One hundred years ago today, live radio began broadcasting what would be soon termed the “trial of the century.”
The state of Tennessee had charged a high school biology teacher, John Scopes, with violating the Butler Act, which prohibited “the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all…public schools.”
Americans remember the Scopes Trial, or the “Monkey Trial,” as it was popularly dubbed, as a landmark fight for freedom of thought and a heroic stance against “ignorance” (as defense attorney Clarence Darrow put it). The trial resonated nationally because it brought the question of the place of science and religion in education to the forefront of public debate. Science, as defended by Scopes’ legal team for 11 days, made the more compelling case to radio listeners across the country.
What is often forgotten, however, is that Scopes lost, personally and legally. State legislators didn’t repeal the Butler Act until 1967 and he never taught again in Tennessee or anywhere else. When Scopes tried to earn a PhD, as he recounted in his memoirs, the president “of one of most respected universities” wrote: “Your name has been removed from consideration…you can take your atheistic marbles and play elsewhere.”
The selective public memory reflects how two Ohio playwrights, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, rewrote the history for their 1955 play Inherit the Wind. They transformed the Scopes trial from a specific historical moment into a legendary and heroic dissent from mainstream orthodoxy. The play is a reminder of theater’s power to demonstrate the meanings inherent in our daily lives by bringing structure and intent to what we experience as a chaotic jumble of events. Inherit the Wind is a perfect example of how theater can change the distant past into a very relevant and urgent present.
As Lawrence and Lee note in the introduction to their collected plays, the duo first talked with each other about the Scopes case in 1943 as “living history, memorable but not musty, involved in our own lifetimes.” At that point they could not figure out how to make the case into a play, because they couldn’t come up with a way to shape the history into a tale that spoke to current concerns.
Read More: The Scopes Trial Is Still With Us
But the growing Red Scare beginning in the late 1940s solved the problem for the two playwrights. The persecution of those even suspected of being communists angered Lawrence and Lee and prompted them to return to the subject of the Scopes Trial. They were looking for, as historian Alan Woods, summarized, “a parable from history to help bring some light to the present.”
They drew inspiration from the work that Lawrence had written his UCLA thesis on: Maxwell Anderson’s plays on the internationally notorious 1926 trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—and the subsequent execution of the two innocent immigrants. Lawrence and Lee adapted Maxwell’s approach, and turned the historical facts of the Scopes case into a “springboard for the larger drama.” They wanted the play to “thunder a meaning that wasn’t pinned to a given date or given place.” After a year of research, they completed the writing quickly.
Lawrence and Lee hit a wall. Almost every New York producer rejected the Inherit the Wind. Their drama wound up sitting in a drawer for five years.
But then in 1955, an innovative director, Margo Jones decided to give it a chance. She had a theater of her own in Dallas and needed plays. Inherit the Wind hooked her immediately. Yet, her colleagues, including the theater’s business manager, cautioned Jones that the play was too risky to produce. Even the playwrights’ manager was reluctant, admonishing her, they “will crucify you down there in the Bible Belt.” With her typical insouciance, however, Jones ignored the advice and went on with the show. “I’m doing it, darling,” she said.
Jones’s conviction proved wise. Inherit the Wind would be her theater’s biggest hit. Local papers raved about it.
The review that really mattered came from the Dallas Morning News’ cultural critic, John Rosenfield, Jr. He compared Lawrence and Lee to famous playwrights Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw and enthused that “a new play of power, humanity, and universal truth found its way into Margo Jones’ Theater. Rosenfield wrote for many national publications and was respected as a critic across the country. His review got the play to Broadway.
Crucial to its success was that Lawrence and Lee set Inherit the Wind in “a small town” not in 1925, but in, as the stage directions instructed, “Summer. Not too long ago.” Audiences were supposed to think not about 1925, but about their own lives and beliefs. The playwrights intended the drama as an allegorical parable for the age shaped by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.
Read More: The Right-Wing Textbooks Shaping What Many Americans Know About History
Accordingly, the moral lesson was not about evolution and creationism; it was about blacklists and anti-Soviet hysteria. The playwrights essentially used the moral panic over evolution at the heart of the play to stand in for the contemporary moral panic over communism. In the preface to the first published edition of the drama, they clarified the stage directions. “It is not 1925. It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow.” Decades later, Lawrence explained during the 1996 Broadway revival: “We used the teaching of evolution as a parable, a metaphor for any kind of mind control. It’s not about science versus religion. It’s about the right to think.” The metaphor resonated with audiences. But it also reshaped popular memory of Scopes in the years and decades to come.
After the triumphal premiere in Dallas, the production moved to Broadway and ran for two years, closing in 1957. It would be revived there twice more, first in 1996 and then in 2007. Recent years have seen multiple national revivals of the play in professional, university, and community theaters. Nationally acclaimed theaters like The Goodman in Chicago and California’s Pasadena Playhouse put it on during their 2023-24 seasons.
Hollywood didn’t ignore the play’s success either. In 1960, Inherit the Wind became a multiple Oscar-nominated film, featuring stars Spencer Tracy, Frederic March, and Gene Kelly. Three made-for-TV movies followed in 1965, 1968, and 1999 with impressive casts of their own.
Margo Jones could not have had any idea when she pulled the play out of her slush pile of unproduced works that she was breathing life into an enduring inspiration for those who fight for knowledge over dogma, reason over fanaticism, and freedom over censorship. What she did know, however, was that live performance reveals the truths inherent in a story and focuses the audience on the meanings and feelings inspired by that truth.
Whether it is the Red Scare of the 1950s or current attempts to censor curricula and ban books storytelling through the theater connects audiences to a long history of those who prize the truth. Theater has the potential to remind audiences that the past is never truly past, and that making knowledge illegal doesn’t erase it or make it less true.
Charlotte M. Canning is a theater historian at the University of Texas at Austin and her most recent book is Theatre in the USA.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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