This 'Trial of the Century' Is 100. Its Lessons Could Save the Democrats.

In July 1925, John Scopes faced a jury in a stifling courtroom in Dayton, Tenn. A 24-year-old teacher, he stood accused of violating the Butler Act, a recently enacted state law that forbade teaching the theory of evolution because it contradicted the Bible. He was convicted, was fined $100 and basked in the renown of the case for the rest of his life.

Despite its rather genial outcome (the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned Mr. Scopes’s conviction on a technicality), echoes from the “trial of the century” still resound in American culture and politics a full century later. The Scopes trial was a momentous clash between modern science and traditional Christianity, represented by two of the most famous attorneys in the country: William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, Clarence Darrow for the defense. Broadcast on the radio, it exposed the horror many urban liberals felt toward people they deemed dogmatic and uneducated. H.L. Mencken, an eloquent if arrogant critic of unrefined America, attended the trial and hissed to his many readers that Bryan was “deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning” and was “a peasant come home to the barnyard.”

A hundred years on, many voters in rural areas still feel that the cosmopolitan politicians and advisers who run the Democratic Party look down on them. Because those voters have an outsize influence on the makeup of the Senate, Democrats will have to reckon with that perception, accurate or not, if they hope to dominate American politics again.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/opinion/scopes-monkey-trial-democrats.html