The Devil Went Down To Dayton

It was a strange thing that the eyes of the entire English-speaking world had descended upon such a small town in rural Tennessee during the summer of 1925, but a lot was on the line. John T. Scopes, a local high school teacher in the declining mining town of Dayton, was charged with violating the state’s new prohibition against teaching Darwinian Evolution in schools, and the whole world wanted to see what would happen to him in what would become known as the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial.” 

Now, for the 100th anniversary of the trial, from July 11th to the 19th, Dayton wants to tell the story on its own terms, free from a century of spin and misrepresentation. 

Hundreds of journalists and tourists from across the United States and England came to report on what would become “the trial of the century”, even though it was only a misdemeanor trial with minimal consequences. The town of Dayton turned the event into a spectacular carnival, hoping to take advantage of the free publicity, but it would quickly spiral beyond their control. 

The trial itself played out dramatically. ACLU-backed provocateur, self-avowed atheist, and infamous celebrity lawyer Clarence Darrow took up the defense, hoping to use it as an opportunity to snub fundamentalist Christians. Former U.S. Secretary of State and internationally renowned progressive thought leader William Jennings Bryan joined the prosecution, hoping to highlight the social evils of his time (Social Darwinism, eugenics, etc.). Renowned journalist and serial provacateur H.L. Mencken watched the proceedings and offered some of its most sardonic commentary, dismissing the friendly locals and their elected officials as “Homo boobiens”. 

The room sweltered in the boiling summer heat, and the floor itself seemed to bow under the weight of so many people. But for days, the two sides hashed out the law. At its dramatic peak, Darrow called Bryan up as a witness for a two-hour grilling wherein the elderly politician was bullied about his Christian faith, peppered with arguments about the scientific validity of Old Testament miracles, and made to look like a fool who hadn’t fully thought through his ideas. In doing so, spectators largely sided with Bryan, seeing the grilling as cruel and irrelevant to the trial.

Ultimately, Scopes would receive a $100 fine and was gifted money to study geology at the University of Chicago, leading a quiet life as an oil expert for gas corporations in his later years. Bryan would shockingly pass away just a few days later in his sleep after praying at the Northern Methodist Church in Dayton. Darrow and Mencken walked away proudly proclaiming they’d made a killshot, with the latter privately proclaiming, “We killed the son-of-a-bitch!” Both sides of the issue walked away arrogantly triumphalistic and feeling they’d won the moral argument. The law would remain in place until 1967, but went largely unenforced.

The entire media circus was never about the actual legality of teaching evolution—that question was straightforward from a legal perspective. It was a mythic battle between fundamentalism and modernity. The ACLU had wanted it to be a battle about free speech, but neither Bryan, Darrow, nor Menchken saw it that way. They wanted to use Dayton to make their enemies look foolish, even at the cost of their legal arguments. This was an optics battle over truth and who had the power to enforce it. 

The “Scopes Monkey Trial” would pass into legend, becoming what trial correspondent Joseph Wood Krutch would describe as “more a part of the folklore of liberalism than of history.” 

However, the quiet town of Dayton would stay exactly where it was. Bryan College would be founded there in 1930, in honor of the martyred prosecutor, but it would remain a punchline and a tourist curiosity—the embarrassing, backwards, fundamentalist town where the concept of scientific rationalism was held on trial, and where democracy had tried to overrule it.

It’s an image that the current inheritors of Dayton hope to challenge. The legacy of Dayton is tainted by media misrepresentation, among them the slanderous depiction of the town in films like Inherit the Wind, which presented the overwhelmingly friendly and welcoming townsfolk as an ignorant provincial mob wanting Scopes hanged for heresy. 

Thankfully, the 100th anniversary offers Dayton a chance to take the narrative back. The Scopes Festival has been an annual festival in Dayton for decades, but this year’s is larger. The town has already been celebrating the centennial since March with lectures and historical events as part of its Scopes 100 festival, but this month brings the celebration to its climax between July 11-19, with a symposium, displays, cemetery and history tours, an antique car show, activities, and a performed reenactment of the trial. 

“We have a lot of people who drive through thinking, “oh, isn’t this where something happened?” and visit the courthouse, but now we're putting on a full court press to get people to know what's going on and to come see us,” says Tom Davis, Vice President of the Rhea Heritage Preservation Foundation. 

Having personally driven through Dayton two summers ago, I can attest that the town isn’t ashamed of its history. I still have a nifty pamphlet from the Rhea County Historical Society that outlines 20 historically prominent buildings and their histories. The original courthouse is still operating as a courthouse, with statues of Bryan and Darrow facing each other in prominent positions outside. It also has a small museum in the courthouse’s basement. But now is the chance to make that history known. 

As Davis notes, not many misdemeanor trials are still relevant a century later. He sees the story of Dayton as being the story of one community’s willingness to challenge the Butler Act, an act that forever changed the course of American education and the role religion plays in it. “This was just a little case, but it had a lot of impact.” 

“In 1925, we decided to let everybody else in the world tell our story,” Davis says. “We thought we knew a little better, and we can do a better job telling our story rather than letting someone else do it. We let people, like Mencken and others with an axe to grind, get away with it. We said, this year, let's tell the story, tell the truth, tell what really happened, and see what happens.” 

Located just an hour from Chattanooga and a couple of hours east of Nashville, Dayton can be a hike. However, July’s events offer a once-in-a-lifetime chance to hear the story of a key historical moment in American history from the perspective of its descendants on its centennial. Davis expects the reenactments alone will sell out more than 850 tickets. 

More information can be found here about Scopes 100 and the Scopes Trial Play.