In nineteen twenty-five, a group of businessmen in Dayton, Tennessee met in a drugstore and decided their town needed attention. Tennessee had just passed a law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. The ACLU wanted a test case. The businessmen asked a local teacher named John Scopes whether he would agree to be charged. He wasn't entirely sure he had taught the forbidden lesson, but he had used the state-approved textbook, which included evolution, and that was enough. Within weeks, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan were both in Dayton, and the whole country was watching.

In this episode of 5 Minute Strange, we cover the Scopes Monkey Trial — the reporters and vendors and monkey jokes that turned a courthouse into a carnival, the moment Darrow called Bryan to the stand and pressed him on whether the days in Genesis were literally twenty-four hours long, and the verdict that found Scopes guilty and fined him one hundred dollars while deciding almost nothing about the larger argument. Bryan died five days after the trial. The Butler Act stayed on the books until nineteen sixty-seven. Scopes left teaching and became a geologist.

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