Scopes Trial story retold in poetry form

• By GREG LANGLEY
• Books editor
• Published: Jul 20, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

The nation’s attention was focused on a tiny town in the hills of Tennessee 83 years ago this summer. There, in the hamlet of Dayton, the forces of science and religion met in a mighty confrontation that became know as the Scopes Monkey Trial. Or at least that’s how the hype goes. In reality, the event was a trumped up public relations stunt devised by local merchants to bring business to the little town whose economy had stalled.

Tennessee had only recently passed a law, the Butler Act, prohibiting the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in its public schools. The American Civil Liberties Union felt the law was unconstitutional and wanted a test case. The authorities in Dayton and Rhea County decided to provide them with such a case.

A young high school science teacher named John T. Scopes agreed to be the guinea pig. All he had to do was admit teaching the theory of evolution. That theory was included in the textbook used in a biology class. Scopes discussed the theory one day when he was a substitute in the class. After agreeing to participate in the test case, Scopes was “arrested.” Then the fun began. The defense brought in famed Chicago defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, a noted liberal. The prosecution enlisted the help of William Jennings Bryan, an aging politician who was a former secretary of state and three-time presidential candidate. Bryan stood for conservative, fundamentalist values and was a believer in Biblical inerrancy.

The trial itself was not meant to settle anything, just draw attention, and money, to Dayton. The outcome was a foregone conclusion. (Scopes was found guilty by the jury after nine minutes of deliberation and fined $100 by the judge). It was meant to be appealed, but never made it to the U.S. Supreme Court because of a legal technicality. It might have been forgotten entirely if not for the circus-like atmosphere that attended the clash of Darrow and Bryan, considered two of the best legal minds of the day.

The press flooded the small town. Merchants sold monkey masks, a reference to the theory of evolution’s claim that men descended from lower orders. Trained chimpanzees appeared in town. Hordes of journalists, only slightly more well behaved than the chimps, squeezed into the town to cover the trial. A Chicago radio station set up a live remote broadcast and a film crew set up cameras in the Rhea County Courthouse. The trial was front page news from New York to Los Angeles. But for all its color and characters, it wasn’t significant legally. But it did inspire two men to write a play.

Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee wrote Inherit the Wind in 1955. It was loosely based on the Scopes Trial and was a big hit on Broadway. In 1960 a movie version appeared in which Spencer Tracey and Frederick March played the leads. It was a big hit.
Now the trial has inspired a new book. Pennsylvania author Jen Bryant has written an unusual account of the trial. It’s a young adult book, Ringside 1925 (Knopf, $15.99), a work of fiction told in free verse (unrhymed and unmetered poetry).

The book is the story of the trial, including its outcome and a postscript about the eventual fates of the key players. The poems are in the voices of nine people who were in Dayton for the trial: a local innkeeper, two teenage buddies whose friendship is tested by their differing opinions about evolution, a local constable, a St. Louis newspaperman in town to cover the trial, a Bible-toting fundamentalist, a Methodist minister who has traveled to town for the trial, an ambitious young woman working to get out of Dayton to the larger world and a 12-year-old black child who is struggling with questions of race in the Jim Crow South.

Bryant’s method is reminiscent of Edgar Lee Masters but her speakers are not ghosts and her poems are not so complex and difficult as those in Spoon River Anthology. The poems in Ringside are not metered, but they have an easy cadence to them that feels conversational and is smooth and digestible. Here Ernest McManus, the Methodist minister, explains his tolerant attitude about competing theories of creation:

“I’ve been a Methodist minister
for more than thirty years.
and human nature still amazes me.
I may never understand why some folks
push our Lord into a little box,
by insisting, “You must say this – you must do this —
you must think this.”
For Peter Sykes, one of the young friends, the answer is not hard:
“Our state lawmakers passed the Butler Act
because they think science will poison our minds.
Well I don’t feel poisoned. I still believe in the divine.
Why should a bigger mind need a smaller God?”

But his friend, Jimmy Lee Davis, is against the teaching of evolution. He knows some church people who are proponents of Biblical infallibility (the Bible is inerrent on spiritual matters but not on science or history) think the theory is harmless:

“But it can’t
be harmless if
it goes against
the Bible …
right?”

Bryant said in a phone interview that she had an unusual reason for choosing the poetry format. “I actually started out writing nonfiction and biographies. That’s what I did for the first decade of writing,” she said. At the same time, “I was reading and writing a lot of poetry.

“It was very different from the nonfiction writing I was doing.” She thought about a novel, but couldn’t bring herself to start it. “I was chicken to write a novel,” she said. She was daunted by the idea of a novel, but used a mental trick to get the poetry collection written. “I told myself ‘I’m not writing a novel, I’m writing a series of poems.’” That mental crutch seemed to work. Still, “I have to confess to a certain amount of cowardice,” she said.