A National Sensation

Cartoon by H. T. Webster (1885-1952), published in Life Magazine.

The Scopes Trial, and the subject of Darwinian evolution, provided a field day for cartoonists, songwriters, journalists, and pundits. In this image by H. T. Webster (1885-1952), Bryan is lampooned for his denials of Darwinism in Life Magazine. Webster’s cartoons portraying the anxieties of modern life were popular in the early to mid-20th century. He worked for The New York World, The New York Evening Post, and Life magazine, the latter of which featured him on the cover. 

Popular music was another beneficiary of the trial. This 1920s shellac record features “The John T. Scopes Trial” by Vernon Dalhart (1883-1953), with the refrain, “the old religion’s better after all.” Dalhart was one of country music’s first major recording artists, who recorded on Thomas Edison’s label. His music marked the beginning of country music's commercial rise in the 1920s. In similar fashion, Billy Rose and Clarence Gaskill’s “You Can’t Make a Monkey Out of Me” (1925), made light of Darwinism with lines like: “there's no chimpanzee in my pedigree, and you can't make a monkey of me.” The songs took to the airwaves in the early days of radio. 

“The John T. Scopes Trial (The Old Religion's Better After All),” by Vernon Dalhart.

Listen to a recording of Dalhart’s “The John T. Scopes Trial."

The legal community responded quickly to the trial. In the handwritten, unsolicited letter here, Mississippi attorney Robert Phifer conveyed to Darrow in June 1925 that several of his cases could help the defense of Scopes. He wrote: “it may please you to know that you have many friends and admirers in this state.” 

Frank Spurlock and Robert Keebler were Tennessee attorneys who volunteered their services and joined Scopes’s team on the appeal. Keebler’s address here, in printed form, was given at the Tennessee Bar Association’s annual meeting on June 26–27, 1925. Keebler called evolution a settled question of science. He furnished arguments on the state’s limited police power and upheld the separation of church and state. In response, he faced a motion to expunge the speech, and the Tennessee Bar sharply rebuked him for treating a religious question.

Samuel J. Rosensohn was a New York lawyer who worked for the ACLU and also joined Scopes’s appeal. In this letter, written a month before the trial, the president of the relatively new New York Law Review inquires if Rosensohn would write a piece on the trial. Scopes’s team was not averse to it, though sought a wider audience: Hays published a notable account of the defense’s strategy in The Nation in August 1925.

Inherit the Wind. New York: Random House, 1955.

In the 1950s, the Scopes Trial inspired Inherit the Wind, a play that fictionalized the trial’s events and, for some, paralleled events in contemporary American life. Written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the play debuted on a Dallas stage in 1955. Inspired by the anti-Communist Red Scare and Hollywood blacklists, the authors dramatized the Scopes Trial with the intention of criticizing McCarthyism and defending intellectual freedom. The play became the longest-running drama then on Broadway and was later adapted into a film, which saw several television remakes. The popularity of Inherit the Wind helped to keep the Scopes Trial in the public eye.

The play’s authors, Lawrence and Lee, were longtime collaborators who co-wrote several plays that addressed contemporary issues. In response to questions about the fictionalization of the Scopes Trial, Lawrence stated: “we used the teaching of evolution as a parable, a metaphor for any kind of mind control…it’s not about science versus religion. It’s about the right to think.” The first edition copy of Inherit the Wind pictured here is inscribed to Clarence Darrow’s granddaughter, described as “the granddaughter of one of America’s most inspiring thinkers.”

Inherit the Wind, Film Advertising Memo

Despite some criticism of its portrayal of trial events, the play was successful, leading to a film adaptation that premiered in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1960, starring Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, and Gene Kelly. Following the film’s release, the director, Stanley Kramer, and the movie’s distributor, United Artists Corporation, directed an advertising campaign at teenage audiences at the beginning of the school year. The document here outlines a plan to hire teenagers in large cities “to play up the movie for their local newspapers, radio and television stations, as well as for school publications and organizations,” reflecting the social importance Kramer attached to the issues the movie treated.

The Riesenfeld Center’s collection includes several items that indicate the film’s international distribution and global interest, including a Spanish lobby card to promote the film, a movie poster advertising the film with its Czech title, “Who Sows the Wind” (Hosea 8:7), and a Danish pamphlet with its translated title, “Sun Stood Still” (Joshua 10:13), providing information about the American movie’s plot and cast.