After the tragedy at Columbine High School, society is searching for answers. What information should children be exposed to, what should children be taught? A new remake of Inherit the Wind, that asks the same questions, recently appeared on cable television. The play was written in 1950 by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee in response to the anti-Communist, anti-intellectual hysteria of the McCarthy era. The playwrights did not claim to be accurately depicting the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925 that pitted evolutionists against fundamentalists, Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan. Director Stanley Kramer’s message in the 1960 movie starring Spencer Tracy and Frederic March is that we have the right to think, the right to question and the right to teach.

In the movie, Cates (Scopes), a high school teacher, deliberately violates a Tennessee criminal statute forbidding any public school teacher to teach evolution and is then arrested. Mathew Harrison Brady (Bryan) and a local fundamentalist preacher whip the citizens of Hillsborro (Dayton) Tennessee into a religious frenzy and a mob threatens the life of the jailed teacher. The preacher’s daughter is torn between her fiancé Cates and her father. Drummond (Darrow) is not allowed to introduce any testimony about evolution and in desperation questions Brady as an expert on the Bible.

The Scopes "Monkey Trial" occurred during July of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. Two of the greatest lawyers in America, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, represented the opposing sides. Darrow thought the case would be remembered " because it is the first case of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft." (Attorney for the Damned, Arthur Weinberg, ed., 1957, p. 176). The case dealt with the issues of evolution versus creationism, control of schools and the constitutional issue of the separation of church and state. These issues are still with us today. Two years ago the Jefferson County School Board agreed to censure a video on evolution.

The New York American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) advertised in the Tennessee papers for a teacher willing to cooperate in a challenge of the state statute outlawing the teaching of evolution. Some of the businessmen of Dayton thought such a trial would bring business to their small town and so accepted the ACLU offer. One of the instigators was a local attorney named Sue Hicks (he was named for his mother who died when he was born). Another instigator, Rappelya, was a mining engineer who believed firmly in evolution. The businessmen convinced John Scopes, a well-liked 24-year-old science teacher and football coach, to "violate" the statute. Rappelya wrote out an arrest warrant and Scopes volunteered to find the sheriff to arrest him. Scopes did not spend any time in jail. A fiancé was created for the movie for dramatic conflict.

Several hundred reporters descended on Dayton. The trial was one of the biggest media events in American history. Christian fundamentalists engaged William Jennings Bryan as a prosecutor. Bryan was very active in the movement to outlaw the teaching of evolution. The ACLU hired attorneys for the defense, including the lead attorney Arthur Garfield Hays and The Baltimore Sun engaged Clarence Darrow. Expert witnesses on evolution were excluded from the actual trial and Darrow did call Bryan to the stand as an expert on the Bible. Bryan was made to look foolish and did admit that the first day might have been twenty-five hours long and thus the Bible could be read non-literally. Bryan died five days after the trial. John Scopes accepted a scholarship from scientists and reporters to attend the University of Chicago and became a geologist.

The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the validity of the statute. The statute was finally repealed in 1967. The United States Supreme Court in Epperson v. Arkansas, 390 U.S. 941 (1968) examined an Arkansas law similar to the Tennessee statute. In Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987), the Court looked at a Louisiana law requiring a teacher wishing to teach evolution to also teach "creation science." In both cases, the Supreme Court found that the sole purpose of the law was to promote a specific religious view and thus it was invalid under the First Amendment separation of church and state.