A Courtroom in Dayton, and a Reputation That Did Not Recover Quickly

In 1925, Tennessee passed a law forbidding public school teachers from teaching any theory denying the biblical account of human creation in favor of a theory that man descended from a lower order of animals, and the American Civil Liberties Union, looking for a test case, recruited a Dayton high school teacher named John Scopes to be prosecuted for violating it. The resulting trial drew two of the era's most famous public figures as opposing counsel, the three-time presidential candidate and fundamentalist champion William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and the celebrated defense attorney Clarence Darrow for the defense, and national press coverage that turned a local law enforcement matter into a spectacle followed across the country.

Scopes was convicted, a verdict later overturned on a technicality, so the trial settled nothing legally, but its cultural verdict landed far more decisively against the fundamentalist side. Darrow's cross-examination of Bryan himself, called as a witness on the literal accuracy of the Bible, was widely reported as having left Bryan flustered and the fundamentalist position looking anti-intellectual and provincial, an image cemented by H. L. Mencken's scathing newspaper coverage and, decades later, by the fictionalized 1955 play and 1960 film Inherit the Wind. Historians studying the movement generally agree the trial did not end fundamentalism, which continued building institutions, Bible colleges and denominations largely outside national media attention, but it did mark the point at which fundamentalist Christianity lost the broader cultural argument in the eyes of the American press and much of educated public opinion for a generation.