EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a weekly series on our region’s history coordinated by the Trumbull County Historical Society.

In 1925, during one of the hottest summers anyone could remember, hundreds of people swarmed into a second-floor courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, to witness what had been billed “The Trial of the Century” before it even began.

The morning of July 20 began so hot that Judge John Raulston convened court outside under the trees. It is here that the climactic scene of the legendary Scopes Monkey Trial took place; here that Clarence Darrow, the lead defense attorney for high school biology teacher John Scopes, called to the stand the lead prosecutor William Jennings Bryan; and here where history would be made.

What happened in the next few hours would be remembered as the greatest courtroom battle in American history, which is ironic considering it did not actually take place in one.

One man held that the soul of the nation demanded the enforcement of a common creed revealed from on high. The other maintained that the foundation of the country rested on freedom of thought. One man believed in the literal truth of the Bible. The other did not believe in it at all.

What Darrow hoped to prove when he called Bryan to the stand was that Bryan was not the Bible expert he was cracked up to be. The task proved easier than Darrow could have imagined.

When it was over, national newspapers announced Darrow had exposed Bryan’s “mindless belief in Biblical scripture,” while Southerners called Darrow’s inquisition a “thing of immense cruelty.”

The next afternoon, the jury took all of nine minutes to find Scopes guilty of the crime of teaching evolution in school, and Bryan died in his sleep several days after that. Tennessee’s ban on teaching evolution stayed on the books for another 42 years, but in a way ended up dead and buried, too, never to be enforced again.

One hundred years later, I am left to wonder, as in that line from Macbeth, whether this infamous takedown, like the Scopes Trial itself, was “all sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Scottish philosopher David Hume once said, “Truth springs from arguments among friends.” At a time when friendships are forged only with people who already agree with us, the chances of finding some sliver of truth — or even some common ground to stand on — seem as remote as when Darrow and Bryan were still flying at each other’s throats down in Tennessee.

In that respect, the Scopes Monkey Trial reminds us not of how far we have come, but how far we have yet to go.

Moss and his wife, Donna, are restoring the Swift-Kinsman House and Clarence Darrow Octagon House in Kinsman.