by Susanna McBee and John Nearly

for Time Magazine, November 22, 1968, p.89

Working on a little something he called, appropriately enough, his Devi/'s Dictionary back in the late 1800s, a newspaperman named Ambrose Bierce found himself humming along through the "M"s. Tossing off malefactor, mausoleum and monarch with ready dispatch. Bierce soon came hand-to-paw with one of the most grapplesome words of his time, the ostensibly innocuous noun monkey. Then, with a pro's sure knowledge of his times and his readers, Bierce instantly and impishly-imputed to the word a meaning he knew would jolt them to the very soles of their button shoes: a monkey, Bierce slyly told them, is a sort of "arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical trees."

Now Bierce most certainly knew about Charles Darwin and his heretical speculation that perhaps Adam hadn't just appeared fig leaf and all in Eden one day out of the blue, and that Eve might have had more to do with a, say, paramecium than with her spouse's rib----notions unspeakably profane to those Fundamentalists who held that every blessed word in their well-thumped Bible was literally true. Nowhere, they screeched, in the chapters and verses of Genesis -and they were perfectly capable of quoting every single one-was there any mention of . . . monkeys! By writing as he did, Bierce was no doubt fully aware of the kind of nerves he was touching in certain unventilated sections of the land. But he might have been surprised to hear that about 87 years later, in this year of our Lord 1968, even as Apollo 7 twinkled in space, the possibility of there being some monkeys in the woodpile would come up for discussion in no less august a body than the United States Supreme Court. The Court had amiably agreed to consider whether it's okay to talk about Darwin in Arkansas schools.

The preposterous fact was that the question is----is-there-is-or-is there-ain't a boll weevil's weight of truth in Darwin?----burned on with undiminished heat. It had once erupted in a glorious explosion in the tiny burg of Dayton, Tenn., where in 1925, as every student of American humor knows, Spencer Tracy gave Fredric March the verbal thrashing of his life, whupping him up'side the head with pure logic until biology teacher John Thomas Scopes got off with a measly $100 fine in time for Gene Kelly to go file a story for the Baltimore Sun's last edition. Evolution----pronounced, in areas south of Richmond, with an appropriately disdainful twist of the lips eevolyushin----became, in fact, a thriving American cottage industry, yielding over the decades reams of smeary tracts and whole rostrums of elocution. Gradually, though, but for an occasional little theater production of Inherit the Wind to keep the Holy Rollers in top red-eyed form, the issue seemed to be dormant.

Except, that is, in the aforementioned province of Arkansas. There, in 1928, upon the urgings of a claque known as the American Anti-Evolution Association, headed by one Rev. Ben Bogard, the state legislature had inscribed upon the statute books a law expressly forbidding "any teacher or other instructor in any university, college, normal, public or any other institution of the state. . . to teach the theory or doctrine that mankind ascended or descended from a lower order of animals. . . ." Setting as appropriate a fine of $500 and a punishment of immediate peremptory dismissal for violation, the legislators thereupon proceeded to forget about the law. They turned their attention to the graver issues of the time, such as who gets to drink out of which water fountain and sit in the front of the bus, subjects considerably easier for them to deal with than the labyrinthine intricacies of genetics.

One who wasn't quite able to forget about that 1928 evolution law, however, was a pretty, redheaded high school biology teacher named Susan Epperson, to whom it was an onerous bother; she and other teachers in Arkansas "always had a cloud over their heads." So when she was approached by the state education association as the perfect teacher to serve as their courtroom guinea pig, she unhesitatingly accepted. She filled all the association's requirements: a Presbyterian, she could not be accused of atheism; raised in Clarksville, where her father taught biology, she could not be dismissed as an outsider; her husband an Air Force lieutenant with top secret clearance, she obviously wasn't a Commie. And this time, mindful of circus aspects of the Scopes trial, the pro-Evs resolved to make certain the issues were sharply posed. Instead of a criminal case, they would present the court with a tidy civil question.

Like Scopes, Susan Epperson was 24 when she challenged the law in 1965. Unlike him, she had not actually taught the theory of evolution when she came to trial. Instead of having Mrs. Epperson teach Darwinian theory and get arrested for it, Eugene Warren, counsel for the education group, filed a suit seeking to prevent the state from enforcing its anti-evolution 'law before she taught the theory. Warren chose to file in the chancery court of a no-nonsense judge, Murray O. Reed. .

He failed to reckon with the passions of the pious folk. How come, queried one Baptist minister from his Little Rock pulpit, if evolution used to happen, it doesn't occur today? Good enough, responded a pro-Ev in a letter to the Little Rock Gazette, but then again, how come nobody's been seen lately walking across the Red Sea like they used to in the good old days? Warren also hadn't figured on one Bruce Bennett, Arkansas's attorney gener~1 and a man who knew publicity when he saw it. Bennett wanted two weeks of hearings-after all, the Scopes trial had taken 12 days. Judge Reed allocated the hearings one day on his docket April Fool's Day of 1966. Bennett wanted to exhume the whole Scopes issue, "proving" with no fewer than 14 "scientific witnesses" that the pro-Evs had it all wrong. Warren wanted the case to turn on just one question: whether the state had the right to ban Darwin. So when the case opened, each time Bennett tried to cross-examine Mrs. Epperson on her personal beliefs (Q. Do you know of any theory of evolution that teaches "that men evolved from a monkey instead of an ape? A. No, I don't) there was Warren, leaping up to object. Most of his objections were sustained; after a scant two hours and 20 minutes, Bennett gave up for the moment. The judge ruled the 1928 statute unconstitutional because it violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and Mrs. Epperson turned happily-and quite legally-to Chapter 39 of her textbook, "The History of ... Man," talking to her class for near ly a week about evolution.

Then Bennett, persisting, took the case on appeal to the state supreme court. Saying the 1928 law was' a "valid exercise of the state's power to specify the curriculum," the upper court overturned Judge Reed. Mrs. Epperson shut her text, and pro-Ev Warren started mapping his appeal, this one addressed to the nine men in Washington. There, behind the enormous mahogany bench, in their majestic chamber with its scarlet velour drapes and 24 towering marble columns, they studied Warren's brief, which noted that other "political majorities have devised hemlock, stake-burning, hanging, crucifixion. . . to maintain the status quo of their unenlightenment. . . ." They heard him argue that the law was vague and thus unconstitutional.

By last month [October 1968] Bennett was gone from the fray, having been defeated in a bid for higher office. In his place, reluctantly representing the state of Arkansas against the onrush of the 20th Century, was young Don Langston, a deputy attorney general who as much as admitted that he was opposing evolution only because his job required him to.

In sharp contrast to the Scopes trial, arguments before the high court took just 30 minutes. Last week came the dry answer from Justice Abe Fortas: the 1928 Arkansas law ran afoul of the First Amendment and was an intrusion of religion into the state schools. But more than just drama was missing from this most recent episode in the career of Bierce's monkey; so was any real discussion of the true issue---that the human freedom to think, to formulate ideas and spread them about, unpleasant as they may sometimes be, extends to Arkansas and, who knows, possibly even to Mississippi, where the country's last anti-Ev law remains in effect.