The ‘trial of the century’ put science on trial long before Moms for Liberty

What do you get when parents and politicians try to dictate the science curriculum for public schools? As recounted in the 2023 book “The Trial of the Century,” you get a courtroom drama that echoes today in the numerous disputes about banned books and other issues raised under the rubric of parental rights in education.

Mind you, the book by Gregg Jarrett with Don Yaeger had nothing to do with other trials of the 20th century, such as those of O.J. Simpson or anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.

Instead, it focuses on the trial of John Scopes, a humble science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee. He agreed to help the American Civil Liberties Union create a test case of Tennessee’s anti-evolution law by informing his students about Charles Darwin’s theories concerning evolution.

Darwin’s book “On the Origin of Species” had hit like a bombshell when it was published in 1859 because it clashed with centuries of established dogma rooted in the Biblical account of creation.

Fortunately for Darwin, questioning dogma didn’t cause him to suffer Galileo’s fate. The Italian astronomer was forced to recant and ended up under house arrest for espousing Nicholas Copernicus’ then-controversial theory that the Earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa.

Even today, some skeptics doubt what Copernicus and Galileo found. Indeed, notwithstanding their centuries-old discoveries and various recent forays into space, reliable surveys by Pew and others indicate that large numbers of Americans still say they believe that the Earth is flat.

On evolution, large numbers of Americans — notably including U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other “creationists” — still question Darwin’s theories and cling to the Biblical account of creation, including the notion that the Earth is only a bit more than a few thousand years old.

At the time of Scopes’ trial, this was the prevailing opinion in much of the world, so the Scopes “monkey trial” drew unprecedented media attention.

The leading characters in the courtroom drama were well cast. Assisting the prosecution was “the silver-tongued orator” William Jennings Bryan. Bryan had thrice been the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee — 1896, 1900, and 1908 — but by the time of the trial, he was 65, in ill health, and was to die there in Dayton five days after the trial ended.

(One of Bryan’s daughters, Ruth Bryan Owen, apparently inherited her father’s political ambitions. After working at the University of Miami in the 1920s, she won a Congress seat representing Miami and most of the rest of Florida’s east coast from 1929 to 1933.)

Meanwhile, defending John Scopes on behalf of the ACLU was Chicago lawyer Clarence Darrow, whose courageous work in support of freedom of speech and assembly was vital in an era when those First Amendment rights were under siege.

Darrow had lined up a group of experts to testify that Darwin’s theories were correct and that the Biblical account was not to be taken literally. The presiding judge refused to allow them to take the stand.

In desperation, Darrow brought Bryan to the stand and cross-examined him about the Biblical account. This provided the trial’s dramatic highlight and was captured very adroitly in “Inherit the Wind” by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. That play, twice made into movies, captures the humiliation of Bryan and the absurdity of the Tennessee law forbidding science teachers to teach this particular aspect of science.

Nonetheless, John Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 — real money at that time. Now, nearly 100 years later, the question of how much parents and politicians should influence decisions about the public school curriculum lingers.

Groups such as Moms for Liberty seemingly want to have veto power over what our kids are taught. However, as the book “The Trial of the Century” suggests, history is not on their side.