The Drama Unfolds

Following his indictment, John Scopes was free--never in danger of being jailed--and traveled to New York, where he met with members of the executive board of the ACLU. Back in Dayton, he continued to live at his boarding house and interacted freely with townspeople and all the visitors gathered for the spectacle. He was friendly with several young men on the prosecution team. Bryan and Darrow were well-received by the town. Several other well-known attorneys joined the defense team. The trial itself lasted only a few days. Some students were called to testify; Scopes himself was never put on the stand, because his grasp of Darwinism was rudimentary at best and the defense team did not want to risk embarrassment under cross-examination. So the real drama of the thing was in the exchanges between Bryan and Darrow. The former more than held his own against the latter, although his willingness at the end of the trial to take the stand as a "witness for the Bible" was ill-advised; by and large he acquitted himself well but there were a few slips that made for good, damaging sound-bites. The media coverage of the event was a travesty of journalistic integrity. Little attempt was made to capture the reality of the thing. Instead, reporters pretty much knew what their editors wanted them to write and so there was a great deal of embellishment. Some didn't even bother to attend the courtroom proceedings. Many, including Mencken, left town before the end of the trial. Ultimately, Scopes was found guilty (at the behest of Darrow, who sought grounds for appeal and was confident that the verdict would be overturned by a higher court and the Butler Act declared unconstitutional; the additional publicity would be good for his anti-religious cause) and subjected to a modest fine. He later went on to graduate school and had an active career as a geologist.



The whole affair sort of backfired for Dayton, Tennessee. The inaccurate journalistic portrait of a town full of rubes and religious bigots did not help the town. Urban skeptics were confirmed in their ill opinion of rural religious conservatives. The Scopes Trial was mostly a propaganda victory for the ACLU and others desiring to discredit religion. Its real value came in the ground it laid for an even more effective weapon in the culture war.