As we anticipate the centenary of the Scopes trial next year, it is instructive to reflect on the hundreds of books, articles, and essays (not to mention a play and a Hollywood film) that have been published about this notable American court case. The only significant gap in our knowledge has been a biography of John Thomas Scopes (1900–1970), an understandable omission considering his reticence, until the last decade of his life, to comment about the trial or himself to any great extent. Overshadowed by Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, and others, the individual listed as “defendant” on the court docket has remained a poorly understood figure.
In his new book, biologist Randy Moore, well known for his efforts to bring the story of the Scopes trial to a general audience, has provided readers with a solid overview of the life of this famous figure in the American struggle to come to terms with Darwin. In order to achieve this result, Moore has assembled a jigsaw puzzle of sources, including newspaper articles, interviews with family members, Scopes’s own autobiography, and various accounts of the trial itself. He thus ferrets out sufficient information to reconstruct his subject’s life to a significant degree. We learn, for example, that his father was a leftish free-thinker, an outlook adopted by the son at an early age that was influential in his willingness to stand trial in Dayton. Discussions of his career as a petroleum geologist and his challenges as a husband and father provide much of interest, although the trial remains, as it did for Scopes, a constant presence. Equally important is the account of Scopes’s decision to become a public figure in the wake of the play (and later film) Inherit the Wind, which ultimately led to his co-authored autobiography, Center of the Storm, published a few years before his death. As Moore admits, his portrait remains incomplete, largely because of the spotty nature of the source material. Yet he provides his readers with an intriguing glimpse into the life of the figure at the center of the famous “Monkey Trial” of 1925.
