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Clarence Darrow is best known as the attorney who defended John Thomas Scopes, the schoolteacher brought to trial in 1925 for teaching the theory of evolution in his classroom in Hillsboro, Tennessee. Darrow volunteered his services in this case because he wished to focus the critical attention of the country on the danger posed to education by the agenda of fanatical Christian fundamentalism for which William Jennings Bryan, the prosecutor in the case, was an important spokesperson. The heavily publicized "Scopes Trial" or "monkey trial" resulted in the defendant's conviction (Scopes was fined one hundred dollars), but the extensive media coverage of Darrow's cross-examination of Bryan made a public mockery of the creationist movement, and the Tennessee Supreme Court later reversed the judgment and dismissed the case. Though this trial and Darrow's reputation were together transcribed into public memory by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's 1955 play, Inherit the Wind (and then by the 1960 motion picture starring Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond, the character based on Darrow), by 1925 Darrow had already spent nearly a half century as a lawyer committed not just to the teaching of evolution and the enforcement of the separation of church and state, but to the elimination of capital punishment, prohibition, racial discrimination, unfair divorce laws, discriminatory immigration policy, and other legal inequities that marked the gap between the democratic ideals of the United States and its oligarchical reality.
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