By Neena Arndt
In the summer of 1925, with the chaos of the 1918 flu pandemic and 1919 race riots behind them, Chicagoans could look forward to the opening of Goodman Theatre, which would welcome its first audiences that October. In the meantime, those craving entertainment could turn on their brand new radios (19% of Americans owned a radio in 1925, up from 1% just two years earlier) and listen to the Scopes Trial, in which schoolteacher John T. Scopes was tried for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. WGN Chicago placed microphones throughout the Dayton, Tennessee courtroom, and through this new form of mass media, turned a trial into a national event for the first time.
John T. Scopes, who had been hired to coach football, did not hold strong views about evolution. Neither did he teach biology or any type of science, though he had earned a minor in geology. Instead, he had agreed to serve as a defendant when the American Civil Liberties Union decided to challenge Tennessee’s newly passed Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in the state’s schools. Dayton, a sleepy town of 1,700, became a center of the nation’s attention as prominent lawyer Clarence Darrow and orator, lawyer and politician William Jennings Bryan debated Darwin’s theories and the morality of teaching them in schools. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 (worth roughly $1800 in 2024), but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. The Butler Act remained in place until 1967, though nobody enforced it.
In 1955, writers Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee—who would become well known for writing the play Auntie Mame, and later adapting into the musical Mame with music by Jerry Herman—fictionalized the Scopes Trial in their play Inherit the Wind. The play opened in Dallas, Texas before moving to Broadway a few months later and would later be made into a film starring Spencer Tracy in 1960. By that time, most of the trial’s major players were long dead, but the man around which the controversy had swirled was still alive. Scopes had spent the intervening decades mostly trying to distance himself from the trial, but he returned to Dayton to attend the film’s premiere.
Although 99 years have passed since Bryan and Darrow’s voices made history by traveling over the airwaves into American homes, the questions at stake in the Scopes Trial remain relevant: who gets to choose what is taught in public schools? Do religious beliefs have a place in education? How do we explain the existence of the world around us?
Neena Arndt is the Literary Manager and Dramaturg for Goodman Theatre.
