Op-ed: Laughing at the Scopes Monkey Trial

By Madeline Bodin
©2025 Telegraph Publishing LLC

In 1925, 100 years ago this year, John Thomas Scopes lost his trial in Dayton, Tenn.,  a case that tested a new state law that made it illegal to teach evolution in public schools.

Scopes lost the legal case, but the hearts and minds of most of the country were behind him. It wasn’t the reserved young high school teacher who won them over, but the cutting wit of reporter and opinion writer H.L. Mencken, known to the entire country at the time as the “Sage of Baltimore.”

Thirty years later, the Scopes Monkey Trial was again cast in the spotlight by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the two playwrights who wrote Inherit the Wind.

H.L. Mencken covered the Scopes trial for The Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper. You may have never heard his name before or forgotten a history class mention, but you probably know of at least one of his modern counterparts: Jon Stewart, John Oliver, South Park, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency or The Onion.

“On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright moron,” Mencken wrote in the Sun in 1920.

A few years ago, I was as fuzzy as any American about who won the Scopes Monkey Trial, relying on memories of reading the 1955 play “Inherit the Wind” and watching its 1960 movie version in a high school English class.That changed when I researched the trial for an article for The Atavist, a magazine specializing in long-form nonfiction narratives, on a misguided effort to convince creationism’s most ardent supporter of the scientific truth of evolution.

I learned that as the July heat rose in 1925, reporters from all over the country poured into the small Tennessee town of Dayton to see science take on religion for the right to teach the scientific concept of evolution in the state’s schools.

Similar philosophical fights are taking place today, over whether schools can acknowledge the full breadth of human sexuality and gender, whether schools and museums can acknowledge the nation’s historical failings as well as its triumphs, whether humans should act to stop the scientifically proven destruction of our climate, and whether our health care should be guided by medical experts or a vibe.

In 1925, the Dayton town fathers thought a trial challenging the nation’s strictest anti-evolution law would bring in tourists. Scopes, tall, red-headed and 24-years-old, was recruited to help boost the local economy. Scopes was defended by attorney Clarence Darrow, who was then one of the most famous lawyers in America for his defense of anarchists and other unsympathetic characters.

William Jennings Bryan, celebrated as a three-time presidential nominee, joined the prosecution team. Then in his later years, Bryan campaigned, not for office, but for Jesus. The weekly Bible study class he taught in a public park near his Florida home drew thousands. Bryan had lobbied Tennessee lawmakers to make teaching evolution illegal.

The trial split the nation, but there was one thing everyone agreed on: It was not John Scopes who was on trial in Dayton. Some people believed evolution was being put to the test, others believed it was Bryan. The trial brought visiting preachers to town, and a chimpanzee. So many spectators jammed the second-floor  courtroom that the ceiling of the room below cracked. The spectacle was the point. Both sides aimed to win America’s heart.

The play and the movie Inherit the Wind portray the trial as a moral victory for science and reason, even if the legal case itself was lost. The playwrights’ true aim, back in the 1950s, was to skewer Sen. Joseph McCarthy — and the Red Scare.

However, my research showed me that when the trial ended, it appeared to most people at the time that science and reason had taken a sound beating in Dayton. Mencken had ruled that charlatanism, indeed, had won out.

The Tennessee law against teaching evolution that Bryan championed would remain the law until 1967. That we remember it differently is mostly because, when Bryan died just five days after the Monkey Trial ended, Mencken thoroughly roasted Bryan’s character, calling him “full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity. …”

The article was a classic take-down that is still studied today.

Mencken used satire to portray the absurdity of the trial in his reports from Dayton, much the way The Onion satirizes today’s news. Mencken’s northern readership lapped it up, as did city-dwelling Southerners. His wit appealed to his audience’s sophistication, much as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency does today, but was also South Park-level cruel and crude, with both the show and Mencken being fond of racial slurs.

Mencken was more popular in his day than news satirists Jon Stewart and John Oliver are in ours. Mencken’s articles on Bryan and the Scopes trial were republished in collections of his writing for years after the trial. They cemented the idea into American culture that anyone sophisticated enough to own a flush toilet was also cultured enough to respect science.

Is it any wonder that the Mencken character —  E.K. Hornbeck — has a major role in Inherit the Wind? One hundred years later, the Scopes Monkey Trial offers us hope in an era when science and reason are again taking a sound beating. Despite the defeat in Dayton, scientific thinking in the United States prospered in the decades that followed.

American science shrank radios and other electronics to pocket size, prevented polio and landed men on the moon.

In spite of what the chatterati have been telling us for years, the arts and humanities are vital partners to science. Humor is a sharp weapon against ignorance, succeeding where the sincerest tutorials fail. Eventually, the best story wins. We just need to keep telling it.

A hundred years from now, nobody will remember who won and who lost, or which talk show host was fired when. What will matter is which stories we remember.

Madeline Bodin is a writer living in Andover.