nits and other things which our monkey ancestors would have found appetizing. It may have been childish display, but in years to come our children and grandchildren will look at those videos and say "Maybe there’s something to that evolution stuff after all. Look how far we’ve come in just a single generation."

There was even a monkey trial museum in the courthouse basement, which contained newspaper articles, photos, the microphone used to broadcast the trial, and several other items from that era, including old musical instruments, an oxygen tent, and a display case full of dental tools and a collection of individual teeth which were used as models for dentures. There was a good portion of one wall dedicated to Curly Fox and his wife, Texas Ruby. I had not heard of them, and thought perhaps they were critical to Darrow’s case, somehow. But Joe told me they were only old time country performers, and that Curly Fox was from the Dayton area, so the people who put the museum together thought he deserved some recognition ... even if he wasn’t a monkey or a lawyer or a congressperson or some other lower life form.

For those of you who are science teachers (tenured) and plan to be in the classroom next Fall, or next month, or whenever the school year starts, God bless you. I have prepared some study questions on the Scopes trial which may be helpful to your students:

1. What was William Jennings Bryan’s middle name?

2. Have you or other family members found yourselves spending a little too much time in trees lately?

3. If not, would you please stop all of that chattering and swinging from the light fixtures before I’m forced to set my desk on fire and activate the automatic sprinkler system? DID YOU HEAR ME?

Come to think of it, math teachers, history teachers, and band directors could probably use those questions, too.