The trial, dramatized in the canonical play and film Inherit the Wind, was ostensibly about whether public school teacher John Scopes, in teaching Darwinian evolution, had broken a Tennessee law forbidding such instruction. But the trial, which attracted rapt national attention and was enveloped in a circus-like atmosphere of revival tents, vendors of all kinds, and a plaid suit-wearing monkey named Joe Mendi, was about far more than Scopes’ guilt or innocence. It was about what many saw — and many still see — as inherently contradictory views about the origins of life, religion and science, and what should be taught in the public schools.
Inside and outside the Rhea County courtroom of Judge John Raulston, the proceedings came to a head when counsel for the defense Clarence Darrow called three-time presidential candidate, creationism defender, and assistant to the prosecution William Jennings Bryan to the stand. The questioning grew heated, as Darrow put Bryan’s religious beliefs on trial, and Bryan responded in kind against those he felt were out to get fundamentalist Christianity.
Bryan, for his part, declared that, “these gentlemen…did not come here to try this case. They came hear to try revealed religion. I am here to defend it.” He went on to accuse Darrow of having called the local Tennesseans “yokels.”
Darrow replied that he had never called the people yokels, and that Bryan had insulted “every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion.”