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A famous liberal reporter at the trial, H.L. Mencken, published such one-sided articles that it would make today's media blush. He excoriated Bryan at every possible turn, trying to make him look foolish. When Hollywood got into the act with a movie called "Inherit the Wind," it imitated Mencken's bias. Misinformed, many think Scopes and the evolutionists won the trial, but conservative rule in Tennessee today reflects the true outcome.
A famous liberal reporter at the trial, H.L. Mencken, published such one-sided articles that it would make today's media blush. He excoriated Bryan at every possible turn, trying to make him look foolish. When Hollywood got into the act with a movie called "Inherit the Wind," it imitated Mencken's bias. Misinformed, many think Scopes and the evolutionists won the trial, but conservative rule in Tennessee today reflects the true outcome.
The case ended with a guilty verdict, and Scopes was fined $100, which Bryan and the ACLU offered to pay. The case was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court which found the Butler Act constitutional, but overturned Scopes conviction on a technicality: the judge had set the fine instead of the jury. The Butler Act remained until 1967 when it was repealed by the Tennessee legislature.
Scopes may have actually been innocent of the crime to which his name is inexorably linked. After the trial Scopes admitted to reporter William Kinsey Hutchinson "I didn't violate the law," explaining he had skipped the evolution lesson and his lawyers had coached his students to go on the stand; the Dayton businessmen had assumed he had violated the law. Hutchinson did not file his story until after the Scopes appeal was decided in 1927. Scopes also admitted the truth to the wife of the Modernist minister Charles Francis Potter. Scopes was not allowed to take the stand at his trial for fear he would reveal his ignorance and turned down a $50,000 offer to lecture on evolution on the vaudeville stage because he did not know enough about the subject.