A Chimp Off the Old Block
A century since the Monkey Trial and still no agreement.
It’s the 100th anniversary of what has become known as the “Scopes Monkey Trial.” On July 10, 1925, jury selection began in Dayton, Tennessee for the trial of a teacher accused of telling his students about the Theory of Evolution. That action had been made illegal through a new law passed by the state legislature, barring any teaching that man was descended from a “lower order of animal.”
The first thing you need to know was that the trial was a put-up job, a little bit of fakery to fool the rubes. John Thomas Scopes, the defendant, had been hired by the local school district eleven months before to teach science and coach the high school football team. The law banning the teaching of evolution in schools hadn’t come into effect until March of 1925, and yet lo and behold, here was a convenient trial for it just four months later, all ready for one of the first national radio hookups.
For the past century this case has been presented to the suckers as some sort of Thunderdome battle over evolution: the smart people who “believe the science” and the hillbillies who believe in God. Two beliefs enter, only one leaves.
The reality was that none of that should have come up during the trial. If you’re charged with driving 55 miles an hour in a 40 mph zone, it’s not going to do you any good to claim that stretch of road has too low a speed limit. The trial is for just one reason: did you knowingly break the law?
By contrast, the judge in the Scopes trial let the whole thing degenerate into an argument over the Theory of Evolution. That should have been taken care of when the state legislature was considering the bill months earlier. Perhaps the judge enjoyed the publicity. For whatever reason, the whole thing should have been taken care of in one day. Scopes broke the law; he should be fined and told to go and sin no more.
Instead it became a circus, with well-known attorney Clarence Darrow on one side and three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan on the other. Why would these two highly-paid lawyers come to eastern Tennessee for a misdemeanor trial? At the start of the trial a minister was asked or a prayer of invocation and he drone on for fifteen minutes before a well-deserved “amen.” Darrow was allowed to question Bryan for over an hour on his fundamentalist beliefs; the next day the judge admitted he had been in error in allowing it and threw all the testimony out. Dozens of scientific experts had been planning to come to Dayton and testify, but the judge ruled against it, noting it had nothing to do with the actual case at hand. He may have been late to the party, but he was figuring it out.
When the case went to the jury on July 21, the verdict returned “just as soon as the twelve men could walk right out, turn around and walk back in again.” That wasn’t exaggeration. The jury left at 11:21 a.m. and was back with a verdict at 11:29. Scopes, they said, was guilty of breaking the law. The judge set his fine at one hundred dollars, the minimum allowed.
As is common in cases like this, the liberal control of the old media allowed them to pitch it as a win for the educated. Yes, morons might believe the Bible is a hundred-percent true, but we know better!
That shows the entire conceit behind liberalism and its political cousins. “We” are not only educated, we’re smarter than you, and “we” must take on the great responsibility of making decisions for you. You won’t save for retirement, so we force Social Security on you. You won’t choose the right transportation, so we legislate no gas-powered cars after 2035 and spend billions on “high-speed trains” that curiously get built slowly. You’re too dumb to know the world is dying because of carbon dioxide, so we’ll tax you for producing it.
The Scopes trial decided nothing, but it was treated as if it had, and still is a century later. Among its falsehoods, William Jennings Bryan wasn’t a lawyer for the defense; he was there more as an observer. After the trial a story on the Chattanooga Times was headlined “Fears Bryan Soon to Wield Great Power.” The idea was that, with his side’s win in the Scopes trial Bryan might control the Democratic Party again and choose its presidential candidate in 1928. Maybe, the reporter thought, it might even be Bryan for a record fourth time.
It was not to be. The next morning Bryan was found dead in his Dayton hotel bedroom, victim of an apparent heart attack. Fundamentalists might say he was being rewarded by God for his brave defense of the Bible; godless heathens would say he had worn himself out doing the same.
A century later, the battle continues.