by Glenn Branch
Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
Unsurprisingly, in the spate of articles and commentaries commemorating the centennial of the Scopes “monkey” trial in 2025, there have been a lot of complaints about misconceptions and misinformation about the history — some justified; some not. To add to the chorus, here is a protracted complaint in particular with regard to the discussion of the Scopes trial in a relatively obscure book — In Search of Adam: The Story of Man’s Quest for the Truth about His Earliest Ancestors (1956), a translation of the Ich suchte Adam: Die Entdeckung des Menschen (1954). Herbert Wendt (1914–1977) was a German science writer specializing in zoology, anthropology, and archaeology, according to the German edition of Wikipedia, which adds that he attained international recognition with Ich suchte Adam, which was translated into twenty foreign languages. In Search of Adam was the August 1956 selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Well, In Search of Adam may or may not be a good book overall, but its discussion of the Scopes trial, occupying the first four pages of chapter 14, is terrible. Wendt starts by reminding the reader that evolution extends to humans, adding, “By July 21, 1925, the day on which the Dayton Monkey Trial ended, scientists in various parts of the world were on the point of solving some of the remaining puzzles about Adam,” providing examples of various relevant scientific work in 1925, including Raymond Dart “brooding over the ‘Taungs’ [a legitimate variant of “Taung”] child.” Wendt claims that “all these men heard of the Dayton affair,” although he provides no evidence of it. And he imputes to them, again with no evidence, acceptance of the Conflict Model of science and religion, writing, dramatically, that they remembered with trepidation the “legions of pioneers who had fallen on the battlefields of science. And they glanced at the calendar. Yes, it really was July 21, 1925.”
A bit of dramatic license might be excused, especially in setting the stage. But when Wendt turns his attention to the details of the Scopes trial in the next paragraph, Scopes is claimed to be “a young elementary schoolteacher”: he was, of course, a high school teacher. The Butler Act itself is claimed to have prohibited “any mention in public educational establishments of Darwin’s theory and the fields of learning associated with it”; it was not nearly so broad, forbidding teachers only “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Scopes is also claimed to have aspired “to give American farmers’ boys some idea of the struggle for survival and the ape man of Java”; it’s unclear whether Scopes actually ever taught evolution in Dayton, or wanted to, although he accepted evolution and objected on principle to the Butler Act.
Continuing, Wendt writes,
A puritanical inspector of schools had called attention to the infringement of the law by Mr. Scopes. A worthy provincial judge, who had probably never even heard of Darwin, meditated over the case for weeks. He searched the statutes of Tennessee, found that Scopes really had defied a prohibition, and eventually resolved to give the lad who told innocent children fairy tales about monkeys the lesson he richly deserved.
Of course, Scopes was recruited as a willing defendant in a test case of the Butler Act, at the behest of locals (including Walter White, the Rhea County superintendent of schools, who later joined the prosecution team — although he actually wasn’t admitted to the bar till 1944) who wanted to put Dayton, Tennessee, on the map. They were, of course, briefly successful, as Wendt correctly notes: “Dayton became world-famous overnight.” But he adds, “Real estate prices rocketed.” Did anybody really move to Dayton on account of the trial?
When the scene shifts to the courtroom, Wendt continues to err. He says that the trial lasted twelve days: although it began on July 10 and ended on July 21, 2025, the court was not in session on the weekend, so it actually lasted eight days. The expert witnesses for the defense are claimed to have been “answered by bellows of laughter from the farmers” (i.e., the audience): only one expert witness spoke in court, and there are no reports of laughter at his testimony. Scopes is claimed to have “attempted to justify his conduct to the jury” and then “canned-food tins, empty bottles, and lumps of filth were hurled at his head”; he spoke only once in court, during his sentencing, and there are no reports of anyone throwing anything at anybody in the courtroom. “The hard-boiled defense counsel” — Wendt is referring to Clarence Darrow; none of his colleagues is ever acknowledged — “found his carefully prepared speech completely ruined by shouted oaths and personal insults”: pure fiction.
Discussing the aftermath of the trial, Wendt outdoes himself in invention. “No sooner had sentence been pronounced than thousands of men and women in Dayton fell to their knees and sang psalms”: there are no reports confirming such a spontaneous chorale. “Next day an epidemic of typhoid fever broke out among the tightly packed masses of people in Dayton and there were more than a hundred deaths.” Ironic if true! And, by now surprisingly, not entirely false. In her Reframing Scopes (2008), Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette quotes a letter from Helen Miles Davis to her husband Watson Davis, who covered the trial for Science Service, warning, “Don’t get typhoid, which, I see[,] has broken out near there.” A footnote adds, “The disease was a concern for all present in Dayton that summer.” Davis himself relinquished a hotel reservation in Dayton to a minister who later contracted typhoid and died shortly after the trial. He was, however, a Unitarian minister, which undermines the irony.
As for Scopes, he “was obliged to give up his schoolteaching”: he was actually offered a new contract to teach in Dayton, but declined in order to pursue graduate studies in geology at the University of Chicago. “His monkey trial had made him so popular that his future was assured”: although he received a lot of offers to capitalize on his fame, he declined them. He suffered a fair amount from his notoriety, too. In 1927, he was recommended for a graduate fellowship, which he was eventually denied: the president of the university administering the fellowship advised him to “take your atheistic marbles and play elsewhere.” “He became not a biologist, but a car salesman”: it is altogether unclear what Wendt is thinking here. Scopes never completed his Ph.D.; he was a petroleum geologist throughout his career, during which, he wrote, “There were no high lights [sic] and I had the same number and the same kind of experiences as anyone else who did that type of work.”
Wendt fails to mention the fact that, in 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned Scopes’s conviction, on a technicality, while leaving the Butler Act on the books. Instead, he rushes onward to offer a summary. In the last paragraph of his discussion, he writes, “The affair at Dayton was a last grotesque revolt against the new conception of history [i.e., evolution] which America itself, apart from its remote recesses, had long since generally accepted”; the Scopes trial was not a “last” revolt, unfortunately, but writing in the mid-1950s, before the rise of creation science and intelligent design, Wendt can be excused for using the adjective. “The world laughed, and soon forgot the trial”: certainly not, especially in its centennial year. “And the natural scientists, profoundly shocked, once more stated emphatically that a picture of humanity which left out of account its historical and biological basis resembled a tree without roots or a house without a substructure”: at last, a point of agreement!
In Search of Adam poses no threat to the status of Jerry Bergman’s The Other Side of the Scopes Trial (2023) as the Worst. Book about the Scopes Trial. Ever! — but that’s only because it devotes only four pages to the trial. Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that their discussions of the Scopes trial are similar, although Wendt and Bergman differ about evolution: both are convinced that anyone who differs with them is ignorant, incompetent, and malicious, and both are so sure of themselves that they transmit or fabricate — it’s often not clear which — spurious details to support their views. A difference, though, is that although Bergman often misuses his sources, he typically (though not always) cites them, while Wendt cites no sources. It’s customary to blame the Broadway play and Hollywood film Inherit the Wind for misinformation about the Scopes trial, but since Wendt wrote before the play’s debut in 1955, the source of his misinformation is a mystery.