The Monkey Summer

Knoxville’s odd roles in the Trial of the Century

 

The infamous Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tenn., took place one century ago this month. Its centennial is getting international attention.

We don’t think of it as a Knoxville story—but then again, maybe it is. Even if connecting it to Knoxville reminds me of an old grudge.

At long last, in 2014, my favorite Reality TV show, “Antiques Roadshow,” finally came to town, and set up at the Convention Center. I was a reporter then. I knew that beside the main-floor antique assessments, they often visit another historic site in the host city. I couldn’t wait to see what interested them about Knoxville.

When they came to Knoxville, they drove down to Dayton, Tenn., to see the site of the Scopes trial.

The Rhea County Courthouse, where William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow debated some of the great questions of existence, albeit without much practical consequence, is 81 miles southwest of Knoxville, more than an hour’s drive. It may be the farthest Antiques Roadshow has ever strayed from any host city.

After all, Dayton is much closer to Chattanooga, formally part of the Greater Chattanooga Economic Partnership. But the show producers had already been to Chattanooga. And when they did, they stayed in Chattanooga, and somehow found plenty to talk about there. For some reason, when they came to Knoxville, they looked for excuses to get out of town.

However, maybe the Antiques Roadshow folks had a point without knowing it. There are a lot of Knoxville fingerprints on the Dayton trial. And there were days, during that hot summer, that the drama was playing out on Knoxville’s streets as well.

***

Much of Knoxville’s association with the trial has to do with Scopes’ half-forgotten lead defense attorney, John R. Neal, a legendary figure here for half a century. Just introducing him requires some context.

But several of those fingerprints also have to do with what made the trial famous, the journalists who covered it. At least three Knoxville journalists were reporting on the trial for a national audience, and became part of the story.

Meanwhile, several of the principal combatants to the case found reasons to come to Knoxville that summer, making notable public appearances here. One was on his way, but before he could make the trip, he died.

***

One of the lessons of history—and sometimes it seems the main lesson—is that everything is always much more complicated than it seems.

In fact, evolution, and whether theories suggesting that human beings emerged into the universe without much help from God, had been kicking around for a while. One peculiar earlier instance of it arrived in a novel published in 1915 called The Seas of God. The author, originally anonymous, was Anne Armstrong, member of a prominent Kingston Pike family, set the story in a thinly disguised Knoxville (she calls it “Kingsville”), home of a conservative educational institution called Ransom College. The main character’s father, an aging professor, had gotten in trouble there for teaching evolution. The book received some international acclaim in 1915, and then was forgotten.

***

When people think of journalists at Dayton, they first think of H.L. Mencken, “the Sage of Baltimore,” as America’s most famous witness to the Monkey Trial. He was in fact the one who named it the “monkey trial.” He covered the trial closely, if not respectfully. Mencken didn’t have much use for most of his fellow reporters in the press corps, or for most of the people of East Tennessee, but in his accounts of the trial he allowed two exceptions:

“One was Paul Y. Anderson, correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the other was Joseph Wood Krutch, one of the editors of The Nation,” Mencken wrote early in his coverage for the Baltimore Sun. “I am very familiar with the work of both of them, and it is my professional judgment that it is of the first caliber. Anderson is one of the best newspaper reporters in America, and Krutch is one of the best editorial writers.”

Mencken didn’t mention it, but both Anderson and Krutch were from Knoxville. They resembled one another in some ways, both skinny young men with receding hair and thin mustaches. But they were from very different sides of the river, literally and metaphorically, one a rough working-class kid who didn’t go to college.

Raised in an educated and cosmopolitan family, Krutch, earned a Ph.D. at Columbia. His mother’s parents were British immigrants. His father’s family, originally spelled Krutzch, with an umlaut, were partly Von Wiersings, minor nobility in Saxe-Coburg.

But Anderson and Krutch knew each other here, as teenagers on Market Square. They make an interesting contrast.

Future Pulitzer-winning reporter Paul Y. Anderson made most of his career writing for the St. Louis Post-Gazette, when it was a paper much watched. Anderson was actually a Washington correspondent for the paper, and it was his reporting on the Harding-Coolidge Teapot Dome scandal that earned him the Pulitzer. But his East Tennessee roots made him a likely candidate to report  on this particular Rhea County story. Anderson was tough, a country kid from South Knoxville who’d grown up poor in a single-parent household after his father’s early death in a derrick accident. For a good story, he was known to challenge crime bosses and wade into riots.

Unlike Krutch, who had a graduate degree before he went to work in journalism, Anderson didn’t go to college at all. He had been a wage-earning reporter since he was a hustling teenager working first for Captain William Rule’s Knoxville Journal & Tribune.

Krutch was a New York intellectual, reviewed plays on Broadway, wrote books about authors and philosophies. His prose is clever, noted for its distinctive bon mots. Anderson’s strength was hard-nosed reporting on difficult subjects. Anderson became famous for telling stories that people didn’t want him to tell.

Krutch lived in New York, Anderson mostly in Washington. As unlikely as it might seem, the two had been in the same room before. Back in May, 1910, when they were teenagers, Anderson and Krutch had squared off against each other in a public debate in downtown Knoxville at the Market Hall, on the subject of Women’s right to vote. Krutch, representing Knoxville High School, took the positive side of the subject. Anderson, representing Central High, then the county school attended by kids from outside of the city, took the negative. It’s unclear whether the points they argued were points they believed; often in those days intermural debates were on assigned subjects.

***

Still another, younger reporter Mencken didn’t mention, likely because he was unfamiliar with his byline, but he was the young reporter long credited with breaking the story.

Perhaps one or two other reporters beat him to the case, but John Moutoux was one of the first to report about the Scopes challenge in colorful detail. An interesting and unusual guy for several other reasons, Moutoux was originally from Jasper, Ind., but moved here when the Cincinnati-based Scripps-Howard, then a family-owned and well-intended newspaper chain, started a new paper called the Knoxville News. The Sentinel was then an older paper, locally run; late the following year, the two would combine as the News-Sentinel. But in 1925 the Knoxville News was the newest of three daily newspapers in town, and often the most surprising. Often taking progressive stands under the pencil of editor Edward Meeman, the News was the first to pick up on the Smoky Mountains National Park story, and to endorse it publicly. The ambitious park project made some unexpected connections to the Scopes story .

Reporters were famously poor; Moutoux lived with fellow newsman Loye Miller, an older colleague of 26, in an apartment in a rooming house in Fort Sanders, at 13^th and Forest. (Several years later, Miller became the editor of the News-Sentinel. It may be stretching a point to note that another notable future journalist, 15-year-old James Agee, then a student at Knoxville High, lived at his grandparents’ home on Clinch, about three blocks away. In an autobiographical fragment, Agee later remarked that his time in Knoxville ended the summer of the Scopes trial.)

***

The Scopes news broke on May 6, thanks to a short blurb in the Associated Press, and appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country. The Journal ran a short front-page item about it on May 7.

Only 23, Moutoux could tell it was going to be a very big story. He proposed covering it for the News, but the editor declined to foot the bill for the 162-mile round trip to get there and back. Newspaper budgets were always slim, and when few roads were paved, Dayton was not an easy day trip. Moutoux was also a correspondent for AP’s rival, the early news organization then known as United Press, and was not to be dissuaded. In early May, he made the trip to Rhea County on his own dime.

In Dayton he met John Scopes, at 24 just a year older than Moutoux, and they became natural friends. Both of them were smart young professional men, both transplants from the lower Midwest. Although originally from Paducah, Ky., Scopes was living in Salem, Ill. when he went to high school, about 125 miles west of Moutoux’s childhood home in Jasper.

By the second week of May 1925, dozens of papers across the country, from New Jersey to Oregon, carried the byline of John Moutoux, the 23-year-old reporter who rented a room on 13^th Street in Knoxville, as he laid out the known facts of the case.

***

As Moutoux described him, Scopes was a mild-mannered high-school substitute teacher, better known in Dayton as a football coach. He’d arrived just the previous fall, but almost immediately improved Dayton High’s dismal team to such a degree that it was almost competitive with Chattanooga’s Baylor. Scopes became a familiar figure at Robinson’s Drugstore.

At the drugstore, Scopes had befriended Sue Hicks, a young lawyer, as well as a coal operator, in charge of the Cumberland Coal & Iron Co., George Rappleyea. An offbeat, impulsive, and sometimes wild-eyed newcomer from New York, Rappleyea’s emergence as one of Dayton’s leading citizens belies the old trope we all grew up with in TV depictions of small Southern towns, that they’re always resistant or hostile to strangers, especially those from up North. In fact, Southern towns often accept young hotshots from New York, and sometimes even take their advice. Rappleyea had lived in Tennessee for only a couple of years, but was sometimes described as the head of Dayton’s chamber of commerce.

In retrospect, Daytonians should perhaps have been wary of this particular young man, whose restless and sometimes reckless later career would include gun smuggling in the Caribbean and a federal prison sentence.

There are a few different versions of the original conversation among young men at the drugstore, but by most accounts Rappleyea was the “ringleader” of the initiative that became  the “monkey trial.” Although he was a Methodist Sunday-school teacher at the time, he was perplexed by Tennessee’s Butler Act.

Proposed by J.W. Butler, of Lafayette, in Macon County—the very rural county in Middle Tennessee then had only 14,000 residents, but was nonetheless represented by a state senator—the ban on the teaching of evolution in the state’s public schools had passed that March, and was getting some interesting attention.

Similar initiatives in Kentucky and North Carolina had failed when university faculty spoke out against them. To be fair, the Butler proposal caused some controversy in Tennessee. Some clerics opposed the bill as “asinine,” and a petition of Christian ministers, presented to the legislature, called it “unwise,” Nashville’s Peabody College, a teachers’ college, opposed it. The Butler bill was the subject of three hours of debate in the state senate.

UT’s professors, even those who routinely taught about evolution, were silent and aloof. Professor L.R. Hesler, head of the botany department and later honored with the name of a biology building on UT’s campus, sidestepped a reporter’s request for comment: “I am not familiar with the terms of the bill,” he said, the week it passed.

Influencing UT’s silence was the fact that that spring, the university was then on a major campaign for more funding from the state. For the first time ever, the entire legislature was planning a trip to Knoxville to inspect the campus of UT, a place several legislators had never seen before. They made the trip the day after passing the Butler Act.

Knox County’s two state senators, Andrew J. Graves, the former policeman who lived on a farm on Sevierville Pike, and Roy Wallace, the Anderson County native who was freshly elected to the senate, supported the ban. Both were notable supporters of the Smokies park movement.

***

Although Dayton’s mastermind behind the challenge to the Butler Act often represented himself as “Dr. Rappleyea,” and left some reporters with the impression that he had a medical degree, Rappleyea was not a biologist or, for that matter, a lawyer. His degree was in civil engineering, with a particular interest in metallurgy. Still, he couldn’t resist an interesting challenge.

They were all young men. Prosecuting attorney Hicks was only 29, himself. (Sue Hicks was, by the way, a male, unembarrassed that he was named for his mother who died in childbirth.)

Hicks seemed to see the challenge as an opportunity for a good argument that young lawyers enjoy, this one with national or global implications. His older brother, Herbert, was the Rhea County attorney. Both brothers already knew young Scopes, and at Robinson’s drugstore, they proposed that Scopes admit to using the standard biology book, approved by state authorities back in 1919, to bring out the legislature’s paradox. Rappleyea swore out a complaint about his friend’s infractions.

None of them were over 30. In retrospect, this young men’s plot can seem like a frat-boy prank that got out of control.

***

For the record, the textbook in question, Civic Biology, by George Hunter, would raise alarms if it were introduced today, for different reasons. Overtly racist, the book that became the symbol of the teaching of evolution lists five basic types of human beings, identifying Caucasians as “the highest type of all.” It also calls for helping evolution along with eugenics, including measures preventing the “feebleminded” from reproducing.

The book, published in New York in 1914, had been used in Tennessee, with legislative approval, for six years. Legislators who were uncomfortable with teaching evolution in public schools had perhaps not actually read it.

***

Some knew what was going on from the beginning. On May 7, 1925, a front-page “Special to the Knoxville Journal” reported, “The arrest is in the nature of a friendly prosecution in order to get the matter before the Rhea County Grand Jury.”

It was the first most Knoxvillians heard of the case, and that short article includes some details often omitted from modern assumptions—like the fact that a “friendly prosecution” was at the center of it. It would get less friendly in the hot summer weeks to come.

In his first feature story about the case, on May 11, Moutoux remarked that Scopes was a “willing victim.”

“He is extremely modest, almost bashful” Moutoux wrote of the recent University of Kentucky graduate, “a most unusual quality for a football coach. He is a good sport. Students point to the fact that he is the first football coach … who let the players continue to smoke during the season…. Long before the term had ended, Scopes had become the most popular man in the school and perhaps in town.”

Moutoux explained how Rappleyea talked Scopes into being the defendant, the sacrificial lamb.

Moutoux remarked that Scopes, as both a sometime science teacher, and a young, single man who might lose a job without serious consequences, seemed the sacrifice. Scopes would visit Knoxville several times in weeks to come, and he stayed when Moutoux in Fort Sanders.

***

It was only a few days before the grownups got involved.

One of the first two defense attorneys announced was a Dayton lawyer John Godsey, but about eight weeks after the announcement, he suffered a “nervous breakdown incident” and withdrew. (His death at age 57 not quite seven years later was blamed on the fact that he had been “ill of a nervous trouble for several years.”)

Scopes’ other original defense attorney was already a bit of a regional legend. The fact that John R. Neal of Knoxville would be the lead defense attorney did not surprise many. Fearless and individualistic, Neal had a soft spot for lost causes. And he was from Rhea County, himself; he knew the territory. Son of a congressman, Neal spent much of his youth in Washington, and regarded it as a second home. He grew up on speaking terms with the U.S. Constitution. After his father’s early death, the brilliant student graduated from UT with the class of 1893, not quite 17 years old. From there Neal went to Vanderbilt for two degrees, and then Columbia for a Ph.D. At age 22, Neal was a professor at the Denver College of Law, but riding the trains back and forth frequently, kept a foot in East Tennessee. Elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives, he passed bills that made a substantial difference in establishing regular funding for UT. By 1909, he was a law professor at UT, when that law school was just gaining national credibility.

William Jennings Bryan was a three-time Democratic Party nominee for the U.S. presidency, and former U.S. secretary of state, during the internationally dramatic Wilson years. If rather than volunteering to help prosecute John Scopes, at age 65, Bryan had simply died—two months before he actually did—he might be exalted today as a liberal hero. The statesman who denounced the international oligarchy back in the 1890s, Bryan was also an outspoken opponent of U.S. imperialism. He was the pacifist secretary of state who quit in protest of Wilson’s “belligerence” in regard to World War I. He had favored women’s suffrage, direct election of senators, a 40-hour work week, and an income tax, all of which were opposed by many conservatives. But in his 60s, he had become more preoccupied with prohibition of alcoholic beverages—which, against all odds, had passed as part of the U.S. Constitution—and fundamentalist faith.

In his early days, Clarence Darrow had publicly supported Bryan’s progressive presidential campaigns. The two lawyers did have several things in common, including memories of childhoods in modest families in the small-town Midwest.

Bryan had been in Knoxville several times in his career, first during his 1896 campaign for the presidency, and had personal friends here. At least once he spoke for the Chautauqua-like Summer School of the South, the big intellectual festival on UT’s campus. He was U.S. secretary of state when he was one of several progressive speakers at the 1913 National Conservation Exposition at Chilhowee Park. His talk that October, in the marble bandstand that remains there today, was titled “The Measure of a Man,” an ecumenically religious optimistic take on human achievement. It reportedly drew 40,000, most of whom could expect only to glimpse “the Great Commoner.”

A local favorite, Bryan returned to speak at Market Square in 1920, and to the Lyric Theatre in 1922.

The Scopes trial is often framed as a matter of religious intolerance, and many who piled on in opposition to teaching evolution did so with blazing hellfire self-righteousness. In truth, evolution can be unsettling to a lot of belief systems. Darwin himself had been troubled by the implications of his own theories, which were hardly flattering to human beings and their potential. Evolution posits that human beings, like all animals, arrived on the planet accidentally. It tells us where we came from, but not that we’re any more important and worthy of respect than termites or jellyfish. For that, there’s a damnable lack of proof.

Bryan, in particular, feared that evolution pulled the rug out from under the whole concept of morality and even democracy. As he aged, he became, more conspicuously than in his radical progressive days, an adamant fundamentalist.

Today, we associate the term “modernism” with art and architecture, but in the 1920s, “modernism” often referred to a compromise between Biblical and secular tenets, in particular doctrines that accepted both faith in a deity and the science of evolution. Bryan opposed modernism, and in some ways helped to define modern fundamentalism. Famous as a speaker on national stages for over 30 years, Bryan was perhaps too confident in his abilities to persuade.

By a startling coincidence, given the fact that Bryan’s home, of Salem, Ill., is so far away—more than 400 miles northwest of Dayton—and so small, it was a town that was shared, in part, by the defendant. Bryan was already Salem’s much-revered native son when John Scopes arrived to attend high school there.

That news of Bryan’s involvement was hardly out before the most famous criminal-defense attorney in America, Clarence Darrow, sent a telegram to John R. Neal in Knoxville, offering his services, as well as those of his close associate, Dudley Field Malone. “In view of the fact that scientists are so much interested in the pursuit of knowledge that they cannot make the money that lecturers and Florida real-estate command,” Darrow wrote, “in case you should need us we are willing, without fees or expenses, to help the defense of Prof. Scopes in any way you may suggest or direct.” (Although Scopes was often referred to as “Prof. Scopes” that summer, the modest football coach was always quick to correct that designation. He just had a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kentucky.)

Neal’s acceptance of Darrow’s offer angered civil-liberties advisors on his own side, those who knew Darrow’s aggressive style and admitted agnosticism might make new enemies for the cause of teaching evolution. The Nashville Tennessean compared Darrow’s role to “the use of a siege gun to slay a sparrow.”

By that time, the whole country was fascinated, along with much of the western world. The addition of major national intellectual and political celebrities made the playful conversations in Robinson’s drugstore had snowballed into a something like a global legal and philosophical crisis.  At least two journalists from Great Britain made the trip to Dayton to cover the story.

In late June, it was announced the New York magazine known as The Nation, which had a reputation as a liberal intellectual publication, would be following the trial closely, and that reporting it from Dayton would be its well-known young associate editor, Joseph Krutch.

At 31, Krutch was then best known as The Nation’s theater critic, a job he held for decades, and despite his many other projects—he was at that time working on a literary biography, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius, which would be well-reviewed.

As an undergraduate student at UT, he had been editor of a pocket publication called The Magazine, and had tangled with the dean over a disrespectful article he’d published there, an article ridiculing Prohibition (in early 1915, even before the ban on alcohol sales took effect nationally). Just weeks before graduation, the dean threatened Krutch with expulsion. In his later memoir, More Lives than One, Krutch recounts that threat in the dean’s office, without mentioning his name. It was likely J.D. Hoskins, a lifelong UT administrator known for his lack of tolerance for anything akin to nonsense. Later that year, Hoskins prioritized the investigation of another student whose odd haircut seemed to form a “T.” But Harcourt Morgan was prominent at UT at the time, too, working closely with Hoskins for many years, and may have been party to the controversy.

When Krutch came south from New York to cover Scopes, Krutch spent part of his time in Knoxville, much of it at his alma mater, trying to find someone to speak in favor of Scopes, and against the Butler Act.

He was also here to visit with his family, especially his mother, widowed two years earlier when her husband had died in a gruesome elevator accident downtown. Always known as Joe Krutch in his youth, her writer son had begun honoring her by adding her English maiden name, Wood, to his own byline.

She lived on Main Street, in the afternoon shadow of UT’s Hill, with her older son, the reclusive Charles E. Krutch, who was at that time a repairman for the Edison Ediphone company, which marketed Dictaphones invented by Thomas Edison. Charles Krutch would later be better known as a professional photographer.

It was a creative family. Joe’s Aunt Louise was a music teacher, and his Uncle Charlie was an notable artist, an old man in 1925 but more famous than in his youth, mainly for his Smokies landscapes. They were perhaps all startled by the headline of Joe’s story in a national magazine:

Krutch’s article, dated July 5, just before the trial, appeared in The Nation with the headline supplied by a New York editor, “Tennessee: Where Cowards Rule.”

“At Dayton no one is afraid to tell me what he thinks,” wrote Krutch. “But when I go to Knoxville, seat of the State University and one of the three largest cities in Tennessee, I enter a different world…. the remarks of all might be summarized in what were the actual words of one: ‘I know it’s a damnfool law—but I won’t be quoted!’ These and other Knoxvillians are defensive and indignant; they resent in various terms the publicity they have attracted, and they protest against being judged by the laws their legislature passes; but these Knoxvillians will not admit that, fundamentally, they are to blame. In Tennessee, bigotry is militant and sincere; intelligence is timid and hypocritical, and in that fact lies the explanation of the sorry role which she is playing in contemporary history.”

Morgan, a biologist by training, had taught practical evolution himself, as a fact of life in the study of all sorts of animals. If Krutch doesn’t use Morgan’s name, he perhaps doesn’t need to: “The president of the university, who ought to know better, can think of no plan more courageous than weakly to disobey the law when necessary, while pretending to the legislature that he approves of its acts, or, more accurately, gives it to understand he will not embarrass it by publicly stating his opinion of the law which both he and it know to be asinine. Concerned above all else with his precious appropriations, it never occurs to him to ask whether his chief duty might not possibly be something other than wangling money from a cowardly legislature….

“As for the faculty which serves under this unhappy president, it is by no means comfortable.” To illustrate faculty discomfort at UT for a national readership, Krutch outlined the story of UT’s “slaughter of the Ph.D.s” from 1923, without mentioning that one of the victims was Scopes’ defense counsel. He continued, “so the others are drawn into the vicious circle of fear which includes nearly every public or semi-public man in the State. The legislator is afraid of some fundamentalist hid in the mountains; the president is afraid of the legislature; the faculty is afraid of the president; and the newspaper editor … is afraid of someone who is afraid of someone who is afraid of someone else.

“Tennessee has no idea how this vicious circle may be broken. From her experience with prohibition she has learned that it is much easier to violate the law than it is to oppose it, and she was proposing quietly to apply this useful lesson to the anti-evolution law when along came Dayton to disturb her contented anarchy and to bring her, bewildered and indignant, face to face with the laws which she has allowed to be written upon the statute books.”

Moutoux’s paper, the mostly open-minded Knoxville News, printed most of Krutch’s essay without comment. The Sentinel was then a separate newspaper run by James H. Moore, who was described as an old-fashioned southern gentleman who had worked in newspapers in the Carolinas and Georgia before moving to Knoxville in 1914. His paper responded with perhaps the most withering editorial in 20^th-century local newspaper history. Referring to Krutch, the Sentinel opined, “we wish this native son to know that we are not proud of him, in view of his odorous exploit. Knoxville and Tennessee will not reserve for him any niche in the future halls of fame and enroll his name among the sons to whom they will point with pride. We presume he was born for some good purpose. There is nothing in nature or creation that is without design. The humble tumblebug serves a purpose in the wondrous plan. But we do not envy him his job or covet his company.”

Commenting on that slap decades later, Krutch claimed that such “hard words are honey to such a young rebel as I fancied myself.”

Sentinel editor Moore died unexpectedly about a year later, at age 69. For the record, in 2025 Krutch does indeed have a niche in a hall of fame, enshrined in bronze at UT’s Hodges Library. Some of his words are engraved in marble at Krutch Park, the public park endowed by his older brother, Charles. He’s also highlighted in our recent Walking Literary Guide.

***

Of course, other reporters from Knoxville’s three papers attended the trial and duly covered the proceedings. We don’t know all their names, but one is worth mentioning. Cary Ross, freshly graduated from Yale and not yet 22, was on the Journal’s staff in the Dayton courthouse. Previously best known as the center of attention at society occasions at Cherokee Country Club, on July 8 he was announced as a member of the Scopes staff of Rule’s Knoxville Journal, when the paper was operating out of the elegant new Arcade building on Gay Street. He was, at the time, an aspiring writer, and published modernist poetry in several national literary journals, but he apparently never earned a byline during his brief time working for the local press.

Paul Y. Anderson arrived in Dayton in early July. He had been reporting on judicial corruption at the federal level and political relevance of the national Ku Klux Klan, and had just written an appreciative obituary essay about progressive Wisconsin politician Robert La Follette, whom he’d known personally.

Anderson had also covered the Leopold and Loeb murder trial, perhaps Clarence Darrow’s most famous case before Scopes. In early May Anderson had interviewed the 68-year-old Darrow, considered to be America’s most brilliant and, by his batting average for acquittals, most successful criminal-defense attorney, about his intention to retire. Positing that a perfect world would be one without lawyers, Darrow said he was tired of the fight, and cynical about the antagonistic justice system. “I don’t know what justice is,” Darrow told Anderson. “Courts, instead of being research laboratories to find out the truth and determine the cure, are simply cockpits for lawyers to fight in.”

Anderson was one of the first to reserve a seat at the courthouse in Dayton. He found humor in the carnival atmosphere. A banner on a store declared “Darwin is Right” and then, beneath it, in smaller letters, “Inside.” Mr. Jim Darwin ran the dry-goods store in Dayton.

***

The Scopes trial happened to coincide with what would have been a major event in the career of John R. Neal, anyway. After UT had fired him, Neal successful launched his own College of Law. Of course, he didn’t have an actual campus, just a few rented rooms on Market Street, so for his first commencement, he persuaded Knoxville High School on Fifth Avenue to let him use their auditorium. He had a speaker everyone had heard of. His new partner in Dayton, Mr. Clarence Darrow, would come to Knoxville to speak to Neal’s graduating class on June 23.

The auditorium was packed that evening, standing room only. Darrow charmed his audience with his unpretentious demeanor. “Darrow, a stooped figure in baggy clothes with a kindly and melancholy look on his face, was loved by his audience the moment he began speaking,” Moutoux wrote. “Tolerance and love for his fellow man radiated from him and into the men and women who listened to him intently.”

Darrow spoke to the attentive Knoxville crowd. “We have fallen into evil ways in this country. Every organization sits up at night drafting their pet theories into laws which they want to inflict on the rest of us. They are binding citizens hand and foot and destroying individual action…

He seemed to try to soothe what he’d observed of embarrassment about the state legislature. “They’re all alike, wherever you go, doing the things that will bring them the most votes…. When and where was there ever a legislature that knew anything about history or science or philosophy?”

With him was Bainbridge Colby, another of the defense attorneys. Colby shared an odd resume detail with William Jennings Bryan. Both men, working as opposing lawyers in the Dayton courthouse, had served as secretary of stage under President Wilson, Colby more recently.

For Neal’s graduating class, and the assembled audience, Colby underscored some of Darrow’s points. “We are living today under a rule of statutory behest—as absolute as the will of an absolute monarch. We thought we had gotten beyond the rule of tyrannical despots and czars, but we find ourselves in this country today living under the rule of absolutism.”

Colby was much more positive about the legal profession than was Darrow. “Lawyers are needed today as never before—lawyers who will opposed arrogant and stupid leadership … who will have indomitable courage to stand up and fight for their convictions.”

Many came looking for John Scopes, who was said to be there. He was, but unobtrusively up in the balcony.

***

Defense attorney Dudley Field Malone, Darrow’s associate, came to Knoxville on the last weekend of June, accompanied by John R. Neal, again with John Scopes himself in tow. In the last year of her life, Suffrage activist Lizzie Crozier French had arranged for Malone, recent candidate for governor of New York, to speak to a female audience at the old Lyceum on Walnut Street at Cumberland. Knoxville’s leading suffragist had been an admirer of Malone’s activism in favor of the 19^th Amendment, assuring women the right to vote. However, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union publicly boycotted the talk, partly due to the fact that they said Malone’s partner, Clarence Darrow, in his talk to Neal’s class, had ridiculed the 18^th Amendment—which banned alcoholic beverages, commencing Prohibition, which was then fully in effect.

Hundreds did attend. French introduced John R. Neal, who introduced Malone.

“The women of America can take care of the morals of their children without the help of Mr. [William Jennings] Bryan or state legislatures,” he said. Declaring himself to be a Christian, Malone continued, “Mr. Bryan says that a person can’t believe in both the Bible and the theory of evolution. That is nonsense. That’s like saying a man can’t be devoted to both his wife and his mother—different kinds of devotion, of course, but both sacred.” He added, “No more serious invasion of the sacred principles of liberty than the recent act against the teaching of evolution in Tennessee has ever been attempted.”

At the end of his speech that Saturday morning, Malone introduced one of the few men in the room, a slender figure sitting quietly in the back of the Lyceum. John Scopes declined to speak.

***

The trial in Dayton attracted several writers, including Westbrook Pegler, the Minnesota native who would earn the Pulitzer Prize for his investigations of corruption in labor unions. Later known for his hardcore conservatism he was a coiner of catchphrases; we can thank Pegler for the term “bleeding-heart liberal.”

The most famous journalist in Dayton that summer was the Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken. An even better-known coiner of phrases, he was the one who dubbed it the “monkey trial.” Although still admired for his reckless candor, sometimes revived as a sort of pre-counterculture hero, the same quality also makes him hard to stomach.

Although Maryland is in several respects as historically Southern as Tennessee, Mencken was skeptical of Southerners and fundamentalist Christians. When Mencken began using the phrase “the Bible Belt,” the previous year, he wasn’t being nice. But Mencken was also skeptical of several other minorities, including mathematicians and those with any great faith in democracy.

There is good blood everywhere, even in the mountains,” Mencken wrote for the Sun. “During the dreadful buffooneries of Bryan and [Judge John T.] Raulston last week, two typical specimens sat at the press table.” That was when he described Anderson and Krutch with admiration for their national journalism.

“Well, both were there as foreigners,” Mencken concluded about Anderson and Krutch. “Both were working for papers that could not exist in Tennessee.”

For what it’s worth, Krutch’s own admiration for Mencken had limits. “Much as I admired Mencken,” he later recalled, Dayton “was one of several occasions when I found in him a brutal rudeness too strong for my taste….”

Somehow they found themselves in the same room in the same July of 1925, reporting on the same trial, and with similar points of view.

***

But of all the Knoxvillians in the room, the one who had the greatest influence on the trial was the lead defense attorney. John R. Neal was already a bit of a legend. Unlike the journalists, he spent most of the rest of his life here.

Mencken admired Neal as much as he did the Knoxville journalists, and thought he’d been badly treated by his home state.

“It was not until the trial was two days old that any Tennessee lawyers of influence and dignity went to the side of Dr. John R. Neal,” Mencken wrote.

“The prevailing attitude toward Neal himself was also very amazing. He is an able lawyer and a man of repute, and in any Northern state his courage would get the praise it deserves. But in Tennessee, even the intelligentsia seem to find that he has done something discreditable by sitting at the trial table with Darrow, Hays, and Malone.

“The state buzzes with trivial, idiotic gossip about him—that he dresses shabbily, that he has political aspirations and so on. What if he does and has?  He has carried himself, in this case, in a way that does high credit to his native state. But his native state, instead of being proud of him, simply snarls at him behind his back.”

***

Then came what everyone had ostensibly been waiting for over the previous two months of hubbub, the trial itself.

“Dayton at present is a paradise for the man who loves to argue,” wrote Anderson. “Step on the sidewalk anywhere between the Hotel Aqua and the courthouse and in two minutes you can get into an argument about anything from religion to hog-breeding.”

The trial itself is well known; transcripts are easy to find.

The defense lined up an impressive series of experts, several of them academics on the biological logic of evolutionary theory. It has been remarked that although one of them came from the University of Kentucky, none of them were from UT, the nearby major university that was then run by a professional biologist. They also introduced some clerical authorities, speaking positively of the compatibility of Christianity and evolutionary theory. One of them was a Knoxvillian, Rev. Walter Whitaker, the rector at St. John’s Episcopal, an early inspiration to James Agee, whom Whitaker had baptized. Then in his late 50s, Rev. Whitaker was considered a “modernist.”

On the other hand, Anderson remarked, “Bryan glorified ignorance.” Confident in his faith, Bryan seemed proud in his own lack of interest in both biology and ancient history.

On the other hand, modern scientists reading Darrow’s words note that his repeated comparisons with physics exposed himself as a strict Newtonian. Scientists of 1925, familiar with the contemporary work of Einstein, Bohr, and Planck, and the newer ideas of relativity and quantum theory, could have found fault with several of Darrow’s almost-religious Newtonian certainties.

Darrow did most of the speaking for the defense. If you watch any film version of Inherit the Wind, you might gather he was the only defense attorney in the room, and some historians suggest that Neal limited his remarks to procedural issues. But the Knoxville lawyer who enlisted him did occasionally come up with a quotable phrase. “We speak here for the rights of minorities,” Anderson quoted Neal on July 13, “for whose protection the framers of the Constitution established these guarantees.”

The tone in Dayton shifted during the trial, and Anderson suggested Neal was partly to blame.

“The spirit of holiday with which the Scopes trial opened has disappeared, Anderson wrote on July 15. “Instead the air is pervaded with a hostility bordering dangerously on hatred. It grew when John R. Neal, former dean of the University of Tennessee law school, denounced William J. Bryan as a man ‘who is either profoundly ignorant of the Constitution or profoundly contemptuous of the rights which it guarantees.”

William Jennings Bryan was summoning the role of Prophet to brace for the storm.

“With his matchless voice and magnetic gesture, he has called upon the people to save their children from the slimy tentacles of atheism and the jaws of hell,” wrote Anderson. “He has been heard. The clans are gathering. Sullenly, with lowering brows and smoldering eyes, Rhea County is rallying to its God.”

***

Darrow took the astonishing tactic of calling the prosecuting attorney as a witness for the defense, as a ‘Bible expert.” To some extent, Darrow did what the defense advisors feared, attacking fundamentalist faith itself, a battle perhaps unnecessary for the matter at hand. Bryan, who hadn’t tried a case in more than 30 years, and was more accustomed to giving prepared speeches than debating in public, crumbled.

It seems to have been about then that Paul Y. Anderson began to sympathize with Bryan. This rough-edged South Knoxville quarryman’s son recorded a brutally ambiguous assessment of Darrow’s performance, hinting at the complexity of the conversation.

“On a rude platform where was convened the trial of John T. Scopes, Clarence Darrow placed William Jennings Bryan on the witness stand, and what followed was an event in the intellectual history of the world. It was magnificent and tragic, stirring and pathetic, and above all it was pervaded with the atmosphere of grandeur which befitted a death grapple between two great ideas. Two old men, one eloquent, magnetic and passionate, the other cold, impassive and philosophical, met as the champions of these ideas, and as remorselessly as the jaws of a rock crusher upon the crumbling mass of limestone, one of these old men caught and ground the other between his massive erudition and ruthless logic. Let there be no doubts about that. Bryan was broken, if ever a man was broken. Darrow never spared him. It was masterful, but it was pitiful.

“It was profoundly moving. To see this wonderful man, for after all he was wonderful, this man whose silver voice and majestic mien had stirred millions, to see him humbled and humiliated before the vast crowd which had come to adore him, was sheer tragedy, nothing else.”

Hardly anyone, Evangelist or scientist, left Dayton unrattled.

It was all unnecessary. Scopes was guilty of teaching evolution, and had admitted as much. The Rhea County jury met only briefly. Scopes was guilty, but it was no felony. After all the drama and personal crisis, the fine was set at $100.

***

The trial took place just as conservationists and businessmen in Knoxville were touting the Smokies as a national park. On the weekend of July 18, a committee from Knoxville including Col. David Chapman, Carlos Campbell, and Wiley Brownlee hosted a dozen newspapermen from Chicago, Philadelphia, London, and New York, on a venture into the Smokies—to Elkmont, Cades Cove, and Gregory’s Bald, with some horseback riding options. They all met in Knoxville first, at the Farragut Hotel, before taking automobiles to Elkmont, where they spent the night at the Appalachian Club. Among the guests was Anderson, who was from here but had likely never been so close to the mountains, mostly forbidden and inaccessible in his Knoxville youth.

The Smokies were a prevailing theme that summer. Moutoux had been one of the early champions of the park movement, describing for the News the steps that made it happen.

People on both sides of the evolution issue had been supporters of the park movement. By July 22, Darrow, Bryan, and Malone had all been formally invited to visit the Smokies. They had all expressed interest in visiting the prospective park, and both accepted separate invitations to spend some time in the privately owned cottages at Elkmont. Darrow arrived first, arriving in Knoxville on July 23 and staying overnight before traveling into the mountains. Introduced to a capacity crowd at the Lyric Theatre (formerly Staub’s Opera House) by John R. Neal, Darrow may have surprised his audience by speaking mainly on the life of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

A dog was to blame for the only remark Darrow made about the trial, and it had to do with an inside joke concerning an unexpected interruption. Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan had included the question of whether man is a mammal. Bryan wasn’t sure about that.

Darrow’s talk at the Lyric was interrupted by a surprise, a “small fuzzy dog” that wandered across the stage from the wings. “That’s a mammal,” said Darrow.

***

The following night, Darrow was at the Appalachian Club in Elkmont. Bryan was reportedly on his way. He’d been invited to speak in Knoxville, too. Their trips would not overlap.

With a party that included Col. Chapman, John Scopes, and John R. Neal, Darrow hiked to Sugarlands on Saturday. It sounds like it was a similar tour to the one offered to the Dayton journalists several days earlier.

The few discernible trails in the Smokies were hardly national-park worthy. On Sunday, they rode horses to Gregory’s Bald that Sunday, up what was described as a “rough trail.” Darrow was the first to reach the top.

“I have been in most of the national parks of this country, and I have seen many mountains, but never have I seen a view to surpass this,” Darrow said. “By all means this should be conserved as a national park.”

***

After the trial Bryan had tarried in Dayton, giving several talks in the Chattanooga area, most or all of them religious in nature. He had prepared a talk, “What Will I Do with Jesus?” that he was planning to give in Knoxville’s Lyric Theatre and also at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the big tabernacle that was then used mainly for religious events.

Bryan’s Knoxville host would be Lewis Hopkins Spilman, one of Knoxville’s leading attorneys, one of very few qualified to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was an important figure in Knoxville outside of courts, as president of the Board of Education, a director of Brookside Mills, and a trustee of Maryville College. He was also a sportsman who sometimes wrote about hunting and fishing for national magazines, generally using a pseudonym. Born in northern Kentucky, he spent part of his childhood in Salem, Ill.—the former home he shared with both Bryan and Scopes. (The Salem connection is pretty odd. More than 400 miles northwest of Knoxville, it was a town of only a thousand when Bryan and Spilman lived there, maybe twice that size when Scopes later lived there.)

But Spilman had known Bryan since childhood. He didn’t comment on the case in 1925 except to express his admiration for Bryan’s sincerity and devotion to a “righteous cause”—though the righteous cause Spilman specified wasn’t the one in Dayton, but Bryan’s support for a church-building project in Hollywood, Fla.

Spilman lived in a large, comfortable house atop Laurel Avenue’s hill in Fort Sanders—just around the corner from Moutoux’s apartment. There he would host Bryan, at least for a summer evening.

The highlight of Bryan’s trip to Knoxville was to be his talk for the ABC Bible Class on Sunday, Aug. 2. The large interdenominational men’s group met regularly, sometimes to greet nationally famous speakers, from baseball evangelist Billy Sunday to World War hero Sgt. Alvin York. Bryan himself had spoken to the class three years earlier, probably the last time he was in Knoxville. The ABCs had tried to get Bryan to come to speak again in Knoxville before the trial, but it didn’t work out. Before the trial, Bryan had seemed hard to budge.

Carlos Campbell, chief of the Chamber of Commerce and primary promoter of the Smokies park movement, was helping to organize it all. Bryan’s talk would be held at the Lyric Theatre, where Darrow had recently spoken about Tolstoy. The charge of 25 cents per pass would be collected and distributed between the Kiwanis Free Farm in East Knoxville, the Babies’ Home, the Old Ladies’ Home, and the Beverly Hills Sanitarium, the tuberculosis hospital up in Fountain City.

Still in Dayton, Bryan was on the telephone with Sanford, finally confirming some details early on the previous Sunday afternoon, July 26. Then Bryan put down the phone and went to take a nap.

About 4:30 that afternoon, the family chauffeur went in to rouse Bryan, and discovered the Great Commoner was no longer breathing.

His death was ascribed to apoplexy, a more polite and euphonious term for what we would call a massive stroke.

***

Clarence Darrow learned of Bryan’s death in Townsend, as he returned from the horseback adventure on Gregory’s Bald. He was one of the first to offer a tribute. “I have known Mr. Bryan since 1896, and supported him twice for the presidency” he said. “He was a man of strong convictions and always espoused his cause with ability and courage. I differed with him on many questions, but always respected his sincerity and courage.”

For years, Darrow would deny reports that he greeted the news with a rude and dismissive remark.

Reporters found Scopes in Knoxville, on his way from Elmont back to Dayton. He remarked, “Honor is due to this man who for more than a quarter of a century was a leader of this country.”

***

The Bryan funeral train left Dayton. In no hurry, it proceeded north to Arlington Cemetery. (He had served as a colonel in the National Guard during the Spanish-American War, training troops for combat.)

One of those aboard, who described it in the greatest detail, was Paul Y. Anderson, who observed the almost religious adoration with which people in the countryside and small towns greeted Bryan. It was a little bit different when it arrived at the Southern Railway station in downtown Knoxville.

“Into Knoxville, and there awaited an imposing throng. With a thousand umbrellas raised against a broiling sun, they stood tightly jammed in the narrow yards, perching on boxcars and baggage trucks. They massed by hundreds on the viaduct overhead, they thronged the nearby streets—fully 10,000…. Once more the casket was opened, and as the huge crowd pressed from the edge to take advantage of the brief 20-minute halt, girls and women were literally crushed against the side of the train, and sharp-rough work was required of the police. [As was often the case, Anderson was liberal with his use of the term “literally.”]

“This was the most impressive single spectacle of the trip. The Mayor had issued a proclamation suspending all business during the presence of the funeral party. [That would have been Mayor Ben Morton, another major supporter of the Smokies park movement.] But here, too, was less of the atmosphere of respect, and more of curiosity. It was a curious, talkative crowd, unlike the silent, staring throngs in the smaller towns.”

The monkey trial and in particular the death of William Jennings Bryan came about just as record companies were still trying to figure out what to do with country music. Charlie Oaks, the blind singer-songwriter from Kentucky who spent most of his days playing for nickels at the Southern Railway station, had gotten the attention of some academic folklorists for his disaster songs, some of them about tragedies he had witnessed almost directly, like the New Market Train Wreck. He was likely there when Bryan’s funeral train arrived. Weeks later, it was in New York, recording for Vocalion label his latest song, “The Death of William Jennings Bryan.”

Another, more scholarly songwriter, Vernon Dalhart, recorded “William Jennings Bryan’s Last Fight.” In those days country music was mainly about disasters, and for most country music fans, there was none more poignant.

***

For a year and a half, there was speculation here and elsewhere that the Tennessee Supreme Court would hand down its decision in a meeting at Knoxville, the East Tennessee base of the state’s highest court. The Supreme Court met in Knoxville’s county courthouse at least once a year. The next session would be in September 1925, and observers seem to have assumed the case would rise to the top of their agenda, and would be considered there.

“There shall be no backing out this time,” Darrow said. “I shall go to Knoxville.”

Later it was believed that it would be here in September 1926. But the court’s final decision actually came about in January 1927, at a session in Nashville, and it was anticlimactic.

***

Rappleyea and Neal, without question the Dayton story’s two leading eccentrics, found common cause on what Neal likely considered his most urgent issue in 1925, saving the Tennessee River from private development. Eight years before TVA, several private power companies were proposing dams on the river. Working together, they both making speeches strongly opposing that private development. Neal is remembered in part as a prophet of TVA, a promoter of the idea that the public should control the river, at a time when several profit-focused power companies were trying to buy up and harness its hydroelectric potential for profit.

About three months after the trial concluded, Knoxville’s Unitarian congregation invited Rappleyea to speak here. That denomination lacked an auditorium, but often used the Lyceum, which was most associated with Lizzie Crozier French, who was also an early Unitarian.

On Nov. 9, at that Walnut Street institution, he gave an oddly beatific sort of talk, quoted in part: “A scientist is a religious man. In his studies he finds order through the universe. He finds a plan: and back of that there must be Planner. Scientists find God through the study of nature. We can be the captain of whatever ship life has given us—whether a fine sailing ship or a frail, rudderless boat. We can steer it to the port of Happiness.”

His metaphors were interesting, considering that he spent much of the rest of his career working with seagoing vessels.

Rappleyea, the ostensible leader of the Dayton Chamber of Commerce, left town six months after the trial, protesting that “life has become unbearable” there. He moved to Mobile.

While there, he noticed there was a ship in the bay called the City of Knoxville. Apparently since he’d recently been there, he invited himself on board and wrote a story about it for publication. He noted that none of the ship’s crew had ever been to Knoxville.

In remarks quoted in February 1926, Rappleyea stated that a second trial on evolution should be held in Knoxville, where—despite what Krutch had written—the home of a major university would give the subject a more thoughtful hearing than it would receive in Nashville.

***

But the meeting finally came in Nashville, in early 1927, and didn’t settle much. Without directly addressing the issue of whether evolution was a creditable way of looking at things, the court rejected each of the bases for overturning the Dayton verdict on strictly legal grounds.

***

After some years in Mobile, Rappleyea wound up in Baltimore, home of Mencken, in the late 1930s, but later still moved back to the Gulf, where he ran a business manufacturing military landing craft in New Orleans, then Shreveport, when he joined in a partnership with swing bandleader Guy Lombardo to sell those surplus boats.  He was eventually arrested for a complicated scheme to ship firearms to British Honduras, ostensibly as part of a plot to destabilize the Cuban government (some years before Castro’s Communist coup). After doing prison time at a federal facility in Texas, he settled on the North Carolina seacoast, and still later, to Miami, as he attempted to create an improved sort of concrete he called plasmofalt, made, he said, from blackstrap molasses.

When Rappleyea died in Miami in 1966, the news seems not to have stirred any stories at all.

***

John R. Neal ran his famous renegade school of law for about 30 years. UT’s law school wasn’t bigger, in terms of students, until the 1940s, often featuring prominent guest lecturers, including state Supreme Court justices and U.S. senators. Clarence Darrow returned to Knoxville in 1928 to speak to Neal’s class. Meanwhile he often took on cases in the public interest, including striking unionists.

He continued to agitate for public control of the Tennessee River, which arrived in 1933 with TVA. Neal was nominated to be the Tennessean among the first board of directors; instead, that role went to his old nemesis, Harcourt Morgan, who quit his job as UT’s president to accept the post.

Though Neal found much to criticize about it. His own home town near Dayton, Rhea Springs, was flooded by Watts Bar Lake in the 1940s.

In his later years, he lived in the Hotel Watauga on North Gay Street, above Regas Restaurant. At age 77, he moved to Spring City, near his old home, in a house constructed of lumber from his old family home. He died there in 1959.

***

John Moutoux remained based in Knoxville for some years, though his career with both the United Press and the newly combined News-Sentinel took him to other parts of the country for months at a time, as he was the KNS’s Washington correspondent for a while. He married a local woman, Katherine Jones, daughter of a prominent marble baron. Working as an investigative reporter for the News-Sentinel, he was arrested on several occasions, notably in 1937 while covering a strike at the Alcoa plant, for “inciting to riot.”

He left Knoxville in his 40s to work for the office of war information during World War II, then to write for PM, a short-lived New York tabloid. Approaching 50, he accepted a desk job as news director for the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency. In retirement, he and his wife operated a fruit orchard in northern Virginia.

***

Cary Ross, likely the youngest member of Knoxville’s press corps, was more an aspiring poet than a journalist, and spent much of the rest of the decade in Paris and Berlin, an “elegant idler,” as one biographer later described him, a member of the Lost Generation. He visited his hometown several times through the 1930s, staying at Rostrevor on Lyons View and maintaining friendships with locals like photographer Charles Krutch. But in the big cities he became close to major figures of the Jazz Age, including writers Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, architect Philip Johnson, photographer Alfred Stieglitz and especially artist Georgia O’Keeffe. On the personal staff of director Alfred Barr, he was on hand for the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. However, his troubled live ended too early, with his death in Baltimore at age 47. His Knoxville sister, who became known as Helen Ross McNabb, devoted her life to improving prospects for mental health.

Paul Y. Anderson won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1929 for explaining the complexities of the Teapot Dome scandal. A frequent visitor to his hometown, he spent several summers in Knoxville, generally staying with his widowed mother, who lived on Phillips Street by the river in South Knoxville, and golfing at Holston Hills’ new course. Long struggling with alcoholism, he committed suicide in Washington in 1938, but is buried at Island Home Baptist churchyard, under a stone paid for by journalistic admirers from across the nation, including Heywood Broun.

***

Joseph Wood Krutch had an extraordinary career, writing several books, both scholarly and controversial, while best known to the public as a critic of hundreds of shows on Broadway. Approaching 60, he left New York and his often scholarly subjects behind, and moved to the desert southwest, to become a naturalist writer, today considered by some to be a godfather of environmentalist writing, especially admired by counterculture naturalist Edward Abbey.

Like Anderson, Krutch later won a major writing distinction, the National Book Award—not a Pulitzer for exposing a well-hidden political scandal, as in Anderson’s case, but for a scholarly work of philosophy, The Measure of Man (1954).

He returned to East Tennessee rarely, but was here in the last year of his life to visit with his widowed and retired older brother Charles, who died in 1981. The last surviving member of the Krutch family, he left the city with a surprise, about one million dollars to establish a public park in the middle of downtown.

***

John Scopes wished to maintain his career in education, and earned a masters in geology from the University of Chicago, but blamed his notoriety with the fact that he couldn’t get a good job teaching. He returned to his home in Kentucky, married, and had two sons. He took a wild stab at running for Congress on the Socialist ticket in 1932. But then, like a lot of geologists, he wound up scouting for oil in Texas and later Louisiana. He finally lived in Shreveport, working for United Gas.

In 1960, Scopes and two “imposters,” all of whom identified themselves as John Thomas Scopes, framed the dilemma for a panel of celebrity guessers on the popular CBS show, “To Tell the Truth,” hosted by Bud Collyer and sponsored by Dristan Nasal Mist. The celebrity judges were actors Tom Poston, Kitty Carlisle, Don Ameche—and, coincidentally, Knoxville native Polly Bergen. She finally disqualified herself, not because she was from East Tennessee, but because she said she’d recently read an article about Scopes that included his current picture.

The three men scrutinized by the panel were all thin, balding old men with glasses, all of them in jackets and ties, all of whom could have been bankers.

Almost all of their questions seem dumb, as they were asking more specific questions about the play and film Inherit the Wind, about which Scopes himself would not necessarily be an expert, than about 1925. But on the show Scopes, the shortest, was #3, and they did guess him right, and claimed to be honored to meet him. The other two “imposters” were guys whose real names were Charles Darrow and an insurance agent named William Jennings Bryan.

***

At the time that bizarre show aired, the 1925 Butler Act remained the law in Tennessee at that time, even though it was often ignored.

After other attempts to kill the Butler Act stagnated in committee, Tennessee’s legislature finally repealed the Butler Act when a latter-day Scopes, a teacher named Gary Scott, a 24-year-old UT grad student who lived near West High School, but was teaching at Jacksboro High in Campbell County, was fired in early 1967 for teaching evolution. He let it be known he was talking to a lawyer—in fact, to New York’s William Kunstler, arguably the Darrow of his era, later famous for defending the Chicago Seven. National attention was immediate. In fact, Scott got to take Scopes’ place on “To Tell the Truth.” (This time, only Tom Poston guessed right.)

Panicking, Campbell County and its school board thought better of it—as one civic leader said, “Whatever Campbell County needs, it surely isn’t a monkey trial” —and reinstated Scott. But the case was already on its way to the legislature, which finally prioritized the matter, and killed the 42-year-old Butler Act. Gov. Buford Ellington signed the death warrant on May 18, 1967.

Although in scuttling the Butler Act, Gary Scott was much more successful than John Scopes, because the matter never came to trial, he’s nearly forgotten.

Contacted at his home in Shreveport, La., 67-year-old John Scopes said he was pleased to hear about it. Rappleyea, the odd duck who’d proposed the Scopes trial to kill the law, never heard about it; he’d died in Miami just six months earlier.

***

Of the principals of the 1925 trial, the man who outlived all of them was Scopes’ original friendly prosecutor, Sue Hicks. Exalted to the status of judge, he remained in East Tennessee, and was not infrequently seen in Knoxville, often filling in as a substitute for a judge who was ill or on vacation.

He was in his mid-70s when he enjoyed a moment of indirect fame. In 1969, Johnny Cash released a song called “A Boy Named Sue.” Cash’s funniest hit was actually written by Chicago-born children’s book writer and illustrator Shel Silverstein. By Hicks’ own account, Silverstein had been inspired to write the song upon hearing Hicks give a talk at a legal conference in Gatlinburg. (Perhaps one in June 1960.) Gatlinburg is mentioned in another context in the song itself.

Cash enjoyed kidding Hicks about it, and sent him records that included the song, with handwritten notes, “To Sue, how do you do.”

When Hicks died in June 1980, the News-Sentinel ran a story that did mention his role in launching the Scopes trial. But the headline was “Judge Sue Hicks, Inspiration for Cash Song, Dies at 84.”

By Jack Neely