The Play Is Not the Trial

Most of what the public knows about Scopes comes from a play written thirty years later and the film made from it, which used the trial as a vehicle for a commentary on the political conformity of its own decade. It is a good play and it is not a documentary. It invents characters, alters the sequence, makes the defendant a sympathetic prisoner rather than a volunteer, and gives the Bryan figure a humiliation and a death in the courtroom that did not occur, though Bryan did die in Dayton five days after the trial ended.

The historical record differs from the drama in ways that matter. The prosecution was not a mob of ignorant fundamentalists confronting reason; Bryan's opposition to evolution was tied to his opposition to the social Darwinism and eugenics being taught in the same textbooks, a connection the play has no room for. The defence's strategy of putting religion on trial was contested within its own team. And the outcome was not a defeat for the anti-evolution movement: the Butler Act stood until 1967, similar laws were passed elsewhere, and Edward Larson has shown that American textbook publishers quietly reduced their coverage of evolution for decades afterwards.

Both sides claimed victory at the time, which is the surest sign that the trial settled nothing, and the constitutional question was resolved only by later cases in the federal courts.