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The following is part two of a four-part series going over the 100^th anniversary of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, courtesy of the Nashville Banner. To read the full story, visit the Nashville Banner’s website, and sign up for the Nashville Banner’s newsletters.

As the trial date neared, Robinson hung a banner outside his drug store. It read: “Where it all started.”

He couldn’t imagine that a century later his sign would still be remembered, if only as an epitaph for a season of strangeness.

Michael Lienesch, a retired UNC-Chapel Hill professor, is not surprised to find the issues that divide America in 2025 mirror concerns from the era of the Scopes trial.

“It’s not like a river or cycles, but for the last 100 years, the same questions keep being debated and discussed. What does progress look like? What is modernity? We saw it then. We see it now,” he said.

Further, these questions are often rooted in the most personal of contexts: belief in a supreme being, expression of faith and definition of a moral life. These queries also have led to disputes, where basic freedoms granted by the US Constitution are forcibly reconciled to the credal thoughts of others.

In 2007, Lienesch examined the rise of American anti-evolutionism in a book, In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial and the Making of the Antievolution Movement. With a focus on American political theory, Lienesch’s book explored how fundamentalism, of which biblical inerrancy is a key tenet, has grown systematically over the last century.

“It’s not something that was invented by Jerry Falwell. Fundamentalism began at the end of WWI. Preachers created movements,” he said. Political activism centering on religious conservatism has been the result, particularly in the last 50 years.

“Today, the role of political parties is so closely tied to religious conservative activists. In the day of Scopes, it was different,” Lienesch said. During the Scopes trial, “society had its own version of culture wars.”

“In 1925, the secularization of society was much discussed. Students were going off to college to learn new ideas and people were drinking alcohol during Prohibition,” he observed. The divorce rate also began rising and the attractions of life in America’s metropolises led many to seek careers off farms. Education, particularly higher education, was also a much-discussed topic. “Academia was an issue. This was a strategy that was good politics for the conservatives in the fundamentalist movement. It all began with how to read the Bible and understand it and that led to the question of whether the Bible was being taught in schools,” Lienesch said.

William Jennings Bryan was an early critic of colleges and universities about what was being taught. “He was debating college presidents all over the country. Years before he was in Dayton, Tennessee, he was traveling. I think Bryan lived a lot of his life on trains,” Lienesch said. Bryan and others called for investigations of college curricula. He focused on evolution, especially human evolution, as a subject that could engage and enrage the masses, the retired professor noted.

Numerous college presidents buckled under pressure to make changes. A few professors lost their jobs.

Today, evolution has been replaced by other topics that are worrisome to conservatives: gender studies, diversity, equity and inclusion programs and how history is taught, among others.

“And we see some college presidents are buckling today — think about Columbia (University) for example — while others are resisting,” Lienesch said.

In elementary and secondary education, modern reform extends to displaying the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Louisiana approved such a measure in 2024 and Texas did the same a few weeks ago. Legal challenges are already underway in both states.

“You know, the Scopes trial was seen as a great defeat for fundamentalists. When Darrow put Bryan on the stand, that was not just quite a show. It was also very revealing to a lot of people. It revealed inconsistencies, some of the limitations of fundamentalist thinking at that time,” Lienesch said.

But they weren’t down for the count.

“The fundamentalist movement and the conservative Christian movement retreated a bit, and they began to build institutionally and this is not surprising that they are very much with us.”

News of a Tennessee teacher being charged with teaching evolution flowed through the country with the rapidity of a wildfire blown by constant winds.

The story caused a stir in Memphis because the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, an organization created in 1919 to defend traditional Biblical values from the influence of modernism, was having its annual convention there. The group’s keynote speaker was William Jennings Bryan, three-time candidate for president, ardent fundamentalist and one who had been denouncing evolution for years at outdoor Sunday school sessions he held in Florida, where he lived.

A day after Bryan’s appearance at the convention, the organization named him to “represent their interests” at the Scopes trial, notwithstanding the fact that WCFA had no legal standing in the Rhea County matter. Having already moved on to his next speaking engagements in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Bryan took a day or so to consider the offer before replying with a telegram from Pittsburgh. “I will do it,” the Great Commoner told reporters. “We cannot afford to have a system of education that destroys the religious faith of 75 percent of our children.”

The matter of whether Bryan, who had not litigated a case in thirty years, could officially join the prosecutor’s team was resolved by an open-arms invitation on May 13 from Sue K. Hicks and Wallace C. Haggard, Dayton attorneys who were the lead prosecutors. Such was his popularity, Bryan’s entry into the fray brought exponential interest in the case nationwide.

Two days later came another shock: the defense announced that Chicago-based attorney Clarence Darrow had joined the fight. The inclusion of the sharp-tongued Darrow, who was considered by many to be the best defense lawyer in the nation, made clear the dividing line between the two camps.

Darrow offered an irreligious counterpoint to Bryan’s unabashed devotion to Christendom. Headlines pitting the two against one another, as if they were heavyweights vying for a championship, appeared with regularity in newspapers large and small. 

“Civilization and not a school teacher are going on trial,” Darrow told the Associated Press.

Even before word arrived that Bryan and Darrow were coming to Dayton, townspeople began sprucing up. The interior of the courthouse received new coats of paint. Lights and benches were installed on the grassy area bordering the square. To quench the thirst of visitors, drinking fountains were installed. To house the phalanx of reporters who didn’t secure lodging at the hotel or in boarding rooms, cots were assembled in large upstairs storage rooms at two downtown businesses, Bailey’s Hardware and Morgan Furniture.

The tall windows inside the courtroom were cleaned of dust and grime. Technicians from WGN in Chicago unspooled hundreds of feet of cable to connect their mobile studio in the courtroom to the local telephone exchange and to install speakers on the courthouse lawn.

The trial began on July 10, a Friday, and ended on July 21, a Tuesday. Judge John T. Raulston, who was midway through his first term in Tennessee’s sprawling 18th District, would preside. He was born in rural Marion County in 1868, just three years after the Confederacy surrendered at the Appomattox Court House. After college, he studied law under the tutelage of an attorney in Chattanooga and passed the bar exam in 1896 at the age of 28. He established a practice in Winchester, the county seat of Franklin, before being sworn in as judge in 1924.

Raulston, 56, was excited the trial was coming into his jurisdiction. If he had doubts or concerns about the unusual case about to unfold in his courtroom, he kept them to himself.

Genesis describes the world being created in six days, with God resting on the seventh. The monkey trial of 1925 took eight days, with two weekends interrupting court, offering a respite from the legal jockeying and the oppressive temps and giving preachers two Sundays to focus their homilies on the evils of evolution. Outside, the thermometer hovered in the 90s. Inside the standing-room-only courtroom, the heat felt like 100 and above. Overheated spectators in the gallery fainted with regularity.

The eight days in court unfolded like most trials, in an undramatic fashion. The first day was spent selecting a jury, 12 men, mostly churchgoers and farmers. Days two and three mostly involved the nine lawyers jawing back and forth on legal issues: whether the defense leaked information to the press (they did not), whether to quash Scope’s indictment (it was not), whether it was appropriate for prayer to open each day’s gathering (yes, said the judge).

It wasn’t until the fourth day, Wednesday, July 16, that Scopes pleaded not guilty and the state presented its case. The first witnesses called were the school superintendent and two students who attended the biology class where evolution was allegedly taught.

On the fifth day, the prosecution entered a motion to exclude testimony from expert witnesses (geologists, biologists, chemists, among others) that the defense had arranged to be in Dayton for the trial. No decision was reached by the time of adjournment for the day.

On Friday, day six, Raulston ignited a firestorm as he ruled the scientists ineligible to testify. Convincing the judge to change his mind was a futile enterprise for Darrow and company, but they tried, nevertheless. They sought to enter affidavits of the scientists into the record, but the prosecution objected all along the way, and Judge Raulston mostly agreed with their objections, which peeved Darrow. He muttered a string of sarcastic rejoinders, interrupting the jurist several times. The defense attorney questioned why “anything that is perfectly competent on our part should be immediately overruled.”

“I hope you do not mean to reflect upon the court,” Raulston replied, his words, no doubt, freighted with rising anger.

“Well, your honor has the right to hope,” Darrow shot back.

First thing on Monday morning, day seven, the judge charged the Chicago lawyer with contempt of court and set a bond of $5,000. Darrow was unsure if he could quickly secure funds, but a Chattanooga lawyer, Frank Spurlock, piped up that he would cover the bond. This revelation prompted chattering among the hundreds of spectators. Kelso Rice, a young Chattanooga police officer on loan to Dayton, bellowed a demand for quiet.

“This is not a circus,” he exclaimed.

Maybe not a circus, but nothing resembling normal, either.

Following lunch, Darrow offered an apology that was accepted by Raulston. They solemnized the moment by halting court business long enough to be photographed shaking hands.

Afterwards, the judge told the overflow crowd that the trial was moving to the courthouse lawn for the rest of the day.

“I am afraid of the building,” explained Raulston, who had been made aware that pieces of plaster were falling onto the floor beneath the courtroom. The cause seemed to be stress from the weight of hundreds of standing spectators who refused to leave.

Consequently, the most important lawyer-witness exchange in the Scopes trial came to be held in the midday light, beneath a summer blue sky.

The matchup was improbable: “The defense desires to call Mr. Bryan as a witness.”

All the headlines promoting a clash of titans were coming true.

Leon Alligood is a retired MTSU journalism professor. For 30 years before joining academia, he was a reporter, most of that time at The Nashville Banner and The Tennessean. He is the co-author (with Kathy Bingham Turner) of “Boss Brooks: A True Story of Fraud, Family and Forgiveness from Tennessee to Texas” which will be published by the University of Tennessee Press in November.